How to Choose a Public Cloud ?

This is a popular question, especially for startup and SMB leaderships, whom may not have an advance tech team at their disposal to support with queries and selections when picking a public cloud that returns the most value for new development or migrate existing workloads. Please note that these questions and methods are skewed towards screening IT infrastructure and platform service provider and not so much the Saas provider (we might cover that in another piece of cheat sheet separately).

Ask Questions
Here are couple of things (in no particular order), that your team can use to prepare before meeting the service providers.  

Please note that it's a really bad idea to meet them unprepared, as it provides a white canvas opportunity for the vendor to paint anything they like. It is highly recommended that you avoid such situations. 

Here are the questions/ areas worth exploring;

1. A list of current IT operations (e.g. applications, tools, analytics, security, data-warehouse and etc.) and technologies in place (e.g Operating systems, databases, development tools and languages, security, infrastructure or even other clouds in place).
2. A list of projected/strategic business activities and their automation/digitalisation needs (e.g mobile app, big data analytics, buyer & seller optimisation, etc.)
3. Customisability of compute and memory requirements (in other words, how much control do you have on your VM or VMs).
4. Pro and cons of owning the PaaS level...
5. Standard tech questions - Interoperability, portability,  new app development cycle, security, redundancy, backup and recovery features.
6. The type and size of technology eco-system that the cloud provider connects to - here you are simply looking for three things; suitability of the technology to your operation; standardisation and; provider that connects with a larger eco-system of technologies (e.g Hadoop, ML, AI, Blockchain, Mobile App Platform and a host of other opensource pieces).
7. Pricing mechanism and projections for on-boarding; utilisation blocks (e.g by minutes, hours, monthly, yearly, types of workload - predictive and unpredictive); exit or off-boarding (be aware that some vendors charge even during off-boarding to migrate data and other intellectual assets off of their platform – this happens when you complete contractual term and don’t plan to renew);
8. Discount and rebate applications - when you get them, and when you don't (ask both questions)?
9. What is the lock-in period (e.g 1 to 3 years). What happens if you exit prematurely. What is the unnatural discontinuation cost?
10. What service guarantee does the vendor provide (e.g. SLA, compliance, security)?
11. What happens when vendor fail to deliver service (system performance, security, data, compliance)”according to contractual term? 
12. What support procedures are in place when a support request is registered?
13. What if you need to scale ? How quickly you can scale the needed footprint?
14. What about trainings and upskill activities?
15. What SMB focused programs does the vendor have in place? Some service providers might have special programs for you to mingle with other users in your category and connect. This can be an added bonus to your business as you can tap onto the knowledge and resources of a wider network.

Request for a Pilot Test

if you are happy with the information gathered through the pre-meeting research and cloud salesperson's answers to aforesaid questions, move on to a test request for the tools and  platform services in question.  Scope the test areas according to your procurement needs to stay on course with your current needs. Look out for performance, usability, flexibility, scalability, security and inter-operability results to support and corroborate information you gathered (unless the test fail to do so).

Tap Talks in the Grapevine
It’s a good idea at this point to fraternise with other fellow startups and SMBs who may have already been using the services first hand.  Their experience could be a valuable addition of information to your decisions. Though, when collecting information from informal sources such as this, be aware of the timelines - a problem or disadvantage that existed a year ago may not apply anymore as cloud companies improve (especially the largest 3 or 4) at a rapid pace.

What is a Satisfactory Outcome?
What are you looking to map with these initial questions and explorative activities?

1. Your IT computing and operational requirement based on business roadmap.
2. Suitability of the service provider/s and their offerings to support your business and future growth.
3. Good understanding of tools and services recommended by vendor before you embark on them.
4. A clear idea on pricing matters; discounts and rebates applications; contractual terms.
5. Outline or scope of duties and responsibilities between you and your vendor in regards to your IT footprint. 
6. Cost of discontinuation of business relationship upon completion of contractual terms.
7. Cost and consequences of discontinuation of business relationship due to premature termination of contract.
8. Your rights when service provider fails you? e.g service delivery, compliance, security or data breach.
9. Exit and migration path to other clouds.

Finally, a piece of useful advice to stay productive and avoid frustrations. Expect for contact points to change at anytime while dealing with vendors or any external parties for that matter. As such, it would be wise to document all requirements, arrangements and agreements to terms, contractual and non. This will help you save time in the reestablishment and reinstatement of such interactions which looses sight due to change of contact points.

In addition, get feedback from both business(finance included) and technical team members on the selection before concluding.

Happy Screening!!!!

Will Data Privacy spark the next Wave of Innovative Applications?

Privacy is a top agenda as we live in an era where data is a fundamental requirement to access healthcare, education, financial facilities, commercial services, employment, security, welfare, social networks, media and even exercise voting rights. Everything around us is designed to optimise and improve by harnessing data, that it has become an undeniable asset with unprecedented utility. 

