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ST: Singapore

Part of Bukit Timah Rd still closed due to canal cave-in

Repairs ongoing; LTA not saying if 'cavities' caused by MRT works nearby

 

Published on Jan 20, 2012

 

 

Workers reinforcing the canal between Bukit Timah Road and Dunearn Road near King Albert Park last night. Part of the drain embankment had collapsed on Tuesday, leading to traffic snarls as part of Bukit Timah Road was closed. One lane remains closed. -- ST PHOTO: ALPHONSUS CHERN

One of two lanes along Bukit Timah Road that had to be closed to traffic after a nearby drain embankment caved in on Tuesday remains shut to traffic.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) had reopened that rightmost lane on Bukit Timah Road towards Woodlands Road to traffic at 6.30pm on Thursday, but had to seal it again at 7.30pm.

A spokesman said LTA staff had thought that they could continue repair works on the side after opening the lane, but decided to close it again for safety reasons.

Equipment for repairs will be placed on that lane, which will remain closed for the next few days.

On Tuesday night, the LTA had sealed two lanes spanning a 25m stretch of the road, after a nearby drain embankment along the canal caved in.

An LTA spokesman had said grouting works had been underway since 10pm on Tuesday, shortly after the 'cavities' were discovered.

The two-lane closure on a four-lane road, near Clementi Road, led to heavy and slow-moving traffic outside King Albert Park on Wednesday.

It is not clear what caused the section of the canal to collapse, but the LTA could not comment on whether it was related to construction of the Downtown Line nearby, or what might have led to it.

The Downtown Line Stage 2, which will run from Bukit Panjang to Bugis, is slated for completion in 2015.

Construction of the MRT line was slightly delayed last year, after residents in Maplewoods Condominium protested against having a launch shaft for tunnelling works sited right outside their compound. When completed, the King Albert Park MRT station will be located right beside the condo.

At around 11pm on Thursday, the rightmost lane of Bukit Timah Road remained closed to traffic. A portion of one lane on Dunearn Road was closed as well to accommodate a crane that was unloading steel girdles to reinforce the side of the canal.

A Cisco van was parked behind the sealed-off lane on Bukit Timah Road, and Cisco staff were there to manage traffic.

Logistics coordinator Frederick Kam said traffic flow last night had improved slightly compared to Tuesday night.

The 24-year-old was at the McDonald's outlet at King Albert Park with his friends on both nights.

Other people at the fast-food chain said they were not aware of the cave-in along the canal, as the situation seemed orderly and it seemed like routine road works.

ROYSTON SIM, LIM YAN LIANG

Midges sour festive Chinese New Year mood in Bedok

PUB, NEA stepping up efforts to control population of insects

 

By Janice Tai , Peter Wong

Bedok Reservoir resident Nigel Gette is not usually a religious person, but he is stocking up on incense sticks this Chinese New Year.

Over the past month, his family has been placing sticks of incense around the house to keep midges, which have been plaguing residents of the area, at bay.

'Our guests may not like it, but there's no choice. If the situation gets worse, we may have to hold our reunion dinner in a relative's house,' said the 18-year-old student.

Other residents near the reservoir are similarly concerned that the infestation may dampen the festive mood, as the early Chinese New Year coincides with the usual annual visitation of the insects.

Since the start of the year, the Aljunied-Hougang Town Council has received more than 100 complaints about the tiny green and blue flies.

Aljunied GRC MP Low Thia Khiang said he has been visiting the affected area and is looking into the problem. However, he noted that according to feedback from residents, this year's infestation is not as serious as last year's.

Meanwhile, national water agency PUB, together with the National Environment Agency (NEA), is stepping up measures to monitor and control the population of midges after an increase in breeding was detected last month. A biological larvicide is now applied to the area more frequently - twice a day, compared to three times a week previously.

Algae, which the larvae of the midges feed on, is also being removed from rocks daily.

The PUB has commissioned a study by insect experts from the National University of Singapore, in a bid to identify longer-term solutions to the problems. The experts will work with entomologists from the NEA's Environmental Health Institute to review the current measures taken.

