Tech Talk: Closed for Business

AN STYLE="font-size: 75%; color:#990000; font-weight:bold">Tuesday, May. 8, 2001 Well, it finally happened. Singapore finally got rid of its streetside Internet kiosks, quietly removed in the dead of night so no one would notice. I fully expect to be jogging through a park one day and see them all pathetically piled up somewhere, a bit like those old plinths of Lenin and Stalin sprinkled across the former Soviet Union -- a reminder of a heady time we'd now prefer to forget.

The fact is, not many people had noticed the 200 kiosks lining Orchard Road, the brainchild of local entrepreneur KK Fong. And the next stop was China. I interviewed Fong two years ago and he thought then that Nokia would be his competition.

Now there's nothing wrong with ambition. The idea was that Fong's kiosks would be living examples of the Wired Island's techie credentials. Want to see if your mates are down at the Huu Bar? Log on and let the bar's webcam do the work for you. It was a good idea -- if you leave out the Big Brother aspect -- but nothing a mobile phone couldn't do. But even then, the kiosks were offline more than on. And the times when they could've been really useful -- buying movie tickets, checking venues -- they were next to useless. You couldn't even check your e-mails. And where were the big bucks? Fong sold ads on the sides of his kiosks.

E-mail remains the killer app of the Internet and people will pay to be connected. They will not pay to log into the details of their union pension plan like you could on Fong's machines. Not while out and about anyway. The Brits, for example, recently introduced street kiosk for those on the run. Not only do they work, you can check e-mail. And they're extremely popular.

Fong's kiosks kind of summed up how crazy the Net world became. He was a printer of banking research who saw the Net threatening his traditional business. A year before the first kiosk arrived on Orchard Rd in early 1999, Fong didn't really know what the Internet was. No matter. Re-cast your company as a Net play and float it on the stock market as Singapore's first pure Internet firm. Which was fine in an Internet stock boom. And for a few months, Fong was almost a billionaire. He was even nominated for a premier business award, the Phoenix, set up by the Singaporean government to encourage corporate re-invention.

But about the only good call Fong made was to see the Net threatening his humble print shop and smartly move to the stock market. Now he's suspected of selling big licks of stock. No surprise there. Still, that will give him some cash. He's gone back to the print business, and what do you know? He was right. His old business actually has been superseded by the Internet.