Dash Living, a Hong Kong-based property tech startup announced today that it has expanded its presence to Asia Pacific by acquiring Singapore’s coliving company EasyCity, according to a statement.

The company, which now has 900 units across two of the most vibrant cities in the Asia Pacific region, has raised US$10 million of funding till date from MindWorks Ventures, Capital Union Investments and ClearMind Capital.

In Hong Kong, Dash Living has over 100,000 sqft under its management, spanning across prime locations such as Causeway Bay, Wan Chai, Central, Tsim Sha Tsui, and Jordan in Hong Kong.

Also Read: Qupital gets US$2M seed funding from MindWorks Ventures, Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund to help SMEs get through the month

As for its latest additions in Singapore, the Dash Coliving units are located in CBD areas as well as city-fringe areas such as Geylang, Paya Lebar, Farrer Park, Balestier, Pasir Panjang, and Clementi.

An “aggressive expansion” is being planned in Singapore according to Dash Living founder Aaron Lee and Easycity founders Alex Liu and Wesley Wen. 

“Dash Singapore is aiming to provide its members with much wider choices of locations and features across the island. Enhanced by the upgraded services, new perks, and the tenant community, living with Dash will be more convenient and exciting than ever before,” said Liu.

The startup aims to tap into millennial demand by targeting young professionals who are looking for reasonably priced housing in a thriving city, along with a community they can easily interact with. 

“All-inclusive, affordable and flexible accommodation for millennials is a sizable problem which impacts the next generation. Being a millennial myself, I’m excited to share Dash’s offerings regionally beginning with Singapore,” said Lee.

Also Read: 3 biggest mistakes founders make when telling their story 

Apart from being a residential firm, DashLiving also offers community services where members, also known as “the Dash community”, can get connected via an app, which can be used to access rooms, common spaces and discounts.

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Image Credit: Dash Living

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Fresh out of a doctorate program, Jane is a proud graduate in the life sciences faculty, joining the ranks of many other women on stage. In this era, the gender gap in science is increasingly narrow and Jane is proud to be part of the pool of female researchers closing this gap.

She dreamed of this moment—the future of experiments and lab research is finally here and perhaps, she could spearhead an experiment with her own research team.

Unfortunately, the statistics are against Jane, as only one in four female researchers get a full professorship in a research university.

If Jane is expecting a more competitive salary after the doctorate, that will happen—only if you don’t compare it to men, as empirical evidence showed that there are significant differences.

Women also typically receive less credit for citations and funding, as a 2018 study shows.

Research has even suggested that women, in general, receive less recognition than men, even if the achievements are equivalent.

The big question is this: why?

With more scientific publications published each day, the number of life science articles published per year has reached a staggering one million threshold—it comes with poverty of attention.

Also Read: Asia Pacific markets see a significant jump in women entrepreneurs: Mastercard study

To make sure scientists allocate time to read their articles, authors have to self-promote through different avenues, be it through social media or presentations. This way, grants, and salaries are much easier to obtain; such resources are typically scarce in the research world.

With resources being so scarce, statistics are showing that women have an even smaller chance of obtaining any of them, relative to men.

Fortunately, there is a core reason, as Marc J. Lerchenmueller and his co-authors Olav Sorenson and Anupam B. Jena discovered in their study: women used positive words to describe their work less frequently than men.

Self-promotion gap amongst academics

Researchers often use positive words in their abstracts and subtitles in an attempt to get the eyeball of a gleaning scientist. Words like “novel”, “unique” and “excellent” are part of the norm. There are times where you can get phrases like “promising result” and “groundbreaking research”.

The study discovered that articles written by female junior researchers and female principal investigators were 21 per cent less likely to use positive terms.

In fact, their research is more likely to be framed as it is: no additional self-promotion and nothing exaggerated. Though both men and women use such words throughout history, women were shown to be using them much infrequently.

The consequences were severe for women: authors that did not self-promote received less attention, especially when they were published in the more prominent journals.

Hence, the gender gap appears—in fact, the study suggested that women gained confidence as they rose to senior ranks, which thus caused the gender disparity to disappear at the most senior levels.

Self-promotion gap at work

Some may argue that the aforementioned study only describes a unique situation: it pertains to the life sciences sector, and particularly on female researchers and scientists.

