TechSG.IO
A Smart Information Platform for a Smart Nation’s Entrepreneurship Ecosystem
A smart nation needs a smart entrepreneurship ecosystem, which in turn requires a smart information platform.
Entrepreneurship ecosystem is about facilitating connectivity amongst the key players: namely entrepreneurs, investors, technology providers, incubators and other facilitating intermediaries including government agencies and industry associations – to maximize idea flows, resource matching and access.
The traditional web portal provides directory listings that allow only limited forms of information searches, and they quickly go out-of-date.
Hence the relevance for TechSG: a smart information platform to support a Smart Nation’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.
TechSG.io provides not only the most comprehensive and up-to-date directories of tech startups in Singapore, but also information on their founders, investors, incubators, technology sources and facilitating intermediaries, and how these are in turn dynamically connected with one another.
It is the pattern of connectivity among these key players, as captured by TechSG, that provides powerful insights to be generated on the key movers and shakers of Singapore’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. Examples of such new insights will be presented on the second day of Innovfest.
TechSG is built on an open-wiki platform that allows all players in Singapore’s entrepreneurship ecosystem to own and update their profiles, including in particular their connections to other players. This real-time information “crowdsourcing” platform is supplemented by a natural language processing (NLP) engine that is being developed to crawl the internet to semi-automate information updating by a curation team. The platform also provides Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to automate and integrate information feeds from various partner organizations in the entrepreneurship ecosystem, such as profile updates, event announcements and press releases.
TechSG also serves as a natural platform for conducting online surveys among the entrepreneurship community, and for disseminating the survey findings back to the community. The platform is the most comprehensive, curated library depository for research and data on Singapore’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and how it is benchmarked against other nations and cities.
With sponsorship from IBM under its Digital Cities Initiative, TechSG is being developed and curated by a research team at NUS Enterprise, working in collaboration with a business analytics start-up, Wonderlabs, under the leadership of Prof Wong Poh Kam, Director, NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, and a leading entrepreneurship academic scholar and educator in Asia.
The team is committed to keeping the TechSG platform and data open for the entrepreneurship community, in line with Singapore’s Smart Nation vision of enabling innovation and entrepreneurship through open data.
Website: http://techsg.io