One of the world's foremost authorities on midges, Professor Peter Cranston, will also be flown in next month to speak on possible methods to keep the pests under control.

When contacted, Prof Cranston, who teaches at the University of California, Davis, said one possible reason for the scale of the infestation here is the onset of heavy rain, which washes nutrients from the soil into the reservoir. This in turn causes the algae in them to bloom, boosting the number of midges as their larvae feed on algae.

'What is so short-sighted is that it seems no one has been monitoring nutrients in the water, algal densities and midge numbers to identify what exactly is going on in Singapore. Without this data, it is educated guesswork,' he said.

Meanwhile, residents have come up with various creative ways to mitigate the problem.

Sixty-year-old Irene Lim has been hanging up a 2m-long patchwork quilt, which has been soaked in water, along her corridor every day - a homemade version of a sticky trap which stalls the midges that fly into it.

Her door and four windows are also covered with netting to keep the unwanted pests out.

'The netting spoils the festive atmosphere and doesn't make my house look very presentable,' she said. 'It also makes the house very stuffy, but... it can keep out about half the number of midges that would otherwise come in and disturb my guests.'

Mr Chew She Bee said he has got used to cooking and bathing without the lights on, as the midges often swarm around fluorescent lights.

'That's still all right - what's irritating is that they get into my nostrils, and it's really uncomfortable,' said the 60-year-old salesman.

The insect explosion has also attracted large numbers of swifts, which feed on the insects, to the area. Bird droppings have become the new bugbear for some of the residents.

The infestation has hit eateries hard, and some stallholders lament that business has been down by around 30 to 50 per cent.

A Chinese restaurant, Super Lucky Restaurant, has not only had to close two hours earlier every day for the past three weeks - as the insects proliferate in the evening hours - but it also does not charge its customers for their meals should the flies land in their food.

For staff at the Mixed Vegetable Rice Stall at the Block 739 coffee shop in Bedok Reservoir, cooking at night has been a hassle.

'We have to stop all cooking at 6pm to avoid the midges. Sometimes, the customers find them in their food but we tell them that it can't be helped,' said stall assistant Kim Wong.

jantai@sph.com.sg

petewong@sph.com.sg

Copyright © 2011 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

ST: Hard times for hardware start-ups

thursday special report

Hard times for hardware start-ups

Limited resources, absence of an 'ecosystem' to nurture innovation are some obstacles

 

Published on Jan 19, 2012

 

 

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Finding the right partners or investors is one hurdle local IT hardware start-ups face as Mr Henn Tan, CEO of Trek 2000 International, has discovered. -- ST FILE PHOTO

 

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• IT veteran Eddie Chau, chief executive of Brandtology, says local IT hardware businesses need a large scale - for inventory or after-sales services - to succeed. -- ST FILE PHOTO
• Finding the right partners or investors is one hurdle local IT hardware start-ups face as Mr Henn Tan, CEO of Trek 2000 International, has discovered. -- ST FILE PHOTO

By Irene Tham, Technology Correspondent

THE inventions of home-grown firms Creative Technology and Fusion Garage could have been the apple of the consumer's eye in world markets.

Creative - once a promising flag-bearer for Singapore's IT industry with its Zen portable music player - has been in the red for more than three years running. And start-up Fusion Garage - which announced a Web tablet a month before Apple mentioned its first iPad in 2009 - recently folded after it ran out of money.

But IT firms in other Asian countries have stood up well to the might of, say, Apple. Taiwan has HTC and Acer, and South Korea, Samsung and LG.

Why is Singapore not in the big league of hardware firms?

Entrepreneurs and venture-capital (VC) firms The Straits Times spoke to put it down to a lack of scale. 'In the hardware business, you need a large scale to succeed,' said IT veteran and entrepreneur Eddie Chau.

The large scale required - for instance, to maintain an inventory and after-sales service - makes the sector capital-intensive. 'But most of the Singapore start-ups live on a shoe-string budget,' said Mr Chau, founder and chief executive of Singapore-based social media monitoring software firm Brandtology.

