Once implemented, it will enable businesses, retail shops, consumers, tourists and visitors to interact with each other in a smarter and more effective manner

About five years ago, Eddie Lee, a tech entrepreneur, and his real estate developer-friend Jeremiah Lee, together with other co-founders, launched a crowdlending platform, called SeedIn in Cambodia, Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines. However, the duo — both huge fans of blockchain — was more interested in exploring the opportunities for this new-age tech. And as their real estate portfolio increased, the pair started asking themselves how to leverage blockchain to better manage and bring more efficiency for their tenants and visitors.

They pondered over this question for some time and finally landed in an idea — smart city.

“We were intrigued by the idea of a smart building, and on a bigger scale, a smart city, which then gave us the inspiration to start Limestone Network,” Eddie tells e27.

Limestone Network, an initiative of Global Tech Exchange, aims to build a smart city ecosystem for real estate developments and infrastructure across Southeast Asia. This, the co-founders hope, can be accomplished through the digitalisation of the city via the development of a blockchain infrastructure.

“Our team envisioned Limestone Network to be the final solution that resolves existing challenges faced by governments, real estate developers and estate management service providers. When Limestone Network is implemented into a real estate project or existing infrastructure, it will allow the facilities management to be taken to a simpler yet more secured level. Businesses, retail shops, building facilities, consumers, tourists and the daily visitors would be able to interact with each other in a smarter and more effective manner to provide a meaningful smart city experience,” adds Eddie.

The beginning

When Eddie and Jeremiah started thinking about building a smart city, the first questions that came into their mind were ‘who are they serving in the city’ and ‘what are the different ways to make it more efficient and increase the productivity for the residents’.

Also Read: How Singapore and Hong Kong provide models for Smart City development

“We believe that in order to build a smart and efficient city, the city and its requirements need to be understood first. It starts by having a digital ecosystem that allows real time analysis of living and moving data. The end result is a greener city through optimal energy production, enhanced security via distributed ledger technology and an urban civilisation that provides efficiency yet with simplicity,” he says.

According to Eddie, this can be achieved by integrating blockchain technology into the physical real estate assets, thus forming a digital network that connects urban cities into the daily lives of the residents that exchange information seamlessly in the background to bring convenience, efficiency and enhance security to their day to day business and life.

The process

Residents who work or reside in the city are required to register themselves with the Limestone mobile app (this is called digital passport). Limestone will first verify the residents’ identity and scan them against global databases before mapping them onto the blockchain network.

With a better understanding of the people living and working in the smart city, Limestone can then unlock one of the key features — digital payments — by working with the payment providers to allow residents to pay for any purchases digitally. Limestone has developed a digital wallet to hold multiple currencies of the solution providers within the cities. It will automatically be available to residents, who have registered themselves over the digital passport.

With the identity and payment data set up, this will form the basic digital infrastructure of the smart city. The smart city will be designed such that the residents own their own data and are empowered to share their information for convenience or to be incentivised by the providers whom Limestone is partnering with for the smart city.

“We will invite third-party developers and service providers to develop our blockchain applications on the Limestone architecture to create a three-dimensional ecosystem to transfer content and knowledge through an open application programming interface (API). The open API is set up to work with partners like the micro-finance institutions, banks and telcos to allow residents to gain access to financial services. There will be added convenience with data portability as they open a new account with the telcos bypassing the submitting of the same set of information that they already have and verified in our network,” explains Eddie, who started his first technology solutions company in 1998 before selling it in 2014 to focus on fintech.

Current project

With the UX of the product ready, Limestone has already moved on to the API integration of the AML/KYC process for the on-boarding of the smart city’s residents. The company has also selected its blockchain protocol and has begun the implementation simultaneously. The minimal viable product (MVP) rollout is expected in Q3 of 2019.

“As for the construction development of the smart city, we have completed the substructure (an underlying or supporting structure) and the work has begun on the superstructure (the part of a building above its foundations). It is targeted for completion in Q4 2021,” he says.

As per the current plan, Limestone Network will first be deployed in a city centre in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh with up to 10,000 business tenants and 190,000 daily population, spanning across 20 hectares of work spaces, encompassing shopping malls, schools, retail outlets and housing the largest exhibition hall for business. Apart from Phnom Penh, the company looks forward to working with other cities within Cambodia and across the ASEAN region.

But do you think the adoption of blockchain itself is sufficient to solve the perennial problems faced by cities? Don’t you think a drastic infrastructural change is the only way forward to achieve this?