This makes data a prime heist for unethical hackers and modern day criminals who steal, doctor and manipulate it for illicit purposes including financial gain, scams, terrorism, identity theft, spreading fake news or spying. Some notable breaches from 2018 are the Aadhar breach involving a staggering 1.1 billion records, forum site Quora, Googleplus, Facebook, several airlines and other online entities.

This is why many large corporations that gauge petabytes of user data are under heavy scrutiny by privacy enforcers and regulators such as National data protection authorities in the European Union through the much debated GDPR guideline. For instance a recent announcement by one of Alphabets subsidiary, Sidewalk Lab on a plan to package and sell cellphone data for various service enhancement sparked outrage from various ethics observer and human rights groups, even when the company justified that the unique identifiers will be removed from the dataset.

Staying connected at all time and living somewhat transparently, is the future reality...

But harnessing data is an unavoidable exercise when it comes to achieving greater quality of life, good decisions and optimal utilisation of natural resources.  As such, refraining from the internet, social networks, online media and performing digital transactions will only result in disadvantages, inconvenience and missed values from economic, social and safety standpoints.

Even if we successfully retained a mysterious existence, we will not be free from unwarranted surveillance by both businesses, independent institutions and governments in public places for various reasons as cities, buildings and public amenities become embedded with sensors, camera feeds and chips that connects to the Internet or clouds to perpetually collect data and create values.

Privacy in Asia....

Asia witnessed multiple incidents of data breach last year among CSPs, healthcare providers, financial service providers and even government sources that lead the public to question credibility of domestic institutions in protecting personal, usage and behavioural data. According to a report by Gemalto, Asia Pacific region contributed to over 35% of cybersecurity incidents last year. 

In most cases, institutions took no further action to restore user confidence apart from the breach announcement, which is a mandatory compliance requirement. Gemalto further stated that the numbers could have been much higher in reality, due to unreported incidents especially in Southeast Asia. Singapore is an exception to this as the authorities take great pride in concluding data breach cases successfully to safeguard the regional digital economy.

Asia also suffers from an overall weaker legal framework and laws for privacy though dedicated privacy task force is emerging in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Philippines, out of which Singapore perhaps is the most advanced in ratifying and enforcing the aforesaid laws. 

At the same time, there is a rise in governments that are explicitly developing and extending state surveillance under the pretext of national agenda, security and cyber crime laws for political reasons. Technologies such as facial recognition, artificial intelligence, biometric, advanced identity card systems, ever increasing compute capacities and various citizen facing applications are converging into social scoring systems that provides granular monitoring of individuals, regardless of their consent. 

But there is a new way to tackle privacy - a new form of application architecture is on the rise .....

Apart from comprehensive legal framework, enforcements and the use of advance security architectures, strategies and tools, the application design and architecture itself can serve as a mechanism to protect privacy by separating personal data and identities from applications.

For instance, a project led by Led by Tim Berners-Lee called 'Solid' and is currently run from MIT, consist a set of tools and conventions that helps to preserve integrity of identities, privacy and data ownership while enabling developers and businesses create a new wave of innovative web applications. Solid is a web decentralisation project that aims to put rightful ownership of data back to every users and empower applications that are completely decentralised. 

Currently the use cases are limited for developer community alone, though discussions on Solid servers and tools are beginning to emerge in Quora, Reddit, FB Groups and GitHub.

Similarly Digi.me and HAT are all projects aiming to decentralised applications on the web, where users can create libraries of their data and is completely in control of how the data is used by corporations and governments.

Privacy concerns will lead to new opportunities ....

Most large businesses perceive privacy as a critical challenge to overcome with growing pressure from regulators. Though regulators approach are not helping as solutions developed around privacy laws are difficult and expensive to attain technically, especially for Internet giants.

In the end, solution might just emerge from the tech world itself through new architectures and business models lead by smart startups willing to embark on new frontiers such as Solid, Digi.me and HAT to develop fully decentralised applications that satisfy users, businesses and regulators.

Larger companies might use 'business within business' approach to innovate in the privacy space or quickly get onto the new themes through acquisitions, mergers and rethinking business models. On the another note, decentralised web may lead to even larger paradigm shift, similar to the ones we experienced when organisations moved from on-premise to cloud of everything, creating new digital eco-systems altogether. The one thing that no one can afford to do, is to remain unchanged.

'Chip War' in search of AI Supremacy!

Ever wondered why we need GPUs or AI accelerators for optimal performance of AI Applications? Ever wondered why a field that existed since the the dawn of twentieth century is only now burgeoning with breakthroughs? 

As Kaplan and Haenlein puts it, "AI is a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation”.

Artificial intelligence applications that mimics cognitive functions involves deep neural networks, machine vision, sensor technologies, and machine learning techniques that depends on multi core designs, low precision arithmetics and in memory computing capabilities to work well in both cloud and the edge.

