MDA Working on a Crunchbase For iJam Startups?
The Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore has been somewhat forward thinking in terms of their initiatives online and offline. Take for example the bold move to build iJam.sg (currently defunct, click here for screenshot), a Digg-like community site that aimed to harness ideas from the community and get the community to vote on them. Though bold, the idea never worked, and Aaron Chua from MDA was quick to point out that MDA lacked the community management abilites needed to run such a site. Not sure how many people remember this but Aaron did mention that the iJam site it being revised to be more like Crunchbase. Has it finally happened? Looks like it has..
MDA’s Version of Crunchbase
The screenshots below clearly show that the folks at MDA have been busy walking the talk. From a functionality perspective, it’s pretty much everything that Crunchbase is, just that it’s entirely catered towards iJam startups. Users can edit/update the entries to keep the data fresh. Users can also add in new entries into the various categories as shown in the menu in the screenshot. The platform also takes into account research institutes and other government agencies. While the site was up since we last checked, it is clearly undergoing testing as observed from the structure of the link. It was even taken down a couple of times in the last few days. Check out the platform here.
Who Built The Platform?
Based on where the platform is currently hosted, we see that it was built by a company called ecPresence Technology. The entire management team of ecPresence Technology is also the management team of Botslife, a Web-based 3D/mixed reality platform that lets lay users “create sophisticated robotic toy movement in a virtual game environment”. Botslife was one of the 5 companies that received a piece of the $7.6 million which MDA distributed earlier this year. We don’t understand the linkage here but it’s something interesting to note.
Long Term Value to the Ecosystem
Platforms are meant to provide value to the community and a platform like this is definitely it. In fact, this is such an untapped space that I don’t think MDA is the only one building a Crunchbase-like platform for Singapore startups. Now that the platform is built, it will depend on how well MDA engages the community to fill it up with content and to get people to use it. They have learned a great deal about community management from their first attempt of the iJam platform, and it will be huge mistake for them to merely treat this platform as a directory. Infocomm Singapore has a platform which is merely a directory, and I do not think that will be the right way to go. The real value is in building a community around it, one that actively looks up to the platform as a reliable data source and one that sees value in giving back to the platform and growing it further for the greater good of the startup ecosystem in Singapore!
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