Siam Commercial Bank Pcl plans to provide payments and lending to increase revenues from digital banking

Siam Commercial Bank Pcl (SCB) announced that it has partnered with e-commerce and game developer Sea Ltd’s Thai operations. SCB is looking to expand its footprints into digital payments and lending service, as reported by Reuters.

Apiphan Charoenanusorn, SCB’s President, said that the lending services aimed at small businesses on Singapore-based Sea’s platforms. It will integrate Sea’s AirPay to SCB’s apps, allowing customers to pay bills directly via the app.

SCB has stated that it is a part of their strategy to secure partnerships and expand its digital capabilities, including payments and lending.

Another part of that strategy also reflected in an undisclosed amount of the investment that SCB made in Indonesian ride-hailing startup gojek’s Thai unit, Get. The next in line after the investment will be planning to expand financial services to drivers on the app.

Thai banks reportedly have been pressured by falling fee income following a waiver on digital transaction fees since last year, which explains the decision behind the partnership with Sea Group.

Also Read: Sea Group trying to raise US$1.5 billion likely aimed at Shopee

Due to lower fee income, SCB’s non-interest revenue dropped by 9.7 per cent in the first half of 2019.

On the contrary, Sea, which owns e-commerce platform Shopee and operates in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, has seen its revenue more than tripled in the April-June period. It just secured US$1.5 billion this year to expand its e-commerce business.

Back in April 2019, Sea Group shared with e27 that it plans on expanding its gaming arm Garena into the live streaming ecosystem.
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Picture Credit: Sea Group

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As a natural melting pot, the city is perfect for  coworking agreements, which are usually defined by sharing rather than keeping to yourself

Co-working arrangements are quickly becoming popular across the world, but few urban areas have embraced co-working as eagerly as Kuala Lumpur, which is fast becoming recognised as one of the global hubs of the practice.

Kuala Lumpur recently became Asia’s fastest-growing city for co-working, with the amazingly affordable rent and competitive marketplace offered by the city proving too tantalizing for most businesses to pass upon.

Here’s why Kuala Lumpur is Asia’s fastest-growing city for co-working, and why we can expect shared offices spaces to remain commonplace there well into the future.

New construction is bountiful

One of the primary reasons that Kuala Lumpur has proven to be one of the finest co-working locations in the world is that the city is filled with new construction projects.

New offices are bountiful wherever you look, with local and foreign construction firms alike raking in huge sums of money by cashing in on ever-growing demand for new business locations and apartments.

As a direct result of Kuala Lumpur’s thriving construction sector, rent prices have been slowly but surely getting lower across the city.

As a matter of fact, one report indicates that rent recently fell by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter precisely because of the supply of new construction projects.

Office space in Kuala Lumpur is incredibly affordable when compared with some other business hubs in Asia, such as neighbouring Singapore.

Given that most startups and more than a few established companies are always looking to cut down on the costs of doing business, having competitive rent prices as well as a solid infrastructure ensures Kuala Lumpur will always be a popular choice for international businesses and investors.

Also Read: Why Asia should be the next destination for your event

It’s not just cheap rent that makes it an attractive spot for co-working providers, either, but also the stability of the city. KL is the backbone of the country and is the economic and commercial centre reinforces it as the business hub of Malaysia.

Many co-working providers would opt for stability over a setting up in a cheaper SE Asian City, and Kuala Lumpur has done an excellent job to ensure that its rent and occupancy levels remain relatively stable.

In recent years an oversupply of office buildings in the Klang Valley had led to uncertainty in the real estate sector.

This created the need to diversify the market and increase the prevalence of shared space throughout the City to offer more affordable and flexible office solutions to smaller businesses and new start-ups. Well-equipped co-working spaces in Kuala Lumpur were available for relatively cheap rates, creating more buoyancy in the market when it was needed most.

It’s also becoming clearer that co-working arrangements don’t have to sacrifice comfort or prestige in exchange for lower rent prices.

Popular listicles featuring some of the hottest co-working arrangements in Kuala Lumpur have been going viral recently, for instance, demonstrating that the city remains cutting edge despite its relative affordability.

This ensures that foreigners looking for a new office destination are being exposed to positive press before finalizing their decision to settle down in Kuala Lumpur, and locals themselves are also given plenty of encouragement to stay where their roots are rather than soliciting office space elsewhere.

Kuala Lumpur is embracing collaboration

Another surefire reason that Kuala Lumpur is becoming such a thriving hub of co-working is that it’s embracing collaboration, a fundamental feature of the co-working economy that’s only going to become more important as time goes on.

Co-working is about more than saving money; countless businesses decide to share their office with other companies or independent workers not because it’s cheaper, but rather because doing so permits them to house their workers in creative environments populated by a diverse myriad of professionals from all walks of life.

As the innovative and collaborative payoff from co-working arrangements becomes more understood, we can expect more companies in and around Kuala Lumpur to hop on the bandwagon and embrace a shared office.

