I recently had dinner with Hitchoo founder, Yinghan Hu, who intends to reverse the online dating game. What happens next was quite surreal:

Under normal circumstance, I’d have thought to myself, she’s cute, then paid and walked off... Under Yinghan’s Hitchoo-powered circumstance, he whipped out his wallet, took out the familiar brown card, and in a genuine manner, told her “you made my day”.

She was flattered.

For those single like me, check out Hitchoo.com.

Entrepreneur27 SG said:

We were pretty excited to learn of Velvet Puffin’s (VP) lightning rise to the top of the local Web2.0 pile today; first the local Business Times feature and then the “Web 2.0 Richter Scale” of Techcrunch. Both founders, R Chandrasekar and Sam Hon are 26 and Velvet Puffin is a project under Radixs, a 60-person company both have founded since 2002. Co-founder Chandrasekar also reveals a total of $10million financing (seed and Series A) for the startup from Purple Ray, Artisan Encipta and the Singapore Economic Development Board.

Recommended by Anonymous Coward: "A review of the website that launched today. We can all take a look at our home-grown Web2.0 company and help support it!"

Link

iBjorn said:

We continue to unearth the more exciting Web2.0 startups in little Singapore, those with crazy ideas that should really sink or swim, as evaluated in front of our live audience. There’s no better way to crash-test your business model in front of real consumers themselves — young university students and bored young professionals with lots of free time spent surfing the web at home, in dorms and offices. If you are keen to practise your VC analytical skills, come sit in. Its really kinda like American Idol where the audience members are all Simon Cowells, Randy Jacksons and Paula Abduls.

Recommended by Anonymous Coward: "Interesting, even the MDA folks who launched the $500M IDM fund will be at the same event. No harm checking out if our local Web2.0 initiatives will take off. "

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iBjorn said:

This event almost looks like another initiative by some harried civil servant who pulled together a bunch of kakis from the other ministries to show the whole world they are all collectively putting effort in doing something that meets their KPI/ ROI/ whatever.

Recommended by Anonymous Coward: "Some views offered on what the government agencies are doing to create a "Web3.0" Industry in Singapore. Are these guys hopelessly out of touch or are we missing something here?"

Link

Bjornlee said:

This is a classic story of a hot young thing that skyrocketed to fame, got blinded by the dazzling lights of scrutiny and thudded back to Earth to peter out of sight with a whimper. Thats the story of Friendster, the first-ever "MySpace-to-be" touted to be the next billion-dollar empire but became a spectacular failure millions of dollars later. John Doerr, Ram Shriram, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) , Tom Koogle (chief executive of Yahoo through the second half of the 1990’s). It was an All-Star Team. No one could touch them. Google tried buying them in 2003 for $30M but was rebuffed. Friendster thought it could be much bigger, maybe something bigger than what Google is today.

Recommended by Anonymous Coward: "For some of us, Friendster has been part of our lives in secondary school, JC and then uni. We grew up with it, thinking it was cool to connect and "kapo" on our friends there. But its a real dud in America. Why MySpace became so hot and Friendster sucks (with thos slow loading of their pages) should be commuicated to Singaporeans. "

Link