He noted that local start-ups tend to raise only about a fifth of what their counterparts in the United States get from VC firms.

Limited resources hurt marketing and design efforts, which could be a reason Singapore inventions tend to be 'behind the curve in desirability' compared with those from the US, said Mr Chau.

Deep pockets, which hardware conglomerates like Samsung and LG have, are crucial for fending off copycats.

'To survive in the hardware business, one needs the financial muscle to produce more upgrades to stay ahead of the copycats,' said Dr Frank Levinson, managing director of Singapore-based business incubator Small World Group. 'This is a luxury that small start-ups do not always have.'

A smaller war chest also means that long-term survival is uncertain, he added. When economic troubles strike, smaller start-ups tend to drop out of the race first.

Also absent in Singapore: a hardware ecosystem for churning out products quickly and cheaply. Over the past decade, the country has moved away from low-value activities like computer and chip development and manufacturing to focus on high-value work in, say, chip research.

'So designers and suppliers along the consumer electronics supply chain have vanished,' said Mr James Chan, principal at Singapore-based Neoteny Labs which manages an early-stage venture fund.

'These are the undergrowth in the rainforest that fertilise future hardware innovation.'

Coupled with stiff competition from industries like energy and shipping for engineering talent, the bar for local hardware start-ups to make it has been raised even higher, he added.

They also face challenges in finding the right partners or investors. Noting that defunct Fusion Garage's investors included people not involved intimately with technology, Mr Henn Tan, chief executive of Trek 2000 International, advised start-ups to find the right partner 'and not jump the gun'.

Trek, which invented the USB ThumbDrive a decade ago, was too eager to show the world its invention without first registering patents globally and forging the right partnerships.

This mistake has cost Trek millions in legal fees to hunt down what is now a veritable army of large and small firms that chalk up sales of 200 million of these storage devices every year.

For his next notable invention, the FluCard Pro, Mr Tan made sure he took time to finalise deals with a preferred partner.

The FluCard Pro - a thumb-size storage device that lets compatible digital cameras and video camcorders connect wirelessly to the Internet and each other - took two years to launch. Introduced last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it will be distributed by Toshiba.

For those still keen to fight the hardware war, another strategy is to go for markets deemed too small by the big boys. US-headquartered Razer, founded by a Singaporean, is one such niche player. The maker of mice, keyboards, headsets and joysticks for hardcore gamers recently launched a tablet for PC gaming.

Facing such formidable hurdles in the industry, many local entrepreneurs have opted for the software path. Trek has developed software that can capture what is written on whiteboards and share the content over Wi-Fi with laptops and smartphones. The software works with its FluCard Pro.

So, will Singapore ever produce its own Acer or Samsung?

On its part, the Government has stepped in to help local inventors and entrepreneurs. In 2010, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced that $16.1 billion would be spent to help firms with research and development by the end of 2015. This is 20 per cent more than the amount invested from 2005 to 2010.

Efforts to foster entrepreneurship in the universities and strengthen cooperation between research bodies and the industry have produced some results.

To date, more than 40 high-tech firms have benefited from efforts by the National Research Foundation to sponsor seed funding and incubation programmes. One beneficiary is Brandtology, which has software that can analyse online and social media trends in more than 12 languages. In 2009, it received $2 million from VC firm Walden International under a funding scheme run by the foundation. Last year, it sold a majority stake to Australia-based media intelligence company Media Monitor.

Because of this support, some have not given up hope that Singapore will one day have its own hardware powerhouses. But it will take longer to get there now that the local hardware ecosystem is gone.

Failure, in particular, should not be frowned upon as there are lessons to be learnt, said Mr Johnson Chen, managing partner at Singapore-based VC firm Clearbridge Accelerator.

'Singapore does need an attitude shift towards viewing failures as something positive,' he said.

Neoteny Labs' Mr Chan concurred.

'Fusion Garage is a blip,' he said, but pointing to Xmi, which makes the X-Mini portable speaker, and Razer, he added: 'We do have some early successes.'

itham@sph.com.sg

http://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainablecities/