In the shadow of Singapore’s standing as 12th in the World Index of Health Care Innovation, pet healthcare remains a backwater. Despite a significant uptick in pet ownership in Singapore in recent times, pet owners’ knowledge of pet healthcare remains quite inadequate.

A local survey of more than 1,000 cat and dog owners showed that the concern that almost every owner had was chronic health issues with their pets. However, despite such a concern, “more than two-thirds of pet owners had little or no knowledge of key health issues such as parasite infestation, chronic kidney disease and heart disease that might affect their cats and dogs”.

When they did try to seek out information on their pets’ health, 35 per cent turned to the internet, while 26 per cent looked at YouTube and TikTok videos instead of turning to the real expert: a veterinarian!  

So, what is driving this phenomenon? And can technology provide some solutions? We explore these questions in this article.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

As the old saying goes, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’. This wisdom directly relates to the health care of our pets.

Let’s focus on dogs as an example. People often say that one year of a dog’s life equates to seven human years, but this is an oversimplification. The truth is, one calendar year for a dog may equal up to 15 human years, depending on the breed. Since dogs age faster than humans, they should see their doctor more often than we see ours. If they only visit their vet once a year, that is akin to us getting a general check-up every four-five years!

Dogs (even when healthy) should be examined by a veterinarian, preferably twice a year. As your dog ages, more frequent visits may be necessary as the rapid ageing process of dogs makes preventive healthcare even more important.

Also Read: Singapore’s MyPetGo wants to be the Apple of pet care technology

Hence, it is concerning to see that in the same survey, nearly 40 per cent of pet owners either prefer to self-diagnose based on internet research, delay vet visits until symptoms worsen or worse of all, not take their pets to a veterinarian at all. This can often aggravate health issues due to misinformation.

Addressing the problems

A big driver of the lack of veterinary visits is the existence of several pain points faced by traditional veterinary care providers, which in turn lead to pain points for pet owners seeking veterinary care. The corresponding spike in patient volumes at veterinary practices that have come with the rise in pet ownership in recent years has caused many clinics to be fully booked and oftentimes overwhelmed.

This is made worse by the shortage of labour in the industry. Consequently, veterinary practices find themselves having to turn down clinic appointments and being unable to provide after-hours care.

Serious lapses in care have also occurred, unfortunately. For pet parents, this means they often have to grapple with difficulty with getting an appointment, long waiting times and limited 24-hour and emergency vet services.

Even if they can get an appointment, they often have to deal with the lack of pet-friendly travel options, not to mention the stress of travelling to and being at the clinic for their pets are subjected to. All these pain points discourage pet parents from taking their pet to see the veterinarian as regularly as they should.

An all-in-one digital solution

Now, imagine an all-in-one digital platform where veterinarians can connect with their clients and patients online anytime, anywhere, enabling them to extend care beyond the physical limitations of their clinics. Moreover, if telemedicine is unsuitable for a pet’s condition, they can refer the case to a clinic for a physical examination.

They can also digitally issue and deliver prescriptions to pet parents (instead of having unnecessary human traffic in their practice from medication top-ups). Veterinary practices can receive and organise physical appointment requests online, which, aside from offering pet parents a lot of conveniences, eases the administrative burden on their staff.

Taken together, the platform enables them to handle a large volume of cases digitally rather than having every single case – big or small – come into the clinic. This allows clinics to focus on complex cases in person, which undoubtedly maximises their in-clinic capacity.

Most importantly, such a platform enables veterinarians to be the first responder and advise on the best course of action whenever pet owners face a health situation with their pets. No more having to turn down appointments and say hello to round-the-clock veterinary care! 

For pet parents, instead of having trouble accessing expert advice and turning to the internet for the wrong answers, they can now simply consult a veterinarian online anytime, anywhere. When their pets’ condition is unsuitable for telemedicine, they are seamlessly referred to a clinic for a physical consultation. They can also book an appointment online for an in-clinic consultation directly (instead of the archaic way of calling the clinic).

Also Read: What telemedicine and Health Tech holds across SEA amidst COVID-19

Following each consultation, they are issued digital prescriptions for their pets and simply get them filled and delivered via the platform (no more trips to the veterinary clinic just to top up long-term medications, too!).

