I’ve heard about her, I’ve read her blog and yesterday, I finally saw her in person …pacing up and down the area outside Suntec Ballroom rehearsing her speech. I didn’t know it was Estee at first and infact, thought she was a depressed woman who’d just been ditched or something, untill I saw the mic. :)

Yup, I travelled 5 hours to Singapore yesterday just to attend the PopOut! event organized by The Digital Movement (TDM) and it was well worth it. I got to meet Maneck Mohan (Recruit.net) too, who recognized me from the photo on my website – not bad, because I thought I looked older now.

PopOut! was an informal event to introduce a couple of interesting web startups in Singapore (except Recruit.net which is HK-based) and for people in the industry to network. Kudos to Howie the project manager, for putting everything together and Estee, who looked and sounded like a seasoned MC.

Five teams presented that night
1) Bezurk.com – a travel search engine.
2) Quaffs.com – social networking site.
3) ZopIM.com – corporate IM for websites.
4) Recruit.net – job search engine.
5) BookJetty.com – library book lookup.

Bezurk.com and Recruit.net call themselves vertical search engines, although there’s a fine line that seperates them from being just aggregators, i.e. building a business using other people’s content. The risk is if the content owners decided both companies are not adding enough value or are cannibalizing their traffic, then they may end their partnerships – remember that using the content of others without permission constitute an infringement.

Eric gave a lively presentation, which eventually drew criticism from AED and IAD nonetheless. For what it’s worth, I didn’t know that it was an NS thing nor tried Quaffs.com to find out that it doesn’t yet work properly. I thought that his application looked cool and feel mildly optimistic since local versions of social networking sites in Holland and Latvia have been wildly successful - the idea is to localized the features and content. I am skeptical about the referral program though, because that may produce many new BUT non-returning bloggers.

ZopIM.com is a cool and free application that lets you see who’s on your website and instantly chat with them. Therein lies the problems 1) privacy issues since the visitors know they’re being watched and 2) irritating message balloons that keep popping out at every page - something that I experienced the day before while visiting ZopIM.com. Perhaps the existing “Live Support - Online” implementation you see on many websites is more practical since it’s less intrusive because it’s customer-initiated.

Last but not least is BookJetty.com - a site that lets you lookup the book reviews on Amazon.com, check the availability at your local library and then some more. It drew the most attention because it looks really good for a one-man show and like most great business ideas, was created to solve an itching problem. I guess Herry’s main challenges are to get permission from more libraries to connect to their database and of course, there’s still the business model since you can’t only rely on Amazon affiliate sales in the long run.

All in all, it was a good night. My only wish is that TDM publish the names, designations, online alter-ego, etc. of the event visitors so that we can network better, e.g. I would’ve loved to meet fellow Pingsters and Internet marketers in addition to the “exhibitors”. ;)

P/S: sorry, no photos so I had to use the PopOut! logo.