History
People have been asking us, so how did TDM come about, why did we
start it, how did this whole idea originate, how did we go about doing
it.
The idea of TDM really started out in Apr 2006 after Meow
participated in the iX conference speakout where he spoke about the
landscape of the Singapore IT startup scene. Through his findings, he
found out that there is a gap in Singapore – a gap between where we
could be as a high tech startup hub and where we are at right now. Meow
saw that closing this gap up, making an impact to Singapore and to
South East Asia is really something meaningful and will make a
difference to the region; hence he decided to commit himself to this
cause and form a team to go crazy with him. : )
Meow started enrolling his friends to join him, where he approached
me, Zhen Hoe and Ahmed. He sold us a vision; a vision of what Singapore
can be, of how they can bring a piece of Silicon Valley back, a vision
of how they can make an impact on this world together. Imagine
Singapore and South East Asia being at the forefront of innovation and
technology; imagine the region being able to level with the super
powers of the world. Imagine being able to say, hey, we built a Google
and the Google is from home. And we were sold. The project was code
named, “Change the World”.
We had our first official meeting on the 29th May 2006,
at the Paya Lebar McDonalds’ where we spent 8 grueling hours on the
business plan and alignment of the team. We had our first name then, it
was called “Student Technology Initiative (STI)”.
We were going around pitching TDM to people and to everyone we met.
It was literally eat TDM, sleep TDM, sh*t TDM. But the thing is, people
still didn’t know who we were and what we were doing (and we were not
so sure then) hence what we did was to strategize on getting
governmental support and school support for our cause. It became an
intensive few months for us where we were meeting MPs after MPs,
friends of NUS, NTU, SMU, IDA, Singapore Computer Society and such.
Some meetings went to naught where we were criticized from head to toes
while some meetings were really encouraging where we managed to get a
few supporters to back us up.
Our very first unofficial event was a networking session with the
INSEAD business club. After that, we branched into holding our very
first paid event where we talked about viral marketing. This was held
in conjunction with INSEAD too. I remember we ordered Pizzas but we
kind of made a loss then cause we did not manage to collect money from
everyone : P
At the same time we also started to expand, and some of our first
few members were Wayne and Su Yuen when they just joined NUS. It was
really a huge challenge to get people to join us because we had nothing
except a huge bag of passion to enroll people into our cause. We made
friends with many advisors, MPs, technology evangelists and after
rounds and rounds of discussions, we finally settled on our new name,
“The Digital Movement”.
After floating around for a while, we saw that in order to be
recognized officially and to set up a bank account we needed to get
ourselves registered somewhere somehow and we settled on the Registry
of Societies. However one of our greatest challenges was that in order
to be a society, we needed 10 members and we only had like 6. It became
a huge frenzy again to invite and enroll people into TDM and after a
few weeks of struggling, we finally managed to get our members and got
ourselves registered at the Registry of Societies on 12th September 2006. TDM became official!
And the rest is history … IGENs Nexus, Blogout, iX, Popout, Vint Cerf …
P.S: In the photo, from left - Meow, Wayne, Zhen, Dionis and Su Yuen. Ahmed is away entertaining some girls.
Cheers,
Dionis
14 July 2008