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New Beginning
By Frank | February 21, 2010
Over the last few years, this website has contained the musings and discussions relating to my evolution of my focus from just Finisar and optical communications towards a broader horizon – clean tech and green investing. I was in sync with the overall trends of high tech culture in this step.
Over the last 7 months I have been working to start an incubator focused on clean tech, optical systems and novel materials – all in partnership with the Singapore government. On December 30, 2009, Small World Group was notified that we were one of the Incubator proposals that has been accepted by the government.
The ramifications of this are multiple -
- first of all it means that I will be spending 4 weeks out of every 6 in Singapore; as a corollary, when I am in the USA the time there always involves travel to both Indiana (home) and California (business) as well as time visiting my children who live all over! I am once again signed up for too much travel; if you want to reach me, you can see my location calendar here.
- SWG now has 2 principals – myself and Dean Haritos. Dean’s background is Cal Tech (BS), Stanford (MS), HP – Finisar – Infinera in terms of big corporations and Cloudbreak Software as a startup company. Dean is a master of project planning and execution. He is also a cancer survivor who works with people diagnosed with cancer – he maintains a website “just past infinity” for this purpose.
- Small World Group Incubator is now a Pte LTD company in Singapore. We began operations in early January and are making progress towards funding our first company. The scheme here allows us to invest up to $88K and at that limit the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) gives the company a convertible loan of $500K where the SWG Incubator owns the right to convert the loan at its own decision for up to 3 years after the company is founded. More is available about the NRF TIS scheme (1), (2), (3).
- In Singapore, we have an entrepreneurial ecosystem that is rich in technical talent as well as rich in Institutes and Universities that have state of the art equipment. Also we find there is a real focus on transforming the country from its diminishing manufacturing base to one where ideas, designs and product development are needed to build the new future.
We hope you will go to the Incubator tab and explore our activities there!
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