In fields like robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, decease diagnosis, speech recognition, object or face recognition, capability to vastly expand AI calculations by embracing massively parallel processing power, means near real-time learning, energy efficiency and optimal performance. This is why AI applications requires AI accelerators in  its infrastructure design to support various types of computing based on the use cases for sustaining performance during training and inferences.

AI Accelerators

Researchers in scientific fields were probably the first to discover, experiment and adopt GPUs for accelerating AI applications, almost 2 decades ago.  Since then, a 'Chip War' has slowly formed along with other technological developments and is now reaching its peak, among cloud companies, Internet giants, chip makers and startups searching for supersonic growth, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. 

Apart from GPUs (graphics processing unit), other types of microprocessors available in the market currently are FPGA (field programmable gate array), ASIC (application specific integrated circuits), in memory architecture and heterogenous computing. As of today, there is no dominant design that underpins all AI architectures, but NVDIA do seems to command some leadership here while others such as Intel, AMD, WAVE Computing, UK's Graphcore and Israel's Habana Labs  are all beginning to ship viable products. 

Chinese players...

China has been investing aggressively to produce indigenous AI chips to wean from dependence on US based producers, with ongoing researches underway by major tech corporations, such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei, apart from government initiatives. 

Huawei released several products last year, claiming to be faster than NVDIA with ready adopters in datacenters globally. Another startup called Cambricon released products and is aiming for 30% marketshare in China, setting off the Chinese AI chip industry. One other company worth mentioning here and quite notably working on a customised AI chip is China's leading facial recognition system provider, Sensetime, which is planning to build another three or four supercomputers to process data feeds for facial recognition from millions of cameras nation-wide.

The AI chip leadership momentum will only continue to intensify in 2019....

Intel, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm are not the only one competing to produce an omni product that can infiltrate into gadgets, computers, machines and robots. There are others such as IBM, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla and many more in the Deep Learning space, all making attempts at the design and potentially a universally accepted standard and product.

Facebook recently sent a strong signal by hiring Google's Head of Chip Development, that the social networking firm is serious about building its own semiconductors, joining the likes of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Cerebras Systems, a startup still in stealth mode hired a top Intel executive, Dhiraj Mallick as its Vice President of Engineering and Business Development. Mallick served as the VP of architecture and CTO of Intel’s data center group prior to this.

What to expect...?

For now, the market for deep learning chips is overwhelmingly dominated by Nvdia graphics processors (or GPUs), which have also been widely used in games and other graphically-intensive applications.

Startups looking to attack this space, has the opportunity to beat the big chipmakers and create a new generation of hardware that will be omnipresent among any AI devices. Think autonomous vehicle, robotics, drones or even a server within a healthcare organization training models for medical problems.

As new products from companies such as WAWE, Huawei, Cambricon, Graphcore and Habana enters datacenters and selected enterprises this year, we might see a flow of special purpose devices being released into the market for AI and deep learning.

AI chip innovation will also aid researchers to make further breakthroughs in various fileds such as Computer Vision, Conversational AI, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning, and General AI. Eventually some businesses and governments from buyer nations, may start to take advantage of the available AI chip offerings and form their own discreet AI clouds for a variety of high profile projects across the organisation for deeper business differentiation and operational excellence as models train faster and learn in realtime.

LK Weekly Precis - New e-Commerce Regulations, Acquisitions and Expansions

This week, new ecommerce regulations in India shook the tech business community and indicated that government meddling and protectionism policies may continue to hinder progress of emerging markets in sectors such as ride hailing, hospitality and many others aside from ecommerce.

Ecommerce regulations was also a topic discussed in Davos at the World Economic Forum (WEF), lead by Singapore. In addition, the event for the first time hosted talks among tech executives and leaders, including from BAT, to shape up AI framework that addresses both the seller and buyer nations.

Other than that, ST Telemedia acquisition of Cloud Comrade and Travelstop expansion to 7 Asian markets simultaneously, along with JD.com's first drone delivery outside of China are some notable developments in the startup sphere this week.

ST Telemedia Acquires Cloud Comrade

Last year we saw a number of consultancy firms such as Deloitte and the likes, hunting for acquisitions in the partner space of large tech companies namely Oracle, Sap, AWS, GCP and Microsoft.  This trend is now picked up by several data-centre service providers in the region.

ST Telemedia is certainly moving in the right direction by acquiring Cloud Comrade to enhance its datacenter service offering portfolio, especially in cloud services, IT management, cybersecurity and overall datacenter performance. 

Cloud Comrade helps customers in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore deploy cloud to accelerate new development and migrate existing business applications for operational excellence. The startup works in alliance with almost all major public cloud providers such as Ali, Azure, AWS, GCP and Digital Ocean. 

Last year, ST Telemedia acquired stakes worth $27 million, in cloud management company, Bespin Global that operates in Korea and China. The new acquisitions will help ST Telemedia complete service offerings in cloud, AI, Bigdata, digital experience and cybersecurity.

https://bit.ly/2Uj7FKe

JD's Drone Delivers Books and Bags in Rural Indonesia

JD.com has been delivering to some rural parts of China using drones for the last two years. This week JD ran its first drone delivery trial outside of China after securing a government license for regional level operation in Indonesia. According to media the drone travelled 250km to deliver boxes of books and bag packs to school children.

