[Singapore] Frambie Wins Young Entrepreneur Awards 2011

If a picture can speak a thousand words, then online premium picture frame store Frambie can be said to help you put together a pretty, convincing story. Perhaps that is the reason why it emerged as the grand winner of the recent 2^nd Young Entrepreneur Awards (YEA), jointly organized by hardware maker Canon and Singapore-based broadcaster MediaCorp.

Frambie, founded by Malaysian Beh Weng Wei, allows you to upload any photos and images to the site, and pick personalized frames for them. These will then be printed, produced, and delivered to your doorstep.

Bryan Lee emerged second in the competition for Intraix, a low-cost home energy management system to help reduce energy bills, while Zhang Weiliang and Joshua Chao, came in third for Avetics, which aims to develop miniature UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) for non-military purposes such as land data record management. The winners were presented with cash and product prizes like Canon business products that will help them turn their start-up idea into a real business.

“Canon has always been a strong supporter of local entrepreneurship, and we are passionate about helping budding Singaporean entrepreneurs realize their dreams,” says Andrew Koh, senior director and general manager of the consumer imaging and information products group of Canon Singapore. “The Young Entrepreneur Awards is just one of the programmes in our THINK BIG THINK CANON campaign, which we launched in 2010 to help empower entrepreneurs to attain a world-class level of business excellence.”

“We were impressed by the quality of submissions this year, and look forward to seeing the winners’ business proposals being turned into successful ventures.”

Aside from Koh, the panel of judges for this year included Foong Ming Lee-Ng  from MediaCorp, lauded local entrepreneur Elim Chew  and founder of fashion retailer 77^th Street, Goh Yiping of online deal aggregator All Deals Asia and Kenny Leck of BooksActually, amongst others.