It should also go without saying that Kuala Lumpur is one of the more technologically advanced cities in its region, ensuring that co-working providers, usually a tech-savvy bunch, cluster up there instead of elsewhere.

Also Read: Echelon is heading to Kuala Lumpur this October!

Many co-working providers attract tenants by offering high-quality digital services like high-speed internet for office users, so remaining a thriving hub of tech investment will be important if Kuala Lumpur wants to continue exploiting the growing trend of co-working.

Finally, as a natural melting pot, the city is a perfect fit for the culture of co-working agreements, which are usually open and defined by sharing rather than reclusively keeping to yourself.

Co-working arrangements are effectively the opposite of an office cubicle – rather than pushing workers into narrow silos of isolation, they ensure everyone in the office is familiar and comfortable with one another.

It’s only natural, then, that such arrangements should become popular in a city like Kuala Lumpur, which is familiar with mixing and melting diverse groups of people into one cohesive body.

Co-working is becoming incredibly popular around the world, yet Kuala Lumpur consistently stands out as a globally-recognised leader of co-working across Asia.

The city can derive substantial economic benefits from its reputation if it continues to prove attractive to co-working providers.

We can expect more companies based in Kuala Lumpur to embrace co-working sooner rather than later.

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The best approach for the future of blockchain will be to build on the use cases in which it has already shown potential

The death of the hype around blockchain might be the best thing that has ever happened to the technology.

Now that companies are no longer using the term to gain some short-lived media hype, we might be able to think rationally about what blockchain can actually be useful for, and what it can’t.

First, though, it’s worth remembering just how much hype surrounded blockchain last year. A recent survey of advertising executives by MediaPost found “blockchain” to be the most overrated word of 2018. For those of us involved with the technology, that’s hardly a surprise. 

The survey, in fact, puts numbers behind the hype.

It suggests that advertisers knew that many companies abused the word “blockchain” just to get free media hype. In January, management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that the vast majority of blockchain pilots and proofs of concept were still stuck in “pioneering mode” or were being shut down.

That’s far from being a negative outcome for blockchain, though. Perhaps we can now start to look at the technology more rationally. That’s what we’ll do now.

The opportunities

It can often seem like blockchain is a solution in search of a problem to solve. Though the technology has been mentioned in relation to almost every IT system and social problem out there, in order to discern the immediate future of the technology it’s worth remembering why it is valuable.

Blockchain’s primary value is creating trust. Through tokenization and encryption, systems that were previously regarded as vulnerable to hacking or abuse can be made trustworthy. It does this by making transactions open and transparent.

From that starting point, there are two primary ways in which blockchain might make an immediate impact:

1. The first is in financial services and fintech. It’s no coincidence that blockchain’s first (and to date only) major use case was in cryptocurrency. Expanding and developing cryptosystems to cover crypto microtransactions and real-world assets would seem like an easy win for blockchain tech, and it’s likely that the proof-of-concept trials undertaken by several major banks in recent years will soon come to fruition.

Also Read: Blockchain have the potential to transform dubious relationships in the music industry

2. Secondly, blockchain could help with e-governance. Estonia is already using the technology to replace outdated identification systems (like the Social Security system) with more secure solutions. Not only will this make public records more secure, but it will also allow greater transparency.

The challenges

All this said, there are still some major challenges facing blockchain as a technology.

These are likely the cause of the reduced hype in the past year: many companies started researching the technology in 2018, only to conclude that it is not yet useful for them.

Cointelegraph, for instance, has reported on a recent survey by Globant that found while 61 per cent of organizations has started researching blockchain, only 28 per cent chose a provider to help them deploy the technology.

There are several challenges facing blockchain, at least some of which will have to be overcome before the tech goes mainstream:

First, the way that existing institutions move from legacy systems to new, blockchain-based solutions is not yet clear.

A press release from a recent TD Bank survey noted that 90 per cent of treasury and finance professionals believe blockchain and distributed ledger technology will positively affect the payments industry, but that only 14 per cent said their organizations had training strategies for blockchain. Managing this change is going to be the biggest challenge for blockchain in the coming years.

Secondly, there remains a perception problem with blockchain.

Also Read:

The public still associates the technology with a shadowy underworld of (at best) crypto entrepreneurs, and (at worst) hackers. This perception is not helped by the continued reports of hacking in the crypto space, from the rise of crypto mining malware to the spike in cryptojacking. Given this bad press, it’s no wonder that large, established companies are unwilling to be associated with the tech.

Finally, there remains a huge problem with scalability.

This is the most-noted technical problem with blockchain, but we are still no closer to a solution. Blockchains can still take many seconds to process even the most basic transactions, and so scaling them up into national databases is not yet feasible. 

The future is two-speed

Responding to these opportunities and challenges can be difficult for businesses, but the falling away of the hype around blockchain allows us all an opportunity to stop and think. 

As others have noted, it is important to refrain from hyping it as-yet unproven new applications for the technology.

