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SINGAPORE : More than 50 start-up companies have benefited from a tie up with the National University of Singapore.
Its incubator programme, established about three years ago, allows the companies to tap on the university's expertise, facilities and funding.
Trying to find a computer in the school's common lab can be a chore.
This prompted two NUS graduates to develop a system that will enable institutions to better manage their facilities.
Temasek Polytechnic is currently using their programme, while the Nanyang Technological University will do so from January.
Said Jeffrey Lau, co-founder of EvoHub, "Our programme allows the NTU to be able to install the programme to give fair allocation to each of these students -- maybe two hours per day for each of these students to use, which is fair use and yet allows them to manage their PCs effectively. You don't have to have 1,000 PCs for 1,000 people."
At another start-up, two 28-year-olds have developed a smarter and more efficient search engine for researchers.
It is targeted at medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies.
Said Mohamed Ariffin Kamaludin, co-founder of Retriva Solutions, "What this search engine does is that at the back end, it tries to understand the researcher's profile and give the researcher the relevant information that the researcher requires and prevents the researcher from being overloaded with unnecessary information, which a typical search engine would return to the researcher.
"Typically it's meant for drug discovery, which normally takes about 15 years and out of these 15 years, researchers would take about three years to do their research. We target that this solution would be able to save up to about three to six months of time for the researchers."
The Singapore Eye Research Institute will test out this system by the end of January.
More than 20 start-up companies are housed at the NUS business incubator, made up of four buildings.
The companies are run mostly by NUS graduates.
The idea for such a place was to allow the entrepreneurs to interact and encourage them to become risk-takers in this mini-Silicon Valley.
Said Professor Jacob Phang, CEO of NUS Enterprise, "We hope that NUS can become a centre for technology entrepreneurial activity. And what we need now, which we don't have, is really sufficient volume; sufficient volume that will provide that cross-interaction, that cross-learning of the companies in their growing phase.
"So we hope to build this and therefore by doing so, we hope we'll be able to achieve a higher proportion of successful global enterprises that will be based in Singapore and grow in every part of the world."
Each start-up company is given a seed funding of up to S$300,000, with a matching grant from the Economic Development Board. - CNA /ct
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