Tomorrow: Entrepreneurship Idea Pitching 12 pm - 2 pm (PnP Tech Centre Sunnyvale)

[Singapore Connect]

Dear Members,

SingaporeConnect and NUSEA are hosting an Entrepreneurship Idea Pitching Event this Saturday.

NUSEA is the NUS Entrepreneurship Association (NUSEA) - a group of entrepreneurial students under the National University of Singapore College (NUS) in Silicon Valley internship program. They are based in the Silicon Valley area to learn about entrepreneurship through working in high-tech startups while taking entrepreneurship classes in Stanford over the course of the year.
 
Throughout their stay in the Valley, they have been infected by the entrepreneurial energy buzzing around and have been churning up a few venture ideas of our own. SingaporeConnect is pleased to invite you to hear these students present their ideas in the form of a "VC pitch", and hear feedback from a group of diverse panelists, including seasoned entrepreneurs and those familiar with the eco-system. You are also welcome to lend your expertise and ask the students some tough questions or share invaluable feedback.

Our distinguished panelists are:

Mei Lin Fung

As an investigator, thought-leader and social entrepreneur, Mei Lin has been exploring the use of television and digital media in the development of new community-based models for innovation in the 21st Century. She co-produces 5 TV shows on Palo Alto Community Access Cable TV and available for viewing on Internet TV, Road to Success, a Chinese language program featuring Chinese immigrants, FutureTalk in English with editions in Mandarin, Russian and Spanish covering the same topics with native speaking host and guests. Mei Lin was an advisor for INJO 6 - the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford and organized a Social Media workshop for the 2009 and 2010 Injo Fellows. She is working on a networked innovation community project with the US Department of Defense, which will explore the use of digital narratives in new media. She worked with the US Department of Labor Office of Apprenticeship to set up the first Registered Apprenticeship in Customer Care in the nation.

Mei Lin worked at Intel and Oracle in Silicon Valley, and also as an operations research analyst and assembler programmer with Shell Australia. She has written extensively and has been translated into Polish, Korean and Spanish. She is regularly quoted on Customer Service, CRM and her case study of Singapore's efforts in eGovernment, and Singapore's National Service Initiative have been cited in academic peer reviewed journals. Mei Lin has served as international advisor to Singapore's National Library Board, and was appointed overseas consultant by the China Ministry of Information Industry to the committee on CRM and Contact Centers. She has spoken at the National Defense University in Washington DC, at the People's Congress Hall in Beijing China and given a talk with Paul Greenberg at the invitation of the Prime Minister's Office in Singapore to all the Quality Service officers in the civil service.

Mei Lin serves on the board of the National University of Singapore America Foundation and holds a Master of Science degree from MIT in Management and B.Sc (Honors) in Mathematics from the Australian National University. She is the co-founder and chairman of the Institute for Service Organization Excellence which is a thought leader in leadership models for the 21st century and designs curriculum for Service Leadership Transformation in a networked world.

Bowei Gai

Bowei Gai is a tech entrepreneur, dreamer and watermelon enthusiast. Bowei first stumbled into the startup world with the accidental success of Snapture Labs. He later co-founded CardMunch which LinkedIn acquired in 2011. Bowei is currently working as entrepreneur-in-residence for LinkedIn on a number of stealth projects. 

Bjorn Lee 

Bjorn Lee is currently the co-founder and CEO of Stickery, that makes mobile games and apps to make learning awesomer for preschool children and parents.He has led teams to develop games and virtual world experiences for brands such as Sony, Samsung, P&G and Intel. That journey took him from drunken TechCrunch boozefests in Michael Arrington’s Atherton home to sobering coffee breaks in Vietnamese roadside cafes and even the polluted air of pre-Olympic Beijing’s Zhongguancun startup district. Prior to Stickery, Bjorn spent five years in various capacities to understand the startup ecosystem as a venture capitalist (DFJ), corporate slave (OgilvyOne), community organizer (e27), startup executive and starving entrepreneur. Bjorn is a graduate of National University of Singapore and was part of the Overseas College program (Stanford University). Albeit as a a game producer and customer developer, this ace prefers the fast-paced thrills of startups to corporate life.

Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and a co-founder of Coursera, which is working with top universities to offer a high quality education to anyone in the world, for free.  He is also the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, the main AI research organization at Stanford, with 15 professors and about 150 students/post docs.  At Stanford, he led the development of the ml-class/db-class online education platforms, which were the precursor to the Coursera platform. In Fall 2011, he was the instructor of ml-class, a Machine Learning class that was one of Stanford's first massive online courses, and had an enrollment of over 100,000 students.  Today, Coursera offers over 40 classes from Princeton, Stanford, UMich and Penn, and has over 1 million enrollments. 

In addition to his work on online education, Ng also works on machine learning, specifically on building AI systems via large scale brain simulations. His previous work includes autonomous helicopters, the STanford AI Robot (STAIR) project, and ROS (the most widely used open-source robotics software platform today). Ng is the author or co-author of over 150 published papers in machine learning, and his group has won best paper/best student paper awards at ICML, ACL, CEAS, 3DRR. He is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the 2009 IJCAI Computers and Thought award, one of the highest honors in AI. 

Yaw Shin Yeo

Senior Investment Manager at Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd

Develop and advance pipeline of VC-backed startups to grow Singapore’s tech entrepreneurship ecosystem, including deal origination, evaluation, due diligence, deal structuring, negotiation and closing. Accelerate portfolio companies' growth through customer introductions, talent recruitment, business development, sales and marketing partnerships. Completed investments into 2 tech startups in the last twelve months.

After this session, the students invite you to a nearby paintball center to bleed off your stress with a fun game of paintball.
 
Pitching:
Date: May 26, 2012 (Saturday)
Time: 12 pm – 2 pm:

There will be four teams pitching. Each pitch lasts 10 minutes. The rest of the time is for Q&A/comments from the panelists and the audience.
Venue: Plug and Play auditorium (440 North Wolfe Road  Sunnyvale, CA 94085)
 
Light snacks and refreshments will be provided. A $5 contribution would be appreciated at the door to cover the cost of food and drinks.

Sign-up: 
http://sgc-pitch-and-paint.eventbrite.com/

(You are welcome to show up at the door, but do please sign-up so we know how much food to procure)

Paintball
 
Time: 2.30 pm –  4 pm
Venue: Santa Clara Paintball 
2542 Monterey Hwy
San Jose, CA 95111
http://santaclarapaintball.com/directions.htm

**Should you be interested to join us for the paintball fun, please RSVP in the Google Docs. The pricing will possibly be as low as $5/person depending on the sign-ups. 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEF2SXVlaG9LUGc4NG5DajU5cnB4aWc6MQ
 
We are would like to see your presence at this exciting event. The NUSEA contingent would especially like to thank all SingaporeConnect members for the warmth and kindness throughout the interactions they have had over the year, and would LOVE to see your presence at this exciting event. What's more, it's a great chance to meet our interesting panelists as well.

See you there!

 _____________
on behalf of the
SingaporeConnect Committee
A social club for food, fun, and friends!