Last but not least, owners can now store and update electronic health records of their pets in a single complete digital platform (versus receiving a loose copy of the medical report for each veterinary visit). All-in-all, this eliminates all the hassle of seeing a vet the traditional way.

Such convenience should encourage pet parents to practise preventive healthcare by increasing the frequency of check-ups for their pets, boosting their chances of survival when illnesses are diagnosed early on. 

Telemedicine has been commonly practised in healthcare for humans, but adopting such technology for pets is still relatively new. As with human telemedicine, telemedicine for pets is not intended to replace physical in-clinic care but rather complement it by providing on-demand access to veterinary care for pets with non-emergency conditions such as minor concerns, surgical reviews, palliative care or behavioural changes, etc.

However, amazing as it is, telemedicine as a standalone service is inadequate as access to in-clinic care is important when telemedicine is insufficient for a pet’s condition. More importantly, when there is a need for any teleconsultation to be referred to a vet clinic, there must be continuity of care such that the in-clinic veterinarian receiving the referral can access beforehand the medical history of the patient and be prepared to provide the necessary diagnostic or treatment plan. Thus, this requires a centralised digital depository of pets’ medical records. 

As both pet parents and veterinary medicine providers, all the considerations set out above were of utmost priority when we were developing Pawlyclinic, a complete pet healthcare platform that comprises two portals: the Owner Portal and the Vet Portal, in a unified ecosystem.

The motivation to start Pawlyclinic was crystallised after seeing first-hand the pain points for both pet parents and veterinary care providers in the traditional veterinary practice. We believe technology and innovation can systematically address these pain points and make veterinary care omnipresent, simple and efficient for all pet parents. 

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SerMorpheus, an Indonesia-based Web3 brand-retailer enabler, has announced the completion of a US$2.5 million seed round of financing led by Intudo Ventures.

500 Global, Febe Ventures, AlphaLab Capital, BRI Ventures, and Caballeros Capital also participated.

The company will use the funds to build infrastructure to bridge the gap between Web3 and Indonesian brands and consumers. It will also expand the team.

Also Read: Where is the future of NFTs and metaverse heading towards?

Launched in January 2022 by Kenneth Tali and Budi Sukmana, SerMorpheus is a Web3 enablement platform. It empowers brands and creators to develop NFTs and manage utilities that allow them to engage directly with customers and communities, unlocking brand value through ultra-personalised shopping experiences.

Through its online-to-offline bridge, NFT holders can earn real-life benefits at events held by brands and retailers and claim/mint branded NFTs in real-life through offline activities, such as concerts, movies, and branded events.

The company works directly with Indonesian and global businesses, brands and creators to develop NFT products and features to improve community engagement and unlock utility.

For users, SerMorpheus eliminates onboarding friction by directly connecting with global NFT marketplaces on their behalf and allowing transactions to be made in Indonesian currency (IDR) with just an email address and phone number, simplifying the process of entering the new digital economy.

The brands using SerMorpheus include Indonesia Comic Con, professional football club PERSITA Tangerang, Jogjarockarta music festival, Indonesian actress and singer Prilly Latuconsina, and Visinema Pictures-produced film Mencuri Raden Saleh, among others.

Also Read: Why ‘Indonesia-only’ Intudo Ventures believes SEA as one cohesive market is a fallacy

The company is developing creator tools, including a self-service drag-and-drop NFT builder, which allows users to mint and release NFTs quickly with zero technical knowledge required.

SerMorpheus will also provide analytical tools to help creators track their collection and user base.

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Echelon 2022 aims to provide intimate and focused discussions on key topics and business matching services to facilitate business-driven connections during the two-day event. e27will curate and invite key stakeholders of startups, investors, corporates, and ecosystem enablers to drive towards fruitful business outcomes at Echelon.

The 2022 Echelon edition will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. Learn more here. 

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The end of August was an exciting time for crypto enthusiasts –and proponents of the Web3 space in general– in Indonesia. There were at least two major events happening that allows them to meet up and share insights about the future of the industry.

I had the opportunity to attend sessions at the NXC International Summit where Deputy Trade Minister Jerry Sambuaga announced the country’s plan to establish a crypto stock exchange by the end of 2022. In his presentation, Sambuaga explained that the exchange will list companies in the crypto industry (that have been granted licences by the country’s financial watchdog).

The introduction of the exchange itself is a means to protect consumers.

