Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

More ignorance dispelled — mine in this case. Last week’s e27 UnConference 2009 was an eyeopener, culturally and commercially. I’d built a dialog with Bjorn Lee of e27 over the past two years (Thanks, Noah!) but I had not yet dug in and learned anything.

When I was invited to give the conference keynote, I  knew embarrassingly little about Southeast Asia and possessed all the normal superficial stereotypes about Singapore (caning, chewing gum prohibition, etc.). My strongest mental images for “Southeast Asia” were all still tied to the mainland Southeast Asian countries in and around the Vietnam war. My father repeatedly traveled to that part of the world as a naval aviator in 1962-65, and I hit puberty during the late 1970s/early 1980s when there was still a lot of angst in the US about the Vietnam war.

I knew that these impressions were wildly inaccurate, so I read up on Singapore a bit. I went for the two ends of the spectrum: Lee Kuan Yew’s The Singapore Story and the light Brit expatalogue Tales from a Even Smaller Island. The former was the far more informative of course, but I always read the expat version.* Lee Kuan Yew’s memoir, while certainly told from his perspective, was a great survey of the interaction between Singapore, Malaysia, and the UK during the Malayan independence period. I was completely unaware of Singapore’s brief inclusion in Malaysia or Indonesia’s involvement in the process. And, I had not appreciated the ways in which the sometimes-divergent needs of the Chinese, Malay, and Indian populations needed to be addressed.

I would need years in Singapore to understand how it’s all really turned out, but at a first pass I can only admire the situation. From little development fifty years ago, Singapore itself is a first-class modern city that seems quite liveable. It also feels far more open and democratic than it is given credit for in the US. Most importantly to me, it seems Singapore has the lowest per-capita political death, injury, and destruction rate of any indepedent former British colony. Hong Kong likely has an even lower per-capita casualty rate, but Hong Kong didn’t gain its independence, obviously.

Commercially, Singapore is the leading gateway to Southeast Asia, an Internet market that many people seem to ignore, and therefore one I plan to learn more about. SE Asia has 100M Internet users, quickly growing penetration rates, intensive mobile data use, and just a few languages cover much of the population. The per-capita income has a long way to rise, but costs are low too. I created my own SE Asia category out of Internet World Stats’ Asia page, which looks like this:

Singapore works hard to be the regional hub for Southeast Asia, and it shows in the Internet startup sector. The government is doing its best to spur investment, including writing some checks themselves much like the folks at Enterprise Ireland. There also appear to be a few good small funds and a few active angels. The community is not at critical mass yet, but they are further than I would have guessed and on a nice trajectory. They need more successful Internet startup founders to be resident, running companies, and mentoring. They know it and are figuring out how to make it happen.

On the ICT side, the island boasts by far the best fiber, reliable power, and signficant  capacity in SE Asia. Inconveniently for the Singaporans, the standard for ICT competition has changed, and they need to build cloud computing resources to maintain their regional leadership. In order to create a fecund environment for many startups without a ton of VC funds, a huge fraction of those startups had better be cloud-hosted. There is no SE Asian cloud host at this moment. The first scaled regional cloud will attract a lot of developers, including the previously successful startup execs they want and need. A few of us spent the Monday morning after the conference talking up a cloud computing strategy with one of the government groups. We specifically encouraged them to homegrow their own cloud using Ubuntu’s new capabilities rather than become beholden to one of the big US vendors.**

The proof is in the pudding, of course. At the UnConference, there were dozens of startups represented and both the mean and median quality were high. Of particular note were Elevyn, EJamming, FirstMeta, Frenzoo, Klout (co-located inLA + SIN), Longscale, and Orsiso. I certainly missed a few, and I didn’t get a chance to meet everyone, unfortunately.

As always, I’m going to look for opportunities where there’s a good-sized market that’s not super fashionable and therefore not overcrowded. Southeast Asia fits that profile a lot better for me than South Asia or Greater China.

Plus, Singapore-to-Bali was less than a three-hour flight.    :)

*Don’t miss French or Foe if you are going to be spending time in Paris. French or Foe should really be called “Parisian or Foe,” but either the author doesn’t get out of town much or the alliteration was too tempting. Similarly, read the UnDutchables for Holland.
**If anyone wants to live in Singapore and build a new cloud or ad infrastructure, please ping me.

Posted 26 May 2009 at 1h20 |  2 notes and  Comments
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