This start of 2013 has really been amazing for Intraix. We have our Home Energy Monitoring app launch with South West CDC on 27 Feb 2013. And this week, we signed a partnership deal with Smart Integration from Japan. This is definitely an exciting time for us. But I stop and start to look at the famous Paul Graham’s startup curve, where exactly is Intraix on the startup curve? Continue reading
When I was in Business School, instead of WallStreet Journal or Singapore Business Times, I was more interested in reading tech blogs (or some may call it tech publications). The regular ones that I followed closely and covers the Asia startup scenes are SGEntrepreneur, e27 and TechInAsia. (there are more now and you can get it from this Quora List)
Recently, e27 raised about US$615,000 to further expand their coverage in Southeast Asia. (Congrats Mohan! See e27.Team) Continue reading
Here’s a shout out to all startups out there,Happy Lunar New Year to all!! HUAT HUAT HUAT AH!!!
And to all entrepreneurs,新的一年，生意兴隆，财源滚滚！
**non-chinese readers, it means I wish all of you prosperous in your ventures and make lots of money!
I actually wanted to skip writing this week because of the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration, but ever since I started my #apostaweek challenge it has become a habit. In fact, I love writing on Saturday night. I get to reflect on my work week and also to assess what have I accomplished / learn for my ever exciting startup journey.
My @uber ride confirmation
Uber Is Now In Singapore, and I tried it with my mom yesterday. Although the price is a bit on the high side (see pricing here), the service was great.
Chinese lunar new year (CNY) is coming and every year my mom would be busy preparing for the steamboat dinner that we are going to have this coming CNY eve. This year it’s a little different, we decided that we could have our Continue reading
As you read this post, Intraix will launching our mobile app at the ECo Day Out 2013 @ South West. This an annual event by South West CDC to highlight and educate the community on environmental issues like energy conservation and the 4Rs. For the past month, we have been preparing for the launch and I really learn a lot from launching the app. From time management, to bug testing and even communication among team members Continue reading
Today, I like to share something interesting, something different, something that’s been troubling me for years. Have you been trying to learn a certain skill set and for many years you still failed to master it? For many years, I have this goal, this dream that I would get an IPPT Gold.
What is IPPT, you can read here but in short it’s a physical test that most Singaporean men have to do when serving the Army.
I have never gotten an IPPT Gold, the best I could do was a Silver. The biggest hurdle – the standing broad jump station aka SBJ. I can do all the stations and even a good but SBJ is always the spoiler. Last year for my IPPT attempts, Continue reading
I had this discussion about “Should Startups Take On Consulting Work?” with several entrepreneurs and most of us agreed we should be spending time building the product rather than doing consulting work.
When I meet up with investors, we talk about this topic too and You Can Only Do One Thing At A Time are the the words Continue reading
3 years ago, I talk about learning to code out an iPhone App. But the attempt fail because the learning curve was apparently quite high (when I tried learning it from the Stanford online course) and there wasn’t much tutorials like this. Excuses aside, I was lazy it was all “NATO“.
Last year, things changed. Being in Plug-in@Blk71, I mix frequently with coders, developers, programmers or whatever you all like to call it. And events such as hackathons take place often at Plug-in and to see developers coming up with a software product or to actually build something out from idea is amazing. This is especially try when you see a 14 year old “hack and tell” his hackathon project.
So I was inspired and set on my 30 days challenge of learning iPhone programming Continue reading
We are minutes away from a Brand New Year. Here’s an early wishes to everyone
Happy New Year & Awesome Goodness in 2013!
Like many others, every year I shared my New Year Resolutions on my blog. Before starting this post, I did a search to read back all my resolutions. Many times, I started with many new goals but only manage to complete less than half. Do you face the same problem too?
Last I tried something different, I did a mid-year review. This helps me to stay focus and to Continue reading
Initially I wanted to write a blog post titled my unexpected journey 2012 before doomsday. So I took some hours off yesterday thinking how should I start and this morning I started to craft the post, hopping I have it out in the evening .
But something happen today, my Mac went dead. It went dead because I tried to mess with the hostname in terminal. *protip; do not mess change your hostname unnecessary in your terminal. (I did this during a Python Training Class 
)
Usually, I would have gone crazy, blank and lost (you know that feeling when you are working on MS words and the things just crash on you and you had not saved the file.) #fml kinda of feeling
But today, I was a little bit more calm. I was calm because all my important stuff are in the cloud. So today, I really want to say Phil Libin and Drew Houston, you guys made a difference to my life today. And to whoever came out the great idea of cloud storage, give the man a tiger!
