Moving on to nicholaschan.sg

After 2+ years of mucking around on Blogger, I am moving this very irregularly and infrequently updated blog to my own personal domain, nicholaschan.sg See you there!

2009 in perspective

It has been 12 solid months since I last wrote an entry. For the occasional reader that visits, here's a quick recap on what I have been up to in 2009.

Keeping busy
2009 has been an extremely busy year despite the downturn, with my personal startup Fredrik Marine IT Services Pte Ltd having doubling its revenue and keeping the entire team busy across Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea. The team also

As Azione Capital moves into it's 3rd year of operations, the task of professionalizing the firm has been taken up by 2 very capable and invaluable individuals, Dennis Phua and Janice Yip. In 2009 alone, these two dynamic individuals focused Azione's portfolio startups, engaged key partners and optimized the structure of the entire firm.

Family
In the spirit of enterprise, my father (who is an above-knee amputee) started up a small provision shop in a suburban district in Singapore, while my mother decided to give it a shot in the property market.

Community
I have been busy mentoring young entrepreneurs, giving speeches on social enterprise, sat on various advisory boards for entrepreneurship and judged on various business and social enterprise competitions in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. At the same time, I am still hosting the "First Thursdays" Singapore Entrepreneur Meetup sessions at Rocky Masters cafe as a melting pot of entrepreneurs in Singapore.

Computing

I found that 1.) having Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 is akin to using your computer while wading in molasses, 2.) downgrading to Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 with my 2010 key is perfectly painless and 3.) the speed increase is clearly seen. So if you are on KIS 2010, do yourself a favour and go with KIS 2009.

Having nearly 6,000 namecards is not a funny thing; one doesn't even know where to start. Compound that with the fact that the entire office is constantly meeting new people and the problem compounds exponentially. The Cardscan Executive is one of the best investments I made, where the entire process of converting the namecards is painless and (dare I say) brainless, with a near-100% proper allocation of fields like company name, position, emails and all. It beats paying for a temporary staff that typically gets the filing wrong and still takes more time and money.

Moving forward
2010 brings with it both excitement and promise yet at the same time, with anticipation comes "butterflies in the stomach". It is a year where we deliver on promises, begin new initiatives, establish new ground and take on new roles. It is a time that we will have our fears and yet not be afraid. It truly is the best time to be alive.