Day: April 9, 2020

Right now, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who managed to nail down working from home, and those who still struggle with it.

Let’s face it.

Working from home has been imposed on most of us with a vengeance. During this pandemic period, it is mandatory to flatten the curve. And we must all cooperate with the best of our abilities to help the world heal faster.

Remote work is just one way of it. In fact, the interest in the search term ‘remote work’ has tripled during the past three months.

Unfortunately, there are several challenges that remote work brings along with it. If you don’t put a lid on these challenges at the earliest, your productivity is going to plummet and your boss might assume that you are slacking at home.

Let’s not make situations so worse.

In this short blog post, I am going to discuss the five most prominent remote work challenges and what you can do to overcome them.

Also Read: How I built a business across three countries with only remote workers

Distractions

If you are someone like me, most probably the kitchen counter would be your work desk. And it will have an abundant supply of snacks which acts as a constant distraction from the pile of work that keeps growing.

If you are living with your family and children, there is also the constant noise and interruptions that you will have prey too.

Well, that is our first challenge to tackle — distractions.

Easy fix

You could be an intern who has just got into your first job or a CEO who has decades-long experience. It doesn’t matter which level of the corporate ladder you are at when you are working remotely; you need a proper workspace.

An ideal workspace for remote work is one where you have minimal distractions, has comfortable seating and a surface to put your work equipment on.

The kitchen counter is definitely not that, neither is the couch or the bed. You need a table and a chair to be productive while working remotely. Of course, you can keep carrying your work to the kitchen counter, couch or bed. Just don’t make them your workspace.

A dedicated workspace helps you prepare psychologically for work. It also helps set a boundary between personal life and work, although both are under the same roof now.

Also Read: (Infographics) Advantages and disadvantages of remote working

Cybersecurity

At work, our IT team would have set up the state-of-the-art IT security systems that would have protected your hardware, software or data from being threatened by cybersecurity criminals.

But, when working from home, especially when you connect to the internet using a private broadband connection, you may not enjoy the same level of cybersecurity.

As per the Techrepublic report, there has been a 667 per cent massive spike in COVID-19 related scams, phishing emails and so on. It is easy for even a seasoned internet user to fall prey to them.

Furthermore, Zoom, which rose to stardom as the go-to tools for virtual conferencing, has also become a hotspot for hackers. A Mashable report suggests that a Zoom security bug can let attackers steal your Windows passwords.

From a personal level and also from an organisational level, these are tough cybersecurity challenges of remote work that should be addressed on priority.

Easy fix

A virtual private network (VPN) is a trusted form of connecting to the internet wherein your device’s internet connection will be routed through a trusted VPN private server then the server provided by the Internet Service Provider (ISP).

It ensures that all the data you send and receive online is not eavesdropped or manipulated by hackers or any unauthorised personnel. In fact, most organisations have been assigning dedicated IP to their employees to thwart cybersecurity threats.

There are also other benefits of using a dedicated IP.

You will be automatically added to your employer’s whitelist. That solves the problem of user authentication for specific tools, databases or such confidential information that you could be trying to access from your home network.

In short, VPN solves the dual problem of cybersecurity as well as improves your access to organisational data.

Also Read: Why you shouldn’t resist collaboration and remote work

Collaboration

Like or hate it, collaboration takes a hit when you are working home.

There is some X factor to face-to-face communication that makes collaboration so easier. Be it fetching a file from a colleague or giving knowledge transfer to a new project — things are more natural when there is face-to-face communication.

One of the toughest (and most prominent) challenges of remote work is the lack of direct interaction. You have to use virtual communication channels like chat, email, voice calls or video calls with fake backgrounds to communicate.

Even with all of these, your message may not get appropriately conveyed since you are not physically present.

How can this challenge be tackled?

Easy fix

The only resort to stay on the same page with a team while working remotely is to use project management tools. There are tons of such tools available online (both free and paid). Some of the best ones in the market are Trello, Basecamp, Slack, Evernote, etc.

Also read: Why remote working is the future for startups

Most of these tools are web-based and thus spare you from the need to download any software or configure them. The only difficulty would be to add team members and make them habitual to using it regularly.

