The challenges from the crisis and our response to it

After talking to numerous companies and startups about how the current climate are affecting them, a couple of major issues have emerged. From these challenges, we have fine tune our Future of Media effort to address them.

Lack of access to bigger players
The crisis has bought about a bigger need to scale faster and to build a real business. One of the ways to do that is to leverage on platform players such as Facebook and iPhone. Unfortunately in Singapore, our bigger companies such as Singtel and MediaCorps are not as open.

Our respond: Our Future of Media initiative brings in the bigger companies as partners. As part of the network, they are committed to open up their market access to the smaller guys. In this way, we have effectively open up our relationships with the bigger companies to the rest of the industry. I think this is more useful than our grants because in this new economy, useful relationships are the new capital.


Difficulty in starting up
To get things started or to build things from scratch is actually very hard. Even with open source software, knowing what to use, how to put things together, where to start etc is a tough challenge, especially for first time entreprenuer.

Our respond: Our experienced partners in the Future of Media intiative is offering support beyond technology platform and market access. They are offering valuable mentorship through technical and market advice. Through the network, startups can gain guidance from fellow partners that will make it easier to startup.


Global marketing
For a startup to penetrate global markets is actually quite challenging. Even with the Web, the amount of localisation is still considerable. You will need local partnerships and connections. However, for a small startup, securing such relationships is difficult.

Our respond: With the network in place, we can market the network itself to our global counterparts. It is difficult to promote one or two companies but as a network of say 100 companies, we are in a position to make our deal more convincing. A network also means that the offerings will be more complete.


We sincerely think that the Future of Media initiative can bring great benefits to our industry. If you think we can do better, do drop me a comment.

Posted in: Singapore startup environment