WHEN Dr Michael Yin was a computer science research scholar at the National University of Singapore in the early 2000s, he dreamt of starting his own company – one that would enable him to use his knowledge to bring new applications to end users.
An initiative under MDA, FutureMobile seeks to bring together best-of-breed offerings and allow industry players to leverage one another’s customer base, market access and partners. More importantly, FutureMobile aims to inspire innovations and offer opportunities for the industry to formulate commercial strategies to reach out to the regional and global markets. For more information, click here. |
Today, he is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mozat, a mobile development company incorporated in 2003. The Singapore-based company is enjoying tremendous growth across the globe, even offering its mobile social networking platform and application, also known as Mozat, in countries as far-flung as the Dominican Republic and Kuwait.
Supporting major operating systems on the most popular mobile phones in the market, Mozat allows users to connect and chat with friends online, access email, share photos and play multiplayer games.
As proof of its sheer popularity, the Mozat community now boasts over 10 million registered users, mainly in Asia and the Middle East. In September 2009, its website received more than 200 million page views and the amount of data processed exceeded 1 terabyte a month – a major milestone.
In January 2010, Mozat won Red Herring’s Top 100 Award, a prestigious award bestowed on technology firms around the world that show long-term promise. In February, Mozat proceeded to wow international visitors at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona.
Looking forward, Dr Yin said, Mozat wants to establish connections with more international partners. He explained: “We need to continue to establish partnerships with different players within the ecosystem so that we can continue to offer our customers superior mobile internet services that are refreshing and exciting.”
The company is set to accomplish this as an anchor partner in the FutureMobile partner network, an initiative under the Media Development Authority (MDA). The partner network ropes in industry players such as SingTel, Nokia, Microsoft, Zingmobile, Qualcomm and Huawei to collaborate on the development and distribution of mobile media services and applications. It seeks proposals for content and applications focusing on games, mobile lifestyle and healthcare, that can potentially be deployed on partner networks’ platforms.
As a core partner in the FutureMobile initiative, Mozat has committed to provide support and market access to developers building applications on its social network platform.
The FutureMobile initiative reinforces what Dr Yin has always observed ever since he arrived in Singapore as a research scholar years ago: an excellent business environment with virtually no red tape.
There is a highly educated and diverse talent pool to tap on, he added, along with “very supportive government policies towards innovation”.
Dr Yin has always steered his company towards profitability. As he told The Straits Times, in an interview in 2007: It is always innovation that pays, not innovation for innovation’s sake.
His advice to young start-ups: raise enough funds.
Of course, there is also a need to “stay focused on delivering value”, he added – and be sure to collaborate with partners because one won’t have the expertise for everything one wants to do.
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