Productivity

Given the many distractions that a home has — the comfy couch, the easily accessible bedroom, the hobbies and crafts that you did not have time to attend to earlier and so on, it is bound that you will get distracted.

When distractions intervene, productivity falls off the cliff into a deep pit. Also, while working remotely, you do not have the sight of your employees as well. This gives some sort of freedom to slack around in your own way.

Easy fix

Maintaining productivity while working from home is not a difficult task. All you need is a bit of preparation.

At the office, the flow of events and the environment might have made your stock of things-to-do and keep going like a well-oiled machine. While at home, you might need a proper plan, perhaps your own to-do list for the day to get things done.

Don’t mind putting pen to paper and writing it down. It has some magical way of ensuring you stack on track.

If that doesn’t work, go for digital alternatives like Google keep, Papier, Microsoft To-do, Trello, Wunderlist and the likes.

Also Read: The future of remote work is happening now, here’s how to make it work for you

Personal well-being

Remote working has several overlooked downsides to it.

Some of them are loneliness caused due to isolation, the need to be always available and for some, even a nagging feeling of insecurity.

These personal well-being issues might seem trivial at first. But, if they are contained at the earliest, they can grow in monstrous proportions causing your entire life — both personal and professional along with it to tumble down.

Easy fix

Having a support system of friends, colleagues and family can help tide over the isolation-caused well-being issues.

To begin with, use the time to get in touch with your near and dear ones with whom you have gotten far due to work and the routine of life.

In fact, the internet is strewn with images of video calls that are bringing together entire families and co-workers who are geographically scattered.

Final Thoughts

Remote work is going to stay, at least for a while. The world as a whole needs some time to heal.

While you are working remotely, you will be bombarded with distractions. You will face cybersecurity issues that you never knew existed. You might even find it difficult to rein in work from colleagues who were easy to work with earlier.

All these challenges cannot be solved in one shot. You have to address them separately, one at a time. Once you have conquered these challenges, you will be able to improve your work productivity, maybe even better than while at work.

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Image credit: Victoria Heath on Unsplash

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Prasetia Dwidharma leads seed funding round in Indonesian online trucking startup Webtrace

Indonesia’s online trucking startup Webtrace has secured an undisclosed seed stage funding, led by VC firm Prasetia Dwidharma, with participation from Astra Ventura.

The company said it plans to use the funds to strengthen its marketing and customer acquisition strategy as well as to expand sales headcount.

Erwin Subroto, CEO and Co-founder, said: “Webtrace aims to help those companies by using its technology and solution, to be more efficient in cost saving as well as improving the utilisation rate, productivity, and safety; by implementing IoT sensors and solution that will generate various real time data and analysis.”

Although the characteristics of Indonesia’s geography are a combination from land, sea, and air, land transportation remains the primary way good are moved goods and it touches the lives of nearly the entire population.

In addition, trucking is the physical backbone of e-commerce, and person-to-person shipments, with spending on overland logistics estimated to reach US$290 billion by 2020.

Edutech startup Lido secures over US$7.4M in funding led by BAce Capital

India-based edutech firm focussing on live online tutorials Lido Learning has raised over US$7.4 million in Series B round led by Ant Financial-backed BAce Capital.

The company said it plans to use the funding to expand its offering to Indian students in tier II and tier III cities with more curriculum-focussed subjects, as well as modern skills like analytical thinking, critical reasoning, communication, collaboration, and creativity

According to Outlook India, Lido is BAce Capital’s first edutech investment in India, as part of a strategy to continue investing in early stage companies in emerging economies in India and Southeast Asia.

Also Read: (Exclusive) Indonesian edutech startup Gredu raises Pre-Series A funding round to help ease teachers’ workload

Lido has a community of students, tutors, and parents connected by its technology to make education more accessible. With the COVID-19 lockdown taking place, Lido offers to connect expert teachers to students across the country in subjects such as mathematics and science tutorials for Classes V to IX in ICSE and CBSE syllabus.

