SingTel Accelerate 2010 – Overview
This is the first of three articles about the recent Accelerate 2010 conference. We got some last minute tickets from James Chan [@motochan] of Neoteny Labs, one of the sponsors (who incidentally have a new website courtesy of my own fair hand).
My first contact was an SMS thanking me for going to i.lluminate, SingTel's more typical 'business' conference from the previous day. I was a little worried that this might be a sign of haplessness to come. In fact infrastructure was not something that faltered at all and the numbers of employed personnel/cameramen left it clear that this was not an exercise in frugality.
First impressions? Holy crap. A massive room, that felt empty despite a couple of thousand people, you had to feel for Noah Kagan [@noahkagan] who was MC'ing, an early morning Singapore crowd isn't participatory at the best of times, but given how sparsely populated the aircraft hanger was they'd have had to have laced the coffee with hallucinogenics.
Then a slightly incongruous drumming band, who were pretty good but the accompanying video animation seemed to fire app missiles from all over Asia into Singapore causing an explosion! I think it was a good explosion though. :-)
The Ads
I'm not going to dwell on the hour and a half that followed and seemed to stretch into infinity. The SingTel CEO had the unfortunate moment where he told the crowd that "Einstein tried a thousand times before he invented the lightbulb", which he'd have had to have emerged from the womb holding in 1879 when it was invented and he was born.We were then told often by several members of SingTel senior management how innovation and creativity were important and that SingTel had them in spades before doing a interminable demo of their new (terrible) TV product that was so awful that it probably deserves it's own article.
The classic 'scared of being a dumb pipe' message of every telco in the world rang out through all of SingTel's speeches. Thankfully it appears they are willing to buy their way out of their 'predicament'! The SingTel Innov8 investment fund was launched last week and we were told that as entrepreneurs it was "another area which you can deal with SingTel, simply".
Again I'm pleased that there is this money available for startups in the South East Asian market, but I can't help but feel that it's more a case that SingTel can use it's huge reach to scale later in a startup's lifecycle rather than help foster the initial push to product.
I'll leave my gripes with SingTel as an article for another time, but it's safe to say SingTel's spoken view of itself and the actual experience of dealing with them in the real world are entirely different.
We also heard from Ronnie Tay, the CEO of iDA. Clearly a very bright chap although suffering from a bad case of buzzword-itis. As I put it on twitter... "Drinking game for #accel2010. Everytime a speaker says innovation, cloud or creativity drink a shot. Hammered in 5 minutes."
There was some good news in the government's understanding that fast network access acts as an enabler to innovative businesses. (Wireless@SG for it's faults is better than everywhere else) And that they want the engineering workforce to have relevant skills. Once again I just wish my experience on the ground trying to get involved with the universities was more fruitful.
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There's also my take on day one's presentations and also day two. Don't forget to checkout our products, Gameplan and Today's News.
