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.

However, this opportunity won’t come cheap: each two-day exhibition slot will cost S$400.

Nonetheless, the potential payoffs of participation are present. Investors and venture capitalists from the region will be attending the event, giving start-ups a good opportunity to network with their peers, and secure partnerships and funding. On top of that, each exhibitor will be given 2 full passes to the various accompanying conferences and workshops.

Prominent Echelon alumni include award-winning remote file access tool iTwin and Japanese online marketplace FlutterScape.

As a regional competition, non-English start-ups are also welcome to Echelon. e27 Community Manager Joash Wee said, “I believe some of the non-English products from countries like Indonesia and Vietnam will have a larger traction because they are built for the home crowd and these countries have a huge population.”

But here’s the catch: participating start-ups must have a tech component. “We do have fashion or art related start-ups that had their services built on the web or mobile space, such as FashionSpace (a website which lets users buy, sell or swap fashion products) and Artyii (an online service which lets Asian artists sell their art),” Wee added.

Besides the start-up competition, Echelon also involves conferences and workshops for start-ups to beef up their arsenal. 2012 will see the conferences tackle issues such as the promise of the cloud, ideas worth investing in, and tried and tested business models.

The speakers and panelists for these conferences and workshops have not been finalised, and e27 is trying to attract about 40 speakers from established companies like Rovio, Facebook, and Microsoft.

If you have an idea that’s been in your head for way too long, Echelon is one of the best ways to get started.

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?

The panel was chaired by Benjamin Joffe, founder and CEO of +8* (Plus Eight Star). Participants included Scott Rafer, CEO at Lookery, Dr Gang Lu, co-founder of OpenWeb Asia, Dr Lai Kok Fung, co-founder and CEO of Buzzcity, and Wong Hoong Ann, founder of HungryGoWhere.com.

Each panelist was asked to share how he spotted the opportunity that led them to start their companies. Scott, who started MyBlogLog and sold it Yahoo later, noted that his venture was “almost accidental”, while Hoong Ann of HungryGoWhere identified the need for a marketing channel catered to F&B establishments, particularly among small restaurants. His business and ad model was changed many times, because “you need the flexibility to start a business.”

Dr Lai of Buzzcity, which started as as dotcom company specializing in WAP mobile communications, said his company did not plan for the company’s current successes in South Africa and Indonesia. It was only after the rapid rise in the number of users accessing the Web on the cellphone some time later that spearheaded Buzzcity’s business in the two countries.

Dr Gang Lu, shared his experience with start-ups in China, which comprises three groups. The first are the copycats who will copy successful products and business models, but “the problem is everyone else will be doing the same thing”. It will be hard for copycats to stand out from the pack. He noted that at one point, there were over 150 YouTube clones in China, but only 10 are surviving today.

The second group will take successful products and localize them accordingly in their target markets – an example would be Xiaonei.com, which is now more popular than Facebook in China. Finally, the last group of entrepreneurs would chart their own path through innovation that would eventually lead to their own unique products.

The panelists largely agreed that selling to businesses is always more profitable than selling to consumers, since consumers are typically unwilling to pay for Internet services – advertising is thus the most common way of monetizing their services. In some market segments, selling virtual goods has proven to be a viable as exemplified by Xiaonei.com and Kaixin001.com.

Panelists were also quizzed on what they were doing to mitigate the dependency on search engines, particularly Google, for their site traffic. Hoong Ann of HungryGoWhere.com shared his company’s brush with Google which reduced his business by half in a single day after his website was placed on page 945 in the search results. Dr Lai suggested that start-ups should grow their organic traffic, while Dr Gang added that they try to grow traffic from social media platforms, which allow them to seed communities and build their brands without Google.

Techgoondu also checked out some promising products and start-ups, and these caught our eye.

iTwin was born out of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) and will be commercialized by Exploit Technologies, A*Star’s marketing and commercialization arm. Essentially, it is a device that can be split into two halves. By plugging each half via a USB port into a home and remote PC respectively, a secured communication channel is established to allow the remote PC to access files on the home PC. In fact, the solution is so elegant that no password is required. The communication is encrypted and authentication is provided through a random key generated by the home PC’s device.

The folks behind iTwin expect the device to be launched by Fall 2009 at a price of between US$40 and US$50. Work is for the device’s software for Windows XP is almost completed, and there are plans to support Windows Vista and Mac OS X. The product roadmap also includes video conferencing applications and even mobile device file transfer.