By showing where and how blockchain can actually help companies solve existing problems, the technology can be built into and around legacy systems.

Secondly, it will be important for companies to take a cautiously enthusiastic approach to blockchain.

One of the primary limitations on the technology at the moment is that staff lack the knowledge to work with it, understand it, or see its potential. But then, the same could be said of many new technologies.

What is therefore required is that companies put in place training schemes that will allow them to take advantage of blockchain, as and when it becomes useful for their business.

Also Read: A blockchain perspective: the irony of financial inclusion

Alongside these training schemes, companies will need to invest in the basic building blocks that will allow them to deploy blockchain. This means increasing their cloud storage and security capability, and ensuring that the systems they are already working with are highly scalable.

As with any new technology, it’s difficult to predict the future of blockchain with any degree of certainty. What is clear, though, is that it has not lived up to the hype. Or, at least, not yet.

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Existing industry leaders need to worry about the listed practices that are driving them towards a dead-end

With 1.92 Billion customers buying items online amounting to 13.7 per cent of retail sales worldwide, we can argue E-commerce is here to stay. KPMG revealed “People shop online because they can shop at all hours of the day” and “65 per cent of shoppers compare prices while in a physical store”.

These e-commerce statistics for 2019 are self-explanatory and they are hinting towards an impending e-commerce boom.

While the e-commerce industry is on the rise and it is posing a real threat to the retail sector, some facts suggest people are yet not comfortable with buying online. A Hub Spot study reveals 80 per cent of people will dump companies after just one bad experience, while another study states only 2.86  per cent of e-commerce visits converts.

Online shopping is shaping the landscape of tomorrow, where people can shop privately and explore more options without actually hopping from one store to the other. Like every good thing, e-commerce also comes with its share of pros and cons.

Let’s discuss trends followed by industry leaders that are not going to last long

 

Cashbacks to lure customers: E-commerce platforms are dolling out cashback like never before to acquire and retain customers. Amazon spends 12 per cent of its annual revenue in cashback.

On the other hand, most customers have agreed to pay extra for quality customer experience. In the times, where experience matters the most, spending heavily on cashback and less on customer experience improvement might cost e-commerce players a fortune.

Also Read: New to e-commerce? Here are 10 recommended books

Also, half of the enterprises are now diverting their investments towards customer experience innovations, which means any business that is not focusing on CX will turn obsolete.

 

Not compensating sellers well: Instead of focusing on improving seller performance, businesses are focusing on beating their competitors at the number game. All these heavy discounts, free delivery, and free returns are costing sellers a bomb and no, players like Amazon, Flipkart or eBay are not compensating them well.

E-commerce players have made slogans out of “Faster Return and Instant Refund”, “No Question Asked Refund Policy”, which is pushing a lot of small sellers out of business.

With sellers losing money fulfilling “no question asked return policy” and “instant refunds”, they are going to stop selling online. Marketplaces like Amazon manufacture no products, they earn commissions on every product sold on their platform. With increasing losses, sellers are bound to quit and bring the whole eco-system down.

 

Competing only on price-points: A good number of e-commerce players are trying to compete only on price point. These players are not bothered about post sell customer service or overall customer experience. By listing products at cheaper prices, these platforms can drive traffic and sales but they are failing big time to retain customers.

As KPMG study revealed, 86 per cent of customers are willing to pay extra for quality customer experience, it is very clear that price is no more a major decision influencer hence not focusing on other metrics and compete only on price-point is not a lasting strategy.

 

A poor search experience: Product Discovery is the metric that guarantees sales, top-notch customer experience, and re-purchases. By assisting customers to discover products they are actively looking for, e-commerce businesses can cross-sell as well. Improving search results has varied benefits but a good number of players are not worried about it.

Businesses today are relying on social media marketing to drive traffic and then converting those traffic into sell. These E-commerce platforms remain unintroduced to the power of Product Discovery.

Also Read: eCommerce potential in Southeast Asia, through the eyes of Taiwanese

Product Discovery is not only about cross-selling but also about leveraging an incomparable customer experience. When a customer finds a product he or she is looking for faster, they will come back every time they need a product.

 

Not offering personalised experience: PwC and Gartner have made it clear that CX is now a key brand differentiator. By not investing in personalized customer experience, e-commerce players will lose customers to their contemporaries.

All the successful e-commerce players have focused on personalized experience not only to retain customers but to drive referrals and re-purchases as well. Experts say “delivering personalized experience can increase customer referrals by three times”. As found by Hub Spot in a study, “81 per cent of consumers trust their friends over businesses for advice” hence offering personalized experience is more effective than running paid ads.

 

Conclusion

E-commerce is certainly the future of shopping but there’s no guarantee that all contemporary industry leaders will continue to rule. With an array of new enterprises entering the arena, the competition is getting stiff.

Also Read: eCommerce: Revitalising conventional forms of trade in Malaysia

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Email marketing when exercised correctly can increase your ROI at least by 15 per cent

With a lot of innovations such as videos, bots, interactive chat sessions, and artificial intelligence, the evolution of email marketing may look like a century-old technique. Do people still have the time to check their emails?