This update is not the only want that makes us feel optimistic about the Indonesian government embracing crypto –and Web3 innovation in general. In a recent interview with e27, Steven Suhadi, Founder of Standard Alpha and Indonesia Crypto Network (ICN), detailed the potential of the Indonesian crypto scene.

“We already have regulations about crypto in Indonesia, while some other markets in the region don’t have clear regulations yet,” Suhadi says. “So we see the cryptocurrency scene is growing rapidly. For example, before the regulation was introduced, there were only two exchanges when we started Standard Alpha and ICN. And now, we have 25 registered exchanges … We’re also speaking to a lot of institutions. Not only a lot of Web2 companies are starting to say, ‘Okay, how do we get into Web3’, but many institutions from traditional finance are also saying, ‘We need to participate in this.’”

Also Read: We’re still in the dot-com phase of Web3: Steven Suhadi of Standard Alpha

He also explains why tech hub such as Bali is the right breeding ground for it.

“All the regulations happen in Jakarta, the capital city, but Bali has a thriving community. And even the Jakarta players start to have offices in Bali either to give their teams a work-life balance or they want to tap into the local community here — expert developers or different sorts of conceptual thinking, people experimenting. They want to merge that and fuse that with the knowledge and bring that relevant skills back to Jakarta.

What Indonesia needs to do

When we look at the details of the situation on the ground, and the promises of what is coming next, it does look like Indonesia has a great future in the Web3 sector. It has all the elements of a supportive ecosystem from a close-knit community to initiative that keep up with the changes in society.

But there is always something to improve on. In this matter, we can boil them down into one major concern: Consumer protection and the willingness to move swiftly to ensure it.

“As a result, Elliptic expects consumer protection will be the major regulatory focus issue of 2022, and consumer protection authorities will become major forces shaping the crypto space,” writes David Carlisle, Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs at Elliptic, in a blog post.

Also Read: How to scale voluntary carbon markets with DeFi and Web3

With the upcoming launch of the crypto exchange, and the licensing that the government is giving to existing companies in the crypto industry, we can see that there is already a commitment to ensure consumer protection.

However, whenever Something Bad Happened, the public has to be ensured that the government will be there for them –and honestly, the precedent is not always great.

The public may have strong reasons to be concerned following a recent incident where hacker Bjorka claimed to have breached state cybersecurity defenses. This move resulted in the compromise of billions of pieces of citizens’ personal data.

Critics have been dubbing the government’s response as ‘lacking’, as reported by The Jakarta Post.

If our intention is to build a strong ecosystem for the Web3 industry, then building trust should remain a priority in the government’s mind. We already have a good plan set on paper; let us make sure that the practice will be just as good.

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Time and time again, research has shown that the hiring process is biased and unfair. Factors like unconscious racism, sexism, and ageism, even the weather on the day of the interviews can influence hiring decisions.

Another study on decision-making in the United States showed that different judges presiding over identical cases meted out varied sentences. While the average sentence was seven years, identical cases had a four-year sentence disparity, the difference between a five-year and nine-year sentence.

Therein lies the flaw in human judgement. We are unable to exercise objective decision-making due to the existence of noise and the unwanted variability in professional judgments of the same problem.

Where there is noise, there is bias and more than you think

Recently, we had the honour of having Olivier Sibony, co-author of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement and Senior Advisor to Qualgro, speak on noise and bias at our Qualgro Symposium

Noise exists because of the existence of various factors. These include cognitive biases, group dynamics, mood, stress, fatigue, and differences in skill and taste between assessors and decision-makers.

Bias is one part of the error equation. The other is what fellow researchers in the field term ‘noise’. Noise is the “unwanted variability in human judgements of the same problem”, and it is just as problematic as bias.

Also Read: Building a diverse and inclusive workplace sidestepping tokenism

Such variability leads to injustices, varied hazards, and multiple kinds of costs. Biases can shape a company or industry’s culture and norms if left unchecked. Other research has found this prevalent in various fields, from military intelligence analysis to actuarial science and virtually every industry imaginable, even one as critical as medicine.

The error equation

According to Sibony, errors can be mathematically calculated. Without getting too technical, this essentially means that the combination of both bias and noise leads to making errors, and the reduction of either has an equal impact on reducing error.