To extrapolate and have it represent the self-promotion gap in other careers would be too much of a stretch—unless you are referring to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that women also constantly self-promote less at work.

Also Read: Women in tech: A global evaluation

The statistic corroborates with Lerchenmueller’s study; men rated their performance 33 per cent higher than women who performed at equivalent levels.

In the study, 1500 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers answered 20 analytical questions on mathematics and science. They were asked to predict how many questions they got correct (to measure their confidence) and asked four subjective questions that typically appear in a performance review (to measure how much they self-promote). The study found:

• When women were told that their answer to a self-promotion question will be communicated to an employer for them to determine whether to hire and how much to pay, women self-promoted less.
• If there was no financial incentive to the self-promotion question, men and women both decreased their self-promotion levels equally—thus the gender gap still persists.
• When told that there might be a chance employers would learn about their true performance in addition to their self-promotion, women still self-promoted less.
• When told about the average level of self-promotion of others, women still did the same.

The persistent gap indicated that women self-promoted less systematically. In every situation, women would generally self-promote less as compared to equally-performing men.

The question rises up again: why?

One of the biggest speculation would be that women, due to a culmination of different reasons, choose to stay out of the center stage.

Yet, it can be difficult to ascribe this gender gap to a core reason—rather than doing so, leaders need to start shaping the workplace environment and employee experience so that women can self-promote without repercussions.

One of the biggest reason that has been suggested is that women suffer from more potential backlash, which can deter them from self-promoting.

There are well-documented cases and studies of women being viewed as “bossy” and “loud” even though they are self-promoting at the same level as their male counterparts.

Self-promotion is a necessity at work as leaders are not always able to know about everyone’s work performance, as accurately as possible.

As such, there are times where employees would have to specifically bring achievements up in order to remind the leader that they did perform well, which can bring recognition and at times monetary benefits.

Unfortunately, gender bias can lead to people believing that women who self-promote are overconfident.

You need to address this elephant in the room. You would have to self-reflect: do they have that gender bias in them? Once there is self-awareness, the problem can be systematically dealt with:

• Treat women and men equally. If they are self-promoting, then it is the performance that matters. For instance, someone staying past office hours to complete the project, instead of whether it was a female or male doing it.
• Understand that not due to that existing bias, some women may take a more passive role. It’s time to throw away your previous assumptions about the characteristics and personalities of your employees. Observe keenly for actual work performance, rather than listen to someone’s self-promotion.
• Look at actual work performance. Ask the employees about their contributions, specifically those who self-promote less.
• Evaluate based on data. Numbers will never fail you. When the performance of the work can be measured against a numerical benchmark, it is easy to evaluate their work performance. For instance, if your goal for the blog post was to reach 50,000 pageviews, that can form a minimum goal.
• Create an environment of psychological safety. Women—and all employees—can give feedback about their work performance without worrying that it might change their superior’s perception of them. For example, if they were to struggle at understanding something, they can ask for help without fearing that it will impact their overall work performance.

Instead of changing the way women work, it is much better to redesign the workplace. When you use a subjective view (i.e. “do I think that this employee is performing well the past month?”), you are much more prone to cognitive biases.

Also Read: Women in tech and a competitive advantage

By restricting yourself to being objective before using your intuition and sense, you can evaluate work performance more accurately.

The problem is that there is still a culture of self-advocation. Employees still have to tell others that they are doing a good job in order to get noticed.

Which begs the question: what are the leaders doing for the employees?

Though it is understandable that leaders cannot observe everything at once, there must still be an effort made to truly understand the level of contribution, by each employee.

Hence, you can create benchmarks, minimum targets, and objectives to help measure actual work performance. You can also give regular feedback to individual employees, which can help reinforce the message that you know what good work they have been doing. It also helps to add some rewards to it.

Through such an approach, every employee can benefit as you reshape the workplace culture. Since employees know that their superiors will notice if they work hard and are rewarded for it, employees will be substantially more diligent, which creates a win-win situation for everyone.

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This article first appeared on Human+Business.

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Singaporean medtech startup eko.ai has raised US$4 million in its very first funding round, co-led by early-stage VC firms Sequoia India and EDBI.

