While we all watched the outbreak of COVID-19 impacting economies throughout the world and play havoc, the mobile app economy is another matter, as mobile app session times and installs saw dramatic increases and decreases varying across industries.

Businesses –small, medium, and large– need facts, data-driven insights, and real-life examples of how brands are adapting to this change in consumer behaviour. It is time for organisations to look at revamping customer engagement methods.

MoEngage and AppFollow partnered to create a holistic guide to highlight engagement strategies for industries irrespective of their growth trajectory for brands across several verticals that need to essentially bounce back to pre-crisis numbers, sustain or accelerate their growth.

The paradigm shift in spending pattern

Customers are prioritising essential buying even with lockdowns getting relaxed in most countries around the world, the ways consumers are engaging with and consuming products and services have undergone radical changes.

For example, there is an all-time high for emotional spending on services ranging from entertainment subscriptions to online workout and meditation subscriptions, growth in loan applications to get through uncertain economic conditions, online shopping for groceries is becoming the new normal, etc.

Also Read: 5 ways you can improve your focus on customer engagement

New consumption patterns and digitalisation have and will change the rules of the consumer consumption game further.

What’s your app adoption trend: Grow, slowdown, or stagnate?

To understand the App Economy better, industry experts and leaders from leading global brands have provided their insights on how businesses might fare with lockdown relaxation on rebuilding their strategies to drive growth.

To map the right engagement strategy for your business, answering a Path Assessment Checklist consisting of a few questions that will help brands measure their milestones and take the right strategy forward.

Below are the three engagement frameworks to grow in a post-crisis world:

• Growth sustaining (for verticals observing unprecedented growth during crisis, viz. entertainment). Plan ahead by providing actionable strategies to define engagement flows, revisit and rework value propositions, curate relevant content, streamline marketing communications and re-evaluate spend. The key here is to streamline your approach by identifying channels that generate the most ROI and continue scaling up.
• Bounce-back (for verticals observing unexpected growth viz. travel & hospitality). Once you clearly understand which track defines your brand, the first step is to know how you can retain users and intensify your customer journey from the ground up. As a brand, you have invested in paid acquisition channels earlier so use that data to pursue paid activities. Pick up paid channels that offered almost 50-100 per cent ROI.
• Growth accelerating (for verticals with neither surge in growth nor heavy decline viz. BFSI). Strike a Balance between paid acquisition and organic channels and allow limited access to premium features- once the user realises the value of the features, they’d be willing to purchase the paid subscription. This also eventually results in stronger community relations.

Expert insights

Businesses striving to navigate and turn around their operations rely upon marketing experts and leaders from various global brands for success stories and how to nurture and grow in a crisis like this.

Also Read: 29 startups that are pros of customer engagement! (Part 2)

Each of these strategies above is accompanied by examples of brands that have successfully managed to turn around operations in the right way and enjoy growth during the crisis. For instance, marketing leaders from Asus Vietnam, OYO, and Aviasales give their take on crisis management and growth.

It is imperative for businesses to understand the changed consumer behaviour and accordingly realign and restructure their strategies for the future.

A key focus area for any business while handling a crisis should be – engaging and retaining existing customers. Once you have engagement and retention strategies nailed down, you can proceed with user acquisition.

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When he was 18, Careershe’s founder Steve Xie decided to pick electrical engineering as his undergraduate course. But he did not actually choose it himself. Like many other students of his age, it was picked by his parents, because they noticed he liked to “fix electrical objects like TV, computer, etcetera.”

In an interview with e27, Xie highlights that this is a very common problem in Asian households where parents wish that their children pursue the common career path of being a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Even the slightest interest shown by their child in these fields can be confused as an indication of their passion.

But is this the best way to make career decisions?

A significant chunk of students believe that the decision made by their parents is indeed correct – but only until they near graduation. This is because decisions are made with extremely limited insights.

“Most people realise what kind of jobs they want only in the third or fourth year [of university], or nearing graduation. After that, they suddenly get more clarity on the kind of major they should have taken,” Xie says, adding that this realisation is attributed to the generic nature of first- and second-year subjects in university.