Bias and noise exist virtually everywhere, and technically, the only way to eliminate them both is to remove the use of human judgements. However, this is not tenable for myriad reasons, especially since the human element still matters in many areas concerning people (e.g., a medical diagnosis).

Noise and bias in business

As a result of noise and bias, professionals in critical industries can make important and even outrageous errors. You can see these errors of judgement in areas such as recruitment and human resources, marketing, and even when choosing which companies to invest in.

For example, a popular method of judging candidates and hiring them is based not on objective data but on the gut instinct of the interviewer. Unfortunately, such decisions can lead to bad outcomes and incur extra costs for the business.

The next best thing would be for humans to learn how to reduce errors in their decision-making, especially with cognitive biases.

Decision hygiene factors

How exactly do cognitive biases and noise affect entrepreneurs, and more importantly, how can we reduce decision-making errors within the business landscape?

Sibony references decision hygiene factors, a matrix comprising four noise prevention techniques to help make better judgements and decisions.

• Aggregate

In some specific situations, a diversity of input can be useful in the decision-making process, so long as the inputs are independently derived. aggregating independent inputs and then averaging them out would statistically reduce noise.

• Use relative measures, not absolute

Chances are, when people describe things or situations, they will use the same terminologies despite meaning different things. This can be problematic if two people use the word “great” to describe what sort of potential investment needs to have, but  Person A means 30 per cent while Person B means it is in the seven per cent.

Also Read: Why we cannot talk of diversity without inclusion

Since absolute measures can be ambiguous, it would be better to rank or measure items or situations against others. For example, before deciding to invest in a start-up that, say, sounds great on paper, compare them to other start-ups similar in scale and size for their relative performances.

• Structure your judgements

Break judgements down into separate components or dimensions and use quantitative and objective measures to assess and/or analyse sub-components of the judgement you will be making, and score them against a frame of reference.

For example, you can structure an interview process to have several stages where specific competencies are assessed (such as through scoring) and compared to other candidates similar to them (relative measuring).

You can then aggregate independent inputs and average their score or performance.

• Keep intuition at bay

Humans are generally susceptible to cognitive biases such as selective attention, confirmation bias, and selective recall.

This can make you over-focus on some types of information and overlook other relevant ones, leading to terrifying outcomes. Just ask Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongly detained for the Madrid bombings.

“The key point here is that you don’t want to know what you don’t want to know,” quips Sibony, “knowing too much, even accurate information, can mislead you”.

Manage the information process to make it difficult to form an intuition too early. Although it is tempting to engage in intuitive judgements, early use of intuition only serves to add more noise.

Final thoughts

Indeed, many people think they are very objective and impartial, especially when their professional judgements are solicited. However, as illustrated, erroneous judgements and decisions can lead to disastrous consequences.

As executives, the company and the organisation depend on not just the knowledge and experience but, more importantly, the sound judgement and decision-making skills of executives.

It pays to be cognisant of how we may stumble at different stages and work towards strengthening noise-prevention efforts for the health and success of the organisation.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community, or like the e27 Facebook page

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Metain, a blockchain-empowered co-investment platform focusing on real estate, has secured an undisclosed investment from IDG Capital Vietnam.

Per a statement, this partnership is expected to foster the development of NFT real estate and attract more global investors to invest in blockchain-powered proptech in Vietnam.

Real estate investment promises a very high ROI with the least risk among other investment types (stocks, crypto, saving, open-ended funds, etc.). However, its characteristic creates high entry barriers for individual investors, including big investment capital and an inconvenient, time-intensive multiple-transaction process.

Meatin makes investing in income-producing assets affordable, convenient, safe, transparent, and trustworthy for investors. The platform aims to grow the Vietnam real estate investment market and improve its accessibility using blockchain technology to complement, not replace reliable approaches.

The startup targets middle-income customers.

Also Read: These 21 Web3 startups prove why Vietnam is world’s most surprising crypto hotspot

Duc Tran, General Partner at IDG Capital, said: “Income-producing property is real estate you invest in to make money from current rental payments, appreciation in market price, or adding value with additional revenue streams. Last but not least, their aims are only around Central Business District properties whose evaluations are the most stable with an all-time uptrend, compared to other options.”

“With the high security, instantaneous settlement, transparent and seamless transaction process, blockchain, smart contract and NFT technology are transforming the real estate industry and will become the key trend in the next decades. The next challenges would be how proptech investors’ pennies with a reliable setup and how to grow these pennies via choosing the right investment assets to acquire. And we believe that we are on the right track of that,” said Nhan Tran, CEO of Metain.