“Both the hardware infrastructure and software layer are important to form an efficient smart city,” he shares. “If a drastic infrastructural change is needed to solve the perennial problems faced by cities, we will actually need to design and construct a city from scratch, without taking into consideration that there will already be old legacy roads, buildings and systemic designs in place.”

Eddie believes that like any new technology, blockchain is also going through its share of controversies and challenging period before mass adoption. “Blockchain holds a great promise and we have also witnessed a few central banks implemented and currently testing them within a controlled environment as early as 2016. This shows that mainstream society is gradually opening up to the benefits of blockchain, and we are confident that we will be able to get over the proverbial hump in pushing for mainstream adoption of the technology.”

Eddie says he has noticed a good bit of interest in corporates wanting to develop the system on blockchain for the supply chain industry as it provides the single source of truth and data immutability.

Also Read: What’s in store for blockchain and cryptocurrency?

“In my observation, I feel that the governments and MNCs are taking the lead in rolling out initiatives backed by blockchain technology, and with adequate education, the SMEs will follow suit. Personally, it is also important for us to develop a good solution through good design thinking for the consumers. It should blend into their everyday lives without disrupting their daily activities. Blockchain or not, it should just be a backend process that works,” he shares.

In March this year, Limestone Network became one of the 10 startups selected for Tribe Accelerator‘s blockchain programme. Eddie believes that Tribe Accelerator has an excellent global ecosystem.

“We have learnt a lot from the partners they brought into the ecosystem. For example, we are regular participants in a curated series of masterclasses, where we are engaged on topics ranging from the legal system, to blockchain design, unique and interesting use cases and exposure to industry grade tools that we could consider using,” Eddie concludes.

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Image Credit: Limestone Network.

 

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Vietnamese startup Luxstay completed a bridge round of funding, with two Korean investors pitching in

Luxstay, Vietnam-based startup that focusses on premium travel accommodations, has just completed their bridge round of funding with the participation of two new investors from Korea: GS Home Shopping (GS Shop) and Bon Angels. This brought the total of the deal to US$4.5 million, which the company claimed to be a substantial amount of early-stage investment for a Vietnamese tech startup.

Luxstay was founded in 2017 by Steven Nguyen, offering a home-sharing platform that targets the Southeast Asia market and operating in Vietnam.

According to statistics from the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, Vietnam served about 80 million domestic and 15.6 million foreign tourists in 2018 alone. Total spending on tourism in 2018 amounted to US$25 billion, of which the accommodation sector accounted for 28 per cent, or equivalent to about US$7 billion.

With the statistics showing growth, the Vietnamese government strongly encourages the tourism sector to become a key economic sector in the next 5 years with government support and promotion policies. Backed by the promising number of supply from the real estate market, apartments and villa projects have been launched in Vietnam.

While the market of home-sharing is still fairly new in Vietnam, the revenue from these short-term rental activities in 2018 amounts to over US$100 million, as shown in Statista reports.

Also Read: Ex-Tiket co-founder Natali Ardianto to open new healthtech startup

Luxstay’s focus on premium products and domestic tourists, the company claimed, is what sets it apart. In order to help business partners and homeowners save time and effort, Luxstay has dedicated team members to support them in operating and managing real estate assets.

GS Home Shopping, one of the new investors, is Korea’s multimedia retailer that dominates TV home shopping. It has a corporate Venture Capital arm that invests through fund as well as direct investments. The other investor is BonAngels, who’s known as venture capital fund that focusses on investing in early-stage companies startups in Korea such as Woowa Brothers, Daily Hotels, and My Real Trip.

In the past, Luxstay had records of names like CyberAgent Venture (Japan), Genesia Ventures (Japan), ESP Capital (Singapore), Founders Capital (Singapore), and Nextrans (Korea) among its investors.
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And how can it be used to make the world a better place?

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be the most interesting discussion topic in the technology industry. It is simultaneously hailed as a savior to mankind or a destructive force that will leave everyone unemployed. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The next question is, what will this middle look like? What will the next few years look like? And how can it be used to improve the lives of regular people.

Scott Jones, the Managing Director of Six Kin, an artificial intelligence development company, spoke at Echelon Asia Summit 2019 and provided fantastic insights into the past, present and future of the industry.

Three waves

The most important thing to understand is that the history of AI can be broken down into three waves.

