Echelon, one of Singapore’s most prominent start-up launchpad, has opened their doors for this year’s submissions from aspiring entrepreneurs. Re-branded as the “Startup Marketplace”, this pre-Echelon call-to-action will close on 31 March, 2012.

An as yet unconfirmed panel of judges will be reviewing the submissions and shortlist qualified start-ups to perform their pitches at one of four cities: Singapore, Jakarta, Manila, and Hong Kong.

Finally, 50 start-ups will be hand-picked out of the lot to exhibit at the main Echelon event in Singapore on 11-12 June.

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Techgoondu had the chance to be at unConference 2009 held yesterday at the Biopolis, thanks to the kind folks at e27 who had put together an excellent program that brought together some of the top forward-thinkers in the region. Here’s a recap of what I felt were the highlights of the event:

Panel discussion: Innovation in Asia and where is it heading? …

Want inexpensive customized art, browse hundreds of styles, and have it delivered to your doorstep anywhere around the world?

Singaporean start-up Phokki, whom I wrote about before, just launched their customized digital art marketplace early this month, a world’s first, according to founder Sean Seah.

Phokki used to be an art e-commerce site with a few artists in its stable a few months back, but now it is a complete end-to-end marketplace — a concept that the founders wanted from the very beginning.

The idea is simple: inexpensive customized art from a banquet of art styles to choose from.

Get artists to come aboard from worldwide, and let them set their own price, production times and review options. The customer sends in a photo to be styled with a corresponding brief. Phokki manages the platform, and any physical prints and delivery within the time stated. Phokki also takes 30 per cent of what the artist charges.

Here are some art style examples. The idea speaks for itself:

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Firstly, a big thank you to the folks who took time out of their busy lives to come down for our first meet-the-techgoondus event last night. We hope you had fun, learnt something, and made some useful contacts.

Originally I had a crowd of about 20 to 25 in mind when I first planned this session, but it seems that word-of-mouth was so good that we roughly doubled that amount.

Besides the seven start-ups who did present their stuff in an informal unconference-styled event, we had a smattering of interested attendees from PR agencies, vendor brands, fellow bloggers (a shoutout to Daniel and Chinmay from Tech65), traditional media, analysts, Web2.0 community activists, and interested kay-poh friends.

Start-ups who presented include:
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