Partech Ventures, SGInnovate and Startup Health were also some of the investors who participated in this round.

The funds will be used to grow the company’s development team and accelerate commercial operations in the US and Europe as stated in the press release statement. 

“With this funding, we can further develop our innovative solutions with the ultimate goal of democratizing echocardiography – the safest and most commonly used tool to image the heart,” said Dr Carolyn Lam, co-founder of eko.ai.

Eko.ai is a healthcare company which integrates Machine Learning into its software to predict and treat early-stage heart diseases. The platform provides tools to improve cardiovascular research and lowers the speed of clinical trials bringing it down to seconds, using ultrasound waves.

Potential applications of the eko.ai platform and tools range from expanding the use of echocardiography in clinical care to improving the performance of cardiovascular clinical trials, especially for the early detection and prediction of heart disease.

Also Read: Meet the 8 Southeast Asian startups who will receive US$1-2M each from Sequoias Surge programme

The company has already teamed up with AstraZeneca, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Samsung Medical Center’s Heart, Vascular and Stroke Institute, and the University of Alberta for commercial and academic research.

“Our ultimate goal is to put heart health screening into everyone’s hands. Cardiovascular disease remains the top cause of death for men and women globally and we’re excited to help address this global health issue in a meaningful way,” Lam added

Founded in August 2017, co-founders Dr Lam and Dr Yoran Hummel were both in the medical field prior to starting up the company, where Dr Lam happened to be a senior consultant cardiologist at the National Heart Centre Singapore and Dr Hummel, general manager of the Groningen Imaging Core Laboratory of the University Medical Center Groningen, whereas James Hare has been a serial entrepreneur, investor and co-founder of a travel company eDreams.

Also Read: Sequoia wants to help young companies get their product right at #Echelon2019

Both the investors are active in the startup ecosystem with Sequoia Capital India, having over US$4 billion in assets according to Crunchbase and EDBI a Singapore-based global investor, making over 100 investments with an estimated annual revenue of US$15.3M. 

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Image Credit: eko.ai

 

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Digital banking is at a tipping point in the Asia-Pacific region and the financial services industry needs to be prepared for a transformative year ahead.

Banks and financial institutions need to be proactive in their response to the looming digital revolution if they’re going to effectively capitalise on this new era in banking.

One of the biggest mistakes any bank can make right now is to do nothing; it is imperative that banks and financial institutions evaluate their existing strategies and look at how they can evolve with the times rather than remaining stagnant.

We know that a digital transformation is inevitable in the APAC financial services industry, but what we’re seeing is that many established institutions are in urgent need of a cultural transformation before they can embrace this brand-new world.

Banks are now realising that they can’t continue to think and operate the way they always have because the industry is undergoing constant transformation. They really need to start thinking and operating like fintech’s if they’re going to thrive in this new era – technology needs to underpin the entire business model.

Also Read: Threat or opportunity? boosting digital banking in Asia

While enhancing customer offerings is a key benefit of digital banking, the impact on regulatory compliance can also provide a competitive advantage.

Digital banking makes it easier for financial institutions to comply with all the different regulations, making it easier to track transactions, keep data safe and also reduce duplication.

So those organisations that make the transition from less secure legacy systems to cloud-based digital platforms, where security improvements are constantly made, will be able to boast greater peace of mind and set themselves ahead of competitors.

To stay in the game, banks need to be able to roll out products and services at a rapid pace, adding new features to platforms while simultaneously enhancing existing ones. This kind of agility is next to impossible to achieve with most institutions’ legacy systems.

However, composable banking architecture – the quick and flexible assembly of independent systems on a cloud platform – can provide the opportunity for organizations to create dynamic products with intuitive, responsive features that can be quickly and continuously updated.

Also Read: Embracing Singapore’s digital bank shakeup in 2019 and its consequences

A cloud-based platform is designed to undergo short, regular updates with a constant pipeline of improvements that are automatically layered on top of existing technology, which frees up the business to run uninterrupted on the front end. This allows financial institutions to make minor changes regularly, rather than major, infrequent updates that can cause significant disruption and draw the ire of customers, as has been the case with some traditional transformations.