An average professional person in 2019, receives about 121 emails a day. Most of your prospects out there still use email as a means of professional communication.

Not every prospect of yours can be targeted with videos, what if the company they work for does not allow video streaming? The same way, what if your prospect does not want to give away information to a bot? But, every prospect out there has an email address. 

Here is an interesting fact curated by expanded ramblings, on an average of about 269B emails are sent in a day calculating to about 149,513 mails each minute.

So, is email marketing dead? The answer is no.

Email Marketing is the best strategy you need to implement to get a high return on investment for your business.

Quoting smart insights, “E-mail marketing is the evergreen channel and one among the top 3 most effective channels driving website visits leads and sales.”

Here are ways to generate a high ROI using e-mail marketing?

Identify your goals

Each campaign that you run might have a different goal and therefore might need a different set of audience. Finding your goal is a crucial step. Because everything that you do post this will round around your goal. If you do not choose this right, chances are high that the entire campaign might falter. 

Your campaign goal can be anything ranging from prospecting to improving brand awareness to educating customers/prospects on new features. Sometimes. It could even be a short survey on why prospects’ aren’t converting. This might help you and your sales team understand their mistakes and work for the betterment of the company. 

No matter what the campaign is about, you need to operate in a single version of the truth. Your entire team should be clear on what they are working towards.

Also Read: Want to bring in more business? These 7 tools will help you write the perfect email

They should know what metrics they should track and what is more important in the campaign to declare it a success or failure. Most campaigns might have a high open-rate, they need not necessarily have a high click rate. This could be because of two reasons. 

1. They found all the information that they needed on the email itself 

2. They did not find the information worthy enough to follow the trial

You need to build on this goal, again and again, to see what works for you. Although high click rates and open rates may seem like a beautiful metric to track, there is one thing that most marketers miss tracking and that is ROI.

ROI is important for any marketing activity that is carried out. If your campaign does not bring anything back to the company, how good is it? You need to find out which segment here generates ROI for your company.  

Build an email list

The most important thing that you need to focus here is that you need to build a list by getting consent from each and every prospect you are targeting. This means they must give you their email address. With GDPR in place, you also need to exercise this information carefully or you can end up being in great trouble.

Getting targets to submit their email to you is pretty easy. All that you need to do is offer them something in return. Nobody gives away anything for free. A little incentive can go a long way.

Here is how you can get prospects to give their email address to you:

Create a landing page, allow them to download some useful materials (Whitepaper, Tips, Free documents), and in return collect their contact details.

Get them to sign up for your newsletter, this way they also know what is happening in your company all the time.

Offer a free trial of your product.

Also Read: All you need to know about the basics of email marketing

Give away ebooks or white papers that might interest your prospects.

You need to exercise great caution in the phrase that asks for the targets’ email address. Simply mentioning “Click to get updates” or “Be updated on what is happening here” is not going to get your targets’ to give away their information. Make it enticing and interesting enough that they would want to come forward to know what is happening around.

Structure the campaign

You should understand that businesses and prospects receive a lot of emails in a day.

And, if they open your email they should have all the information that they need in it if they decide to take it forward. To do that, structuring plays an important role. 

Here is a sample from Airbnb:

It explains the process of completing your listing in Airbnb.

Your email should have a specific flow that will help your targets in quickly understanding what you are trying to say.

Structuring your content in paragraphs, using the right amount of colour and indent might look like a no brainer, but can go a long way if done correctly.

Follow up

Your targets have received the emails, what’s next?

You need to follow up with them constantly to make your campaign a success. You can choose to do this manually but for the ease of tracking it would be better to leverage on an automation tool.

Most email service providers these days give you the option of autoresponders. An autoresponder is nothing but a series of emails, focused on a particular topic, sent to customers in a particular interval. 

These emails are also called as follow up emails, colloquially. The sender, that is you, must prepare the list of customers and emails and feed it into your campaign manager. Then, you need to schedule the emails on a timely basis.

 Here is an example:

Day 1: Send mail #1

Day 3: If there is no reply, try connecting through other means such as Linkedin

Day 4: Send follow-up email for #1

Day 7: Try calling them 

Day 10: Send second follow-up email for #2

Going back, you need to know why you are running this campaign.

No marketer runs one for fun. You need to engage your customers to make sales. Which means the content that you create must add value to them. They should be lured into your content that they would want to try out your solution immediately.

That said, you need to do the trick of slowly transitioning from giving away incentives to actually selling the product. This needs to be subtle and powerful because if done wrong, this is where most prospects drop out. 

It is good to slowly start doing that from your second or third email. Sending Newsletters is a good start. It contains information about your product as well as content that will be useful for them. It is the right package of sending what they need and what you want them to see.  

There is no hard and fast rule on how you do this, Each business has a different requirement. You need to understand this and prepare your pitch accordingly.