Also Read: You’ve heard about speed dating. Here’s what you need to know about speed hiring

Despite completing his undergrad in engineering with NUS (National University of Singapore), Xie only discovered his true love for the business world after nine years of working with SSMC and HeidelbergCement Asia. He then decided to pursue an MBA in Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

While some realise have the liberty to make a quick switch after realising that they are not fit for the subject, many don’t. Enter Careershe.

Clarity before confusion

The idea behind Careershe is to provide students with an in-depth knowledge of the different career options, outcomes, and the best university degrees towards the desired outcome to help people pick the right path along the way.

When a student signs up on the mobile platform, they can see contents on a range of different occupations from various industries, from aircraft maintenance to creative banding. They can further explore the options through videos and infographics, detailing information such as salary and work scope.

To put it simply, Careershe is designed as a “career encyclopedia”.

Apart from that, the platform also helps individuals to identify their strengths and weaknesses through different kinds of psychometric tests.

The platform currently operates in China and works as a subscription-based model which costs as low as US$25 in total for a year.

“Careershe focuses on two parts: The first is to help students identify the career of their dreams by providing them insights on a range of career options,” Xie explains.

“The next phase of our growth is to show students how to get there. We want to build a pathway for them where they can upskill themselves along the way so that they can reach their desired destination.”

Partnership with Oxford

In addition to raising a funding round with only a business plan in hand, Careershe says that it has become the first Singapore-based venture to emerge from Oxford University Innovation (OUI) startup incubator.

Chandra Sekar Ramanujan, Senior Licensing and Ventures Manager at OUI, says in a statement, “We are very much attracted to Steve’s vision for Careershe, as well as the thought and market research that has gone into developing the idea. We have supported Steve in validating his business model and connecting with Oxford University’s world-leading academic resources – notably in big data and AI. At this time we are particularly interested in promoting ventures and partnerships overseas.”

Also Read: Meet the first batch of e27 Pro Perks partners

The company has also been affiliated with the TusStar startup incubator programme which has incubated over 5,000 firms.

Having built the product, launched to the market, and gleaned insights from users over the past year, the company is now focused on raising funds from investors and seeking partnerships. For example, with schools in China.

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Image Credit: Careershe

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The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution builds on the third, the digital revolution, that has been occurring since the middle of the last century.

Best characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the biological, digital and physical spheres; we have embraced it wholly, and it has fundamentally altered the way we live, work, and relate to one another. The scale, scope, and complexity of the transformation have been unlike anything humankind has experienced before.

And just like the revolutions that preceded it, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to raise global income levels and improve the quality of life for populations around the world. But let’s reflect on our own behavioural change and market expectation over the past decade.

Thus far, we, the consumers have tapped technology to increase the efficiency and pleasure of our personal lives — from requesting rides (GoJek), ordering in (Deliveroo), purchasing groceries (RedMart), making payments (GrabPay), watching films (Netflix), playing games (Sea) or simply communicating with each other (WhatsApp) — any of these can now be done remotely. Even more so, as we navigate life under the cloud cover of a global pandemic that is the COVID-19 virus.

And in general, the response has mostly been comprehensive and integrated, involving stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors, and to academia and civil society.

Also Read: Indonesia’s BCA launches 3rd SYNRGY Accelerator with 11 startups

From linear to circular

However research by McKinsey & Company shows a big shift across all industries, and the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire ecosystems of governance, management and production. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential, rather than a linear pace.

In fact, the team of Andreas Waschto, Tanguy Catlin, Jahnavi Nandan, Johannes-Tobias Lorenz, and Shirish Sharma from McKinsey & Company in their article predict that ecosystems will account for 30 per cent of global revenues by 2025.

Moreover, the actual composition and shape of these ecosystems will vary by country and region, both because of the effects of regulations and as a result of more subtle cultural customs and tastes.

But what it means for businesses is that putting customers at the centre of every digital activity will help drive scaled adoption and capture previously unimagined value. You only have to look at Amazon, Facebook, Grab and Alibaba, as examples.

How does this affect us as individuals or even employees or business owners, you ask? Well in our new, multi-dimensional connected world, we are already moving from linear to circular, participatory value models. However, most organisations are still comfortable in traditional processes, where the buyer captures value by consuming the product or service.