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Echelon 2022 aims to provide intimate and focused discussions on key topics and business matching services to facilitate business-driven connections during the two-day event. e27will curate and invite key stakeholders of startups, investors, corporates, and ecosystem enablers to drive towards fruitful business outcomes at Echelon.

The 2022 Echelon edition will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. Learn more here. 

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Supply chains in Southeast Asia are famously broken. As small businesses are digitising, they are trying to find new sales channels to generate income by exporting beyond their home markets.

Both within Southeast Asia and outside, demand for locally produced products is rising. Buyers are moving away from China as a primary (manufacturing) source and starting to appreciate the quality, prices and diversity of SEA.

However, it’s not smooth sailing yet, and there’s a large opportunity for service providers and marketplaces to jump into the space and address the voids.

The problems with cross-border e-commerce

• Regulators are not catching up yet, and SEA is far from a ‘freedom of goods market’ (such as the US or Europe). Hence all sorts of compliance issues (taxes, import licenses, etc.) that restrict (the ease of) import and export have historically not been addressed.
• Import and export regulations are different for various product categories, adding to the complexity.
• SMEs are getting the demand but don’t have access to the distribution supply chain (DHL and FedEx won’t always entertain SMEs for various reasons) to reach their customers hassle-free yet.
• Existing distributor supply chains are closed and typically demand volume which is not suitable for most SMEs.
• Existing marketplaces (such as Lazada and Amazon) focus on sourcing from China or only satisfy supply and demand in their respective local markets.
• Global risks in the last few years are causing reversed globalisation trends.

The need for solutions

I don’t see regulators catching up fast enough, so we probably should not bank on them to provide a solution for e-commerce in the region.

Innovation is likely to come from startups that, in their core focus on:

• Taking on the compliance burden while offering SMEs a hassle-free import and export experience.
• Offer SMEs a product that offers a quick and easy way to ship products to the buyer’ market (regardless the importing jurisdiction).
• Generate and open up new demand, promote SEA products and build an infrastructure that supports lower (minimum volume) so that small buyers can be reached.

Challenges faced by startups and the massive opportunity

With HH VC Investments, we have looked at several promising players in the space within Southeast Asia.

These are the main challenges these players are trying to overcome:

• There are a lot of moving parts to make this work. Leading to the risk of loss of focus for (typically) financially strapped startups.
• They must ensure sufficient and diversified supply is available for the demand to be satisfied. This is the typical catch-22 for any marketplace, but now with the added layer of cross-border demand.
• They need to leverage existing or generate new demand across different markets with each its own culture, channels and habits.
• They need to build or use existing supply chain infrastructure in various jurisdictions.
• They need to navigate the (sometimes very) complex compliance frameworks of different countries

Just within SEA alone, there’s an ever-increasing middle class that is willing to spend on and try new products from their neighbouring countries.

Final thoughts

There’s a huge opportunity for startups to focus on cross-border e-commerce. This is simply given the sheer number of ever-increasing middle-class buyers that are willing to spend on and try new products from neighbouring countries in SEA.

But it’s still early days.

New entrants will be able to create a huge barrier to entry as these players wouldn’t just be building the infrastructure but also the compliance knowledge in-house.

Those that can overcome the challenges and offer a seamless product will be able to crack the space and have the potential to grow towards the size of the likes of Lazada and Alibaba.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic

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At e27, we are kickstarting a new articles series to know startup professionals and their lives beyond working hours. 

Bee Kheng Tay is the President of Cisco Systems in Southeast Asia and is responsible for driving the networking products giant’s profitable growth. She also leads its go-to-market operations across the ten countries in the region.

Tay brings more than two decades of experience in the enterprise technology industry across Asia-Pacific and Japan. She is a seasoned leader with a proven track record in building innovative sales organisations.

Tay is passionate about encouraging women to pursue a career in STEM. Outside the world of IT, she has a keen interest in history, psychology, philosophy, and science.

In this candid interview, Tay talks about his personal life, professional life, and hobbies.

Excerpts:

How would you explain what you do to a 5-year-old?

I work for a technology company that builds the internet to connect people, things, and data to make the world a better place. My team helps businesses in Southeast Asia use technology to transform the way we work and play, scale their organisations and offer better services to people.