Tracking metrics

We have come to the last and most important section of the blog. Return on Investment is the main reason why any company would run a campaign.

Let’s say you spend an average of about US$10 on a campaign, what would be your return on this? Rounds back to the goal of the campaign, but any return would mostly be getting customers to pay. 

To help in understanding this, there is something that you need to know about email analytics – open rate, click rate and unsubscribes. If you are using a campaign manager then the tool would by itself calculate this for you for every campaign sent.

Open rate 

Open rate is ideally the number of prospects who open your email. 

It is calculated using the following formula:

Number of Emails Read / Number of Delivered Emails ×100

If your open rates are low, then it means that something is wrong with the subject line or the time in which the email is sent. You need to look at working on it. 

Click rate

Click rate is nothing but the percentage of recipients who have clicked on one or more links in the email.

It is calculated using the following formula:

(Total clicks ÷ Total number of delivered emails) * 100

Example: 1000 total clicks ÷ 10,000 delivered emails * 100 = 10% click rate

If you have a low click rate then it means that your message has somewhere not reached your audience right. You need to look at reworking on your copy. 

Unsubscribes

This is the list of customers who have opened the email but have chosen to not receive any more emails from you. This could be due to a lot of reasons like the content that you send might not be of value to them, you contact them too frequently that they find you disturbing, they have subscribed to an alternate service, they are unhappy with your product etc.

In addition to these three metrics, there are a few others that would help you calculate the performance of your campaign and increase ROI.

Also Read: How engaged are different devices with emails?

Bounce rate

It is the total number of emails that did not reach the recipient’s inbox. Bounce rate is calculated using the formula:

(Total number of bounced emails ÷ Number of emails sent) * 100

There are 2 types of bounces, hard Bounce and soft bounce.

Soft Bounce is a temporary issue such as server problem, full inbox etc. Hard bounces happen when the email id is non-existent, invalid or closed. You need to remove these addresses from your list.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the most important metric that you need to factor in while calculating your ROI. It is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed the desired action.

This action could be anything such as filling out a form or purchasing a product.

Conversion Rate is calculated using the following formula:

(Total number of people who completed the action ÷ Total number of emails delivered) * 100

For example, if your goal is to get people to download an ebook. All the customers who have downloaded it from your email are said to be converted.

Overall ROI

Overall ROI is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the total spend. 

[(Amount made in additional sales made) – (Amount invested in the campaign) ÷ (Amount invested in the campaign)] * 100

Example: (US$1,000 in additional sales – US$100 invested in the campaign / US$100 invested in the campaign) * 100 =  900 per cent return on investment for the campaign

The Bottom Line

As Marketers take ROI seriously for email marketing. As a marketing channel, you should.

If you haven’t set up your SLA when it comes to email marketing, high time you do. 

If you have already, share how email marketing has increased your ROI in the comments section below. 

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Image Credit: Austin Distel

 

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In addition to Alibaba and Kaola, we also have updates from Swiggy, theAsianparent, SCB, and Sea Group

Alibaba acquires NetEase Kaola for US$2B – TechCrunch

Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group has acquired NetEase Kaola for US$2 billion, TechCrunch reported.

Tmall Import and Export General Manager Alvin Liu has been named as Kaola’s new CEO, replacing Zhang Lei.

Following the acquisition, Kaola will continue to operate independently under its own brand.

Citing a press statement made by the two companies, the report said that they will integrate Kaola into Tmall, creating what is said to be the largest cross-border e-commerce platform in the country.

Reports of the acquisition have circulated since weeks ago; it is said to had stalled in August after the companies reportedly disagreed on transaction details.

“We are pleased to have found a strategic fit for Kaola within Alibaba’s extensive ecosystem, where Kaola will continue to provide Chinese consumers with high-quality import products and services. At the same time, the completion of this strategic transaction will allow NetEase to focus on its growth strategy, investing in markets that allow us to best leverage our competitive advantages,” said NetEase CEO William Ding.

India’s Swiggy launches new on-demand services – SCMP

Indian online food ordering and delivery startup Swiggy has launched new on-demand services that included intracity courier service to send small packages, South China Morning Post wrote.

Called Swiggy Go, the service will operate in the company’s home base of Bangalore and expand to more than 300 cities by next year.

Swiggy also announced a “phased rollout” of its on-demand grocery delivery service Swiggy Stores in Bangalore and Hyderabad, which enables orders from both family-run stores and supermarkets.

Also Read: Meet the 5 regional finalists of Alibaba-MDEC Jumpstarter 2020 competition

theAsianparent names Susana Tsui as new CEO of Media – e27

Southeast Asian platform for parents theAsianparent today announced the appointment of Susana Tsui as new CEO of Media.

This appointment comes after theAsianparent’s recent announcement of its market expansion plans and e-commerce market foray, following its Series C funding round led by Fosun and JD.com.

Tsui’s previous notable stints include as Asia Pacific CEO of PHD, and Asia Pacific COO of OgilvyOne.

