TechASEAN is an online platform that maps the technology startup ecosystems of ASEAN economies.
TechASEAN aims to provide not only the most comprehensive and up-to-date directories of tech startups in ASEAN, 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 TechASEAN, that provides powerful insights to be generated on the key movers and shakers of the entrepreneurship ecosystem.
TechASEAN is built on an open-wiki platform that will allow all players in the 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.
TechASEAN is powered the proprietary APEIRO technology, co-developed by NUS Enterprise and NUS portfolio company Wonderlabs Pte Ltd. APEIRO is an infinitely flexible database engine that allows a data scientist to store, structure and capture data collected in a format that lends itself to be easily presented/analyzed as a social graph.
TechASEAN also serves as a natural platform for engaging the entrepreneurship community via online surveys and sentiment polls, and for disseminating the survey findings back to the community.
At the soft launch in July 2019, TechASEAN will comprise comprehensive data on the ecosystems of two economies - Singapore and Indonesia, and basic information on startups of eight other ASEAN economies.
The Insights section of the platform will present analytics about the Indonesian and Singaporean ecosystems, including comparative analysis of their trends and structures, as well as highlighting the interconnectivity between the two.
The Connectors 2019 Singapore is the inaugural ranking of the most influential ecosystem players in Singapore. Unlike the subjective “power rankings” that proliferate online, The Connectors is an objective ranking which quantifies the linkage data collated in the TechASEAN database. Applying the concept of node centrality from network theory, an influence score is calculated for every organization and person in the ecosystem.
The TechASEAN team plans to officially release The Connectors 2019 Singapore ranking in late 2019.
The methodology will be applied to the Indonesian data to construct The Connectors Indonesia, to be launched at a later date.
Leveraging on the capabilities of the APEIRO technology, TechASEAN has the potential to be a dynamic platform for online community engagement, to generate and sustain cross-border conversations about topical and timely issues of interest.
Upon completion, the platform will be the most comprehensive, curated library depository for research and data on ASEAN’s entrepreneurship ecosystems and how they benchmark against each other within the region.
The TechASEAN platform and data are owned by NUS Enterprise.
TechASEAN is being developed and curated by a research team at NUS Enterprise, working in collaboration with a data analytics start-up, Wonderlabs. The collaboration is led by Professor Wong Poh Kam, Senior Director of NUS Entrepreneurship Centre and Professor at the NUS Business School, who is a leading entrepreneurship academic scholar and educator in Asia.
The team is committed to keeping the TechASEAN platform and data open for the entrepreneurship community, in line with Singapore’s Smart Nation vision of enabling innovation and entrepreneurship through open data.