By Elizabeth Wilmot

IDENTIFYING the geographical origin of timber to counter illegal cross-border smuggling and developing cutting-edge firewalls for computer networks: These are just two of the innovative projects awarded generous funding by Spring Singapore yesterday.

They were among 21 winning projects selected from 220 submissions under the Technology Enterprise Commercialisation Scheme (TECS). In total, they were granted about $8 million in funding support.

This is the second batch of winners under TECS. Last year, 17 projects were awarded a total of $6 million in grants.

TECS was launched in April last year by Spring to provide technology start-ups and enterprising public sector researchers with early-stage funding support. It aims to provide $75 million in grants to about 100 projects in five years.

Proposals should come from areas such as electronics, photonics and device technologies, and biomedical sciences.

This year, a new sector - information and communications technology (ICT) - was added, and more than half the proposal submissions were related to ICT.

Biotech firm Double Helix Tracking Technologies' project was one of the winners. It aims to identify the geographical origin of wood products by using the DNA of trees.

Managing director Darren Thomas said: 'There's a problem of illegal logging where timber is smuggled from one country to another.' He plans to build a genetic database of a certain timber species that is under threat in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea from illegal logging. The project's target markets are the United States and the European Union.

ICT solutions provider Niometrics' project was another winner. It hopes to develop a next-generation firewall that helps organisations prevent data leaks and enforce corporate network usage policies.

Its founder, Dr Anagnostakis Konstantinos, said: 'The TECS grant is giving us a rare edge over similar young start-ups elsewhere, enabling us to aim for world-class innovation in a very competitive market for IT security solutions.'

Spring Singapore chairman Philip Yeo gave out the awards yesterday at the Swissotel Merchant Court. He said the downturn could be seen as 'an opportunity for entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to get ahead of the competition, and be in a good position during the next upturn'.

Mr Yeo added that Spring will now accept applications all year round from entrepreneurs. Details can be found at http://www.spring.gov.sg/tecsportal/.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.