The first wave is already over, having ended in the mid-20oos. It has based on a highly logical “model-based approach” that laid the roadwork for the industry. Good examples of first wave artificial intelligence are computers that can play chess, Google Maps and software that can help complete legal paperwork.

Today we are in the second wave of artificial intelligence.

“The second wave of AI has been dominated by statistical machine learning techniques, made possible by advances in computing power and access to bigger data,” said Jones. 

Also Read: This on-demand cleaning startup adjusts with the needs of Singapore’s market

This is the ability for AI to learn over time. The most famous examples are when Google’s AlphaGo beat a world champion and the continuing push towards self-driving cars.

However, second wave AI is far from perfect and while it sometimes seems like we are on the verge of a Terminator-style take over, that is not really the case.

Jones brought up the metaphor of a golf cart vs. an automobile. Today, cutting edge technology can reasonably drive a car around a parking lot without any incident. However, if someone were to take the same technology and throw it into a golf cart, the AI would have no clue how to operate the vehicle.

This is the key difference between AI and a human, who could easily figure out a golf cart after a minute of looking around.

Another interesting example is that if someone showed an AI computer a picture of a cat, the computer should be able to use statistical analysis to pinpoint that the picture is a cat. However, it would not be able to explain, “what is a cat”.

Finally, even these impressive feats are based on an enormous quantity of data. It takes engineers thousands and thousands of data sets to teach an AI machine, “this is a cat” whereby it only takes two or three explanations to get across the same point to a toddler.

Jones expects the second wave will continue to improve, but humanity won’t break into the third wave until the 2030s.

The third wave

The big step needed from the third wave of AI technology is expertise in managing abstract intelligence and contextual awareness.

“Instead of being fed enormous sets of labeled training data, Third Wave AI systems will learn from descriptive contextual models,” said Jones.

Also Read: Travel accommodation Luxstay secures funding from GS Shop & Bon Angels

This means, when an AI robot sees a cat, it will not churn through thousands of mathematical formulas to statistically decipher that the animal is a feline. Rather, it will see ‘whiskers, claws, tail, desire-to-destroy-hooman’ and immediately recognise it as a cat.

Essentially, AI will be excellent at perceiving, learning and reasoning. Importantly, this will require an ability to generalise, aka being able to understand that a golf cart probably works like a car.

If this happens, robots should be able to learn and function with minimal supervision.

Introducing Pandai

With this context in mind, Jones introduced his education product called Pandai (‘Smart’ in Bahasa Indonesia).

The best way to think of Pandai is the ‘next generation of e-learning’.

As Jones said, students across the world think, “e-learning equals no learning”. It is generally static and technology limits most platforms to a one-size-fits-all approach towards education.

Pandai is trying to replicate the advantages of a human teacher — being able to react to students, understanding when someone is weak in a subject, access updated knowledge and being available.

Jones said the technology is not quite there, but as a former educator he and his wife are passionate about making it happen. He pointed to 265 million kids across the world who are not in school, and that 22 per cent of them are primary school age.

Solving these kinds of problems can make for a better world, and help turn artificial intelligence into a tool for good.

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GDP Venture invests in the Indonesian startup to support its plan on data labeling NLP-based apps

Datasaur, a data labeling platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) based in Indonesia, has received a seed round of funding from GDP Venture as reported by DailySocial.

Datasaur was founded by Ivan Lee, who’s a Computer Science graduate from Stanford University living in Silicon Valley. Behind AI trend that keeps evolving, there’s a human-labeled training machine that’s time-consuming and expensive, which inspired the establishment of Datasaur.

Datasaur developed an intelligent tool to support data labelers with efficient and automated ways of data labeling while simultaneously increasing data privacy and security.

The system, according to Lee, uses an AI-based and Natural Language Processing (NLP)-supported that proactively suggest labels. Any labeled data that’s not coherent with the previous tag labeling or contextually out-of-place will be subjected to verification.

Project manager then can manage how many times every data will be labeled to guarantee accuracy.

At this early stage, Datasaur’s service is still focussed on text-based data input. Datasaur said it plans to expand its services into audio-based data input as well.

Also Read: Indonesian “1000 Startups” initiative being renewed by the government

“We are still open for any additional participation from potential strategic partners in this seed round,” said Datasaur team.

Prior to Datasaur, founder Ivan Lee co-founded Loki Studio with three of his Stanford friends, before it was acquired by Yahoo in 2013. Yahoo then appointed Lee as its first Associate Product Manager, responsible for developing the company’s mobile search platform with AI.