Before joining theAsianparent, she was the Group CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network China (DAN), managing over 22 agency brands across five cities in the country.

Siam Commercial Bank expands to digital lending, partners with Sea Group – Reuters

Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank Pcl (SCB) announced a partnership with e-commerce and game developer Sea Ltd’s Thai operations to provide payments and lending services, Reuters wrote.

The bank will provide lending services to small businesses on Sea’s e-commerce platforms.

Sea’s AirPay customers will also be able to pay bills via SCB’s apps.

The tie-up is in line with the bank’s strategy to secure partnerships and expand its digital capacity, including payments and lending.

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Image Credit: Adi Constantin on Unsplash

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The subscription fee is US$36 per month for Elf, which weighs less than 13.6kg

US-based startup Scooterson, which has its R&D office in Singapore, has unveiled a new foldable light-weight smart e-scooter, Elf.

The new model — which comes in two variants, Elf and Elf+ — will be available in Singapore from October this year. The user will have the option to either purchase or subscribe to it.

While Elf (UL 2722-certified) is priced at S$799 (US$578), Elf+ costs S$999 (US$723).

The subscription fee is S$49.9 (US$36) per month each for both models. The vehicles weigh less than 30 pounds (13.6kg) each.

“Elf, which stands for Electric, Lite, and Fun, is the world’s smartest kick-scooter designed to have the most required attributes of the daily riders,” claims Scooterson CTO Deepansh Jain.

“Based on our tests, we noticed that almost all riders are comfortable to lift a scooter that weighs between 25 and 30 pounds. Also, the statistics show that riding a scooter more than 20 miles a day is very unlikely,” he added. “We worked on making the frame lighter and adding more cells without crossing the 30-pound limits. Built from light magnesium alloys and automotive-grade aluminium and weighing only 27.5 pounds, Elf is easy to fold and lift into your car trunk.”

The Elf models come equipped with many innovative features: “Smart Ride” helps riders optimise the mileage by suggesting the most efficient riding mode for the already-known roads. On the other hand, “Charging Reminder” reminds the user to put two-wheeler at charging whenever he/she is in a charging-friendly location.

Also Read: This intelligent electric scooter could force Mobike and Ofo to shift gears in Singapore

The “Adaptive Lights” feature in the vehicle can sense the ambient light and switch on and off for better visibility and safety.

The Elf models also boast of a smart battery management feature, which gives 20-plus miles range.

The user can manage all scooter functionalities from the Scooterson app for better performance and battery life to suit the way you ride.

Elf also features ‘anti-shenanigans tech’, which enables the user to know his/her Elf location anytime using the ‘Find My Scooter’ feature on the app. The anti-tampering alarm will send the user a notification to his/her phone each time someone tries any shenanigans with the Elf+.

It also comes in vivid colours and fully programmable mood lights, which will add more visibility and safety while riding in the night.

The Remote Diagnosis feature enables Scooterson’s engineers to detect and conclude the issues faster without further ado, to shorten the service turnaround time.

Elf also stores and process all the telemetry data in the cloud. Based on this data, the app will start giving you suggestions on how to improve your riding style.

Shipping of Elf and Elf+ will be started in September in Europe and North America.

Scooterson was founded in 2016 by Romanian national Mihnea de Vries (CEO) and Jain. In January last year, Scooterson secured US$1.75 million in seed funding from Arsat Industry, a manufacturer of precision metal parts for leading automobile companies in the world.

The company’s first model Rolley, still in Beta, is available only in the US.

 

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CMIA Capital Partners is from Singapore while Bintang Capital Partners Berhad is from Malaysia

Oneberry Technologies Pte. Ltd. (“Oneberry”), an end-to-end security and surveillance solution provider, announced that it has received funding of S$30 million (US$22 million) from Singapore-headquartered private equity firm CMIA Capital Partners (“CMIA”) and Malaysia-based Bintang Capital Partners Berhad (“Bintang”).

With the fresh funding, Oneberry plans to expand its offerings while taking its products and services to a larger regional scale.

“The latest capital injection into Oneberry will enable us to step up our research and development initiatives, accelerate our compelling growth strategies, and allow us to explore emerging industries of growth, including cybersecurity,” said Arun Murthy, Deputy CEO of Oneberry.

Oneberry Technologies was founded in 2003. It offers to help address shortages in security manpower through technology solutions that “increase security, surveillance, and productivity”.

It claims to have clients from government agencies as well as public and private sectors, servicing the likes of the historic Trump-Kim Summit and 33rd ASEAN Summit held in Singapore in 2018.

Also Read: 5 reasons why startups should get a managed cyber security service provider

Ken Pereira, Founder and CEO of Oneberry, said: “CMIA and Bintang are ideal partners to help bring Oneberry to the next level, to help us execute our vision more rapidly into new sectors such as commercial, residential, industrial, retail, and also overseas where the opportunities are tremendous.”