I’m restarting this post just a minute past doomsday. Because I just got the rest back from time machine. (Yes, Steve you made a difference too) So here’s my sharing of an unexpected journey in 2012.
tl:dr: For the past year, I been having fun, making new friends, learning new skills, making hard decisions that I sometimes regret but had to move forward and gaining lots of experiences in my startup journey.
Intraix has started with an idea in 2011 and turn into a running business in 2012. Are we doing what we first conceived. No. Low cost home energy monitoring system (HEMS) just doesn’t make sense locally yet. So we pivoted (the word that Startups love to use) to Building Energy Monitoring. In another words, we are an Enterprise startup (lots of buzz around the word Enterprise among startups too) You can see our live demo here.
We also accidentally a pretty strong community for Bikeroger.com. Yes. It’s a startup too. People have ask us why are you not focused? Well, this calls for another post but the community we build is even strong than Tribesports. (Not I say, fanpagekarma say) We did not even know we are building a community, we just wanted to use Facebook to publicse our services. But as the crowd grew, we do less of selling and more of engaging. And I learn so much about community building from Bikeroger.com.
Also making a significant contribution to my startup life is Blk71…(Yes, Yes, I know. I talk a lot about Blk71) I posted that Blk71 is like a big family to me, but I like to give a BIg BIg thank you credit to the guys and ladies running the show. They are the ones that makes Plugin@Blk71 special.
Thank you. Agustiadi, Peck Ying, Liana (who has her own fanpage) and Cheng San.
I blog about my startup life, sometimes about tech and even my love for running. But I never expected that my love for running would bring me the following.
1. a chance to write for a magazine – I had the opportunity to write a 3 page Okaley Review for Run Singapore. The magazine is now on sale
2. becoming an Evernote Fitness Ambassador – I love Evernote, it is my most commonly use productivity tool. I even used it as my training log. I blog about it and with my love for sports, I wrote in to apply for the Evernote International Ambassador program. I went through the interviews and proud to say. I made it.
Also I ike to introduced Bikeroger Ekiden Team. I wrote about having pre-race jitter but it was all worth it. Out of 300 teams for the Ekiden race. We sent 2 teams and we got 11th and 24th placing. You guys are amazing. And I clocked my personal best at 8.8km – 38:35mins
Now where you are spending most of your time in a workplace full of geeks, you will soon become a geek (in my opinion). There are many talents in Blk71 and there can be so much to learn from them. I’m a business student but I have not picked up HTML/CSS skills (Thanks to @zackyap, sorry if I keep bothering you why this? why that?) that I practiced it on my Tumblr, hopefully I can create beautiful Tumblr themes that thousands use.
Also, iOS programming. Some says it’s tough to learn it without programming experience. One guy wants to show that everyone can code, so on Sat/Sun he will spent sometime to teach me iOS. Our common goal to turn me from a iOS noob to ‘coder’ (even if that means creating a simple RSS reader app) I’m using a 30 days challenge app to monitor my progress. You can see it here.
Sorry for the super long post, but i’m sure you can feel that I love writing 
.
Finally, I love startup life and I really hope to see the startup community grow in Singapore. So I took the initiative to create 2 little side projects. (to do or not to do side projects, you can read it here)
1. Startups in Singapore - It is a rotation curation projection (@Khyathi92 from WeBlog is also helping out in this project). 52 weeks, each week an entrepreneur will be tweeting from a common twitter account and they can share their startup life experiences. Why I do this? I really want people to know more about our Singapore startup culture and I hope this would be a good way to share different experiences.
2. PSDPY.COM - A simple side project with Weileen. It’s a job portal side for startups. One problem that we faced while hiring for our own startups, it hard to find good talent. Job sites like Job.db or Jobstreet does not cater to the crowd of Startups and many times these job sites does not bring in suitable applicants. PSDPY.COM is a free to post jobs site, everyday 3~5 tweets will be out to share in the startup twitter verse.
I would love to hear feedbacks from you about these side projects, if you like to join in. I’m most welcome.
p/s It’s 02:21, i’m still alive and have finished my 2012 wrap-up :D #backtowork
