iPhone/iPad radio panel to be re-broadcast later today

If you missed the lads -- Mugunth Kumar, Muh Hon Cheng and Joash Chee -- on the radio earlier today, don't be too desolate. You can catch the encore performance (I love how this is now a synonym for re-run) at 11pm today on 938Live.
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NAVFone SG is US$0.99 till end of February

If you are looking for a good journey planner, now is the time to consider NAVFone SG. This app, which normally retails for US$9.99, is now selling for just US$0.99 on the App Store. The promotion will run until the end of February. Presumably it will return to its original price of US$9.99 after that.

NAVFone SG has a nice journey planner that integrates the bus and the MRT. What's also nice is that it shows you multiple options so you can make an intelligent decision about how to get from A to B.

There are other journey planners out there, such as Google Maps and Gothere.sg. Google Maps is on your iPhone and its free. However, it only offers one way to get to your destination. Locally developed web app Gothere.sg is an improvement over Google Maps because the web app allows you to pick either a bus-only route or a mixed bus-MRT route. However, it will only give you one of each. Muh Hon Cheng's SG Buses will do journey planning, but will only handle journeys by bus.

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Catch your favourite iPhone developers on 938Live today

For an hour of compelling radio, tune in at 11am today to 938Live to catch local iPhone developers Mugunth Kumar, Muh Hon Cheng and Joash Chee. They will be taking part in a live panel discussion on iPod and iPhone development on The Living Room, hosted by senior producer-presenter Pamela Ho.

Mugunth is the developer behind iCash SG and StationAlarm SG while Hon Cheng is responsible for SG Buses, SG ERP and many, many others. Joash is a musician and developer who came up up Chordica.

Their segment will be on between 11am and noon.

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Chlkboard promises to lower your shopping bills with location-based promotions

The idea of paying as little as possible is deeply engrained in the Singapore psyche. One local start-up is hoping to capitalise on that.

The company has created a web app called Chlkboard that offers location-based promotions. When you go to chlkboard.com/m/ on your iPhone, you can find out which retailers around you have special promotions.

The company, which is also called Chlkboard, was started by well-known entrepreneur and venture capitalist Bernard Leong, together with Saumil Nanavati, the founder and former president of digital media company Sydus. In an interview with iMerlion, Bernard explains why he thinks Singapore users should use the app, why Singapore retailers should come on board, and why local iPhone developers should also work with them.

Explain Chlkboard to us in your own words.

In 3.5 words, Chlkboard is: Nearby promotions on mobile. From this short 1 minute video, your readers will understand why they should use it.




At its heart, Chlkboard seems like a relatively simple app. It is a location based service that tells you where to get deals around you. Its success or failure will depend on how many retailers you recruit, how often the retailers update their offers and how well you market Chlkboard to end-users. What are you doing to address these issues?

SME retailers have been traditionally left out of marketing primarily due to costs. It is equally important for them, like larger global brands such as Nike, to advertise their offerings.

Till now, there have been very few credible local marketing opportunities that are affordable and simple to execute. We understand this well and are able to respond to those expectations.

With each retailer signed up, we are refining our offering to match their expectations and ability to execute. With this, we are already seeing a groundswell of retailers referring our solutions to their customers and other retailers. For example, one of our advertisers, the Blog Shop on Haji Lane has utilized our platform very well by sending out promotions and update so that the customers are updated with their offerings.

To address these issues, we focus on doing three things well:
(1) We constantly work and update the retailers we recruited into our network and through word of mouth marketing and other channels such as government agencies and retail associations, we will be able to scale up once we create a groundswell and reached the tipping point where the success generated with the early adopters will induce those who are skeptical earlier to sign up;
(2) We also told our retailers that their promotions will expire within seven days from their last one and that will encourage more activity, and
(3) We leverage on the advertisers and various media channels to get our word out to the end users.

One important value proposition we offer to our advertisers to sign up with us is the analytics that enable them to know how many people have viewed their listings and click-thrus. We also have a map on our site that shows all the advertisers who have signed up with us.

According to an interview that Saumil Nanavati gave, you aim to work with iPhone developers in Singapore. Can you tell us what you are offering them and why they should work with you? What will they need to do to incorporate your ads into their apps? What kind of apps do you think would best leverage the Chlkboard ad network?

Basically, we offer a way for these developers to monetize their apps and particularly for some location based services which we believe would best leverage on our ad network, we can deliver relevant location-based ads which are of value to their users. Basically, we help to find the advertisers for them so that they can focus on developing better features and UI for their app.

