What is TechASEAN?
TechASEAN is an online platform that maps the technology start-up ecosystems of ASEAN economies.
TechASEAN aims to provide not only the most comprehensive and up-to-date directories of tech start-ups 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.
How does TechASEAN work?
TechASEAN is built on an open-wiki platform that will eventually allow all players in the entrepreneurship ecosystem to own and update their profiles, including, in particular, their connections to other players. In the initial stages, TechASEAN is populated using information crawled from multiple public-domain sources. In the long term, the platform will be updated via real-time information “crowdsourcing”, which will be supplemented by a natural language processing (NLP) engine that is being developed to crawl the internet. The platform will also provide Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to automate and integrate information feed from partner organisations in the entrepreneurship ecosystem, such as profile updates, event announcements and press releases.
TechASEAN is powered by 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 can be easily presented/analysed 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.
What is in TechASEAN?
Currently in beta, TechASEAN comprised comprehensive data on the ecosystems of two economies - Singapore and Indonesia, and basic information on start-ups of eight other ASEAN economies.
- Singapore: More than 7,000 start-ups, 5,052 founders, 1,144 investors , over 100 facilitators, more than 30,000 start-up linkages
- Indonesia: 5,628 start-ups, 32 investors, 70 facilitators
- Vietnam: 2,172 start-ups
- Malaysia: 2,139 start-ups
- Philippines: 1,455 start-ups
- Thailand: 1,150 start-ups
- Myanmar: 207 start-ups
- Cambodia: 106 start-ups
- Brunei: 19 start-ups
- Laos: 8 start-ups
The Insights section of the platform will initially 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.
TechASEAN is still a work in progress and will be fully launched at a later date.
Visit TechASEAN at http://techasean.io/