The APAC financial services industry looks set to be turned on its head over the next 12 to 24 months, and as the fintech age forces institutions to digitise, innovate and scale to adapt to customer needs, it will be those banks and financial institutions that can move at the pace of a technology company, while remaining committed to strength, security and service, that will be the leaders of this new era.

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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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SVARA, a broadcasting and media startup, announced today, that it has secured an undisclosed amount of capital in a pre-Series A round, from corporate VC firm UMG Idealab, in a press release statement. With this, SVARA’s valuation has reached a total of US$10 million.

The capital will be used to develop products, strengthen marketing and development teams, expand strategic partnerships, and educate the radio industry on being more digitally focused.

Founded in 2017 by Hemat Dwi Nuryanto and Farid Fadhil Habibi, SVARA is a platform where users can stream live radio and listen to music.

SVARA also uses a cloud-based system in supporting media industry, such as professional radio station, on how they operate their end-to-end business process, such as scheduling pre-on-air, execution the broadcasting activity, and reporting after on-air. So that the radio crew, can handle all operational radio remotely.

It consists of an on-air platform (broadcaster automation) and an online platform. Users can enjoy various audio and non-audio content in the app, including radio, music, and podcasts.

Also Read: Leisure marketplace SelenaGO raises seed funding from UMG Idealab

SVARA has collaborated with various parties, including PRSSNI (Indonesian National Private Broadcasting Radio Association), Collective Management Institute (WAMI – Wahana Music Indonesia), Telkomsel, LPIK ITB (Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development Institute of Bandung Institute of Technology), and IDX (Indonesia Stock Exchange) Incubator.

The creative digital firm claims the platform is used by more than 100 AM/FM radio broadcasts in Indonesia.

Also Read: These later stage funding rounds of December are the perfect closure to the year 2019

UMG Idealab being one of SVARA’s first investors is a unit of UMG Group Myanmar and has actively been investing in nearly 30 startups in Indonesia.

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Image Credit:  neil godding

 

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PLDT exiting Rocket Internet by selling US$50M worth stake this year [DealStreetAsia]

Philippine-listed telecom and digital services firm PLDT is selling its remaining stake in German e-commerce investor Rocket Internet worth $50 million to finance its capital expenditures this year.

In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, PLDT Senior Vice President June Cheryl Cabal-Revilla confirmed reports that the company is disposing some of its real estate assets as well as its about two million shares in Rocket Internet on opportunistic basis to bankroll its capex for 2020, which the company said is “slightly bigger than 2019”.

Chinese EV maker Byton debuts SUV with 48-inch dashboard screen at CES 2020 [KrAsia]

Beijing-based electric vehicle (EV) maker Byton debuted the production version of its M-Byte SUV model on Sunday at CES 2020, the annual tech trade show in Las Vegas, local media Tencent News reported.

The long-awaited M-Byte model features a 48-inch screen that spans the whole dashboard, offering content such as weather, GPS, media, and stock prices, among others. The firm has also announced a wide range of key partnerships to power various functions of the vehicle’s massive screen, including one with mass media conglomerate ViacomCBS and ACCESS, which will allow passengers to stream television programming and movies in the vehicle.

Ex-Coty Executive Venkatesh Babu Joins Blockchain Solutions Provider Aqilliz [press release]

Aqilliz, a blockchain-enabled digital marketing solutions provider, has announced the appointment of ex-Coty Regional Sales Director for Southeast Asia Venkatesh Babu as Chief Revenue Officer, effective January 1, 2020.

With an established career in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector spanning almost 25 years, Babu has held roles at multinational cosmetics, fragrance, and skincare conglomerate Coty and leading global multinational FMCG corporation Procter and Gamble (P&G).

In his capacity as Chief Revenue Officer, Venkatesh will be responsible for all the go-to-market initiatives at Aqilliz across key geographies in the Asia Pacific region, in order to drive long-term growth and scalability.

With two decades of experience at Coty, Babu is a seasoned emerging markets expert with a proven track record in implementing market entry strategies and business development across diverse geographies spanning ten countries in Europe and Asia Pacific. Before Coty, Venkatesh began his professional career at P&G Prestige Beauty (formerly Cosmopolitan Cosmetics) as the Market Development Manager for Russia where he managed the business during the 1998 Russian Crisis, mitigating losses by over 50 per cent.