Tencent has a 15% stake in JD.com and together the companies co-invested in a number of Chinese companies. Last year Google announced significant amount of investments in JD and Tencent to make inroads in China. 

Soon, same day and next day delivery will be a common offering, sighting of drones in residential areas should be expected and e-commerce logistic players may have to reinvent their game.

https://globalcosmeticsnews.com/jd-com-paves-the-way-for-drone-deliveries-in-southeast-asia-with-first-government-approved-flight-in-indonesia/

Travelstop Expands to 7 More Markets

Travelstop is a year old startup from Singapore, that simplifies business travel and expense management to the SMB and startup segments. Since inception, the T&E Saas platform has been updated continuously with features and functions to sufficiently meet the needs of both travellers and employers in a segment where such services were inaccessible. 

We believe they are in the path to join the likes of 'certify', 'coupa' and 'apptricity' to challenge other established players such as SAP Concur in the travel and expense solution space for the enterprises.

Recently, the company announced service availability in Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.  The company also announced a mobile app for iPhone users to easily access services. 

https://www.eventsnewsasia.com/20190122052718000454-business-travel-startup-travelstop-strengthens-presence-asia-launches-seven-markets/

New e-commerce Rules/Restrictions in India

The new rule restricts online retailers or marketplaces from sourcing more than 25% of inventories from a single vendor, vendors where the online retailers may have a stake and exclusive deals that results in deeply discounted products. 

The new rules seems to be aimed at protecting millions of small traders, operating offline and suffering from huge losses due to deep discounting practices of both Amazon and Flipkart. According to analysts and mainstream media, the recent electoral losses is seen as one of the contributing factor to this unusually regressive move.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/india-issues-new-e-commerce-rules-to-check-amazon-and-flipkart/

AI Discourse at World Economic Forum, Davos 

Finally AI takes a critical spot in WEF this year with US (Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft) and China ( Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) seen as leaders of the space. Economic potential, social threat, globalisation 4.0., ethical practices, AI nationalism, global policies for both AI sellers and buyers were some of the issues beginning to shape the global AI agenda.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Asian-tech-execs-voice-hopes-and-fears-for-AI-in-Davos

Singaporean Ride-hailing Startup, 'Tada' in Vietnam

This year we might see more ride hailing players emerging in the region, including traditional players modernising their business and competing for their pie with larger competition namely Grab and Go Jek. 

New entries might come from taxi operators, affected driver groups and rental service providers. 

We might also see, new country level regulations, niche plays, convergence of industries/sectors, significant mergers and acquisitions in this space as we cool off in quarter four.

https://www.retailnews.asia/singaporean-ride-hailing-startup-tada-launches-in-vietnam/

HG Exchange

HG Exchange, a fintech industry backed initiative has recently submitted a regulatory application to Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). This move will provide investors in the region with better access to high growth companies such as Grab, Go Jek, Didi, Deliveroo and others. 

The exchanged will be built by blockchain developer Zilliqa and Taiwanese digital asset platform MaiCoin.

https://www.techinasia.com/in-brief-hg-exchange-seeking-launch

It's seems to be a slow week in anticipation of CNY next week but we believe businesses will keep up momentum till quarter 3 as a slow down is expected in quarter 4. 

Happy Sunday!

LK Weekly Précis - Big Week for Fintechs!

This is a new attempt for LK, to provide followers weekly summaries of startup news for Southeast Asia, China and India, posted both at the blog site (www.letskopi.com) and FB Closed Group (look for 'Startup Jam').

This looks like a big week for fintechs global and regional with new funding, acquisitions and game plan announcements from Akulaku, Grab, Go Jek, Razer, Gcash/Mynt, Paymaya, Alibaba and Tencent with just one or two announcements about AI related startups.

Fiserv acquired Firstdata for $22 Billion

Clearly Fiserv acquiring Firstdata for $22 billion topped the list. KKR cleverly reduced stakes in Firstdata from 36% to perhaps 16%, offloading at the right time. KKR's share price went up following the announcement.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/fiserv-is-buying-first-data-in-a-22b-fintech-megadeal/

Akulaku in Indonesia secured $100 funding from Ali

At the home front, Akulaku finally made the official announcement on their recent D series funding from Alibaba for $100 million, exceeding expectations. This is much higher compared to what competitors such as Kredivo, Cekaja, Modalku and KoinWorks raised late last year. The highest was Kredivo at $30 million. Successful Indonesian fintechs are focusing on lending or credit.

