Harshwardhansinh Zala, who claims he has received many offers from abroad, wishes to help the armed forces through his technology

What were you doing when you were 14 years old?  At this age, I was still struggling with Maths and Science in the 9th grade.

But this wonder kid from the Indian State of Gujarat was already working on a revolutionary drone when he was this age. Now 16 years old, he has fully developed the drone, EAGLE A7, which can detect and destroy landmines, minimising  the risk of losing human lives.

Harshwardhansinh Zala, Founder and CEO of Aerobotics 7, the company behind EAGLE A7, claims that this drone can go from, say the Indian army base station, to the path where it has to go and detect the landmines. After detecting the landmines, the drone will send the information back to the base station. The landmines can be viewed real-time and destroyed real-time without human risk, he told in an interview to The Quint .

“We have developed the entire technology using raw materials and multi-spectral landmine detection technology. It is now under the process of international patent registration. We can detect landmines through different wavelengths,” he said to the publication, adding that this technology is not available anywhere else.

The model is currently under the process of international patents registration.

Also Read: Drones will revolutionise these 3 industries, so watch out

Aerobotics 7 was founded by Zala when he was 14 years. The startup’s mission is to make the “most innovative and advanced products for a better life”. Its main focus is designing and developing life-saving drones.

Zala, who claims he has received many offers from abroad, wishes to help the armed forces through his technology. He said he has got partnership offers from South Korea, the US, France, Dubai and Thailand.

“We have got offers to establish our company there. We have been ensured funding as well. But, given the number of jawans (soldiers) being martyred (due to landmines) in our motherland, if I can develop this technology to serve the Indian Army and the CRPF, I will be glad,” he said.

The child prodigy is also the winner of the “International Peace Award” (Billion Acts Hero Award 2017).

Zala had sealed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Gujarat government at the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit in 2017, and bagged a deal worth INR 5 crore (USD4700,000) for the production of his self-designed drone.

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SEAF Women’s Opportunity Fund (SWOF) is joined by CyberAgent Capital and other investors in funding e-learning solutions KYNA

KYNA, an all-age e-learning solution, has announced its second investment from CyberAgent Capital, who was joined by SEAF Women’s Opportunity Fund. Previously, KYNA receives the first round of investment in April 2016 from Cyberagent Capital.

KYNA has shared that it will use the new funding for growing Kynaforkids.vn. The startup claims to have attracted more than 150,000 parents paying for its Math and English programs.

Also Read: 16-year-old Indian prodigy has developed a drone that can detect and destroy landmines

“This funding will help KYNA fostering new product development, upgrading technology infrastructure, learning experiences, and gaining new market share,” said Tram Ho, Co-founder and Managing Director of KYNA.

In five years, KYNA claimed to have attracted more than 600,000 users in all age ranges. Its products include Kyna.vn, an online short courses in different topics for adults and Kynaforkids, an online courses for children from age 5 to 12 years old.

Adding to its products option, KYNA also has become an e-learning contractor for large corporates in Vietnam.

“This investment will support KYNA’s growth plan, deliver significant social impact through skills training for adults and effective education service for children,” said Jennifer Buckley, Senior Managing Director of SEAF Women’s Opportunity Fund.

Previously known as CyberAgent Ventures, CyberAgent Capital is a Japanese venture capital firm that has been focussing its investment portfolios in Internet startups with founding teams who show potential. In Vietnam, CyberAgent Capital has backed around 30 startups like Foody, NCT Corp, VNG, Tiki, Topica, and Luxstay.

Also Read: Sam Tsai: The pivotal figure behind Taiwanese e-commerce giant PChome’s entry into Thailand’s e-commerce market

SEAF is an emerging markets private equity fund manager that provides capital, capacity building, and a global network to support small and medium-sized business expansion. The firm is particularly focused on women’s economic empowerment and gender equality. It also pursues companies in health and education, clean energy and smart solutions, sustainability in agribusiness, financial and technological inclusion, and displaced and migrant peoples investing.