On the other hand, is a true circular, participatory value model, a distributed, decentralised value mechanism, embedded within the whole ecosystem, with value creation through a collaborative effort, comes into play.

Also Read: Has COVID-19 pushed us into the digital future?

In fact, if your organisation has been forced to move to a remote way of interacting with clients, this might be the perfect opportunity for you to involve the team in the build of their own bespoke version of this new, multi-dimensional world.

The eventual goal for organisations to thrive in this world would be to create a platform of co-creation, co-sharing and co-distribution among collaborating parties, as an “open value sharing” process, acting as an ongoing circular and participatory value model, as outlined by Annabeth Aagaard in her book Digital Business Models: Driving Transformation and Innovation.

If we reflect on which organisations are more of an ecosystem and less of a product-driven organisation, one might argue that product-driven “works”, as there are experts who spend years developing them. According to Kevin Kelly in his book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future, another way of exploring this is by shifting towards creating an ecosystem that is “governed by co-evolution, which is a type of biological co-dependence, a mixture of competition and cooperation, where one’s success hinges on the success of others.”

That way, we will move away from just a core of experts, which can be deemed as stagnant, to a combination of a core while harnessing the power of a crowd, which is constantly, and dynamically, evolving.

What happens then?

In their paper –The importance of Non-Hub Elements – researchers Azusa Minamizaki and Euan McKay, argue that for organisations to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution, the “core” could be distributed at various sections of the highest centrality across the globe which is then able to develop active and scalable networks.

Also Read: Meet the 15 new startups that have received funding from Antler

According to Professor Matthew Jackson who authored the book The Human Network: The Science Behind our Hidden Positions in Life, such a network is known as the Eigenvector Centrality Network which relies on the measure of influence and strength within a network instead of relying only one individual as opposed to:

• Degree centrality: reliant on an individual being able to get a message out to millions of followers on a social medium gives a person the potential to influence what many people think or know. (extremely traditional), or
• Diffusion centrality: reliant on how well-positioned is a person to spread information and to be one of the first to hear it. Not a very scalable approach.

Simply put, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, or so the old adage goes. Professor Jackson shows us through his ground-breaking research that the relationships in school, university, work and society have extraordinary implications throughout our lives.

By understanding and taking advantage of these networks, we can boost our happiness, success and influence. But there are also wider lessons to be learnt.

Ultimately, the ability of organisations to adapt will determine the survival of the Eigenvector Centrality Network. If they prove capable of embracing a world of disruptive change, subjecting their structures to the levels of transparency and efficiency that will enable them to maintain their competitive edge, they will endure. If they cannot evolve, they will face increasing trouble.

Also Read: Why the future of AI needs more of diversity and the arts

As the growing possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. Then suffice to say that the world is changing towards relying and creating access to infinite experts around the world, instead of depending on a finite few as we have done so in the past.

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Register for our next webinar: Meet the VC: TNB Aura

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. Become a thought leader in the community and share your opinions or ideas and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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Fresh out of ICE71’s latest cohort, Scantist captured our attention being the only Singaporean cybersecurity startup that made the cut.

Scantist’s story dated back to 2016 when Co-founder and CEO of Scantist and team found a critical vulnerability in the Adobe Reader software during the course of their research.

“This vulnerability allowed hackers to create a malicious PDF file which would trigger a denial of service attack when opened. We reported this vulnerability to Adobe, which promptly thanked us and even issued a bug bounty,” says Liu.

But his team got intrigued and even pursued the issued bounty. “Some of our researchers got excited and kept digging — and they found another two vulnerabilities with similar impact,” he explains.

They ended up applying this approach to other popular commercial software. “We found that these issues were everywhere which was extremely surprising. Every day our society uses this software with a belief that these are secure but turns out they are not,” he says.

Liu realised then that these vulnerabilities were present in applications built by multi-billion dollar software companies which presumably had the best engineering talents and all the resources they needed.

“If even they couldn’t be 100 per cent secure, what about the vast majority of software built and used every day by SMEs, government agencies, or even non-tech large enterprises?” he wonders.