Super Surfaces raises US$500K funding

Super Surfaces, a design and delivery company that specialises in the luxury wall and surface finishing, has raised US$500,000 from Vishnu Reddy, a serial entrepreneur and an investor based out of Washington DC.

With the funding, Super Surface will scale up and grow its brand.

The company targets to achieve a delivery capacity of 10 lakh sqft per month by March 2023 and is also planning to enter the global market starting with Srilanka and Bangladesh by 2022 and the US and Australia by 2023.

Kumar Varma started his company with the main reason to offer design and delivery solutions of surfaces with primary focus on architects and interior designers. He holds 12-plus years of professional experience in the Amusement & Theme park industry and has worked with many reputed global amusement brands.

OVO launches crowdfunding campaign for flood victims of Greater Jakarta [e27]

Indonesia’s leading fintech firm OVO has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help the victims of the massive floods that devastated parts of Greater Jakarta since last Wednesday.

For aid distribution, OVO has partnered with Grab, Indonesian Red Cross, Baznas, Aksi Cepat Tanggap and Rumah Zakat. Online mutual fund marketplace Bareksa has also expressed its support for this movement as a corporate social responsibility act.

Users can donate by accessing ‘special donations home’ banner on the OVO app. Ride-hailing firm Grab has also pledged to match up to Rp1 billion for the donations thus collected.

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Antler, a global startup generator and early-stage venture capital firm, today announced that it has raised additional US$50 million for its funds in Amsterdam, London, New York, Stockholm, Oslo, Sydney, Nairobi and Singapore.

Amongst the new investors are Facebook Co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Elaine Saverin, investor and philanthropist Christen Sveeas (through Kistefos), Canica International, and Japanese financial services company Credit Saison, amongst other independent investors, entrepreneurs and finance industry leaders.

Also Read: Use this eSIM wherever you go in the world, thanks to these 2 Turkish entrepreneurs

Magnus Grimeland, CEO and Founder of Antler, said: “Raising funds across seven geographies means that we can spread our impact across the world. We are looking forward to seeing our existing portfolio of exciting startups expand and launching further Antler programmes in 2020.”

Founded in Singapore in 2017 by Grimeland, who earlier co-founded Zalora, Antler identifies and enables exceptional people to build groundbreaking tech companies — regardless of gender, socioeconomic background or ethnicity — from the ground up through its programme.

Antler then provides pre-seed and later-stage capital to successful companies. In order to provide this funding, it has local funds in each geography.

Antler invests US$100,000-200,000 into select teams.

Since its launch in Singapore in 2018, it has invested in over 120 companies. The portfolio is diverse, with companies in 17 industries, founders from 36 nationalities and 52 per cent of companies having at least one female co-founder. Its portfolio firms Airalo and Cognicept have both raised investment from Sequoia, Sampingan from Golden Gate Ventures. Base, another Antler startup, secured money from East Ventures.

Antler already runs programmes in eight global locations and will soon launch in Jakarta and other locations globally in 2020.

“More than half of Antler’s portfolio companies have at least one female founder, which is above the industry average. We need to champion and back female leaders as an industry, and it’s great to see Antler doing its bit,” said Elaine Saverin.

Also Read: The Capture app enables you to track, reduce and offset carbon emissions from everyday life

In November, Antler announced a partnership with National University of Singapore (NUS) via its Graduate Research Innovation Programme to launch an executive programme to enable more entrepreneurs to build successful deeptech startups.

 

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In October 2019, Arcadis, the Amsterdam-based global design and consultancy for natural and built assets, ran a roadshow in Singapore to introduce its Arcadis City of 2030 Accelerator –the result of its partnership with Techstars.

The roadshow aimed to search for the first Asian startup to join the second year of the programme, which is set to start in March in Amsterdam. The programme itself will peak in a demo day event in May.

“Arcadis is all about improving the quality of life and is always interested in people brave enough to bet their livelihood to that cause. We love that startups are more agile, flexible and willing to take risks. They also give us new perspectives on how to solve some of our cities’ challenges by looking for unconventional solutions,” says Stephen Uhr, Executive Director Asia Pacific – Clients, Innovation and Strategy, Arcadis.