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/akulaku-reportedly-raising-us-100m-series-d-funding-033711711.html

Chinese AI firm Megvii is aiming for $1 Billion IPO

7 year old Alibaba backed, Megvii that provides facial recognition system and owns face++ is aiming for $1 Billion IPO this year, probably in Hong Kong. Megvii provides facial recognition system to security, financial services segments and is a well known player for many government related contracts in China. Story goes that competitor "Sensetime" is also planning to raise $2Billion this year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-11/alibaba-backed-ai-startup-megvii-is-said-to-weigh-ipo-this-year

Philippines fintech, Voyager secured $215 Million Funding 

Philippines fintech player Voyager, owner of Paymaya recently raised $215 million from Tencent, KKR and World Bank arm International Finance Corp. This will be the largest deal so far in the country's fintech industry. Together the investors own more than 50% stake in the company.

Last year, Paymaya's main rival, Gcash/Mynt secured funding from Alibaba /Ant Financial Services for 45% stake in Globe Fintech Innovations (GCash owner).

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-Trends/Philippine-e-payment-apps-bank-on-Alibaba-and-Tencent-for-growth

Grab partners with ZhongAn for Insurance Platform

Grab extends into insurance with Chinese partner ZhongAn. Under the agreement, ZhongAn will bring in technology solutions to build an insurance ecosystem that will be launched in Singapore in the first half of 2019. The platform will address pain points of insurance discovery, premiums and payment options through GrabPay or affiliate payment partners.

Apart from food delivery, parcel delivery, grocery delivery, and financial services, Grab also intends to expand into cross-border remittance and online healthcare in the coming year via its Superapp strategy. I would think Grab might even make way into Chinese market with a partner, though no such plans annouced so far.

https://www.bankingtech.com/2019/01/zhongan-and-grab-clutch-at-se-asias-digital-insurance-market/

Razer Pay / Singapore 

Razer Pay which was launched in Malaysia in July 2018 is expected to continue expansion in Singapore by 2019.  Something we already know since last year. While entry into Malaysia was smooth, this is probably due to Razer’s acquisition of MOLPay which aided in the wallet rolled out across retail outlets like 7-Eleven and Starbucks. We believe Razor has a lot more work to compete effectively along the sides of Grab, Go Jek, WeChat and others.

Thailand issued licenses to Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Four cryptocurrency exchanges were issued licenses by Thai authorities/regulators following their Japanese counterparts to embrace crypto and digital currencies as an unavoidable social and commerce phenomenon. The four cryptocurrency exchanges, are Bx, Bitkub, Coins and Satang Pro, which are granted permission to operate in the country. This is a step forward to legitimising cryptocurrencies in Thailand.

https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/thai-crypto-exchanges-tenx-116824/

BasisAI, a new AI startup in Singapore

A new venture focusing on AI solutions for businesses. However it's unclear what the solution is really about. We suspect they are in stealth mode and maybe working on something related to explainable AI (XAI).

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/basisai/

Zurich Malaysia Partnering Bereev App to Modernise Services

Zurich Malaysia and Bereev, sealed a partnership for launching an online legacy planning platform, to help customers plan various things from wills to insurance policies, possessions, outstanding loans and personalised wishes. 

https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/business/zurich-malaysia-partners-fintech-startup-bereev-offer-estate-planning

Overall we should expect a few more major fintech fund announcements in the coming weeks mostly fuelled by Chinese, Korean and Japanese investors (#BAT, Softbank, Naver). JVs between these eastern investors with western PE or investors such as KKR should also be expected in major deals.

As fintechs start to fill the financial service gap for consumers and businesses cut off from conventional banking systems, it's only a matter of time, before banks start to struggle in consumer banking and SMB services segment. 

I would think in 5 years we'll observe massive downsizing in banks due to lost revenue and there is a good chance that the trend will hit Southeast Asia or Africa first. Similarly we might see fintechs with superapps becoming formidable partners to traditional financial service providers as they learn and discover new data monetisation strategies.

Another key trend to note is the fact that fintechs are distancing themselves from Telco/CSP investors ( e.g. Globe and PLDT in the case of Mynt and Smart Money) and moving closer in alliance with financial services and e-commerce players.

Well it's only week two, let's see how this changes in December 2019 🤓✍

Happy friday everyone!

Should Government Regulate Ride-Hailing?

#LKminiblog - Should Government Regulate Ride-Hailing?

Indonesia is planning to regulate ride-hailing rates, amid pressure and protest from driver groups. Both Grab and Go Jek depended on low price offers to passengers in the past for initial growth and expansion, but prices have always surged as business matures. Plus, the ride hailing firms subsidises drivers during discount campaigns. 

Low price is just an entry strategy....

The low price was just an opportunistic route to break into new grounds and get customers accustomed to a new alternative. Over time, reliable and consistent service quality became the foundation to sustaining the massive success of these unicorns. 

Ride-hailing businesses run on leading edge technologies, not an easy feat to replicate...

