Started in 1995, Mr Bean is the leading chain soya bean food & beverage retailer in Singapore today. With more than 30 outlets located islandwide, Mr Bean offers a variety of soya bean drinks and snacks. Young and old can enjoy refreshing shakes, ice blended flavoured soya drinks, ice-creams, pastries and more. Adopting a fast food concept, Mr Bean possesses the experience and technology to produce fresh and delectable product offerings with traditional nutritional value. Today, Mr Bean prides itself on a strong corporate philosophy – where constant research goes into producing healthy and creative products.

Goojje is a play on the chinese enounciation of the word ‘Google’. Google sounds like Goo-哥, so Goojje is supposed to say Goo-姐.

Here’s the 16 page slide-deck of how Mint.com pitched. Good reference for budding entrepreneurs who are new to pitching.

Update: It appears that the story has been killed on Hackernews. No reason has been given.

Martell is asking you to submit your business idea on what to do with a 760 sq ft retail space in Clarke Quay and you stand to win executive training at INSEAD as well as the space itself.

More details can be found at SGEntrepreneurs who’ve done a great writeup on the program.

They have 6 participating malls are

• Central (Clarke Quay)
• Pacific Plaza (Orchard)
• Far East Square (Near CBD)
• Square 2 (Novena)
• Orchard Central (Orchard)
• West Coast Plaza

According to their press release, elgible tenants under this scheme will issue Redeemable, Convertible, Cumulative, Preference Shares (RCCPS) in lieu of their monthly base rent, with a cumulative dividend of 4% per annum.

After 1-2 years, they could opt for redemption, or redeem it at the end of the two/three year lease. Far East Organization also in this case, may convert their issued RCCPS to ordinary share.

Far East Organization are looking for vendors with exciting new brands as well as existing retailers who want to expand their stores and presence in Singapore.

If you think you have the mad chops, why not give it a try, it sounds like a pretty good deal when you’re just starting out.

Editor Note: When visiting their website, in order to view the brochure and press release, you will have to save it to your system first and rename it to add the .pdf extension. At the current press time, it would appear that the files downloaded from the site, does not come with the necessary file extension. We’ve wrote an e-mail to Far East Retail to inform them about this error.

Jan 1st 2010. A date which for better or worse signals the end of an era of television programming on our public transportation system. TVMobile, Mediacorp’s mobile television network, has ceased its broadcast at 12am this morning.

While no more television programming will be shown on the display units, there is still potential for other kinds of information like, arrival time, weather and other non-intrusive data. What do you think? What kind of information would you like to see on your daily bus commute?

NRF sets aside S$50m to nurture early stage high-tech start-up companies
SINGAPORE: Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF) has announced the selection of seven incubator managers under its Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS).

The managers are tasked with nurturing early stage high-tech start-up companies, and S$50 million has been set aside for this.

The initiative is part of the 360-million-dollar National Framework for Innovation and Enterprise programme, announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in March 2008.

Under the scheme, the NRF will provide up to 85 per cent co-investment in each start-up company identified by the selected incubator managers, up to a maximum of S$500,000 per company. On the other hand, the incubator manager will be required to invest at least the balance of 15 per cent in the start-up.

As an incentive, the incubator manager will be given an option upfront to buy out NRF’s share in the invested start-ups within three years of investment, by repaying the capital plus interest.

NRF said this way, the government will share the downside risks of the investments.

The seven incubator managers chosen from a pool of 32 are: Clearbridge Accelerator; I2G Tech Accelerator; Neoteny Labs; Plug & Play; Social Slingshot; Small World Group; and Stream Global.

This is great news, looks like our local startup scene is about to get hotter!

Update:
Other than Neoteny and Small World Group, I am unable to find any additional information about the other 6 incubators. I’m not sure if Social Slingshot is the same Slingshot Labs started by Rupert Murdoch in 2008.

If anybody have any information about the other incubators, please let us know in the comment section below! We’d also like to encourage our users to check out this new community-run documentation project called ‘Startup Lah’, a wiki for startup information, and help to contribute information into its repository.

Update 2:

Reader wangkw has given us the link to Plug & Play Tech. Thanks!

Update 3:

Reader Jessica Tan has given us a link to Clearbridge Accelerator. Thanks!

Starting Up

Opportunities

Choosing your Business Partners

Business Tips

Charles & George

Business Week

Christopher Ng has a dream: Help alleviate a major global health problem by bringing toilets to the world’s poor — at a tidy profit.

Ng, managing director at Singapore-based Rigel Technology, hopes to sell his state-of-the-art portable, fertilizer-making, toilets for as low as $30 beginning next year, tapping into a multibillion dollar market for proper sanitation in developing countries.

It is among the exhibits at the annual World Toilet Summit in Singapore, which brings together industry players to generate awareness of the world’s sanitation problems.

Experts estimate about 2.5 billion people lack functioning, hygienic toilets and instead excrete in the open, a habit that can contaminate water supplies and spread diseases such as E. coli bacteria and other viruses.

Ng said his company’s toilets separate liquid and solid waste, a feature that should reduce unpleasant smells and create fertilizer.

“A farmer could sell this recycled fertilizer,” Ng said while pulling out a compartment on the bottom of a prototype. “It’s good to sell something that’s useful and make a minimum profit.”

Jack Sim, who founded in 2001 the nonprofit World Toilet Organization, one of the organizers of the three-day conference, estimated the market for sanitation in developing countries is worth $1 trillion.

Health advocates have sought to entice companies like Rigel to invest in affordable, portable toilets after efforts by international aid organizations and donations by rich countries fell short, he said.

Donated portable toilets would sometimes end up in storage, as the units were poorly distributed and villagers were not taught how to use and maintain them, Sim said.

“We’ve seen that the donor model doesn’t work,” Sim said. “Now people are taking the marketplace as the solution, because it works fastest when you have a profit motive.”

“Selling to the poor need not be exploitative,” he said.

Sim said the World Toilet Organization will help advertise Rigel’s toilets through its contacts with non-governmental organizations and humanitarian groups.

K.E. Seetharam, director of the Institute of Water Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, estimated that just 22 percent of India’s rural population and 29 percent of China’s have access to working toilets.

“People aren’t aware of the cost of open defecation in terms of lost work and school days from disease,” Seetharam said.

He said many children in poor areas are malnourished “not because of a lack of food but because of worms in their intestines that they got from unsanitary conditions.”

Rigel’s Ng, who estimates poor countries need 500 million toilets, said he expects to sell 10,000 units per month beginning in February in countries such as China, India and Sri Lanka.

“The market for this is very big,” Ng said. “I hope other companies will follow our lead.”

[1] Rigel Technology (Warning, loud flash music on load)