The Women’s Opportunity Fund is investing up to US$2 million per investment in growth-oriented, women-led businesses in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
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Karan Bharadwaj, CEO of Singapore-based PLMP Blockchain and former CTO of XinFin talks about his experience at Echelon Asia 2018

Get ready for a bigger, better, and bolder Echelon Asia Summit 2019! Been waiting for this? Then get your tickets here.

I’ve spoken at many blockchain and technology events, and I remember e27’s Echelon 2018 event quite fondly. I think the culture of Echelon is the biggest draw for both speakers and participants alike.

The organisers were extremely helpful and the staff assigned to me made sure I had been introduced to my co-panelists, had my paperwork for travel in order, and even made helpful suggestions about my stay in Singapore.

I had a chance to come early to the event and take a look at the other talks and panels. The diversity of the crowd was very refreshing. Echelon featured young startups and mature companies rubbing shoulders with each other, which, I feel, always leads to the emergence of interesting perspectives.

The panel I was speaking on was about the ‘limitations of blockchain technology’. I was expecting contradictory views but was surprised at our consensus on the fundamental issues with the ecosystem. I do remember having quite an intense discussion with one of my co-panellists before the the panel actually started. It reminded me of my run-ins with bitcoin maximalists!

Another unique aspect of Echelon was the format/arrangement of the venue. Because of a number of simultaneous stages I could simply walk into an area that caught my fancy. I quite literally stepped off stage and joined the crowd to listen to other speakers.

Also Read: Registration is now open for Echelon Asia Summit 2019

The speakers’ lounge was an excellent place to talk to entrepreneurs from all walks of life. The sheer diversity of the speakers was an enriching experience in itself. I had not planned on networking too heavily, but I incidentally made quite a few interesting connections.

I also had an interesting experience at the venue. I was sitting in the speakers’ lounge and was having a call with my business team back in India, before my panel started. We were discussing our possibilities of our token being listed. We really wanted to list the tokens on Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange Huobi.co, and had been talking to them for a while.

After my call, I picked up a conversation with the two guys sitting next to me in the speakers’ lounge and I realised halfway into the conversation that they were both wearing Huobi shirts! It turned out that I was talking to two senior executives of Huobi Southeast Asia. I told them ‘hey, we are trying to list our token on your exchange, but no luck so far’. They smiled at me and asked to email them. I did so and they followed up within an hour and got us the help we needed.

Also Read: Why TOP100 made the decision to host a private pitching competition

Overall, Echelon was a great experience for me. We expect e27 to continue the good work in future as well.

I wish all the best for e27 and the Echelon team.

(As told to our Editor Sainul Abudheen K)

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Register for TOP100 today!

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The rise of e-sports in Indonesia has provided a new opportunity for gaming companies to tap into. So what can companies do to stay on top of players’ mind?

The Indonesian gaming industry has reached a new milestone with the rise of e-sports in the recent years.

In the archipelago, e-sports industry has a history that goes back to the late 1990s. However, at the recent Kopi Chat Deep Dive Series: Gaming event at Block71 Jakarta, Eddy Lim, President of Indonesia e-Sports Association (IESPA), explains why 2002 was considered as the official founding year of the country’s e-sports industry.

“We first made a game event in 1999, but [we can say that] e-sports in Indonesia began in 2002 as that was the first time we host an international gaming event,” Lim says.

Within 17 years, the sports gained such popularity and reputation that an e-sport exhibition was held at the last Asian Games, held in Jakarta and Palembang in 2018. Even in the upcoming Southeast Asian (SEA) Games 2019 in the Philippines, e-sports will be featured as a medal games for the very first time at a competition held under the International Olympic Committee.

As the sports gain its momentum, so is the opportunity for athletes and clubs to collaborate with brands and businesses.