“We are currently working with startups to deal with some of the most pressing issues in Asians cities such as mobility, resilience to climate change and dwindling resources,” he continues.

In this interview with e27, Uhr talks about the Southeast Asian (SEA) and European startup ecosystem –and why collaboration between startups and corporates are key to the balance between innovation and profitability.

Also Read: From coffee to dentistry: The top 10 funding news that rocked the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem in 2019

Can you tell us the most outstanding difference between the Netherlands and SEA startup ecosystem? In what ways can each ecosystem learn and work with each other?

Europe is a well-developed and accessible market with a wide talent pool. The European Union (EU) offers tax incentives to facilitate investments in startups. It is a desirable market, not only for European-based startups but for Asian startups looking to expand. The Dutch startup culture, along with the rest of Europe, is mature and its success lies in its ability to attract talent with the Netherlands being one of the largest startup hubs in Europe.

SEA has an emerging startup scene backed by government interest and driven by the rapid growth in digital adoption. Indonesia has one of the largest growth in digital adoption rates in the world – 99 per cent increase between 2013-2018 and global players are scrambling to expand capacity in infrastructure such as data centres to meet this demand.

It can be more difficult for companies in Southeast Asia to attract international talent which is why many countries have taken to appealing to their overseas communities to return to their home countries with promises of investments in their startups.

Of course China leads the way in the full integration of digital services into everyday life as anyone who has tried to pay cash in a taxi in mainland China will know.

When it comes to dealing with the challenges of climate change, how far along have startups in SEA come? What are the opportunities that we can tap into, and the challenges we need to overcome?

Many startups are focussed on dealing with climate change. We’ve seen how technology can be used to clean plastic from the oceans, create zero-carbon vehicles, make buildings more energy-efficient and much more. The challenge now is to make this technology scalable and make it in the norm rather than the exception.

Also Read: Top 5 appointment news that rocked the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem this year

We have been working with BlueSG, which provides a new environmentally friendly EV sharing service in Singapore. With plans for 500 charging stations and 2,000 charging points by 2020, BlueSG is different from existing car-sharing services as drivers need not return the car back to its original location. This flexibility reduces the need for citizens to own a physical car. BlueSG’s charging stations require specialised civil engineering work for connecting to local electrical grids and telecommunications networks that are critical for EV deployment.

Arcadis’ project management expertise ensured that this development met the technical guidelines of Singapore’s utility providers as well as BlueSG.

Europe is further along on issues regarding sustainability and decarbonising its economy and we are seeing many interesting startups in this area.

One example of a startup we have been working within this space in Asia is Sensity, a startup dedicated to collecting real-time climatic data through the use of IoT sensors. This technology is well suited to asset owners wishing to understand the actual environmental impacts of their operations.

As a business, how can startups balance between creating a sustainable company and creating social impact?

Startups are often quick to evolve and innovate and create social impact because they are smaller, but as they become successful and grow rapidly, their internal operations struggle to catch up.

This is where larger businesses can support startups by giving them access to markets, clients and scale whilst remaining focused on the core mission.

It’s important not to lose that innovative mindset and ‘can do’ bootstrapping attitude – which has happened to many startups as they’ve grown.

Also Read: 5 real-life obstacles that startups face and tips to overcome them

The SEA startup ecosystem is getting increasingly popular among global investors and accelerator programmes, even for social businesses. What do you think is the strength of this market, that leads the world to be interested in it?

In Southeast Asia, we see thriving economies and so the investment opportunities are very tempting to global investors. In Thailand and Vietnam, a young population and a growing middle class have become key to global growth. Governments are increasingly startup-friendly too – in Singapore, for instance, the government is actively trying to encourage startups with tax incentives.

The flip side of this rapid growth and urbanisation mean that cities are facing different challenges from those they faced ten or twenty years ago, so they are looking for new ways to meet those challenges, and this inspires a startup culture.

How do you envision your positioning in SEA tech ecosystem in the next five years?
The challenges we face as citizens continue to evolve and multiply and our lives have become increasingly digitalised. Arcadis is changing the way it does business to meet that new digital reality through automation or its core business and the growth of new technologies to improve the quality of life for SEA.

As an industry, construction has been relatively slow to adopt new technology compared to other sectors. We are starting to see this change. Not only will we be able to offer new solutions to our clients, but we are engaged in various initiatives to help strengthen our digital transformation.