You've decided to deliver Chlkboard as a web app. From your experience with Chlkboard, what are the advantages and what are the disadvantages of this approach?

Our original approach is to come up with a demo product which we can show to advertisers and subsequently to publishers who we plan to work with. We thought that it would take a longer time if we created a native app on the iPhone. Hence we decide to adopt a similar strategy to what Google has done with Latitude, and leverage on the GPS and HTML5 features in the iPhone to create the web app. 

The advantage of the approach is that the app is easy to load and we have effectively bypassed the iTunes Store legally. The disadvantage of this approach is that the browsers on the other smartphones are not HTML5 enabled, particularly, Symbian and Blackberry phones. However, the disadvantage will be mitigated with more mobile browsers supporting HTML5 like the Android phones and also the Nokia N900 (and our app actually works on Mobile Firefox on Maemo Linux).

Chlkboard CTO Bernard Leong.

You're better known as a venture capitalist. However, it looks like Chlkboard is a company that you're pretty heavily involved in. Can you describe the nature of your involvement in Chlkboard? How you got involved in this?

I prefer to consider myself to be an early stage investor, given my role as a partner in Thymos Capital. Before Thymos, I have built and exited from my first company in the UK. I am probably one of the few investors in Singapore with the real entrepreneurial experience of starting up a company and developing the product and business, generating real value for my customers unlike other investors who are usually from the private equity sector. After seeding and working with a couple of companies (iHipo and Eteract), I begin to feel the desire to go back to being an entrepreneur and to start a new venture again. After some brainstorming and surveying the mobile landscape, Saumil and I come to the conclusion that we should start Chlkboard.

I am currently working almost full-time as the chief technology officer of the company. My roles and responsibility include product development of the advertisers platform and the mobile web app. Given my experience as a social media publisher (as the co-founder of SGEntrepreneurs), I am also directing the social media strategy and execution for the company. But in a start-up, you usually do everything else and that includes sales as well.

Who came up with the idea for Chlkboard?

Saumil and I have known each other for a long time and we have been looking forward to a project which we can both work together. Through his experience with his first company Sydus, he saw that SMEs, unlike brands, do not have large marketing budgets to promote their products and services. We surveyed the whole landscape of location based services and realized two things: one, we found that there are difficulties in monetizing most location-based apps on the mobile phone, and two, there is a need for a way that can allow the SMEs to send promotions, market their products/services and put themselves on the map given the anecdotes coming from our friends who runs the retail and F&B businesses. Hence the idea of Chlkboard came about.

Saumil Nanavanti

What was the biggest challenge in getting it from napkin sketch to where it is now? How did you overcome the challenge?

The biggest challenge was to get the platform up ready for the advertisers and users within 21 days. The way we overcome the challenge is to agree on a set of basic features and make sure that we have the discipline to execute the entire operation effectively. The continuous challenge is to quickly make revisions on our solution to narrow the gap of expectation by retailers who sign up with us. We did our second iteration after the first seven days of launch where we allowed an advertiser to send promotions quickly to multiple locations, and they welcomed our response to their feedback. Now we are on the third iteration of our product offerings.

What are your short, medium and long term goals for Chlkboard? Is there an exit strategy for this?

My short term goal is acquire more listings from advertisers and also get more consumers to use Chlkboard. The medium term goal will be working with the iPhone apps publishers to deliver the promotions and the long term goal is to make Chlkboard a sustainable company to deliver real value for consumers as well as advertisers from the SMEs.

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ERA helps iPhone users find HDB flats for sale

ERA, one of the big names in Singapore real estate, now has a free app that allows you to search for HDB flats for sale.

With ERA Singapore, you can search for flats using criteria like location of HDB estate, flat type (one-room to executive) and model. The app promises that all the flats in these database are exclusive to ERA.

This app also has property news so you can keep track of Singapore's HDB property market.

This is the second property related app to enter the app store, the first being ProxiHomes. This, no doubt, is more evidence that the housing market in Singapore is picking up.

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A rash of Wireless@SG apps

Overnight, we have been visited by a plague of free Wireless@SG apps. On Feb 5 and 6, Apple approved three apps, namely Wireless@SG SingTel, Wireless@SG M1 and Wireless@SG iCell.

The last two sport a similar interface and look like they were done by the same developer. Wireless@SG SingTel has a different opening screen but also offers the same basic features, ie. the ability to automatically log-on to a Wireless@SG network, details about that hotspot and locations where you can find other hotspots run by that operator.

These three apps join two older apps that help you log on to the free wireless network, 1-Click Wireless@SG and SG Wireless.

(Tip of the hat to iMerlion reader Izhar for alerting me to this!)

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