LiveIn launches Pay What You Can (PWYC) programme addressing COVID-19’s vulnerable community

LiveIn, a property-technology company for a long-stay term, has launched a PWYC (Pay What You Can) scheme to its existing tenants and any individuals affected by the COVID-18 situation.

This scheme provides access to discounted rooms for LiveIn, which is aimed at helping those who have gotten furloughed, terminated, retrenched, or have undergone a loss of business and/or revenue during the MCO which began on March 18, 2020.

Through this arrangement with the owner-partners, LiveIn is open to invite more home seekers to come onboard and rent rooms with a ‘Pay What You Can’ afford basis, provided they have the necessary supporting documents required.

LiveIn was established in 2015. It provides property care services for homeowners and room-rental solutions for accommodation seekers in the Klang Valley with hassle-free convenience.

According to CEO and Co-founder Keek Wen Khai, the LiveIn Assist Rent-Relief Program can be found on LiveIn’s social media channels.

NUHS launches AI bot to assist instant information access to COVID-19

The National University Health System (NUHS) and Bot MD have announced a partnership to launch the NUHS-Bot MD A.I., a clinical assistant app for frontline medical staff to instantly search for hospital specific information including COVID-19 guidelines and operational directives.

Also Read: Indonesian founder develops CE-approved rapid self-test kit priced at US$10 for COVID-19

Over 500 healthcare professionals, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and medical social workers from NUHS have benefited from the first-phase roll-out, with plans to expand access to more than 3,000 staff across the NUHS healthcare cluster.

The NUHS-Bot MD A.I. assistant is a chatbot that instantly answers questions from hospital staff about hospital protocols, COVID-19 operational directives, drug dosage information, drug formulary, and even on-call rosters. It also allows hospital staff to record their temperatures by integrating the daily temperature reporting form within the Bot interface.

The NUHS-Bot MD A.I. assistant is accessible on any smartphone device and serves as a 24×7 virtual assistant that benefits hospital clinical staff, allowing them to access healthcare information anytime and anywhere, even when they are off duty. The smartphone app also allows hospitals to build custom clinical tools based on their own guidelines and protocols.
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Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

The post News Roundup: Indonesian online trucking startup Webtrace secures seed funding led by Prasetia Dwidharma appeared first on e27.

While governments and private sectors across the world are engaged in a battle to curb the novel coronavirus, some use this epidemic as an opportunity for profiteering. Complaints of unjust and exorbitant pricing of products on e-commerce platforms have prompted market regulators to crack the whip on several e-commerce companies. 

In Southeast Asia, many marketplaces, such as Tokopedia (Indonesia), Lazada (Thailand), Sendo, Tiki, and Shopee Vietnam were pulled up by regulators for exploitation during the epidemic. 

While companies like Tokopedia took swift action by closing thousands of online stores that were selling personal protective equipment at exorbitant prices on its marketplace, some others imposed fines on sellers. 

There are some others, who have leveraged new-age technologies to address this issue. Tiki is one such company, which came up with several novel products to mitigate the price hike on its marketplace. 

Also Read: How Vietnam’s e-commerce firm Tiki is tiding over COVID-19 crisis

The Vietnamese e-commerce giant has introduced Artificial Intelligence-based features and strict audit to provide customers with the best products in terms of quality and prices, as well as preventing hoarding.

“Online shopping is one of the safest and most-convenient solutions to meet the daily shopping needs of consumers, who are under the lockdown. However, consumers are worried about the price hike on some marketplaces, as well as the poor quality of the products,” Tiki CTO Tridiv Vasavada said. “As a technology company, we have fully exploited and applied technologies to control the quality and price of the products, as well as to mitigate hoarding.”

‘Winner system’ and ‘buy box’

The company has introduced two new features on its marketplace — ‘winner system’ and ‘buy box’ — to provide the best possible offers to its customers.

What it does is that when an item is offered by multiple sellers on the platform, Tiki puts a score on every offer by using “Regression AI”-based mathematical models. The tool takes into account various factors, such as price competitiveness, delivery speed, return and cancellation trends of the seller, and the proximity of the stock to the location of the customer. The offer that scores the highest — whether it is from Tiki’s own seller (Tiki Trading) or a third-party seller — is presented as the primary offer to the customer.