Lee, whose stints then included VP of Product di GoButler and AI Product team in Apple, based Datasaur’s business in both California and Indonesia.
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Startups can often focus on the wrong metrics. This strategy will put you on the right path

Move fast and break things, that is the goal right? Startups need to create big, audacious, goals, take on a heroic task and constantly iterate to eventually become rich. This is the key to success for any young company.

Except it’s not.

Radhika Dutt, a Product Development Executive, outlined a new approach — one that focusses on impact and puts the long-term goal ahead of short-term victories. And while it sounds like an ethical approach to business, it is equally about improving the chances of finding success.

“For every company that has been able to become successful, there is a graveyard of companies that have failed using this approach,” Dutt said. 

Prior to diving into the radical product thinking, Dutt broke down the traps that many startups fall into. They are as follows:

Hero Syndrome: This is the problem of focussing on scale instead of making a real impact. It often involves trying to sell people products they neither want nor need. Or, it might mean expanding rapidly but offering a poor product.

Hypermetricimia: An issue that arises when Founders focus on popular metrics that don’t actually matter. This could mean focussing to much on MAUs without caring about if people actual spend time on the app.

Obsessive Sales Disorder: When companies start taking easy wins instead of learning to say no they can sabotage their ability to achieve long term goals. Think about it, if a Founder signs a bunch of deals that helps the bottom line, they may find themselves with a full year of deliverables that need to be executed and kills the bandwidth to move the startup forward.

Obviously there is a line that needs to be navigated. Startups have to survive, but they also can’t get chained down by deals that don’t move the business forward.

Pivotitis: This one is fairly self-explanatory. Companies can often struggle to define their direction and wind up constantly pivoting and going nowhere.

How to think about radical product development

The best part of Dutt’s talk was she provided concrete, tangible advice for business owners to implement. It starts with three core ideas which are :

1. Find the problem you are inspired to fix
2. Envision the world you are aiming for
3. Engineer your way to getting there

Find the problem you are inspired to fix

While the headline itself is used across the startup world, Dutt approached the brief from a different angle. She brought up the example of Margaret Hamilton, the engineer who was a key person in the first lunar moon landing.

Dutt was able to interview Hamilton, who told her that she felt personally responsible for the lives of the astronauts. With this mindset, Hamilton approached the project thinking, “Everything that could go wrong will try hard to do so.” This allowed her to envision problems and fix them before they happened on the mission.

For startups operating in a less life-or-death environment, they need to observe the people they want to impact, feel their pain and then envision the world where they fix their problems.

Envisioning the world you want to create

When Facebook was growing as a company, they envisioned ‘a more connected world’ and did a fantastic job of achieving that goal. However, they failed to envision how people would leverage this for political gains or raise concerns about personal privacy. Now we see a company that cannot consistently react to controversies and criticisms.

Also Read: Busting the myths around AI, IoT, Big Data and Cloud at Echelon 2019

Dutt said the vision, “Has to be shared by you, the team and the people’s lives you want to impact. Nodding along and saying ‘yes, I do want that world’.”

If a Founder meets a lot of people and they say the product is a bad idea, then listen and rethink the approach.

How do you create such a world

Dutt shared a wonderful Mad Libs-type of approach to finding an strategy to solve problems. It is as follows:

Today when [IDENTIFIED GROUP] want to [DESIRABLE OUTCOME] want to [CURRENT ACTIVITY] this is unacceptable, because [SHORTCOMINGS]. We envision a world where [SHORTCOMINGS ARE RESOLVED]. We’re bring this world about through [BROAD APPROACH AND TECHNOLOGY].

Not only does this help guide decision making, it helps customers clearly understand the company.

Engineer the world

Rather than ramming your way into a customer base and break everything along the way, Dutt suggests systematically integrating the vision into day-to-day life.

Ride-hailing in Southeast Asia is a good example of that. It started as just a taxi service, so people became familiar with the product. Then they added food delivery, then ticket redemption, then retail deals, then financial planning. Suddenly, the apps have become a necessary part of the lives of millions of people.

If they had launched with all of their products on day one, it would have been overwhelming to users would have rejected it.

In conclusion, radical product development is way of approaching business that tries to make ‘impact’ the star. It aims to cut through the noise, avoid easy mistakes and help 

startups build a loyal and enthusiastic customer base.

More information (and a free toolkit) can be found here.

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