You can’t get more “uniquely Singapore” than this! Pictionary Singapore Edition is the result of the partnership between Ash Singh, VP of Interactive at Imagine OmniMedia, and Mattel South East Asia. The makers of the project are currently seeking “uniquely Singapore” words and phrases to fill the Singapore Pack. Words are voted by the crowd and the top 300 words that were voted get to be selected in the game along with the name of the contributor. What better way to put your local mark than this!

Upon hearing of this, I chatted with Ash about the project over Facebook. From the conversation, it was pretty clear that localization efforts in South East Asia have been paying off for a lot of businesses trying to mimic/imitate US based products/models. The interest in local ideas and content is definitely taking over purely US based content and this trend is already evident in other industries such as music and fashion. As mentioned by Ash himself, “People dont follow the west like they used to.” What’s most surprising is the crowd sourcing model. They have intelligently used the web to crowd source for words and phrases for a non web based board game. Rather than get their own internal team to put up words, they have harnessed social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to get the words. This is much harder than it looks and Ash is quick to point out that its important to have a good brand that people trust and a user interface that is easy to use, in order to execute a model like this.

While the Singapore edition looks to be a winner (Phua Chu Kang, Michael Fay, Kiasi etc.) it is definitely too early to stop here. The team has plans to expand the game to Philippines and Indonesia and we can just guess at what kind of words will be coming out from those countries. We hear that Ash has more interesting projects up his sleeves and he’s going to keep us guessing for the time being.