What has been the biggest highlight/challenge of your career so far?

Like many other women, balancing and navigating the demands of my career and parenthood is challenging. It took me some time, but I have realised that these different aspects of my life are not at odds with each other. Instead, they complement and enrich my life. Staying present and focusing on the task at hand when the time calls for it has been a valuable skill for me.

Once I overcame that mental hurdle, I could accomplish many things. Some of my career highlights include becoming the first female Managing Director for Cisco Singapore and Brunei and the first female President for Cisco ASEAN, all while bringing my two children up as a single mother. In and outside of work, I continue to champion women in tech and advocate for a hybrid work model that empowers employees to work from anywhere and juggle their different roles at home and at work.

How do you envision the next five years of your career?

The tech industry holds tremendous potential to help bridge the digital divide and power sustainable innovation. Cisco’s purpose is to power an inclusive future for all. With the opportunities around us, I genuinely believe that technology is one industry that plays a crucial role in bridging the social divide in the world. This will not happen overnight, and I want to drive this momentum in ASEAN as I grow my career in IT with Cisco over the next few years.

Also Read: What makes Desmond Yong thrive in ambiguous situations

I look forward to working with my team to ensure that people and communities in the region can access the information they need seamlessly and securely and enjoy meaningful digital experiences powered by innovative, intuitive, and automated technology.

What are some of your favourite work tools?

I love that collaboration, like many other technologies, isn’t just a business for us. It helps us power our entire organisation.

Especially in a hybrid normal, it is understandable that employees feel distant from not seeing their team and colleagues in the office daily. However, with collaboration tools like Webex, we can reimagine the employee experience so it is engaging and consistent for our people, no matter where they connect.

We have designed Webex to level the playing field for all participants and enhance their engagement with features such as noise cancellation and voice enhancement technology, as well as real-time transcriptions and translations.

These not only facilitate and enhance communication but also ensure that the meeting experience is inclusive for everyone regardless of working locations and circumstances.

For us, inclusivity is more than a physical location. It supports your work style, whether you are an introvert or extrovert, digital native or occasional user, frontline worker, or remote knowledge worker. One of my favourite functionalities on Webex is People Insights, which provides insights into how employees spend their time and who they engage with most often.

The insights can only be seen by the employee and no one else, and this helps them uncover blind spots in how they work to empower them to stay more engaged, be better teammates, reduce potential fatigue and enhance well-being. This has helped me customise interactions with colleagues and plan my day to get the most out of work.

What’s something about you or your job that would surprise us?

Despite my years in technology, I have always gravitated toward the arts. I am a voracious reader, and my favourite authors are Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Over the years, I have also developed an appreciation for art in its different forms. I’m not an art connoisseur, but I enjoy collecting and displaying paintings and art pieces in my home. Ironically, despite my inclination toward the arts, my favourite model is the Standard Model of Particles Physics, which describes the basic building blocks of all known matter. I am full of contradictions!

Do you prefer WFH or WFO or hybrid?

Cisco has always been a big proponent of hybrid work and is here to stay. As a leader, I have seen how hybrid work has helped achieve the fullest potential of employees by empowering them to be their best selves with the flexibility and convenience to work from anywhere and in a way that best works for them.

We are seeing improvements in overall employee performance, work-life balance, and well-being for employees not just in Cisco but across organisations in Singapore and globally.

Also Read: What Pierluigi Cau loves most about working at GitHub

64 per cent of regional employees have shared that hybrid work has improved their productivity. As a result, they are taking more time for themselves, and 80 per cent say that their total well-being across various aspects of social, emotional, physical, financial, and mental has improved.

But challenges remain in fostering an inclusive environment and a sense of belonging for every employee. This fundamentally requires a rethink of various factors that underpin successful hybrid work, including inclusive culture, employee experience, and well-being enabled by technology and led by trust and empathetic leadership.

As leaders, we need to incorporate empathy, active listening, flexibility, and continuous learning in how we lead and engage with people. For example, Cisco conducts Quarterly Engagement Pulses to evaluate and spark conversations about how each employee feels about their team, the work environment, and themselves.

All employees take part in weekly check-ins with their managers that allow employees to have a focused conversation about their work sentiments, priorities, and strengths. This includes what they loved and loathed doing and the support they need from their managers each week.