Also Read: Go-Jek arm in talks to invest US$30M Indian e-sports gaming startup Mobile Premier League

“‘There’s a good e-sports player here, I wonder what he drinks?’” says Haryono Kartono, COO of e-sports enabler company Mix 360, pointing out an example of partnership opportunities with brands that e-sports athletes and clubs can take.

“Back then the opportunities are limited to IT companies, but today other products, such as isotonic drinks, are beginning to open themselves up to e-sports,” he adds.

Even with all the available opportunities, gaming companies continue to face challenges in dealing with the different aspect of product marketing. From the event, e27 has compiled how two Indonesian companies –a game developer and a game publisher– deal with theirs.

Here are some of the most valuable lessons that they have learned about marketing games in the e-sports era:

User demographic

 

Before we begin developing marketing plans, we need to look at the people whom we are reaching out for.

So who are the primary target audience for gaming companies in Indonesia, particularly those who aim to reach out to the e-sports category?

Also Read: Beyond gaming, these are 6 potentially disruptive uses of augmented reality

According to Shieny Aprillia, CMO at Bandung-based game developer Agate, the profile of a typical Indonesian gamer can be seen through the audiences of their title E-Sports Saga: Its 5,000 players are dominated by male audience aged between 18 and 24 years old.

Her view is agreed by Kenken Rudi Salim, COO of game publisher LYTO, who sees that there are reasons why it would be rare to find an e-sports players aged beyond 30 years old.

“There’s no scientific study to support this, but the most ideal age to build a career in e-sports is up until the age of 28. This has something to do with the fingers’ reflexes,” he explains.

Apart from that, e-sports athletes that have gone beyond 30 tend to explore different aspects of their profession. For example, by expanding into content creation.

“This enables former e-sports athletes to make money for themselves. When they were still part of a team, the money that was earned has to be divided among the team members,” Salim continues.

Challenges in product development

 

With the rising popularity of e-sports, game developers are facing a fresh new challenge in Indonesia: Every single new title that they release has to have an e-sports angle.

Also Read: Here’s how blockchain can disrupt the billion-dollar gaming industry

“E-sports has become a part of the most successful marketing strategies to increase the games’ [sales] performance. Each developer wants to try their best to make sure that their products are being included in e-sports tournament. If there is no e-sports angle in it, then how are we going to market a title?” Salim says.

“[For games like that] the only solution is to market using advertisement,” he adds.

Another pressing challenge that developers are facing is the fact that the Indonesian game market is still dominated by foreign titles.

In dealing with this particular challenge, Agate chooses to “play it safely.”

“This means, within the next one to two years, we are not going to develop something similar to Mobile Legends, or enter the enemy’s lair in any form. We need to be able to find our own niche,” Aprillia says.

“Out of the 50 million Mobile Legends players, there is got to be something that separates one from the rest. Some of them will like robots more, et cetera. We try to find a segment that is sizeable enough to work on, and find a niche with no major player yet,” she elaborates.

Also Read: Myanmar-based mobile gaming subscription startup Goama launches in India

As a game publisher, LYTO is taking a completely different approach. Instead of going against the current, they have to follow through with what the audiences want.

“Unless there is a certain intellectual property rights that prevent us from doing it, we will seek for something similar to what is trending,” Salim says.

Maximum returns

 

At last but not least, game companies in Indonesia continue to struggle with this particular challenge: How to maximise return with a limited marketing budget and average revenue per user (ARPU)?

First of all, it is important to note that ARPU in Indonesia is still relatively low with US$5-7 being the highest possible price a user is willing to pay for.

“ARPU from mid-core games tend to be bigger than those of casual games,” Aprillia comments.

“KotaKita is casual city management game that we have developed. We recently included in-app purchase and after one to two months, we checked the analytics … Even after we lower the price of in-app purchase from IDR9,000 (US$0.64) to IDR3,000 (US$0.21), people are still reluctant to pay and would rather watch ad videos instead,” she further explains.

When it comes to maximising their marketing budget, Salim has one thing to say: It will never be easy.

