Singapore's successful young entrepreneurs
If there is one aspect of life in Singapore that is particularly encouraging, it's the fact that young people are encouraged to express themselves from an early age. This definitely fosters a strong entrepreneurial spirit amongst the island state's youth.
Amongst the up-and-coming business people from Singapore who have embarked on successful financial careers from a tender age are Chua U-Zyn. Typical of the inventive and mature outlook of so many Singaporeans, he began to experiment with basic computer programs aged seven. After many years spent developing and honing his skills, he founded Ping.sg, a service aimed at providing a platform for Singapore's dedicated regiments of online bloggers. U-Zyn became so successful because of his intrinsic knowledge of what his community aspired to. To this day, Ping.sg is a continuing success story, with users posting over 5,000 individual blogs each day.
Another inspirational Singaporean entrepreneur is Paddy Tan Lek Han. At a young age he saw the possibilities for anti-theft devices, and went on to pioneer a series of unique lost-and-found services, under the mantle of Bak2U. The main motivation behind this remarkable young businessman was to provide a better life for his parents, a commendable aspiration that he has more than fulfilled with the success of his enterprise.
The blogging community was also the driving force behind Nuffnang.com, the brainchild of Cheo Ming Shen. Nuffnang.com is a vibrant blog advertising community that enjoys high traffic ratings in Singapore. "Being a boss, a salesman, and a client all at once is a challenge you do not get anywhere else but in business."
The internet is undoubtedly proving to be an inspiration for so many of the island state's budding dot com millionaires. Chew Choon Keat set up SharedCopy.com (deadlink now), established as a platform to allow users to share interesting web pages. Recycling web content in such an audacious way might seem like such a no-brainer that it is surely remarkable no-one had thought of doing it before. Chew Choom Keat's unique take was to run with a basic idea and employ some dazzlingly speedy execution to get the site up-and-running. Once he had created his little slice of the web market, he could begin experimenting to fine-tune his entrepreneurial ideas.
Another fine example of Singapore's often apparently limitless pool of young talent is Herryanto Siatono, a web application designer responsible for two ultra-cool sites. Pluit is a web application design and development house, producing superior ideas for quality sites. His other venture, BookJetty, is an online platform specifically designed to allow cataloguing of book collections, as well as the ability to follow friends' bookshelves.