What would you tell your younger self?

I would tell my younger self that everything is possible. You just need to want it hard enough, be passionate enough, and set goals to guide you consciously and unconsciously during your journey. But don’t be too hard on yourself and enjoy the journey. Beyond that, it is about believing in yourself and recognising that challenging times too will pass.

Can you describe yourself in three words?

No fear, no guilt, no regret.

What are you most likely to be doing if not working?

I love to read. I am very interested in particle physics, psychology, and philosophy. In my free time, I read non-fiction books on these topics.

Earlier this year, I set myself a target to read the top 100 books of all time on the TheGreatestBooks.org site.

What are you currently reading/listening to/watching?

I am currently in the “Great English Writer” phase. The book I am currently reading is Great Expectations, written by Charles Dickens. I am learning more about William Shakespeare and politics, which extends to watching lectures, reading novels, and watching plays on Macbeth, Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Tempest, Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night.

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Singapore-based FlexOS, which helps companies manage hybrid teams and offices in a data-driven, employee-centric way, announced today it closed an oversubscribed US$1 million seed round.

Led by Do Ventures, the round was joined by VIK Partners, Vulpes Ventures, Hustle Fund, Wing Vasiksiri (iSeed SEA), and GK Plug and Play Ventures, joined.

Former GoJek VP Windy Natriavi, renowned management consultant Dr Ramesh Ramachandra, Jeff Lonsdale, Julian Low, Kheng Lian, Marc Gottesman, and Amarit “Aim” Charoenphan also co-invested.

Established by Daan van Rossum, Greg Marschall, and Jonah Levey, FlexOS offers companies data-driven tools to engage and retain hybrid teams and operate hybrid offices.

According to research from McKinsey, 90 per cent of companies will switch to hybrid work, combining work from home and work from the office.

In Southeast Asia, hybrid work is often not even a choice for employers.

Also Read: What makes Bee Kheng Tay a remarkable leader

In Singapore, two in five employees will not accept a job if their employer doesn’t provide them with flexibility for when and where to work. In Vietnam, only 9 per cent of Gen Z wants to work in an office full-time. In Indonesia, 83.5 per cent prefer to work in a hybrid mode. Their employers experience challenges when introducing hybrid work.

According to FlexOS, companies must introduce, measure, and optimise hybrid’ policies.’ They must redesign their offices and operate them differently to provide on-demand spaces to focus, meet, and collaborate. Most importantly, they need to be more intentional about employee engagement. A vast body of research shows that connection, community, and company culture suffer when people do not work together in person.

FlexOS supports those companies and their employees. It does so with gamified office check-ins, desk and meeting room bookings, and up to ten monthly events and activities tailored to employees’ unique interests.

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TNL Media Group, a Taiwan-based multi-language media and data platform, has acquired food and recipe lifestyle media iCook for an undisclosed amount, marking its entry into e-commerce.

The deal aims to grow TNL Media’s readership, launch new products, and expand the group’s paid subscription business.

The group will leverage iCook’s experiences to integrate its current e-commerce services with other suitable media brands internally. The group also plans to connect the new app, membership and e-commerce transaction data to its other existing digital products and services.

The objective is to enhance TNL Meda Group’s data analytic capabilities, unify data across all media brands, and connect with the data sources from the group’s mobile ad tech company Ad2iction. Besides, it will look to grow its big data market research firm TNL Research and AI CDP and data exchange company DaEX.

Also Read: YouTube, Twitch co-founders invest in Taiwanese news site The News Lens

Group Chief Content Officer and Co-Founder Mario Yang said: “TNL looks forward to helping iCook’s direct media sales, social media expansion, launching new video and audio products and giving more international exposure.”

TNL Media is a leading digital advertising, data analytics, and media platform. It runs Mandarin, English, and Japanese editions.  The group has nine content brands and eleven subsidiaries, including The News Lens, INSIDE, Sports Vision, Cool3c , every little d, Agent Movie, OHSOWOW, and Business Yee.

With 7 million monthly unique visitors (MUV), the integration with iCook will bring TNL Media’s total reader scale to 25 million MUV and 100 million monthly page views.

The media group’s existing high-profile investors include North Base Media, an original seed investor in The News Lens, YouTube Co-Founder Steve Chen, Twitch Co-Founder Kevin Lin, and Tim Draper.

