Is the world becoming a smarter place?

September 4, 2018

With the massive emergence of blockchain around the world, people have taken up varying opinions when it comes to matters of pros vs cons. Everybody knows A.I aka Artificial Intelligence and how it is serving industries by making computers smarter. But what about people – are they becoming smarter, more empowered, and better equipped? Is our world going through a transformation for the better and smarter?

 

At the Blockchain EXE on Sept 20th, our team sat down with three different entrepreneurs and industry leaders to tackle this topic through their own unique current work.

Nicholas Ong – Technical Account Manager of Tuple Technologies

1. Could you share with us a little bit about yourself and what Tuple Technologies has been up to recently.

I’ve been in the technology industry from start-ups, to using display apps, and from there on I learned about how technology helps enterprises. My next phase was at a Japanese company. In the beginning, I learned about sales i.e the value that accounts bring to enterprise, then I joined an A.I startup that was looking into sales and marketing using AI.

2. Tell us how Tuple works from a client’s perspective and what the onboarding process looks like

As we look into enterprises, there are a number of departments and problems within those departments and we usually go and ask them what is the one thing that we can help them with immediately. Usually, their problems are customer-related so ‘How can we find the customer that we want, easily?’ from there they look to us due to our enterprise experience. The onboarding process is easy – we just have to discover their problem statement and with this problem statement we look at internal data. I.e data cleaning and then data sources that can usually tell us more information about the product. From there, we can run algorithms that are helpful for our customer, and with this algorithm we can focus on 360 marketing and once they happen to have a feedback loop – we learn using the A.I software.

3. What is the reception like for AI based products?

I think for the past 2 years the company has been trying to educate the public about A.I. It’s not going to take away jobs but rather to help enterprise by saving time. In that sense, the reception has been quite open so far and companies usually want to start with some mini projects. Even with the toughest clients that these companies are unable to reach – they hand it over to us and we can solve their problems. Therefore, I think that they are getting better in understanding what A.I can do for their companies.

4. What do you think about market in Asia for AI?

I think it’s huge. What we see here is just the start of the whole A.I adoption of sales and marketing. Now it’s moving into other fields like Operations where we begin to see time-saving, workforce efficiency – this is what I foresee will continue to come up.

5. Data breaches in IoT industries are still at large, how does Tuple tackle that?

When Facebook had their data breach, we saw that our CEO was being interviewed about this. On the outside, we were educating the public about how we get our data and use it. This was a really interesting experience for us because a day after, our clients began to approach us and ask us about the process. When we work with public sources, we always ensure that they go through the data privacy compliance to ensure that the data they are collecting is for public usage. That is something we assure our clients with i.e that whatever we use is compliant.

6. How do you see AI based product can help driving lead generations while still maintaining user privacy.

I believe as we do sales and marketing, a lot of the time we think “How can we cut this down from 10 costs; to 3 costs; in order to reach the right person?” Essentially for our company we’ve seen in certain use cases that in 3 months’ time they go from 3% market share to 11% market share without doing any additional work, just by doing the regular work, but we give them their correct target audience so that they are on time in the market, to search for the right product. Therefore, with A.I we prove this information directly to them. We believe that by empowering enterprises, we are able to do the same for them.


Mr. Anthony Doan
APAC Business Development Manager, Kambria and OhmniLabs

1. Could you share with us a little bit about yourself and what Kambria has been up to recently.

My name is Anthony and I’m with Kambria to develop the markets in Asia. We are targeting a few different markets in Asia: Vietnam, Korea, China, Japan and Singapore. Basically what we’re doing within these markets is to build up the community of developers which are the supply of innovation. At the same time, we are trying to build up the demand for this kind of innovation as well. Our platform is an open-innovation platform so we are trying to get all of these stakeholders together for supply and demand, as well as with investors to build up the platform and to build up the resources. We want to help this innovation protocol.

2. What do you mean by open innovation protocol?

Open innovation is actually about open source. All innovation is going to be open source for everyone to have the chance to utilize this innovation for purposes like education and commercialization. With that, we try to decentralize the ownership of these kinds of innovation. It should not belong to just one company or one owner anymore; it should belong to everyone. Everyone will have the chance to join and develop this kind of innovation as well.

3. Do you think this open innovation platform has its potential into the Asia market?

I think that there’s a good chance and a good opportunity for these kinds of platforms to start now because of the front-tier technology such as blockchain and AI and robotics, the opportunity to develop the capabilities is the same everywhere. As we are seeing now, the resource development in Asia, has better quality and large quantity than in other developing markets. This is a good chance for this kind of innovation to start in Asia and this kind of platform will be facilitated in Asia.

