Extracts from the 10th Malaysia Plan (2011 – 2015) speech by Prime Minister Najib this morning, related to IT industry and stimulating the emergence of startups in Malaysia:

• Encouraging entrepreneurship: “…bankruptcy laws will be simplified to support a risk-taking culture, eliminate the stigma of failure and allow high calibre and credible entrepreneurs who fail to become active again (p 20);
• National Key Economic Areas, NKEAs: Information and communication technology, ICT as one of the 12 NKEAs (p. 15).
• Focus on soft infrastructure development: The 10th Malaysia Plan’s “allocation for non-physical infrastructure will be increased to 40%, compared with 21.8% in the 9MP. Focus will be given to skills development programmes, R&D activities and venture capital funding geared towards promoting a higher level of innovation in the country” (page 14);
• Growth funds: Mudharabah Innovation Fund “with an allocation of 500 million ringgit, will be introduced to provide risk capital to government venture capital companies” and Business Growth Fund “to bridge the financing gap between the early stage of commercialisation and venture capital financing for high tech products” (p. 20);
• Technology-driven development of NKEAs: “the application of high technology will be emphasised in the development of NKEAs. Technology platforms such as biotechnology, nanotechnology and high-end engineering will further increase the impact of the NKEAs on economic growth” (p. 16);
• Competition Law: The Law “will be introduced to provide a regulatory framework against market manipulation and cartel practices that may affect market efficiency” (p. 17);
• Working Capital Guarantee Scheme: Additional RM3 billion allocation for the Scheme, which is designed to “ensure that the SMEs have better access to financing facilities” (p 24).

Full speech transcript here.

10th Malaysia Plan on IT, entrepreneurship and startups, announced by PM @najibrazak originally appeared on GreyReview on June 10, 2010.

Elevyn is a social purpose e-commerce platform. Developed by Mike Tee and Devan Singaram, Elevyn aspires to assist marginalized communities to improve their economic well-being by (a) encouraging and enabling them to trade online with socially conscious consumers from across the world and (b) a more effective means to raise money for social causes.

This venture is probably what Bill Drayton described as social entrepreneurship, which involves a combination of pragmatic and results-oriented methods of a business entrepreneur with the goals of a social reformer.

Social Economy on Elevyn

Anyone can signup for free at Elevyn. Members can support / suggest a cause and setup an online shop. Preferably, the online shop sells products made by the community artisans and the community members manage the online shop, from creating product catalog to product packing to delivery to customers.

Every online shop on Evelyn is also encouraged to must support a Cause. A portion of every sales made through the online store will fund the Cause. After each completed transaction, a buyer will automatically see how is channeled to the Cause.

An example, “raise $200 to buy books for kindergarten.” Evelyn takes 5% for each sales and also 10 cents for each item listed on its online product catalogue. Another 5% goes to PayPal with the remaining 85% will be collected by the seller. Once the fund reaches the target $200, Evelyn will send it to field coordinator to fulfill the Cause (which is, purchase books for the kindergarten).

Online Shop at Evelyn

Besides purchasing products, a member can also contribute by (a) joining the cause, (b) making a donation and (c) raising awareness of the cause by embedding widget on website.

Based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Elevyn took 8 months to develop its front-end interface; it was launched on November 11 2008. The company is currently developing backend analytic engine that is able to calculate optimum selling price for each country, by aggregating prices on its platform.

Elevyn Empowering Fringe Communities originally appeared on GreyReview on November 29, 2008.

EzyPzy (pronounced as “eezy-peezy”) is a web utility for managing information delivery cycle, from contacts management to sending out of text messages and emails to target audience.

Founded by Aaron Gill in 2006, the MSC Malaysia status start-up can easily passed off as yet another business contacts repository service, as offered by players like Plaxo, LinkedIn and Xing. Although its contacts management comes with nice features like highly customizable Contact Form and flexible tagging, it acts more like a complementary function to its web/mobile information delivery.

Information Push and Pull

EzyPzy’s Listings offers information-on-demand (information pull) facility. Here’s how it works. Create a Listing from EzyPzy’s web, Ajaxy interface. Each Listing is assigned an Ezykode.

For example, an Ezykode for a restaurant can be “Daily Specials.” The Ezykode is promoted on the restaurant’s promotional materials and those interested to find out more about the daily promotions can text message “EZY Daily Specials” to 36881. The restaurant owner can choose either to send out text-based (SMS) promotion information or pictures (MMS) to the requester. The mobile number of the requester will be automatically entered into the restaurant’s contacts list on EzyPzy.

This information pull service by EzyPzy can adapt to many settings, be it selling of real estate and automobile and also sending daily updates to conference participants.

EzyPzy Dashboard

Users can also create Campaign, which involves sending emails and/or text messages to predefined contacts/leads (information push).

The EzyPzy Menu

EzyPay charges service ‘subscription’ fee, per-month basis. Fee ranging from RM0 to RM300, depending on the size of contacts repository and number of Listings (see Table below). At any time, a user can easily upgrade (and downgrade) their usage plan.

The Pricing Plan

On top of the ‘subscription’ fee, EzyPzy also charges its customers a standard rate of RM0.15 per SMS and RM0.30 per MMS for text messages sent out from EzyPzy system.

From Features to Solution

According to Founder and CEO Aaron Gill, EzyPzy was originally conceptualized as a tool to assist real estate agents to manage their property listings online and push information to their potential leads via mobile phones. As development progressed, the application organically grew and became an integrated information delivery solution.

EzyPzy continues to grow by adding layer upon layer of features and capabilities, in order to differentiate itself in the marketplace. In coming months, the company will introduce new features and functionalities:

• Embeddable customizable contact form, which can be embedded on any website; contact details entered into the form are automatically stored to EzyPzy contacts repository,
• Automated contact details capture of scanned name cards, and
• Scheduler for its email and SMS Campaign.

Launched in May 21 2008 during the World IT Congress in Kuala Lumpur, EzyPzy has over 150 clients storing over 12,000 contact records. The company is one of the first five recipients of the MSC Malaysia’s Technopreneur Pre-Seed Fund.  EzyPzy has been used in two major events in Malaysia, namely the Monsoon Cup and Miss Malaysia Indian Global Pageant. Besides Malaysia, the company has started offering its service in Singapore.

Information Pull / Push Made Easy by EzyPzy originally appeared on GreyReview on November 27, 2008.