We are continuously expanding our digital and data expertise; a recent example is through the acquisition of the software and analytics firm SEAMS. We are also activating digital leadership throughout the company through a knowledge partnership with Vlerick Business School. All these initiatives will spur on Arcadis’ city-centric vision and strategy of continued digital innovation and growth.

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Image Credit: Mike Enerio on Unsplash

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Singapore-bases startup accelerator-cum-early-stage VC fund, Accelerating Asia, has unveiled its second cohort of ten startups.

The startups hail from six countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore.

The new cohort features three female-led ventures, with 40 per cent of the startups having female co-founders.

These 10 startups have together raised over S$2 million (US$1.48 million) in funding already. Each of them will now receive an additional S$100,000 (US$74,000) in growth funding from Accelerating Asia’s venture arm.

“All the ventures coming into cohort 2 are catalysts for positive change, for example, Joni.ai is transforming education, delivering AI-powered platforms that are customising learning according to student needs,” Accelerating Asia Co-founder Amra Naidoo said.

Also Read: V3, EZ-Link-led consortium, BEYOND joins Singapore’s digital banking license race

The accelerator said that it had touchpoints with over 2,000 startups and selected ten from over 200 eligible applications. Its last cohort had raised a combined amount of over US$3 million in funding.

Accelerating Asia is a partner of Enterprise Singapore’s Startup SG Accelerator programme.

The cohort’s Demo Day will take place in May 2020.

A sneak-peek at the 10 companies:

Hellotask: An app-based platform that upskills domestic workers and connects them to employment opportunities as on-demand, verified maid services to households.

iFarmer: Delivers innovative financing for agriculture and farming by enabling secure investing for individuals and institutions and ensures a return on investment by providing market access and support services for partner farmers.

IZY.ai: Uses the latest mobile and machine learning technology to deliver concierge services that customise the guest experience to elevate hotel stays, digitises hotel services and improves internal hotel productivity.

Joni.ai: An AI-powered adaptive assessment platform that personalises education and helps students to make sense of their learning data.

Moovby: A car rental marketplace or the Airbnb for cars, where travellers can rent any car they want, whenever they want it, from a vibrant community of local owners.

Nitex: Connects businesses to streamlined overseas production and standardised apparel sourcing for remote buyers by providing transparency and process optimisation.

NumuWorld: An app that enables brands to reward customers who promote their business on social media. Numu offers brands flexible promotional opportunities tailored to social media activity as well as visibility over who and when someone posts.

Priyoshop: An e-commerce platform enabling small town micro-entrepreneurs to sell a wide selection of authentic products to customers without having to invest in working capital stock and get access to affordable financing.

Recyglo: A waste management platform, which provides circular economy, zero-waste management, traceability, monitoring and analytics and recycling solutions in ASEAN.

Romoni: A one-stop destination of beauty and lifestyle needs of women and a credit facilitation platform for micro and small women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh.

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Image Credit: Accelerating Asia

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The central banking monetary regime is the dominant form of economic exchange

The world runs on fiat currency; this is a fact of life. Although the last decade has seen an exponential increase in digital and cryptocurrency adoption, we are at the very beginning of the process of building a global digital economy.

That process has begun, though, and there are now several major urban areas such as Hong Kong, Bristal, and Tokyo – where the very concept of “money” as we’ve come to understand it is being re-defined. 

One of the best examples of using an alternative money system in Hong Kong who implemented a “time voucher” tokens system. 

An alternative way to exchange value: time banking

What is a time bank?

“A time bank is a banking institution that runs on-time credit exchanges. Time banking works on the principle that after retiring, people can spend some time taking care of the elderly voluntarily, and the services provided will be recorded as time credits.

Community time banks give the volunteers a time banking card, and if needed they can one day exchange their time credits for an equal amount of free nursing services. The services provided include chatting with the elderly, doing their housework and shopping for them.”

According to Professor Chen Gong from the Institute of Population Research of Peking University, “time banks in China have developed significantly since 2008 due to the release of regulations on voluntary services and the increasing demand for elderly service care.”

