As National University of Singapore students drifted to the college bar for

As National University of Singapore students drifted to the college bar for Wednesday’s “Ladies Night,” Ishan Agrawal sat in his dorm’s common room, working out how to harness the Internet to fight corruption in India.

Agrawal, 22, is one of 90 hand-picked students at N-House, a residential block modeled after the dorms of California’s Stanford University that housed Google Inc.’s Larry Page and Yahoo! Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang. Their Wednesday evenings brainstorming new ideas or pitching to potential investors are part of a S$16 billion ($13.1 billion) effort by Singapore’s government to build a tropical Silicon Valley.

“It’s like a big dating party, bringing everyone together, which is what Silicon Valley does,” said Agrawal, from Dehradun in northern India, who interned for a year at a startup in the San Francisco Bay area and took classes at Stanford as part of the program. “Here, you sit in the kitchen and discuss entrepreneurship ideas. You discuss entrepreneurship in the bathroom.”

Singapore became Southeast Asia’s only advanced economy by moving up the technology ladder, turning a trading port into the region’s biggest banking center and a manufacturer of electronics, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. Now, the nation is looking to gain a bigger share of a software industry that raised $28 billion in initial share sales last year.

N-House, which opened in August 2011, is one strand of a five-year plan by the government that includes offering new technology companies grants of as much as S$500,000, supporting venture capital funds, and encouraging high schools to teach business and entrepreneurial skills, in an effort to groom the next Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook Inc.

‘Something Different’
“Singapore looks quite favorable,” said Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor who has written about efforts to boost entrepreneurship. “If a program doesn’t work, they’ve been willing to abandon it or fine-tune it and try something different.”

So far, successes have been few. Standard-bearer for the program is Darius Cheung, 31, who sold his first company, a security program that protects mobile phone data, to McAfee Inc. for more than $10 million in 2010.

His latest company, BillPin, is among more than 100 located in a refurbished public housing block called Blk71 funded by the government and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (ST), the nation’s largest telecoms company. BillPin allows users to divide shared expenses like rent and bar tabs via an Internet account.

Free Advice
Blk71 companies get subsidized office space and free legal and accounting advice. They share office space with Edgar Hardless, chief executive officer of Singtel’s S$200 million venture fund, which backs mobile-related startups. More than 90 percent of the tenants are developing Internet-based software and mobile apps, said Lily Chan, chief executive officer of NUS Enterprise, who helped develop N-House and Blk71.

Singapore is “a relatively good place to be doing a tech startup,” said Cheung. “The talent pool, the capital — it’s a lot more available than when we first started.”

With more Internet-connected mobile phones and residential broadband subscribers than households, the island makes an excellent test-bed, said Andrew Roth, who relocated to Singapore in 2011 from Hawaii. His Perx application, designed to replace store loyalty cards, is backed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who moved to Singapore in 2009 and renounced U.S. citizenship last year.

Saverin, now a permanent resident of Singapore, introduced the startup to Singtel, Roth said, leading to a partnership announced in October where the telecoms company bundles the program with other apps.
Getting Out

While Singapore’s level of development helps test new programs, some companies find its size limiting.

“One of the targets we set was to be out of Singapore within six months,” said Vincent Ha, who moved his company Gushcloud to California. The program gets social media users to help retailers advertise in exchange for store discounts and benefits.

“We thought we knew everything, but when we went to Silicon Valley we realized that there are thousands more trying to solve the same problem,” he said.

While revenue from Singapore’s information-communications industry has more than doubled to S$83.4 billion between 2001 and 2011, the share of revenue from software has slipped to 14 percent from 25 percent, according to the government’s Infocomm Development Authority.

Singapore has spent S$50 million on about 140 technology projects over the past four years through a grant program that offers companies up to S$500,000, according to Teo Ser Luck, minister of state for Trade and Industry. Six out of 10 companies that completed their projects were able to secure initial customers or follow-on funding, or both, said Teo, who also chairs the Action Community for Entrepreneurship, or ACE.

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