Unlike traditional transportation service providers, ride-hailing companies built their business capabilities by adopting various leading edge technologies (AI, ML, DL, Augmented Reality, Mobile app, bigdata and IOT) for operational automation, service delivery, prediction and planning. User data is collected through mobile app and harnessed to innovate faster, improve services and maximise values to the whole business eco system. 

A well functioning alternative service to riders.....

The arrival of ride-hailing companies in Southeast Asia were welcomed, as for once passengers had a choice to abandon conventional transportation service providers, that mistreated clients for decades (all of which were regulated businesses). Since the arrival of ride-hailing companies, more passengers comfortably leave their vehicles at home and use the ride-hailing services. After all, passengers can easily book a ride via their mobile app and get served within 7 to 10 minutes, as opposed to the old call booking system where getting through is extremely difficult.

The solution to driver economics problem is dynamic in nature...

Question is, why would we need government intervention to solve a problem already resolved? Secondly, there are two methods to solve this driver economics issue - one by increasing passenger prices, the other is by streamlining the large number of drivers according to current demand. Both are dynamic elements and neither strategies can be executed by the government efficiently without realtime data, reliable predictive capabilities and the backing of a credible data science team.

Let's not get politics in the way of good business....

Finally, driver groups involved in protests may carry other hidden agendas (speculative but that's the popular trend) than just preserving their economic interests. Government intervention here might end up protecting business interest of politically linked individuals or groups that destroyed service quality, encouraged business monopoly without competition and frustrated consumers in the past.

Are Superapps Draining our Money Pots?

#LKminiblog - Are Superapps Draining our Money Pots?

Superapps and ecommerce startups snatched a big chunk of startup funding for Southeast Asia last year, especially those endorsed or lead by Softbank and BAT (Baidu, Ali, Tencent). 

Capturing the sizable Southeast Asian consumer market...

In 2017/2018, investors were particularly focused on startups with standardised platforms to engage with Southeast Asian consumers mainly via mobile devices. This trend is expected to continue this year, but with more coverage areas by ride hailing companies and new value added services including to businesses.

The 10 or so well backed Unicorns will continue to grow and prosper...

Plenty of capital reserve will enable companies like Grab, Go-Jek, Zalo, Bukalapak, Tokopedia, Lazada, Shoppee and others to continue improving their applications, interfaces, technology stack, talent pool and market reach. These startups can become a critical gateway to new eco systems in health, retail, and finance, not reachable by conventional businesses.

What about the B2B tech startups?

However, this strategic focus by major investors certainly affected tech startups on the B2B segment, especially those developing and innovating vertical solutions. Most investors, including regional financiers, simply followed the footsteps of larger investors with their bets in the past years. This drained the money pot and left thousands of B2B folks to battle it out for the leftovers.

Driving the change we want...!

Hopefully investor tone will change this year with promising startups emerging for applied AI and AR in various sectors, fintech that blends several techs, healthcare innovation and smart city solutions. 

As for regional and corporate MNC investors, the former will continue to invest opportunistically or for nationalistic reasons and the later will align investment to scale the size of the community on their platform. The rigour of activities here will depend heavily on economic growth and the entrepreneurial community.

In the end, the challenge for Southeast Asian B2B startups in 2019 remains the same as the previous years. Changing the perception of stakeholders and our entrepreneurial community to break the heuristics that we are incapable of creating scalable world class solutions.  Instead, we should be driving harder for excellence, up skilling, team building, task completion, coaching and envision business solutions fitting for global markets and scale. 

Are we up for it?

LK Expert Opinion featuring Peter Adamson – The Mining Sector, People and impact of Technology Advancements

It was sheer privilege to conduct this interview with Peter Adamson, an accomplished general manager, consultant, advisor and people advocate in the mining field with broad global experience in business, organisational effectiveness, operational readiness and safety culture. He held various leadership roles in the mining industry, driving multi billion dollar operations across continents, including the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australasia.

In this casual interview with LK, he shares his words of wisdom, global experience in shaping leaderships and witty responses on how he thinks technological innovations are changing the sector, decision making processes, environment and future workforce.

Find the full transcript of the interview below:

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started in the mining industry?

What a hard question!  I ended up here totally by accident, perhaps because of a background in community development and people issues, gravitating to an industry where the main asset is not the machinery or even the ore bodies. The main asset in the mining industry is people who come together to run the businesses.

My first involvement was conducting rescue team training, which seemed to quickly become team development and they were the first two aspects of my work in this industry.  Of course, team development is also about leadership.

My passion for learning has always been about the power of experiential learning and that’s where I became engaged with this very interesting and enormously diverse industry. Somehow, building managerial leadership skills in others has meant that I have ended up in senior General Management roles myself, when I have not been consulting (Learning by doing).

2. The mining industry is seen by most as having adverse effects to our environment, work safety and social fabric (especially native communities), both during and after mining processes. What are your comments on this?