Also Read: Meet the 9 cybersecurity startups graduated from ICE71’s 4th batch

So Liu and team set out on a mission to help secure software applications. “The idea was simple; translate what we had done in a research lab into a commercially viable product that everyone could use so that any piece of software (be it mobile, web, or IoT) can be free of security vulnerabilities. And that’s what vulnerability management is about,” he says.

Why vulnerabilities need management

Traditionally, firewalls and access control were seen as the key to securing systems. Software was used internally in an organisation – and as long as it can be used to keep malicious agents out, the theory is that it was secure.

But we have to take into account the present times, where everyone and everything is hyper-connected with software that is used increasingly to interface with customers, partners, and employees across the globe.

“Today’s situation made it no longer feasible to just ‘build a wall’. Accessibility is key, and you can’t control who accesses or tries to access your systems. If access cannot be limited and your applications are insecure, you will inevitably succumb to an attack,” the CEO explains.

Liu then drew an example from the Equifax breach in the US, which compromised credit ratings of over 140 million Americans. “That and the Panama Paper scandal, which began with a hack of the document management application at Mossack Fonseca. You see, the potential impact of vulnerable software is massive. An incident like that would be catastrophic for Singapore and it’s smart nation initiative,” he warns.

The challenge then is to ensure that the software the enterprise relies on is secure in and by itself.

“No matter who tries to access it, your applications need to be robust enough to ward off any malicious activity. But doing that in a manner that is cost-effective and does not add overheads or inconveniences the end-user is a massive challenge,” he admits.

Understanding cyber threats

When it comes to securing software applications, or any form of cybersecurity, there are two broad categories of threats.

“The first is the known threats — these are vulnerability issues that are well understood and have been seen in the past and are typically well-documented in the public domain. But despite that, they may still impact new software applications as there are just so many of them and keeping track of them is a humanly impossible task,” he adds.

Scantist steps in with its Software Composition Analysis — a lightweight, low cost scanner which looks at application (in source code or binary formats) and alerts the company if there are any known threats that exist.

Also Read: 5 cybersecurity strategies every startup must know

“And we don’t just stop there — we go one step further to give you the quickest way to fix these issues specific to your use-case so our customers can save time and money. This is a solution I believe every organisation needs to have in the digital age,” he says.

The second is the the unknown threats. These are vulnerabilities that are unique to your application and cannot be directly mapped against the existing known vulnerabilities. This however does not mean they can’t be found.

Liu claims that years of R&D has allowed Scantist to find these unknowns with its Smart Fuzzer. “This solution allows us to imitate a hacker by using intelligent brute-force to trigger application-level vulnerabilities at run time. We have gotten recognition internationally for it.”

What is Scantist

Software, in general, has all kinds of security weaknesses due to the design, implementations and even installation and misuse. “We call these problems software vulnerabilities, and what Scantist aims to provide is the automatic tools to help the developers and software end-users to identify these vulnerabilities so that these issues can be pacified before the attacks,” Liu summarises.

However, he notes that a one-time scan is not enough because vulnerabilities are found and disclosed every day, and secure software today can be vulnerable tomorrow.

Scantist serves even further by monitoring all the newly founded vulnerabilities in the world and informing their customers about these vulnerabilities so that they can take swift actions and manage the vulnerabilities.

NTU’s support and ICE71’s time

Scantist is heavily supported by Nanyang Technological University (NTU), so much that it’s dubbed the company as “cybersecurity spin-off from NTU”.

“There is no way we would have been where we are without the support of the local ecosystem, and NTU’s support is perhaps the largest,” Liu shares.

As a university faculty himself, Liu says that the ability to run a startup tackling the next generation of cybersecurity challenges would have been impossible without the university’s support.

“And so we take immense pride in letting the world know of our roots,” he says.

Liu himself graduated from NUS and joined NTU as a faculty member in SCSE in 2012. “Currently, I am a Chair Professor, Director of the cybersecurity lab at NTU, Deputy Director of National Satellite of Excellence of Singapore. My research is centred around cybersecurity, software engineering and AI,” he explains.