In Hong Kong, they primarily use “time coupons” to promote the exchange of community residents services and goods. In Hong Kong, they recognise time coupons in various increments: one hour, a half-hour, a quarter-hour, and five minutes.

These time voucher systems keep the economic activity local and enable people who don’t actively participate in the economy a chance to trade services.

For a simple example, elderly people could do some basic work in exchange for the healthcare services they need. By enabling the elderly to “earn some of their services,” it frees up capital to invest in higher-growth areas of the economy.  

The concept of time being a unit of value is not unique to Hong Kong. Both mainland China and Japan implemented a similar system of “care vouchers.” 

“The number of people aged between 55 and 59 has now surpassed other age groups in Hong Kong”– Law Chi-Kwong, labour secretary of Hong Kong 

Time vouchers and care vouchers are especially beneficial for countries with populations heavily weighted towards the elderly, as we’ve seen in both Hong Kong and Japan. 
Incentivising on climate change can assure people to behave much more efficiently

One man’s trash is another man’s tokenised asset

Dense urban areas and remote rural villages may have little in stock, but tokenisation and non-fiat currencies have the potential to be equally effective in both situations. Take waste management, for example – there’s no more “local” issue than that. 

In densely populated urban areas, trash piles up fast and needs to be sorted, collected, likely sorted again, processed, and then recycled or disposed of in some other way.

In villages with just a couple of roads and vast distances between them and anything resembling a city, the challenge is in the collection and processing. It’s hard to get out there, expensive, and the environmental effects can be catastrophic. 

As Stephen DeMeulenaere from the Qoin Foundation explains in this Blockchain Beyond Hype episode produced by Blockchain Zoo, local services like waste management are as crucial as they are neglected (Note: the embedded clip below starts at the portion of the discussion on this topic, but please feel free to watch the whole thing!).  

 

(Embed the above video at the timestamp 6:50)

The key is to use tokens to incentivise and reward certain behaviours – much like Swachhcoin, and ECO Coin do for sorting trash and recyclable materials. 

Rather than complicating a relatively-uncomplicated concept with fiat currency and bank-based payments, projects like these provide simple, easy-to-use rewards for behaviours that may help us save our oceans. Gather recyclables, sort them correctly, bring them to a recycling centre, and get paid out in tokens instantly – it’s really that simple. 

Plastic Bank partnered with IBM to do something similar with the aim of helping people in some of the poorest parts of the world – and the places most affected by climate change and pollution – get out of poverty and clean up the environment while they do it. 

Plastics are widely-regarded as both one of the worst of forms of pollution and the most-solvable. 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been produced since the middle of the 20th century – 60 per cent of this has ended up in landfills. 

Here’s how David Katz, Founder and CEO of Plastic Bank, puts it: 

I realised we had to challenge our perception of plastic, and make it too valuable a commodity to throw away into a river or stream simply. At Plastic Bank, we encourage citizens to collect plastic waste and deliver it to our local processing centres.

In return, they earn life-changing rewards like schooling for their children, food or phone top-ups. We then grind the plastic into pellets and sell this back to manufacturers to re-use as an ethically-sourced raw material.

This approach can be scaled up or down depending on the use case, and it’s likely the future of waste management, utility allocation, and perhaps the money itself. 
Incentivising on climate change can assure people to behave much more efficiently

Money… but without the money

The regulatory environment around some of these ideas is fluid – at best. Fiat currencies are still how business is done, and are the lens by which policymakers make decisions.

What Stephen DeMeulenaere at the Qoin Foundation is trying to do – along with many forward-thinking people in governments and businesses – is to bring communities together around a central concept of value that may be separate from money in its current form.

The Time Voucher system in Hong Kong is a great example of how this can work. However, it’s not a silver bullet for our economies. These alternative voucher systems should be viewed as a method to incentivise very specific goals in an economy

The reality is, the central banking monetary regime is the dominant form of economic exchange.

Hopefully, as the technology and regulatory infrastructure catch up to the big ideas such as cryptocurrency and moneyless society. 

Luckily the entire world seems to be waking up to the idea that money doesn’t have to come from your government. Look no further than Bitcoin, which is emerging as a hedge to the global macro uncertainty. There is no telling where this movement might take us. 

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Image Credit:Murray Campbell

This article was first published on September 4, 2019.

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