Also Read: Singapore’s gaming startup Mighty Bear raises funding; market-testing first title in India, Philippines

But from his experience, the COO learned that the “easiest, quickest” way to attract audiences is through offline events such as game competitions. The only downside to hosting such event is that companies need to invest heavily in the prizes.

Salim also stated that there is no guarantee that the more budget you spend for an event, the more successful it will become.

“We have held events at internet cafe where we managed to gather between 200 to 300 people,” he closes.

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Image Credit: Sean Do on Unsplash

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From the scarcity of furnitures, to the limited government’s support, Jeff Laflamme has seen it all and still run AngkorHub for almost six years now

Back when it was cool to be a digital nomad, Jeff Laflamme, like the rest of us, sure had been intrigued by the lifestyle that it offers. Ditching his-9 to-5 job at that time, he landed in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, when he bumped into a friend who told him about Siem Reap, south of Cambodia.
This friend introduced him to the idea of co-working space, at that time was one of the firsts in Vietnam, and Laflamme stumbled upon an AHA moment that became the preconception of AngkorHub, the first tech hub in the heart of the touristy city of Cambodia, Siem Reap.

Selling romanticised lifestyle

“It was really like the classic story of a digital nomad. I just got tired of the 9-to-5 routine,” said Laflamme.

Even so, Laflamme admitted that he realised how romanticised the nomadic lifestyle really was. “It sells the idea of working on your laptop with the beach view, remotely in an island with espresso on your table, but it was really interesting and people bought into the idea,” said Laflamme.

The reality, he added, was really trying to find a stable internet connection to be able to work for only a few hours at once. However, this seemed ideal.

Also Read: E-commerce Trends in Singapore to look forward to in the Year of the Pig

So Laflamme thought to himself, why not setting up one in Siem Reap, where tourists are flocking for the beach. “At that time I was really intrigued with co-working space industry and I fell in love with Siem Reap,” he explained.

Quickly he got to work. “I start comparing the situation, numbers, and average wages in Cambodia, especially in IT sector compared to other countries,” said Laflamme.

Challenging feat

He decided that the co-working space he was going to build should be approached with social enterprise concept. “I told myself that we can reuse the same space for training businesses that come to the place. So immediately I worked on a business plan and joined force with someone,” Laflamme added.

Laflamme proceeded to meet with a local who showed him buildings, something that he recalled was like a countryside project.

“There was no stable internet connection at that time, so that was my first challenge in setting up a tech hub, aside from how limited the buildings that are decent enough and being leased to be a place for a co-working space,” said Laflamme.

In addition to that, Laflamme remembered that it was exactly on August 2013 and Siem Reap was still the second poorest province in Cambodia at that time.

He mentioned other challenges like sourcing materials like furnitures to really create a comfortable and inviting co-working space. “You can’t find anything that fits. Sourcing it from Thailand was the closest you could get to a nice interior at that time,” he added.

“I remembered visiting the capital just recently and I was shocked seeing all the infrastructure and materials like furnitures to fill up co-working space that to me doesn’t look like it is in Cambodia,” he recalled.

Next comes the administration.

“Registering business, going to Ministry of Commerce, only to find that they didn’t speak English and they don’t have forms. I remember the guy that was there brought me to another city just to do the paperwork. It was all complicated and there was zero information online,” Laflamme told e27.

After what seemed like endless hurdles, Laflamme settled in the ex-building of a bank.

The socialisation part

Laflamme might have finished all the administration and the location necessity to build the co-working space in Siem Reap, but he wasn’t really prepared for what came next.

“I thought It will be obvious that it’s a co-working place with all the tables and facilities like a power generator. I just assumed people will jump over the idea. I was wrong,” said Laflamme.

AngkorHub was set in a tourist city, with the main attraction of the place being the leisure experience it offers. So it made sense when the firsts of their customers, the people who would need the place to work are expats, more so than the locals.

“The small network that we did have and would be a customers wouldn’t be our customers within a few months because they came during their vacation,” said Laflamme.

