OMG there hasnt been a post in 2008

Hi Guys,

Just abit of intro about myself, i graduated from SMU in 2006, was the VP of SMU Ventures as well. I started work in General Electric FMP. I am now currently co-founder of my own Internet Marketing firm called Conversion Hub. Do let me know if there are synergies that we can work on . Thanks =) Can add me to LinkedIn also it is at Joel Fu Oh and haha it coming year end already. Merry Christmas to everyone ^^ hugs.

Conversion Hub is Singapore's most comprehensive internet marketing company that specializes in new emerging social media and conversion marketing. Measurable and Transparent Performance of our internet marketing campaigns has always been the key focus of Conversion Hub's business strategy. We are also Singapore's first and only firm to have our online marketing consultants certified Professional Internet Marketer (PIM) by WebCEO, which is the defacto "Fortune 500" standard for online marketing.


Conversion Hub is also working with MICA, MDA and NUS to pioneer a series of next generation advance internet application and development tools (SAAS) under the advice of Reza Behnam who was formerly the Managing Director at Yahoo! - Southeast Asia and Lisa Watson, Chairman of the Direct Marketing Association of Singapore. We have also signed a strategic partnership agreement with the world largest domain registrar which allows us to offer the cheapest domain in the world, fully back with a 100% money back guarantee.

SMU Hostel Cafe

Nine of our Ventures’ members have been working on a hostel café project for the past few months. The SMU hostel lacks any sort of food facilities within the hostel premises. Our members took advantage of this market gap and decided to start up Café@ Prinsep to be a form of convenience to the hostel residents. It will be set up in the pantry area of the SMU hostel. The cafe, for now, serves hot and cold beverages, gourmet sandwiches, tacos and instant noodles. It has plans of including ice cream sundaes and other finger foods as it expands. This project also helped these members to experience real business situations and problems encountered while starting up a business. The café has already had a good opening on the hostel sports day. However, a formal opening is on the lines as soon as the contract gets signed, which is in the next few weeks. All food and drink items are reasonably priced from 80 cents to a maximum of 4 dollars for specialty finger foods. The café will also have a sms or call in system which allows residents to place their order when they wake up. Currently, the core 9 owners of the business will be operating the store. However, future plans include getting residents to serve as employees. The café once opened, will operate during peak hours of student demand, namely mornings before students leave for school and late at night. Café @ Prinsep is beneficial to the hostel as it is in a favorable location, provides cheaper snack to students and value adds to the vibrant SMU hostel community! We look forward to seeing you there soon J

Uttara Gupta

Recently heard: SG VC's approach to investing

Singapore VC: "My approach to investing is very hands off. I don't get involved in the running of the company unless the entrepreneurs want me to."

This VC has himself confused with the portfolio manager who works halfway across town at one Raffles Quay in an office that's 30 floors up from his.

A New Begining

Hi everyone! Starting today, a few of us from SMU Ventures, have taken up the responsibility of managing the blog and taking it forward. The team from Ventures consists of Aditya Harneja, Vaibhav, Uttara, Nivedana, Harsh and me. We have already revamped the look of the blog and many more updates are in the pipeline. We hope that this blog will become the focal point for all entrepreneurs in SMU to showcase their businesses, and to get to know each other among other things.

We have begun the process of contacting student entrepreneurs in SMU to get them to post on this blog. We are working on linking up this website with websites of other like-minded organisations in Singapore.

So stay tuned...

China's Internet trends

Getting started developing for Facebook... briefing by Slide

For those of you who want to know a bit more about developing for Facebook, Slide has given a pretty comprehensive presentation on the development approaches you can take and what are some of the pitfalls to avoid.

Too late to get on the Facebook Bandwagon?

Things got interesting earlier this week when it was reported that Microsoft was considering a stake in a 5% stake in Facebook for between $300 million to $500 million. Following the news, Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) shares rose to from below $29 to almost $30 mid-week before closing the week at $29.46 representing a gain of about 2.3%. More importantly, it got people really aware of the Facebook "phenomenon".

I was listening to the 93.8 live DJs discussing Facebook on air and I thought: Wow! Now EVERYONE (even those who aren't part of the usual social network demographic) is talking about Facebook!

Since my company, TYLER Projects, officially launched Singapore's first Facebook MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Game), MW:BattleStations! about 3 weeks ago, we've been contracted by 2 other companies to create Facebook apps for them. We actually had to turn down 2 more requests because our order book was already full.

While we were working on BattleStations!, I was tracking the user growth of Warbook (another Facebook MMO) when it still had no more than 1200 users. The day after I joined, it grew by 1500+ users; 2000+ the day after that and 2500+ the day after. Beyond that, I didn't bother counting and spent more time working on our own app. With those kinds of growth figures, it's no surprise that developers are churning out hundreds of new applications everyday hoping to enjoy the same success.

However, economic theory dictates that something this good can't last forever and there are signs that it might already be too late to reap the same exponential growth that the first movers did.

Take our app for example:



MW: BattleStations! is growing at the rate of about 300~400 installs per day (~4000 in total). Active user growth is about 100~150 a day (active users = ~50% of total installs). The growth is certainly accelerating, but it's not exponential. The inertia is definitely noticeable and a sign of increasing saturation in the Facebook app space.

I can think of 2 reasons for this:

1) If you think about it, there's a limited amount of real estate on a user's profile that they are willing to use for apps. The apps that manage to get onto users' profiles earlier tend to stay there. Facebook users have also started to get sick of the torrent of invites they get all the time and now tend to ignore new invites.

2) Facebook has been trying to prevent "spam" marketing by apps and they've changed a few things as a result:
- Apps are now rated according to the % of active users they have instead of just installs (total users with the app).
- FB API has changed to prevent apps from spamming users with invites. Earlier apps could allow users to send invites to all their friends and even reward users just for sending out invites. Not anymore, the new system restricts you to 15 invites and the developers don't have anyway to track the invites and new users.

Newer apps are going find it very hard to get any traction even if they are better than existing apps. The way I see it, if you want to launch an app now you have to either:

a) make an app that's very viral and is really going to make users want to add it to their profile
b) you spend alot of money either buying ad banner space from Facebook or advertising on apps with a larger user base.

I think the Facebook Platform still has some ways to go before it hits a mature stage of development. While most of the early apps were created by individuals, I expect to see more companies with bigger budgets really going all out to push higher quality apps which will mean better quality and variety for Facebook users.

For the application owners who are already on Facebook and have managed to secure a stable user base; that user base will become more valuable as time goes by and the barriers to entry start propping up...

...which is why we'll launching 2 more apps very, very soon.

TYLER makes Singapore's first Facebook MMOG!

It's our first MMO and we're pretty excited about it because we'll be launching it first inside Facebook and then later on mobileweapon.net.

Mobile Weapon: BattleStations! You can play the game now! just follow this link http://apps.facebook.com/battlestations/



We've been doing ALPHA testing since 2 weeks ago and I must say that the game is really fun even though it's now just into BETA. Here are some screen shots of the game.

Explore the world!
We've made sure there's plenty to do in MW:BS. If fighting all the time isn't your kind of thing, you can go exploring or trading to make some gold and maybe find rare items. We've added more than 50+ ships, weapons and upgrades. There are plenty of secret items to be found as well.



Ship to Ship Combat!
Remember the characters in MW1 boarded and airship and flew to the Imperial City? In MW:BS you are the captain of your own airship. Airships are a big part of Sios and we decided it be fun if you get to fly your own and try to become the most powerful battleship in Sios!


It's not MAWs but finally MW players will be able to engage in PvP combat!

Make sure you add the game to your Facebook account ASAP!