Johan Rozali-Wathooth, Founder and Managing Partner of Bintang, commented: “Bintang hopes to deploy our resources and network in support of Oneberry’s expansion plans, and we are confident of a successful and productive partnership with the company.”

Oneberry said that it will also look to increase funding in its cybersecurity and robotics research and development programme, with the company looking to integrate connected Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices with traditional offline surveillance.

CMIA Capital Partners is a private equity firm headquartered in Singapore, focusses on control and growth capital investments in mid-sized businesses in Southeast Asia and China since 2003. In 2016, CMIA has pivoted to focus on Southeast Asia investments, especially in new economy, consumer, and technology sectors.

Bintang Capital Partners Berhad was established in January 2018, and has since deployed in excess of US$75 million of capital across various investments.

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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The new, unnamed capital city has been described as a “smart metropolis”

You may have heard about the Indonesian government’s plan to move its capital city from Jakarta to East Borneo –a plan that has been in mind for decades but has only been confirmed this year by President Joko Widodo.

While Jakarta will continue to become the centre of business activities, the new capital will be the administrative and political hub of the country.

Following up the announcement, the President revealed more details about the government’s vision for the new, unnamed capital city. In this report by The Jakarta Post, the new capital is described as a “smart metropolis”, designed to be a “melting pot of technological innovations that can sustain the country for the next century and beyond.”

Personally, I always warn myself to be sceptical of any vision or plan announced by the government until it actually materialised.

Also Read: Jakarta comes out as “challenger” to global startup ecosystems: Startup Genome Report

But the topic of capital relocation has been a discussion in the e27 Telegram Group, which houses at least 400 members located anywhere from Singapore to Nairobi (!). Within this discussion, the tonality was mostly positive.

One of the most exciting points that came up was about the possibility of stronger ties with East Malaysia, with startup communities emerging in places such as Kuching and Sarawak.

There is also a possibility that local startup communities in Borneo will finally get the kind of attention usually given only to communities on the island of Java, as the country’s most populated island.

Even the prospect of building a “smart metropolis” seems to offer opportunities for startups, especially those working in the smart city field. (It reminded me of this commitment from SoftBank, though)

So what is your take on this? Is this capital relocation something you are excited about? If your company has been based in Jakarta, would you consider adding a presence in [whatever the new capital will be named]?

Let’s discuss!

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Image Credit: ekoherwantoro on Unsplash

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An inspiring side hustle story of building an ecologically responsible business

Who I am

Hi, my name is Kan Yamamoto, and I am the designer of Kamino Wallet.

I started it as my side hustle, and since I opened my shop in June 2018, it has grown slowly. Though it is still a tiny business, I enjoy creating useful tools that are loved by many users around the globe.

Considering what I’m making from this project, I know it’s not that much, and it will take some more time to turn it into my full-time business.

But I’ve learned many things along the way, so I think it wouldn’t hurt to share my story.

About Kamino Wallet

Under this brand, I make minimalist, eco-friendly paper wallets out of washable paper.

Washable paper is a kind of material you would find as those labels on the back of your jeans. It is highly durable and even machine washable, which makes it an ideal alternative to leather while maintaining the paper-thin profile.

My wallets help you lighten the load on your pocket and the environment, by getting rid of the bulge and the cruelty of the conventional leather wallets.

The wrap wallet is my best selling product, and it is the best example of how my products stand out in terms of the design.

I apply the art of Origami — the traditional Japanese paper folding technique, to bring the full potential out of the material and make the most minimal wallet ever with maximum utility.

My backstory and how I came up with the idea

I am a self-employed graphic designer who also works as a woodworker/lumberjack. I was born and grew up in Kochi, Japan but moved to Europe and have spent my twenties in Switzerland and Berlin, where I practised graphic design and the fine arts.

After I graduated from the University of Art Berlin in 2011, I returned to Japan to dig deep into my cultural roots and to contribute to the local community.

Now I am living in a mountainous village in a suburban area of the city of Kochi. I love living near nature, and the quality of life here is irreplaceable, but one of the biggest problems in rural areas is that there are no jobs.

So I thought the best thing would be to learn how to create small businesses myself. And by doing it, I could be an example for the younger generation to show that it doesn’t matter where you live. You could build a global business, however small it is.

 Tosayama village, Kochi, Japan

With my background in art and design, I am a maker by nature, so I naturally looked for ideas for products that I can make myself by hand without much investment.

A wallet was my first choice because I genuinely needed it as a consumer but couldn’t find the right one that is slim, functional, and eco-friendly on the market.

 

My small workshop in the village

The process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing my first product

I started designing wallets by prototyping with paper, looking for which form and style work best. I wanted it as minimal as possible, in its appearance as well as in environmental impact.

After trying various materials, paper, which I always had considered the material for prototypes, turned out to be the best solution for me. It also helped that I had some knowledge and experience with various kinds of papers as a graphic designer.

Soon after I finished the design of the first version, I wanted to see if there is a demand at all. So I quickly made a simple landing page to release the design as a free DIY template. And I asked visitors if they would be interested in the production version which will be made out of more durable material.