Fusion Garage was founded by R. Chandrasekar, a familiar face in the Singapore tech circle. Chandra was the founder of Radixs, which previously developed the Motion Experience Interface (MXI) operating system and the Velvet Puffin integrated online service that marries social networking and instant messaging.

The company is currently developing the software for the CrunchPad, a web tablet hardware device conceived by the folks at Techcrunch:

The idea is to get a new type of device into people’s hands for as cheap as possible (we were aiming for $200, it looks like $299 is more realistic). It fits perfectly on your lap while you are sitting in front of the TV, so you can look up stuff on Wikipedia or IMDB as you channel surf. It plays Flash video flawlessly so you can watch movies and TV shows on Hulu or Joost or wherever. Or listen to music on MySpace Music. Or use TokBox to have a video chat with your parents. Then check email and call it a day. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Hulu, Wikipedia, Google Docs and Gmail are the killer apps for this device.

Because the device skips the resource-sucking parts of the operating system and focuses on one application – the browser – very low end hardware can be used and still give users a desktop-like Internet browsing experience.

The team from Fusion Garage did not show off any working prototypes of the Crunchpad at the event. For more information, check out this video:

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:

A good marketplace is one with many choices, and in this, Phokki succeeds with a big diversity of artists, styles, and price options.

Thus far, Phokki has registered hundreds of artists, each bringing with them a couple of styles each. When I last talked to Sean early last week, the number of styles numbered around 500, but with the additions daily, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it hit the low thousands by the end of this month. Prices for art varies widely: from a few thousand to even free, depending on the art style and artist.

The best ideas are those that don’t need much explanation, and I think Phokki falls into this category. It’s easily grokked by people who visit the site for the first time. And as the artists and customer references have shown, it is applicable to a global audience.

The site still needs some polishing, and one area I hope they will look into is in making it more user friendly for customers, especially in browsing and search. As a customer, I would like to be able to search by price, or to have a search bar for genres/artists/styles. They are currently experimenting with user voting — a thumbs up from me — and how to make the site more user friendly.

In a nutshell, I think Phokki is a great concept. It has potential, and I hope this Singaporean start-up does well.

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:

• Twinity (Jeremy Snyder): a 3D online-world that replicates real world cities in a virtual environment. The city of Berlin has already been launched, and both London and Singapore will be up later this year. According to Jeremy, they have about a 100,000 sign-ups since the launch of Twinity in September last year in 2008.
• Brandtology (Aaron Koh): a social media monitoring start-up that help companies makes sense of the big bad web by mining sentiments from it. Brandtology is founded by CEO Eddie Chau, who previously incubated managed security services player e-Cop that was acquired by Temasek in 2007.
• Makeaffinity (Thomas Tan): ever wanted to control robots over the internet to slug it out in a death match? Now you can with Makeaffinity’s robot sharing platform, which allows folks to play with and make web robots without much programming whatsoever.
• 2359 Media (Hong Ting and Wenhan): founded by a trio of passionate entrepreneurs who just finished their NUS studies and a stint in Silicon Valley. 2359 Media is an advertising platform for mobile phones utilizing location based services.
• Jorbb (Shen Heng): Most job advertising portals cater to the white-collar worker. Shen wanted to create a portal specifically for blue-collar workers — part-timers, trade promoters, temp staff — and Jorbb is the result.
• Neat Co (Sarabjit Singh): Neat co, a small US company with a second office in Singapore, was the only physical tech appliance company amongst the presenters. Showcased was their contextually aware OCR reader, a smart scanning solution for receipts and the like.
• Phokki (Sean Seah): And lastly, Phokki, a start-up which turns your photos into works of art via a platform that links artists to end users directly. I’ve written a post on Phokki before.

We had a couple of other start-ups who didn’t present like seemeCV and Airvert. Not to worry. Due to good interest in this first event from anecdotal feedback (thanks to those who gave theirs!), the Techgoondus will think about running this on a semi-regular basis once in a few months. Will keep you readers posted if we do run this again. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in ideas on this front, feel free to drop me an email.

It’s important to recap that Techgoondu started this because we believe that the tech start-ups don’t get enough visibility through traditional channels. Daniel, who runs the Youngupstarts blog, summed up this sentiment well in this entry, saving me the time of having to reiterate the purpose of the meet-ups.

Lastly, events like this work because of the content and passion attendees bring when they come for such an event — YOU folks provide the content. Feedback is crucial to understanding what works or what doesn’t. If you attended the event (or even if you didn’t), please feel free to give your unvarnished feedback on this post, or drop me a note via email. Thanks!