Colin Tan
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| Colin Tan | |
|---|---|
 Colin Gerard Tan.jpg Colin Tan | |
| Born | Singapore |
| 🏳️ Nationality | Singaporean |
| 🏫 Education | St. Andrew's School, Singapore |
| 🎓 Alma mater | National University of Singapore University of Cambridge |
| 💼 Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| 📆 Years active | 2001–present |
| ❤️ Partner(s) | Sarah Lau |
Colin Gerard Tan is a Singaporean technology entrepreneur and poet. His works have been performed in Australia and the United Kingdom, where he did his postgraduate studies at Cambridge. He is the founder of Rentlord, one of the earliest fully online property management portals in the UK allowing landlords and tenants to manage every aspect of a property tenancy over the internet.
Biography[edit]
Tan was born in Singapore and educated in St Andrew's Primary and Secondary School. After mandatory military service, he studied English literature at the National University of Singapore, where the poets Edwin Thumboo and Lee Tzu Pheng were his tutors and mentors.
After that he worked in human rights at Franciscans International, a non-governmental organisation in Geneva representing the poor at the United Nations.
Tan became a student at the University of Cambridge's English department's first cohort of the Masters programme in Critical Theory. He received a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust scholarship to study his PhD on Aesthetic Theory in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Immanuel Kant. During this period, he also tutored at St John's College. At Cambridge, he was a contemporary of the Singaporean poet in Chinese Chee Lay Tan, who was also doing his doctoral thesis, and with whom Tan collaborated artistically on poetry translations of each other.
Creative works[edit]
In Melbourne, he collaborated with composer Michael Easton. Together they wrote I Chose to Climb, a multimedia play with music, for the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival, which Tan also directed. The play was later published in his poetry collection, The Evidence of the Senses. It played also in London at the Royal Academy of Music.[1]
In England, Tan's text has been set to music by Gabriel Jackson. His sequel to Addison's Spacious Firmament premiered at St Margaret's Church, Westminster Abbey, and was commissioned for the John Armitage Trust.[2][3]
Tan has been anthologised in Singapore and his writing taught in the classroom. In 2001, he was one of the winners of the National Arts Council Golden Point Awards.[4]
Entrepreneurship[edit]
While living as a tenant in London, Tan conceived that the process of property management would be much faster and more efficient if it was done online. In 2008, together with civil law barrister Sarah Lau and fellow academic Kok Hong Cheong, a lecturer of computer science at Republic Polytechnic, he began developing Rentlord.[5]
In 2010, Rentlord was featured by PayPal at its Innovate Conference held in San Francisco, which Tan and Cheong presented at.[6] It was invested in as a technology startup by prominent UK accelerator programs Seedcamp and the Silicon Valley-based 500 Startups.[7] Tan and Cheong also demoed Rentlord to the primarily Silicon Valley audience at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it was featured as an Editors Choice.[8]
Selected publications[edit]
- The Evidence of the Senses (2007, Ethos Books)[9] ISBN 9789810573782 Search this book on
. - Angeli, Archangeli (Oxford Univ. Press)[10]
- Yet We Who Neither Burn Nor Shine (Oxford Univ. Press)[11]
- &Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond (Anthology)
- Fifty on 50 (Anthology)
- Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia[12]
- "Time Logs" (Artwork/Collaboration)[13]
References[edit]
- ↑ "The Music of Michael Easton ARAM". Archived from the original on 22 May 2014. Retrieved 22 May 2014. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "John Armitage lives on in concert - Music - Going Out - London Evening Standard". Archived from the original on 22 May 2014. Retrieved 22 May 2014. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "Classical Autumn Preview 2008 | Opera + Classical Music Features". 30 September 2008.
- ↑ "Search". Retrieved 22 May 2014.[dead link]
- ↑ "Home". rentlord.com.
- ↑ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: PayPal X Innovate 2010: Interview with Colin Tan founder of RentLord. YouTube.
- ↑ "Rentlord Launches a Socially Connected Market to Let Landlords and Tenants Manage Their Rent". 14 September 2011.
- ↑ "Rentlord Startup Battlefield Presentation".
- ↑ "The evidence of the senses / Colin Tan".
- ↑ Angeli, archangeli. New Horizons. Oxford University Press. 17 July 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-336171-3. Search this book on
- ↑ The Spacious Firmament 2: Yet we who neither burn nor shine. New Horizons. Oxford University Press. 11 March 2010. ISBN 978-0-19-336867-5. Search this book on
- ↑ "search". Retrieved 22 May 2014.[dead link]
- ↑ "APPENDIX A: LIST OF ARTISTS AND THEIR ARTWORKS" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 May 2014. Retrieved 22 May 2014. Unknown parameter
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