“We are aiming to bridge the gap between the theoretical contribution and practical software evaluation solutions for high quality and security,” adds he.

The other co-founder is Dr T Srikanthan (COO). He is the Director of NTU cybersecurity institute (Cysren) and a well-established researcher in hardware and a veteran in entrepreneurship.

As for their involvement in ICE71’s last cohort, Liu says: “As cybersecurity is even more crucial now, startups like us need more support to get our solutions to market more quickly to address the evolving cyber threats. Through ICE71, we’re glad to be connected to the vibrant cybersecurity ecosystems here and overseas. This will help us take off and expand internationally.”

Post-COVID-19 for cybersecurity industry

“Just like any other companies, we were forced to shift our operations to a 100 per cent remote workplace. As counter-intuitive as it may seem given the digital nature of our products, there were a lot of challenges as our customers still prefer on-premise deployments from a privacy standpoint. But our team was up to the challenge, and I am proud of how well we handled the situation,” Dr Liu recalls.

On the customer end, Scantist faced no significant adverse impact on the business. “We even found that organisations accelerating their digital transformation efforts and as a result really ramping up their security posture as well. We are working closely with our customers and partners to deliver our services in all sections,” he says.

What’s good about coming out of the other end of the pandemic is that there is greater awareness in the industry today that cybersecurity is critical and necessary.

“For me, what I see is that Southeast Asia is undergoing its next phase of accelerated economic growth off-the-back of the great digital revolution that is currently underway,” he says.

Liu then adds: “But still there is a lag — especially in cybersecurity — when it comes to best practices and latest trends. A big contributor for this lag is that we see cybersecurity as a hurdle, as an expense that adds limited value.”

What’s next for Scantist

Liu further explains that currently, the company is launching a new software architecture analysis tool to find critical software architecture issues and debts. “We hope this can help in a way that developers cannot ignore if they want to have better maintainability of the software.”

Next on the pipeline is that the company is ready to launch a new mobile app vulnerability assessment tool which aims to provide detailed security and privacy scanning for both known and unknown vulnerabilities for apps.

Also Read: Cybersecurity in the age of information warfare and IoT

An AI-powered vulnerability detection engines for source code and binary is also underway. “This could be more customised towards customer own code base with a low false-positive rate. The AI algorithms can make the tool smarter via self-learning,” he explains.

The long-term vision of Scantist is to provide a holistic intelligent software analysis framework for both qualities, security, maintainability, compatibility, and so on.

When it comes to application security in the vulnerability management domain, the world is moving to security by design principles and embedding security into every part of the software development cycle through the DevSecOps movement.

“Scantist wants to be the flagbearer for that change in the region. We are trying to play our part by providing comprehensive, accurate, and easy-to-use application security solutions.

Now what is critical is that the mindset around cybersecurity needs to change. Cybersecurity needs to be seen as an enabler. The true potential of technology – from self-driving to telecommuting and e-learning to contact tracing – can only be unlocked if cybersecurity is considered on every step of the digital transformation journey,” he concludes.
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Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

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Xangle’s US$3M funding

The story: CrossAngle, operator of the global crypto asset disclosure platform Xangle, announced that it has successfully completed its Series A2 investment round led by Hanwha Investment & Securities, a subsidiary of South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Group.

What is Xangle: Xangle is a public crypto disclosure service focused on providing transparent data for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

In order to provide its disclosure service, Xangle collects, verifies and integrates corporate disclosures from global projects and companies that have issued crypto assets. The platform provides the public access to both off-chain corporate disclosures and on-chain metrics and analytics.

Plans with the capital: The Series A2 investment is expected to enable it to develop an infrastructure for institutionalising crypto data services.

Uber gets new India, South Asia president

The story: The ride-hailing giant has appointed Prabhjeet Singh as the new president of its India and South Asia business. He replaces Pradeep Parameswaran, who was promoted to be the regional General Manager in the Asia Pacific region.

What is his role: Singh, who joined the ride-hailing firm five years ago, has helped Uber manage operations in dozens of cities in India and South Asia in recent years. His new job is to oversee the next phase of growth in what Uber sees as one of its “fastest growing and most strategic markets.”

 

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