Creative Idea Powerhouse

Raising the Philippines Entrepreneurship Competitiveness Index in Global Outlook

I’ve been on and off fly into Philippines for business trip since May last year when we kick start our Philippines operation in May 09. Recently, when I checked back my passport (due to some reason I have to carefully look into my passport, my team mates in SMilDS will know why..) I’ve been entering this country for a total of 12 times (counting the airport custom stamps …) since May last year, practically more than 1 time a month on average. Good enough and thank god, our Philippines operations has started from 2 persons in June 09 to approximately 20 people right now, and have our own operation office in the heart of Makati City. It is never an easy job and thanks to our be loving Platform2u.com Philippines CEO, Mr. Edward’s support, everything come into pictures in less than 6 months.

 The more I get to know this country – Philippines, the more I get to appreciate the setup, support and structure I have enjoyed back in my country – Malaysia. Fellow Malaysian, we have government grant to support and grow entrepreneurs, we have facilities that given to the entrepreneurs for free to use, and we have many programs prepared to groom local entrepreneurs to be competitive in APEC. We have MDeC that keep engaging regional top trainers to train the local entrepreneurs to think out of the box, be innovative, and yet, we heard complaints from everywhere that money is not enough, government is not supportive and so forth. Until now, after I step out from Malaysia and explore the regional opportunities, I will really need to say this truly from my heart, I’m fortunately and proud to be Malaysian. Thank you! When times come, I will for sure contribute back to the country J

This year, SMilDS is planning to launch a massive and large scale program to help raise the local entrepreneurs in Philippines, where we called it SMilDS Connect Program. The program is designed with the objectives to raise the awareness of Filipino towards ‘Run Your Global Business – RYGB’ initiative; groom local entrepreneurs into become social e-Entrepreneurs; and ultimately, create jobs opportunities for the country. There will be training, sharing, workshops, and one after another events to introduce the SMilDS Connect into the community starting from Q2 this year. Anyway, our first SMilDS Connect event falls on this coming Tuesday in the one of the high class hotel in Makati City.  It is a by-invitation function to a group of selective future entrepreneurs in Philippines.  To ensure the future events’ success rate, we will need to be selective on our BETA program participants and keep the ball rolling effects. It is not an easy task to groom and raise the local entrepreneurship in a country, but I know I have a team of experts behind supporting our efforts. What’s more, it is always fun to work with young, energetic, and visionary entrepreneurs, and when we can visionalize the ‘end results’, hundreds over thousands of young entrepreneurs celebrating their achievements!

It all starts from one step at a time. Our first milestone, 19^th Jan 2010 – First SMilDS Connect Program – Your passport to Social Commerce will be live in Inter Continental Hotel, Makati City, 6:00pm sharp (no matter what, we aim to start sharp at 6:00pm Philippines time). Lets the journey begin…

SMilDS.COM, the brainchild introduced by Platform2u.com during April in Malaysia, is one of the latest e-Commerce tradding engine. With the complete e-Commerce features and functions build in and bundle with Cross Selling Model, it is the first of its kind in e-Commerce world that able to deliver a mess cross selling machanism, and easily to enable merchants to sell their products to the world without hassle.

SMilDS.COM has been introduced in Malaysia during April, Hong Kong in May, and Philippines in July 4th. Its a remarkable day for the United States for celebrating their national day, and to us, it is the remarkable day for Platform2u.com too, because through Philippines where SMilDS.COM will start to connect to the world marketplaces such as United States, UK, Europe and other Asia countries.

When we conceptualizing our solution initially, the SMilDS.com is design as a pure e-commerce trading platform that build in CRM, payment gateway, and logistic. It never be different than rakuten, taobao or yahoo can provide except we have the cross selling engine, which is our killer apps.

We know we needs to be lots more unique, special, outstanding and innovative in order to stand out from this battle of e-commerce. It is a cyber trading battle and we are new, we can be attacked by any big giant from all kinds of tactics, or backdoor without us realizing it. Yeap this is the real world..

After going back to the traditional business school 101 toolbox and dig out the swat tool, our only differentiation is our strategy in positioning ourselves correctly, south east Asia where the e-commerce marketplace are still green. That will also enable us to buy time to learn the market before we get ourselves over expand and get into trouble like alibaba did before during the early day of Y2000.

With this, our next target marketplaces will be focus in s.e. Asia countries, taking 3 years to build ourselves to be the largest e-commerce platform in all the countries we have presence.

In term of our Strategies on e-commerce, we will fully focus on building the new generation of social e-commerce, a e-trading engine that enable our young entrepreneurs to venture into e-commerce with little investment and risks free.

Tapping into the social network we have in the market currently, it is a perfectly match that enable more young people to start their entrepreneur journey in young age.

Looking at our next generation who have been eat, sleep, and get entertain by internet, social e-commerce will be the next new thing for us to look on.

When we were drafting our initial project plan for platform2u.com, our idea was simple, to build an e-commerce solution that enable the Internet entrepreneur. The buzzWord glocalization never came into our mind at all. All we aim for is our enthusiation to help the young Internet entrepreneur to find a point of start up and utilize their existing familiarity on Internet to earn their first fortune.

Throughout our journey, the plan and idea evolved, and the Big Picture slowly reveal. Our dream and vision become bigger and extended to a regional basis – to build a cross countries e-commerce platform that able to facilitate regional trade through internet.

I need to admit that to build a web shop or e-commerce for Malaysia is easy, but when we need to extend to a regional cross trading, many consideraiona come into picture. Localize payment gateway with local currencies exchange is a challenge; cross border logistic for micro or small sme with small quantity shipments is a challenge; to prevent and proactively reduce fraud case on e-commerce is a never ending fights against the non ethical buyers in internet. We know all these challenge and we need to call for a choice to go local or global. It is beyond the technology concerns of server loads, hardware and apps uptime, or language compatibility issues. We know that for the nex three year, there are one after another challenges that we can’t predict nor avoid awaiting us. We take the bold step to move on and build this platform, and fortunate, we have launched our first e-commerce 4.0 system in April 09, continue with a month later to launch in Hong Kong, and in next month in Manila, Philippines.

The buzzword glocalization came across our mind a month after we launch our system , during one of our business briefing session with our prospect merchant. I gave an example, if you sell something online and you have 100 agents or cross sellers selling your product online, you are doing a global business. And when your product is cross-sell by the 100merchants in their individual local webstore, with local look and feel website design, your product actually selling as localize one. On the term, this is glocalization… And SMiLDS.com is the enabler for this glocalization business, and we help Asia retailers to glocalize their business at every countries we presence. This is our vision and we will definitely make it happen!!