The quandary for me is that, there are so few human activities that are not harmful or adverse to our natural environment.  Geologists and miners are living and working in natural environments, this is our backyard, and we do (in Australia) demonstrate a high level of care for that backyard.  Perhaps, more than any other industry in the world, mining seems to be at the forefront of investing in knowledge, skills, technologies and the means to mitigate our impact. Compared to farming, garments and the travel industry, mining is doing quite well if it is about comparison, and what can be done, particularly so in Australia. Everything that we ‘people’ do is harmful to the natural environment.

Regarding safety, yes, when I first came to this Industry, it was accepted that it was of high risk, that people would be killed and hurt.  Over the years, we have been able to change that belief to one where, no one needs to get killed or hurt going about their daily work.  Statistically, in organised mining in the Western World, the most dangerous part of the workers day is driving to work.  Fishing, (particularly recreational fishing), farming, and other activities are extremely dangerous now, compared to mining.

Across the past thirty years, one person in one team, did cut his thumb, requiring a suture, driving a stake into the ground without wearing his gloves. This is the only event, across tens of thousands and thousands of people days working in very hazardous environments doing risky work in different parts of the globe.  This is aside from illnesses which are still problematic in many parts of the world.

Regarding social fabric.  I have worked with this element in many countries around the world.  Mining is an industry which creates wealth and in so doing can easily generate poverty as the projects go through their various stages of development.  If managed well, and with thinking going out beyond the intergenerational change, the disruptive opportunities for positive change that mining can generate are enormous.

Think health, education, training, economic development, information flows, small and large business development, technological development, research in a wide number of fields, new skills, useful employment and empowerment of people.  The variations on this are enormous and most of it, is quite healthy if done well.  When it is not done well, poorly thought through, working from flawed principles, ad hoc or where a vested power seeks to maintain the status quo, then it can mean horror.

3. What action would you take to change this public perception?

Each time I have been involved in a project, agreement of the key principles for how the project will be conducted, is where I start.  If I cannot accord with those principles, I walk away.  Transparency, Zero Tolerance for Corruption, Integrity, Safety and Compassion are some of the key drivers for me and for successful Mining Projects.  Strange words to associate with such an apparently harsh and exploitative industry but these are key. When we get it right, no one will notice, is how it should be.

4. How does technological advances impacting your industry?

Enormously. There have been no new technologies now for some fifty to sixty years, but our abilities to advance existing tech, build and create from previous inventions, still seems to be in early stages.  Imagine a future where we tip a cup full of nano particles onto the ground, they soak down and organise themselves around an orebody, explode or expand, then transport the ore to the surface with no people involved.  In the same way, we may go after cancer cells in the human body.

The significant downside of technological changes are in not knowing how best to use them in our industry, and the impacts they may have on the purposefulness of the humans in the industry. Reducing employment numbers meets cost objectives of the miner, however the impact for employees is significant. We can now, do so much more, with so much less and at the same time reduce the opportunities for harm.

5. Most people associate this industry with adventures, explorations and dangerous jungle expeditions in remote lands lead by the instinct of daredevils alone. How data dependent is this multi-billion business in reality, especially during prospecting or when operating a mine?


I have had some wonderful experiences with some awesome people in all sorts of places, around the world. It has been great. But now, we are being tamed!  Yes, there is a place for experience and intuition in this industry, however it is diminishing. Data, data and data are the critical elements. Appropriate technology for generating information that captures all of the data is key.  From that information, choosing which bits to use for forming the organisational knowledge bank, that’s where the intuits are still having some say. The growing science to deal with this in a useful way will mean, soon the term “knowledge Management” will take on new contemporary meanings, I am sure.

6. Are technologies such as mobility, IOT, AI, Augmented Reality and cloud computing a common tool for collecting, sharing and analysing data today in this industry? How do mines connect with their corporate offices? What business events can you predict?

The data generated in mining operations is of a magnitude very difficult to comprehend or describe, it is on a scale so enormous.  Engaging with that data and accessing it to create knowledge and generate decisions for ongoing monitoring and assessment, whilst working collaboratively with fellow professionals.

I have sat in an office in West Africa with real time data linkages into Toronto, London, Paris, Perth and Melbourne whilst my consultants have had similar linkages back to Delhi, Houston, Sydney and other places. One project with an 18 billion dollar capital expenditure meant we were spending 48 US Million dollars a day, the magnitude of just tracking monitoring and ensuring this happened in the way we wanted and the technology we used, was probably at leading edge.

With the wave of autonomous vehicles and long distance trains, this is the realisation of a vision from twenty five years ago and the focussed development of appropriate technologies along with synergising opportunities.  It varies from trucks and trains repetitively in pattern, to machines deep underground working autonomously, all controlled and maintained by an operator thousands of kilometres away.

For example; can you imagine the data, knowledge and systems thinking that goes into deciding to drill one oil well, when the cost of that well is likely to be in excess of $70 million USD?  When the measures of risk and uncertainty for the engineers are so vastly different for the same measures of risk and uncertainty for the geologists, these professionals live in such different worlds but need to reach agreement.  Gathering evidence for and against that agreement and assessing the evidence that is missing, that is one of the key roles of technology in that setting.