4. In your opinion, what are the challenges to Kambia?

I think the challenges come from inside and the outside as well. From the outside we can see the force from the government and other partners. For the government, it really comes down to whether or not we have good policies in place to facilitate developments for these kinds of platforms and at the same time the interaction with different partners all around are challenging. The fact that partnerships are very important but how we develop these kinds of partnerships and whether the environments are favourable is a factor. What we’re trying to do is to cooperate with several partners to build up relationships so that people will see that it’s beneficial to join the platform rather than be outside of this open innovation movement.

5. What will be the key activities in the near future for Kambia?

We have 3 sides related to 3 different stakeholders of the platforms 1) demand 2) supply 3) investors. So for the demand we are trying to take the top-down approach which means we’re working with a lot of governments and associations in Robotics, AI, so that the adoption of this open innovation will be faster and in some markets that have an abundance of resources like vietnam we are actually trying to build a community of developers so they become the resource and the supply for this open innovation platform. Because we are in an ICO period, we are done with our private investment round so what we’re trying to do next is to release our data platform and after that release our ICO. Later on we hope that these investors will become the backer in our community which become the ones who are investing in different frontier technology rather than just investing in Kambria and flip out of the company

Mr. Erik Cheong
COO of Logistics X

1. Could you share with us a little bit about yourself and what Logistics X has been up to recently.

Our platform is about building a decentralized logistics network that connects all the stakeholders starting from e-com platforms and all the way down to the end-consumer. We actually introduced freelancers into the ecosystem engaging housewife retirees to become an on-demand collection point and at the same time to introduce freelancers to become on-demand delivery persons.

2. Park n Parcel was your first adopter, how was that process and current status like?

We are working with Park n Parcel because they have the largest connection network in Singapore. They have 1500 collection points – 80% residential and 20% are commercial. This will contribute to LogisticX ecosystem as the backbone. This is where we can start rolling out are MBPs, prototypes, to launch on Logistix. Currently they are serving customers such as AliBaba.

3. Logistics X & the Blue Whale Foundation have partnered up, what is the current roadmap like.
We’re the first DMA partner of Blue Whale. Blue Whale is a decentralized git economy where they rolled in freelancers into their system to which they match rewards with the job that they can do out of their free time. We see a direct synergy with Logistics X because it is building a pool of parkers and runners. Parkers are on-demand collection points; Runners are delivery people. For us, we are focussing on bringing the demand in AliBaba, DHL, etc. That’s how we see the synergy; we don’t want to reinvent the wheel ourselves but rather to join forces with a partner that has a strong presence in the region.

4. Apart from Singapore, what is your next target market that you hope to expand LogisticsX in?

Thailand – we are going to secure a partnership with a local partner who is currently working with logistics with DHL, Fedex. We’re going to look at building a hybrid collection point network, together with our runners in Thailand. Right now actually what we’re building is going to launch in Korea as well. How we select the countries are on 3 points 1) high density 2 ) good infrastructure 3) growing e-com market. These are the three main criterias.

5. Partnership-wise – what is the next plan for LogisticsxX?

We hope to rope in more ecosystem builders. As you know blockchain, without multiple stakeholders, alone cannot work. So we need to get DHL, Fedex, to onboarded, and then promote blockchain as a mass adoption technology so LogisticsX can work.

The big takeaway here is the diversity in opportunities to come. The blockchain space may be esoteric and unexplored but what these dialogues and insights bring to light is that it is an unexplored bounty filled with opportunity and possibility. There are no small roles in this space and just about anything can be solved or demystified, through the power of blockchain.

    Related Article
    Blockchain Enables Verification of COVID-19 Immunity
    Given the virus is not going to disappear in a hurry and we are some time away from vaccinating the ...

    November 21, 2020

    Illicit Cryptocurrency Activity: A Concern
    Market regulators such as SEC has accepted cryptocurrencies as a financial instrument and are consta...

    November 20, 2020

    IBM Using Blockchain to Help Businesses Reopen during COVID-19
    IBM’s healthcare unit, IBM Watson recently announced that they will soon be launching an app to supp...

    November 20, 2020

    Canadian Pacific Railway Collaborates with TradeLens
    Canadian Pacific Railway recently collaborated with TradeLens in a bid to improve its efficacy as an...

    November 19, 2020

    We provide information about Asia Blockchain Review latest activities as well as global blockchain news and research. Subscribe to our Newsletter now or Contact us