Sahiba Banu, junior reporter on the President*s Design Award team, blogs about her experience at the Techxchange Conference.

What do you get when you combine entrepreneurs, business owners and innovators together in a room? You get a room filled with content creators, which I got to experience.

On 10th May, I had the opportunity to attend an exclusive event called Techxchange at the Suntec City Convention Centre. Techxchange provides people with an opportunity to network and optimise opportunities, as ideas are exchanged with potential partners and collaborators, insights are gained from industry leaders and change-makers in the industry, and new tech-based products and services yet to be launched are discovered.

As the clock struck ten, guests from all walks of life took their seats for the first presenter, Viddsee, Derek Tan, co-founder of Viddsee. Viddsee is an online platform that carries multiple short films with the purpose to empower local filmmakers and storytelling.

As a millennial who spends a lot of her time on the internet, I was not aware of such a platform. The presentation by Viddsee made me realise that Singapore is filled with local creative talents. Derek showed us a glimpse of how the website looks like and also shared with us a few of the most popular videos, like Ten Thousand Bowls. “Each of us have our own stories and values, with the idea of sharing short films on an online platform, it allows people to come together because shared stories lead to shared memories. We want to build a platform to empower storytellers, and for them to share their stories to the world.”

Shortly after Derek Tan’s presentation, six presenters from different companies like AsiaMX, IMDA and Lusus Lab shared their companies’ missions and latest developments.

I was particularly intrigued by Lusus Lab because of their apps’ objective. Founded in 2016, Lusus Lab developed a community-based livestreaming app called Peeqr. Peeqr allows brands, product owners as well as content creators to benefit from live streaming.

These days, the younger generation is constantly hooked onto popular apps like Snapchat and Instagram. Their constant desire to be known in the social media world led to the development of Peeqr. “The reason why we developed Peeqr is because, everyone wants to be seen and heard. The hunger for social recognition among the younger audience is real. Why Peeqr? It is unique. There’s instant gratification and response. You can give an instant feedback while livestreaming and this can be done through your mobile phones as well as your desktop.”

Later during the day, I was able to gather some insights from the industry leaders and change-makers. The panel session, which started at 2.30pm, comprised of Mr Chan Hock Eng, a Managing Partner at ZANA Capital Pte Ltd, Mr Ian Hong, a Managing Director Head of Equity Capital Markets at Mizuho Securities Asia and lastly, Mr Francis Chu, an Assistant Director at IMDA.

The capital industry leaders and investors took the stage to talk about working with start-ups, entrepreneurship and fundraising. There were many questions being raised and answers being thrown around from one speaker to another. One question that stood out to me was, “As an aspiring entrepreneur, at which stage should I approach the funders when starting up a new business?”

The panel session concluded with a quote by one of the speakers, “If you’re going to start up your own business and you don’t respect investors, what makes you think this person will respect the staff or anyone that can bring success to the company?”

Techxchange was indeed an insightful and informative session. The ideas that I have gathered made me realise we are often producing formal and serious videos, yet after this session, we should tug at one’s heartstrings and produce heart-warming, fun and relatable content about President*s Design Award. Nonetheless, we are fortunate to have creative local talent amongst us today.

The President*s Design Award team would like to thank OMG Venture and Oculis Innovations for allowing us to experience an informative and memorable tech conference. Do keep an eye out for future outreach activities organised by the P*DA team.