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Singapore e-commerce marketing startup blacklisted by schools after director accused of misconduct

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By Shawn Lim, Reporter, Asia Pacific

July 24, 2018 | 3 min read

E-commerce marketing startup Apps Authority has been blacklisted from hiring interns by Singapore-based education institutions after a director of the company was flagged for misconduct.

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The company counts like the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Singapore Post as its partners.

Local media broke the news that the National University of Singapore (NUS) had removed a ‘local tech company’ from its internship portal when it found out that the director had offered a female student twice the usual internship allowance if she accompanied him on a business trip without telling the school. Since then more schools, like the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Lasalle College of the Arts, followed suit.

While the company, nor the director, was not named in the initial news reports, an investigation by local Chinese broadsheet Lianhe Zaobao a couple of days later identified the company as Apps Authority, which was started in NTU’s startup incubator, NTUitive.

In an interview with e27 in 2016, Kenny Goh, founder and chief executive officer of Apps Authority told the tech news website that the company wants to help brick-and-mortar retailers to direct their sales towards online platforms, to compete against the likes of Lazada.

To do this, the platform created a multi-channel digital marketing system and a customer relationship management (CRM) tool called SmartCommerce, which allows users to launch a unified campaign across various social media platforms from a single source, while its CRM tool acquires repeat customers with its rewards system.

The company counts like the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Singapore Post as its partners. The Drum has reached out to Apps Authority for comment on this matter.

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