Also Read: Taiwan’s TNL Media Group ropes in Tim Draper as an investor

Operated by Polydice, Inc, iCook is a leading recipe-sharing social platform in Taiwan and Hong Kong, with more than 250,000 recipes, 3 million registered members, and 7 million monthly unique active users. Beyond recipes, the platform also provides content about food, cooking, life tips, and general health/living knowledge in several formats, such as blog posts, videos, and other rich experiences.

Its gross merchandise volume grew 40 per cent annually amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It also has one of the largest app downloads amongst media brands, with over 6 million and a paid subscriber base of close to 15,000.

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Ever since a conversation with a German Bitcoin evangelist back in 2014 where I learned about some of the radical ideas of the blockchain world, crypto has been a topic that has fascinated me.

I kept up with the main developments in the space over the years, I was a financial journalist after all, but it was not until last year that I decided to take the space seriously, both as a creator and as a tech founder. Specifically, my interest has been captured by non-fungible tokens.

Much has been happening in this space, but the numbers don’t lie:

• The market went from 0 to US$40 billion by the end of 2021
• January 2022 started equally strong, with US$7 billion in sales recorded

Eye-watering numbers for sure, which probably explains why the current landscape of NFT observers and users is divided between very vocal worshippers and haters.

As a cautious optimist on the potential of NFTs, I think both approaches fail. The former group fails to see that, indeed, the space is being held captive by the rampant fraud and speculation of many of its players and ignoring the climate concerns that NFTs and other uses of the blockchain raise.

The haters, however, refuse to see the simple fact that creators are, indeed, finally able to monetise content through NFT sales. This is largely achieved by artists targeting fans and communities directly, often without having to play the algorithmic lottery of platforms like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram. That, surely, must be ruffling some feathers and may explain some of the hate.

That being said, we are just at the beginning. A jpeg image or an ebook being sold as an NFT is a rather static, primitive use of the blockchain or any of the amazing technologies available to us.

If the current evolution of NFTs stops at “I sell a digital item, you buy it”, then we are not adding much to what Amazon has been doing for 15 years. And, as many critics like to say, you do not need the blockchain for that.

That is why the concept of “NFT utility”, meaning leveraging the ability of the blockchain where those NFTs sit to act as a shared, trusted ledger of interactions between holders of a certain digital currency and related NFTs, will be key.

Also Read: How NFTs are surviving and prospering in the bear market

The “ledger + utility” piece will be key to the next evolution of NFTs. These utility features are, in fact, already being used for anything from playing crypto-enabled videogames to unlocking access to special communities to providing discounted lifetime access to sales of music or art by a specific artist. Utility tokens are also being used to engage in creative, collective storytelling exercises.

Will all these projects succeed? Absolutely not. But the seeds have been planted for new ways of giving value to so much amazing work done by writers, illustrators and other artists that I do not think NFTs will disappear, even if they end up evolving into something that is not intrinsically tied to the blockchain.

Storya’s NFT Plans

The implementation of an NFT marketplace on the Storya platform in the coming months has two primary goals resulting from the above:

• Help authors monetise. This has always been a priority for Storya, and NFTs will be just another tool that creators on Storya can use if they so wish.
• Fill the gap. The tech skills gap is something that plagued the old creator economy platform, and Storya is built to fix that. We will do this for NFTs by allowing creators to ignore many of the complexities inherent to the “minting” of these tokens (e.g. understanding differences between tokens, selecting which blockchain to use, and what features to include in a smart contract). Through Storya, creators will be able to dip their toes in NFTs (and specifically on the WAX platform) with minimal knowledge at first, then choose for themselves if they wish to build all the technical knowledge required to help them do more complex NFT projects.

And, given Storya’s emphasis on collaboration, we will also work directly with ambitious creators that want to use NFTs to help them build the NFT projects that work for their specific storytelling experiences.

All in all, despite a lot of the negativity, NFTs are here to stay.

And, as platforms offering Metaverse experiences multiply and continue to rely on blockchain-related technologies to power their marketplaces and events, NFTs will continue to soar.

Storya is already working on testing what the Metaverse will mean for storytellers, but the dream is to see static storytelling experiences (an eBook, for example) transformed into an engaging, interactive “experience” within the Metaverse. The possibilities are endless. Topic for another post!

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