SingTel Innovation Exchange 2nd Year

Yay, SiX updates on my own blog :p

It has been a tiring period of time recently as some of my teammates left without replacement for many moons. It has been a relief to see new blood finally arriving this week. Much of the work has been in the background since Accelerate 2010 and I’m glad that I have some people who continue to have faith in what we do.

Almost like a TCP congestion control back off with badly managed TCP window, matching unrealistically high ambitions with no headcount simply created a congestion avoidance gap that, hopefully, will recover back to optimum speed in due time.

i.Challenge 2011 – The Tablet Enterprise
Most important thing right now is the competition. i.Challenge 2011 – The Tablet Enterprise attempts to fills the void of enterprise mobile applications that are easy to deploy and use, with up to $100,000 to be won in stages (concept, then prototype).

The launch is in 2 week’s time – 2 June. This is not your average competition: It’s one that we work very closely with enterprise and SME customers to bring something useful to them as pioneer customers, as well as to the targeted market segment so that we can help shape a focused delivery of Enterprise Mobile apps, with tablets being the best beachhead, to advance the innovation in the market.

Developer Training on Mobile / SaaS on SingTel
There are actually a number of strategies to succeed in this market, but I’m not going to share them here because I want to meet you in person in one of the 2 training sessions that we’ll be running as part of i.Challenge 2011. Please register yourself for these trainings: the first one is on June 2 and the second one is on June 20. Yes I know it’s an entire day, but you’re welcome to do your work here too, hang out with other enterprise app developers, and get a better appreciation from some of the industry leaders as well as technical staff on SingTel on tips to succeed in this Enterprise / SME market of Singapore.

App Peek 1.0 (Singapore SaaS market)
On a slightly slower pace but equally important is the SaaS development. 120,000 users now, but as you can imagine without me having to confess, they are mostly on Google ONEOffice and Intuit Quick Books, and another big base that came from our traditionally loyal customers on traditional services (eFax for example).

Looking forward, myBusiness portal is set to expand, and one of the key charter of mine is to populate it with more applications. We are keenly aware that penetrating the Singapore and Asia market is hard, so we really need your help to get this going. Once bitten twice shy, experiences launching some of the earlier apps is making us take a step back to make sure whoever gets on-boarded onto myBusiness has demonstrable strength by Singapore customers.

If you’re a SaaS app developer, I urge you to apply to join App Peek, which is essentially our “Labs” for the next set of SaaS apps that we’re researching and considering on-boarding.

If you’re a business looking to adopt SaaS, we urge you to sign up as an Early Adopter on App Peek, to trial, rate and review these apps for us and the ISV (Independent Software Provider sorry industry jargon), so that we hear your feedback before putting them into production.

Asia’s Leading One Stop ICT Experience Provider
Where are all this leading to? Well we have a vision to implement but the execution is probably not what you expect.

To businesses, SingTel wants to be the leading one-stop ICT experience provider. If we get clinical about this vision, we’ll see that

• ICT clearly marks the departure from pure telco (if you’re one of those dumb pipe proponents, you’re more than welcome to stay back in one of the above training sessions for us to discuss business strategies, we might both learn a thing or two);
• One-stop clearly states a complete stack play, but also alludes to a regional if not global play;
• Leading clearly describes the ambition, but also alludes to playing some surprising cards to get ahead of some of the current global providers; and
• Experience, not just service, which is probably the toughest to get right but the most important as a service provider.

In my day to day banter with ISVs, I get a lot of SingTel should do this and that – in reality, we can do many things, but they won’t all fit the overall strategy + people naturally need to focus. So the correct question is, why are we only selecting these few things to do and not others, to achieve this vision? Again, come for the training, we can discuss.

SiX Year 2
As for myself, as my colleagues takes on a bigger role, you’ll start hearing more of them while I’ll switch focus a bit more towards productization – so I’m still very eager to have you speak with me. After all, we will still be planning mission trips while there are some big events coming up soon.

Be warned: I don’t respond very timely these days – the pace of which companies are contact me has escalated a lot since Accelerate, so your best bet is still to submit your request into the SiX portal. I’ll say this once here: not Contact Us, not find my email and write to me. These get LOST in the sea of correspondence. You want to click SUBMIT PRODUCT on six.sg, and fill up the form to help with build semantics around the product you’re trying to pitch. Unless of course if you’re a web usability expert, where I would welcome any suggestion on making the above behavior the default behavior.

Breakthrough
Year 2 now – time to break through!

You can help me achieve some of the most mundane numbers: Follow us on Twitter, Sign up for SiX membership (free one, got free lunch sometimes some more), and give App Peek a spin and feedback either the app or the selection or the trial environment itself.

With those in place, I can spend more time to focus on real work that benefit you – finding that breakthrough together with you. Business model, pricing model, service model, partnership model, marketing channel, sales channel, everything we do, we are looking for breakthrough.

Final word for those who, for wearing all the entrepreneurship badges available, came to me and suggest that we forget about this breakthrough because of some unmovable constraints (oh I’ve heard many, ranging from we should all bow to you-know-who to cancelling our activities that are too small for their appetite), I want to say, let us try anyway. At least, small inexpensive experiments that fails give us hard lessons that we will eventually share with the industry.

p/s have you seen ST2 launch yet?