Tiki Trading proactively attempts to secure as much inventory as possible for such stock-keeping units (SKUs) and places the inventory near the high-demand clusters, ensuring the stability of product prices.

“Technology is used to price the offers by comparing prices from a diverse set of marketplaces. This system is currently applied to approximately 300 SKUs and we will extend this to 50,000 more soon,” revealed Vasavada.

Now, to detect and remove poor quality products, Tiki has developed an AI-based Investigation Tool, which collects and processes a huge volume of data, including customer review, rating, return and cancellation rates. 

It has also built a prediction model to detect fraud and automatically turn off/remove fail-to-meet-standard products. 

This technology helps reduce 6x processing time with an accuracy rate of 90 per cent, according to Vasavada.

Lastly, to avoid the hoarding of products, Tiki’s system has set a certain limit to the number of products on each SKU a customer can purchase.

“Some users may circumvent this limitation by creating multiple accounts to place one order every minute. To tackle this, we have built a fraud detection system (FDS), which uses a variety of encoded customer data, from demographics to shopping behaviours, and applies AI models to predict within a couple of seconds, whether or not a customer is fraudulent,” he continued. 

This system is applied to each and every order placed on Tiki and able to be scaled up to thousands of orders in event of rapid demand rush on particular SKUs such as medical products.

Vasavada hopes that a combination of smart pricing, optimised inventory placement and fraud prevention will offer daily necessities and medical supplies to as many customers as we can at fair prices from reliable sellers.

Besides technologies, audit activities on Tiki are continuously implemented to ensure the quality of products and sellers. 

“During our audit process, sellers are required to provide their business licenses or household business certificates to fulfil the seller registration on Tiki. Besides, sellers are requested to prove product origins and authenticity through eligible certificates before products are onboard.

Tiki also keeps tracking customers’ feedback to remove violation products and sellers. The strictest penalty is the permanent removal of violation stores on Tiki,” he concluded.

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Image Credit: Tiki

The post How AI is helping Tiki address price hike, fraud, product quality issues during the outbreak appeared first on e27.

The pandemic is undoubtedly going to go down in history books and it is high time we accept the fact that even in the post-COVID-19 era, life is not going to be the same.

At such times, one cannot simply resort to silence and “going with the flow”. There may not be many areas under our control these days, but what we say –and how we say it– certainly is. What every organisation and individual really needs is a structured plan to tackle the “new normal”.

Very well put by Puja Bharwani from Antler at the latest e27 Webinar, “Over-communication is the need of the hour.” For the first time, the whole world is facing the same issue in struggling with the pandemic. This makes the role of empathy in communication even more integral. Since we are all in the same boat, being empathetic comes easily.

Also read: e27 Webinar: Work-from-home or work-from-office, which is better?

Leaders, be it for organisations or even countries, have a greater need to feel calm and secure as everyone will be looking to them for answers. Hence, equipping them with a streamlined and contextual flow of messages will be a long way in addressing worries and keep the show going on.

Entrepreneurs may have to manage expectations and openly communicate at various levels– to investors, employees, customers, and even their families.

In this quarantine period, making up for face value and human connection can be crucial. Even it means simply making more video calls or leveraging video technology to send out key messages. Gary Koay from the video production company, Shootsta, also shared his tips on how to create these messages optimally.

If you missed the insightful webinar, check out the video recording and let us know your thoughts at contact@e27.co

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Image credit: Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

 

The post e27 Webinar: Why silence is not golden appeared first on e27.

RISE raises US$8M seed round after posting rapid growth since its inception

RISE, a tech-enabled corporate innovation platform, has announced the closing of a US$8M seed financing round, led by Metro Company Limited, D2C Inc. (Japan), and Chanwanich Company, among others.

Additionally, RISE has announced plans to scale its services beyond Thailand to Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

“For us, speed is the winning key in the game of innovation. With the global network of RISE, we strongly trust that RISE is able to connect best-in-class tech startups via its Global Accelerator programme to collaborate with our internal team in order to accelerate our innovation,” said Keibun Go, Global Business Alliance Head of D2C.