People around Laflamme was telling him that he needed to build a community first before starting the coworking space. “I get that, but that couldn’t be the case for every co-working space, especially not in a touristy area,” he said.

Laflamme added that AngkorHub is still struggling to date to make people understand the concept, even people that are well-traveled and professionals.

Pioneering the tech industry

“We used to be the only one, and in our first months we tried to connect with similar initiatives. It took me several months to get people’s awareness, and soon enough, like two months after opening, there were some expats starting another co-working space,” he recalled.

“Now there are around six co-working spaces, and this year local group will open one that’s going to be a big one,” he added.

Laflamme mentioned that when AngkorHub was first launched, the first idea was to be a social innovation center and become an incubation hub for young talents. It was in 2013 to 2014.

“The challenge with making it an incubation center was that people barely understood what co-working was. It was simply not ready for it. We could only plant seeds and shift focus until it’s ready. That’s what we worked on,” said Laflamme.

There’s a limited startups and investors in Siem Reap for AngkorHub to become an incubation center. “To do that, we’d definitely need the guidance. I myself have been playing an advisor role for some time, providing consult for people about their startup business,” said Laflamme.

However, Laflamme prided the fact that AngkorHub is well-positioned in Google search and reviews. “But even that’s still not enough for people to com. Startups are really limited here,” said Laflamme.

As the longest running co-working hub in the city, startup events that looked for spaces in the area would reach out to them. “Mostly are event organizers from outside of the country. The local ecosystem itself didn’t really connect and reach out to organize event with us,” said Laflamme.

Co-living in Siem Reap

Now that it’s been almost 6 years into operation, the hub has been operating from its second building, abandoning the ex-bank building. It also provides a co-living option now.

“Our business model is really working based on the co-living space. It’s creating community through renting the room, aiming at digital nomad who work online and need a good connection,” explained Laflamme.

Right now, the place is divided into two big areas: one is the common area downstairs, and the other is the upstair for co-living space.

“Now we have 20 spots, all in open space with no private offices. But we’re actually working on it because there are demands for it,” said Laflamme.

Right now, the hub provides one meeting room, a small one where people get their calls done there.

The hub offers monthly membership and options of Day pass and Weekly pass for the co-working space.

Also Read: Microinsurance is key to Southeast Asian financial inclusion

“20 per cent of our visitors are expats who will come living for a month or so. They are either a travelling professionals or digital nomads, who also stay in our co-living facility. We have more co-living members than the co-working members, actually,” said Laflamme.

“The plan for 2019 is to work on having a private office, and we will change the existing concept now, although I can’t get into details with the public yet,” said Laflamme.

What’s next

For AngkorHub, which Laflamme said has received an investment from an Angel VC based in Singapore, it’s still hard to keep the business afloat.

However, with the undisclosed number of investment they have received, the hub has begun their search for new location.

“This person helped us by investing in the project, enabling us to look for other locations with adjustment in concept,” said Laflamme.

For this year, since Laflamme has found that coworking space in the area is not valued properly if it’s not paired with incubation, AngkorHub will need to adjust business model.

“After all, the hub itself exists also to support the locals. The goal is to make people see Siem Reap and Cambodia past the temples, because it’s about the people,” said Laflamme.

Towards the end of the conversation, Laflamme shared his opinion on how Siem Reap has been overlooked by the government, especially in the tech sector.

“I would say Siem Reap is nowhere near ready to be the tech hub of the country. The government pays more attention to the capital, and the only time they were involved was a few years back, doing a business incubation 101 here. The government doesn’t connect with the existing players in both Phnom Penh and other provinces, and instead, they went out of their ways and created other programs and chose the same winners over and over again,” said Laflamme.

Laflamme believed that the only way Cambodia, and eventually Siem Reap, will be at par with other countries in terms of tech innovation and facility is for government and community to take it one step at a time. “Walk before we can run. The government should work their way from grassroots and collaborate with local universities. I believe doing it this way would create more lasting impact,” closed Laflamme.
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