SUTD Student Accused SingPost of Copying His Design & SingPost Has Responded

SingPost isn’t having a good run in recent years.

From discarded mails to even “cheating” cases, the national courier has been fighting fires after fires.

But this time round, it’s not about postmen anyhowly throw letter in robbery-filled Ang Mo Kio, but about a technology.

SingPost Shows Their Technology

On Tuesday (24 September 2019), SingPost unveiled a high-tech system that allows all mails to be tracked, and all physical stamps to be desolate.

Using a big high-tech letterbox, it allows the use of “smart stamps”.

How high-tech, you ask. This high-tech:

• Postmen just need to slot letters from the same block into the letterbox which will automatically slot the letters into individual units
• When you want to collect your letter, just go to the letterbox and scan a QR code with an app; your letters or even parcels will come out like a vending machine

Cool? Cool.

It’s currently a concept and there hasn’t been any concrete plan to roll it out nationwide yet, as SingPost is still discussing with the authorities. It’s also unknown if postage fees would increase with this high-tech direction…though I think even without this, postage fees will still increase #justsaying

Two days later, someone said that SingPost stole his idea.

Meet Jerry Neo, a self-professed Gordon Ramsey X Steve Jobs (according to his Instagram) SUTD student who alleged that he had come out with the idea first.

LinkedIn Post Allegations

On Thursday (26 September 2019), Jerry, who’s also the CEO of Snap Labs (can’t find much info about this company), posted in Linkedin that back in April this year, he had invented something known as “auto mailbox”, seemingly with a group of other students.

He has also taken an image with a man he claimed to be “VP of SingPost”.

If you can’t read:

The pathetic state of innovation in Singapore.

Where seemingly reputable companies such as #Singpost can copy student’s project wholesale and claim to be world first. This is precisely why Singaporeans are risk averse and not willing to venture. This is exactly why the local startup scene is not blooming.

I was fine when the news came out and they did not credit us. I told my team that we have proven ourselves as innovators. But when I saw #CNA’s news that they claimed to be world’s first… oh boy..

Checkout our pitch deck and prototype from April 2019 and don’t get me started on the WhatsApp chat with the VP of Singpost. https://lnkd.in/fyJwyp6

In the post, he alleged that a SingPost representative (not sure if it’s really the VP of SingPost) requested for a video and photo of the project. Jerry then asked about working with them to further develop the “auto mailbox”, but the representative said that it won’t be feasible “as our requirements are quite different”.

It’s unknown if Jerry’s invention works the same way as the one unveiled by SingPost, but according to the deck he posted, it seemed pretty similar.

SingPost Responded

With such strong allegations, SingPost of course has to respond.

And they did so with a Facebook post as well, because why not.

Here’s what they’ve written:

SingPost is aware of claims made by SUTD student Jerry Neo that the design of the smart letterbox we unveiled on Tuesday was plagiarised from his school project.

This is untrue.

SingPost had already commenced work on developing a prototype of the smart letterbox in January 2019, a month before Mr Neo and his group first approached us in February 2019, asking SingPost to assist with their school project entitled “letters ATM machine”.

SingPost informed Mr Neo and his group then that we were working on a similar project but were unable to reveal more due to a non-disclosure agreement with our prototype developer, who had already come up with a preliminary smart letterbox design. However, SingPost nevertheless hosted Mr Neo and his group to a tour of our sortation and mail processing facility.

The design and operation of the letterbox Mr Neo developed is markedly different from the one SingPost unveiled on Tuesday. Key differences include the sortation and storage process which does not use a mechanical arm, the incorporation of tracking capabilities with the data matrix, a fail-safe put-to-light mechanism and the ability to deliver multiple letters to the same storage unit simultaneously.

SingPost would like to emphasise that Mr Neo’s design was never used in our iteration process or shared with our prototype vendor. The postal engineering staff whom Mr Neo’s group consulted was also not involved in the designing of the smart letterbox. In fact, despite exchanges over text, SingPost did not receive nor do we possess Mr Neo’s designs.

That said, we could have done better in our communications with Mr Neo and his team to avoid this misunderstanding. We are arranging a meeting later today with Mr Neo, his group members as well as the professors overseeing his project so we can clear this up.

So far, there has been no update. Jerry’s Instagram is set to private while the Linkedin post is still live.