Also Read: The raging Amazon forest fires: Why businesses need to step up for climate change

I shared it on Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Instructables, etc., and to my surprise, I immediately got hundreds of downloads.

I could build a mailing list of about two hundred in a few months. Some people contacted me to give me their feedback on the usability of the design, and I kept refining the design based on that feedback.

One of the first prototypes made out of used Rhodia cover.

The process of launching the business

After I realized it could be a business by seeing the demand for the DIY version, I started to prepare for the launch. Finding the right kind of paper that is durable enough for daily use was hard, and in fact, I am still looking for the perfect material. But I eventually found a durable synthetic paper that is good enough for the first product, ordered it in bulk, and started making the actual products.

At the time of the launch, I had managed to have a mailing list of about 200 subscribers. Looking back, it is not that big at all, but I think that is enough for a start and assumed that a large number of them would place orders.

But I was wrong, dead wrong. I learned a hard lesson that subscribing to a mailing list and paying for a product is a different thing. In the end, only a few out of the list ended up buying my product.

I had zero knowledge of e-commerce at the beginning. But I have slowly learned many things by doing it, such as how to build a brand, website copywriting, and the way to optimize my site for conversions. Then I slowly started to gain customers from all around the world, and the designs have also evolved.

What worked for me to attract and retain customers since launch

What I care about the most is the personal connection with my customers. I always enclose handwritten thank you notes in the packages and respond to questions or feedback as openly as possible. One of my customers once wrote to me

“It’s great that you are so committed to customer service. These days it’s not normal anymore to get this kind of swift, effective and personal service.”

I also include one or two cards/bookmarks with a discount code printed that are made out of the same material as my wallets to encourage word of mouth. It would make it easier to refer a friend by simply giving a card so that they can touch and feel it.

After all, the digitized world we live in is sometimes rough and noisy, so this personal touch is what makes a difference in the long run. I believe being able to offer this kind of service is one of the strengths of being a small maker. And it certainly helps to build trust and retain my customers.

Thank you card that doubles as a bookmark.

What I’ve learned particularly helpful through starting the business

What surprised me the most is that many people on the internet do like to give feedback when I ask them to or when they genuinely love my idea/products. I think I made the right decision to release the DIY version as soon as possible to get feedback and brushed it up.

It is still relevant now, and listening to my customers is one of the best tactics I have learned when it comes to product development and marketing.

Another thing I am impressed by and thankful about and is how effectively the global postal network works. As I am based in a remote area, the logistics could have been a pain, but in reality, it works like a charm.

I can send my products out from a small post office in my village. Usually, within 10–14 days, they will arrive in North America and Europe, where most of my customers are.

Also Read: Can a sustainable workplace be profitable too?

By the effort of making my products and the packages as slim and lightweight as possible, I could reduce the shipping cost and ultimately afford to offer free shipping worldwide on all orders.

 The inspiration

I’m a kind of a bookworm, so I’ve read many books about starting a business, building a brand, or design/art in general, but my number one would be:

“Design for the Real World” by Victor Papanek

I always come back to this book whenever I want to make sure if I’m on the right track as a designer/maker. Let me quote one of my favourite lines.

Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical in the truest sense. It must dedicate itself to nature’s principle of least effort, in other words, maximum diversity with minimum inventory or doing the most with the least. That means consuming less, using things longer, and being frugal about recycling materials.

Now and the future

Currently, it makes around US$1,000 in sales, of which about $600 is profit. So it is not a typical success story you usually see here. At least it is profitable as my side hustle, and I love doing it.

I get about 60–100 visits a day mainly through organic search, Instagram, and Reddit. And my current conversion rate is around 1 per cent, which would explain why it has been slow in sales.

I tried google ads for a while but couldn’t figure out how to make it work effectively, so I stopped it for now. While I would like to keep the business rather small, it could expand a bit more so acquiring new customers is the biggest struggle at the moment.

Regarding the cost and the profit, I try to keep the gross margins before ad-spend around 35–40 per cent for every product. The cost of labour is also around 40 per cent, which I am taking for now, but I would hire someone with it for making my products if it eventually scales in the future.

Based on the feedback from my customers, I have been designing new products, including notebook wallet and coin pouch. Also, I am talking with a manufacturer who produces even more eco-friendly material that has more colour variations so the products line up will undoubtedly keep growing.

It may sound optimistic, but I believe my business has the potential to turn into my full-time business eventually, or even beyond that.

It seems more and more people are interested in a simple, eco-friendly lifestyle, and my products would appeal to those audiences once I tuned in the right channels.

Advice for fellow side hustlers

All the above being said I guess I am nowhere near the position to tell anyone how to start/run business.

All I can say is that you need to take time to grow the business, so take it easy and don’t give it up too soon.

Thank you for reading, and I hope it could give you some inspirations for starting your side hustles!

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Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

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Image Credit: Author

This article is the edited version of the interview done with Starter Story.

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