Update on Singapore and CommunicAsia 2010

WIP was represented at CommunicAsia in Singapore this year by Teresa and I, from June 14th to 18th.  My favorite things about Singapore - the food of course (pepper chili crab the new favorite) and the great energy of the people.  Whereas in Vancouver we have two types of high rises - those with green glass, or those with blue glass (quite boring); Singapore is much much more interesting.  Take a look at the picture of this new building in Singapore, a combined hotel, casino and botanical gardens - ready to beat the next tsunami!  CommunicAsia is moving to this location next year!

We started the week attending a series of events hosted by the Canadian High Commission in Singapore, who always does a nice job of supporting Canadian companies.  For a change this year, we did site visits, one to SingTel and the other to StarHub. 

Interesting in the different approaches of the two  companies, SingTel being very aggressively international with interests in the following operators for a combined subscriber base of 249 million (as of March 2009):
- Warid Telecom – Pakistan (18.5 million subs)
- Telkonsel – Indonesia (79.8 million subs)
- Pacific Bangladesh  (1.98 million subs)
- Globe – Philippines  (23.1 million subs)
- Bharti Airtel – India (110.5 million subs)
- AIS – Thailand (28.3 million subs)
- Optus - Australia (8.2 million subs)

While on the site visit, Mr. Loo Cheng Chuan, Principal of the SingTel Idea Factory told us about the trends he is following in mobile:
- webTV (especially keen on TV widgets and social TV)
- 3D TV
- NextGen Cloud, particularly for gaming
- Music streaming
- eReaders
- NextGen apps, particularly keen on Virtual Assistants
- Android Apps

For third parties looking to partner with SingTel, The SingTel Idea Factory aims is the business development arm, looking for innovation application and technologies.  SiX, SingTel Innovation Exchange is the very nascent  partner programme for third party developers and has two marketplaces myBusiness and AppZone.

Starhub, the smaller company, was the most enthusiastic of the operators we met and seemed very keen to meet with third parties.  In general, the operators in Asia are much farther behind the 'open innovation' initiatives found with operators in the US and Europe.

Our WIPJam Session was held on June 16 at the Convention Centre sponsored by MoSync.  It happened on the day that Singapore had flash flood and Orchard Road was under six feet of water, so traffic at the convention center was really low.  Despite the low turnout and freezing cold room (it didn't go above 18C the whole day), we had a good lively bunch of developers and other members of the ecosystem from Singapore, Malaysia, India, Germany, Sweden, Hong Kong and China.  Many of the developers were successful in working with local operators and focused on local applications; while others such as Home Camera have been getting traction around the world and are set to showcase at DEMO in September.  

A big thanks to all of our speakers:  Alex Jonsson, MoSync; John Wernecke, NAVTEQ; Emmanuel Allix, InMobi; André Schmidt, Enough Software;  Varun Arora, Home Camera; Clive Wright, Xybec; Chandra A, Muvee; Chris Silverston, hyperWALLET; Olaf Loman, The Mobile Gamer; Ashish Thomas, SingTel; Raghu Chandrapati, Yoose; Roy Avinash, Ten Cube; Rohit Dadwal, MMA; Kevin Chia, ClearHub.

A special shout out to David Lim from BlackBerry, also one of our speakers for sending me a phone to Singapore as mine had crashed in Phuket the week before.  Unfortunately it was lost/stolen in San Diego, so I am phoneless again :-(

We finished up with our WIPJam After Party,sponsored by NAVTEQ Network for Developers, by returning to Brewerkz at Merchant Point where we held it last year.  Another sell out - you know it is a good party when the free beer is gone, but the party keeps going! 

Singapore in general has a very small mobile developer community, with limited deep knowledge of mobile development, so there tends to be more web developers, folks with 1-3 years of experience.  The government is keen to change that  with the new AMPlify program  for local mobile applications developers to gain advanced technical skills training and hands-on experience with leading mobile MNC partners. This is made possible with the newly launched Applications-on-Multi-Platforms Simplify (AMPlify) initiative announced on June 17, 2010, by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). Working with MNC partners such as Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Research In Motion (RIM), developers will receive training in technical areas relevant to the partners' operating platforms, including cross-platform technologies, web-based technologies, and user interface and experience design.

As well, stay tuned for SingTel's new DevCon taking place in September.

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