7. Some people say that some of our landfills contain more metal concentration today as opposed to the mines. Is this true?

Who knows?  The metals we are mining from the earth are a finite resource.  They do run out. South Africa has passed peak gold, Australia is probably the same. Other minerals too, Australia long ago passed the peak of its diamond production, although with all of these, new resources are waiting to be found.

8. Do you think we have a mature enough recycling technology to recycle metal concentration in the landfills?

Landfill has to be a resource. We did not do the planning with landfill, with the idea to make it accessible again, and much of what is down there now, is probably absolute waste.

Changing our lifestyles will probably generate greater opportunities to reduce the impacts on our world.  Just deciding to take the colour of our nail polish, motor car duco, and other colours available in paint would have a huge impact on mineral earths mining industry.

9. Do you think that technology advances have also resulted in growing demand for certain rare minerals?

Definitely, and it has generated some dodgy sovereign practices too, where countries have attempted to corner a market so as to have global dominance, whilst other countries have sought to erode that dominance. Rare earths is one example. Some of the strategies by different countries to assert themselves globally through minerals are interesting to behold, they go back a long way in history and continue to provide an interesting spectacle, although activities are usually much more covert in this past century.

10. How do you envision, the future workforce of this industry ? What kind of new skills and expertise are essential to embrace technological advances that will further optimise business processes? Do you think that the mining workforce will consist of more people with multidisciplinary qualifications including computing and data expertise (both in the field and corporate)?

It would be hard to see even more computing specialists in the industry, than the thousands already here.  More I see a broadening of skills bases and a change in stratum thinking so that we all have the computer skills, plus there are still specialisations but the changes should be measured in a different way.

For example, in the Australian Mining Industry today there are few jobs where people are just working “in the day”.  And those jobs are rapidly disappearing.  The minimum that people will be thinking and working in, will be across 90 days result areas. As this thinking moves out from the mining industry into other sectors, I see broader changes happening globally.

Truck drivers, cleaners, bulldozer operators and train drivers are all now being replaced in this industry with broader ramifications for other industries.  We no longer need to have the farmer sit on their tractor whilst ploughing, seeding or harvesting their crops. Those were the jobs where people worked in the day, most of them disappear in the near future, I am not prescient enough to know what fills those spaces.

11. In your opinion, will we ever reach to a point that issues such as ‘conflict resources’, is a thing of the past? 

If only, I knew the answer to that one, the dream of world peace and the disappearance of poverty and greed. A world of compassion and empathy.



LK's Note : We hope this post has been both educational and inspiring to readers. If you have an interesting question for Mr Adamson, kindly post them here.

Google Summit 2018 - Kuala Lumpur

Overall a good event but was crowded with some 2000 people at venue, making conversation and moving around the event hall, real hard.

As expected, every stream emphasised on artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning infusion in Google products such as G Suite and various other cloud offerings. Server-less computing or Google Cloud Function range of services for building application back ends (IOT, api gateways, and etc), real time data processing, virtual assistants, chat bots, image analysis and text analysis for different use cases was another area of highlight.

Tools, documentation and support for developer community was shared with various strategies to cut development work, transition to micro-services architecture, adopt containerisation and get solutions to market a lot quickly.

There seem to be quite an uptake and interest from enterprise customers too, with many re-platforming traditional applications or deploying new applications on GCP. Local CSP, Celcom Axiata seem to have moved their Drupal based portal, e-commerce system Magento, analytics, and a few other business applications onto GCP. AirAsia and Maxis, each presented a successful use case as well.

Startups as suspected, are starting their business journey by default on public clouds such as GCP and almost all that presented are early stage players. Though, I was really hoping for a late stage startup story, to learn more on how growing organisations are transitioning and juggle between public cloud and in-house IT footprint.

There were no mention of interoperability or portability of solutions in any track, though RedHat did have a slot to talk about their cloud management and application packaging solution including Ansible Tower.


As for me personally, I didn't discover anything particularly new, but then again, I am part of at least 12 different global discussion groups on FB that keeps me on track with the tech world.

However, understanding how Malaysian customers are seeing success with GCP made it worthwhile. Though, customers seem to be sticking to proven use cases alone and I did not come across anyone innovating a disruptive new service just yet. Many spoke about CapEX, risk reduction, business relationship and time to market as key drivers and values.

None of the customers made any reference of internal cloud teams responsible for drawing their cloud strategies and risk management measures or exit plans to protect against vendor lock in, cost spiral or security concerns. Perhaps we will see those topics to appear in the coming years as adoption matures and customers start to ramp up internal strategies.

Lastly, there were 3 women speakers that I noticed - one from Google and the rest from customer organisation. Among attendees too, the number of women can be counted.

None of the tracks I attended accommodated Q&A somehow (data insight track) which was a big letdown. Perhaps, this was done to keep to the schedule.