Founded in 2016, RISE has been growing rapidly and claims to have now hit USD 1 billion in impact through its platform across Thailand. Currently, the company has a network of more than 400 corporations, 2,000 startups, and over 20,000 corporate innovators globally.

Investree raises US$23.5M to support SMEs in Indonesia

Investree, a B2B marketplace for financial lending in Indonesia, has secured US$23.5 million in a Series C funding round, co-led by MUIP, the venture arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, and BRI Ventures.

With the new funds, Investree plans to further develop its services to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia and to expand activities in the Philippines and Thailand.

“Southeast Asia has significant potential in terms of SME lending, and we see that Investree already has a proven strategy and management expertise that really makes it the standout player in the fintech lending industry in Indonesia and wider Southeast Asia as it grows overseas,” said Nobutake Suzuki, President and CEO of MUIP.

Singaporeans spend more on entertainment products during COVID-19 crisis: Revolut report

As much as 55 per cent of Singaporeans spend on entertainment-focused products during the COVID-19 crisis, says a Fintech super app Revolut, with most users ending up buying digital goods, specifically video games, with Steam Games (+104 per cent) and Nintendo (+82 per cent) seeing the highest increase.

The report is based on data gathered between February 2 and March 31, 2020.

There were also more purchases seen in apps and software as more working professionals begin work from home. Some of these include Zoom (+200 per cent), VPN subscriptions (+20 per cent), Skype (+18 per cent) and LinkedIn subscriptions (+22 per cent).

Although foreign in-store transactions saw a decrease of 34 per cent, local in-store and e-commerce saw a spike of growth (30 per cent and 35 per cent respectively).

WeWork sues SoftBank for pulling out of US$3B deal

Commercial real estate company WeWork has sued SoftBank for pulling out of a US$3 billion deal on the ground of ‘pending criminal and civil investigations’ surrounding the company and its co-founder Adam Neumann, say a CNBC report.

According to the deal drafted in November 2019, Softbank would buy US$3 billion in shares from existing shareholders, and SoftBank jointly agreed with the co-working company to set performance milestones that would be met in exchange for the secondary liquidity

Softbank retaliated saying that several of the milestones agreed in the contract was not met by WeWork.

“Nothing in the Special Committee’s filing today credibly refutes SoftBank’s decision to terminate the tender offer. Several of the conditions the Special Committee, WeWork, Adam Neumann, SoftBank and SoftBank Vision Fund agreed to last October as requirements for completing the tender were not met as of April 1, 2020,” said a SoftBank spokesperson.

“Their filing today is a desperate and misguided attempt now to rewrite that agreement and to rewrite the history of the past six months,” the person added.

Also Read: News Roundup: Indonesian online trucking startup Webtrace secures seed funding led by Prasetia Dwidharma

WeWork’s Special Board Committee said that it “regrets the fact that SoftBank continues to put its own interests ahead of those of WeWork’s minority stockholders,” according to a press statement.

BRI Remittance joins hands with Everest to enable Europe-Indonesia money exchange

Decentralised digital payments SaaS provider Everest has announced a partnership with BRI Remittance, a subsidiary of Bank Rakyat Indonesia, to execute money exchange across Europe-Indonesia borders.

Everest aims to stop the neglect that those unidentified individuals face when banks and financial systems don’t provide services due to the lack of identification. The company’s device-free solution can identify people and transfer value, covering 196 countries and 4,000 different IDs.

“BRI Remittance’s vision is to be the leading global money service provider. To accomplish this mission, we established joint co-operation with Everest, the leading solution combining KYC, AML, compliance, and digital money movement, all through an integrated blockchain platform,” said BRI Remittance Executive Director Gigieh Perkasa.

This strategic partnership is also expected to increase business relations within the Indonesia-Europe corridor.

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Image Credit – RISE, Revolut,  Eloise Ambursley

The post Afternoon News Roundup: Indonesia’s Investree nets US$23.5M; Thailand’s RISE raises US$8M appeared first on e27.