The opportunities for tech startups to deliver digital financial services are said to multiply

Fintech companies that combine innovative financial service business models with digital technologies are emerging in Southeast Asia in waves.

Fintech is revolutionising Asian banking by modernising cumbersome service channels, creating new ways to borrow money, and bringing in once-excluded customers.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the region has around 266 million people, with limited access to basic financial services such as bank accounts, loans, credit cards and insurance. There over 30 million SMEs underserved by the financial system, facing a collective credit shortfall of around US$175 billion.

It is safe to say that the potential market for Fintech in the region is significant.

At Cento Ventures, a Southeast Asia-focused venture capital firm, we focus on the financial technology industry from a broad perspective that includes both companies that are providers and enablers of modern financial services.

When we look for Fintech investment opportunities, our main criterion is the use of technology to enable or to improve a financial event in some way. For example, a software platform that is widely adopted by retailers might create an opportunity for lending to those retailers or for insurance of the goods being traded – perhaps not ‘Fintech’ in the narrow sense but most certainly an enabler of it.

Fintech in Southeast Asia

In recent years there has been a global trend towards the convergence of finance and IT in the form of Fintech, leading to the emergence of various new digital financial services.

In Southeast Asia, the economy is still in the early stages of digitalization. The total economy of the region is estimated at US$2,900 billion, out of which, only US$50 billion (1.7 per cent) is digital. This suggests that there is a significant opportunity for the growth of digital financial services as the digitization of the wider economy progresses.

Also Read: A decade of innovation: How East Ventures is building Indonesian tech ecosystem from the ground up

Approximately 1,000 companies have been built in the last few years that use technology to tackle some of the challenges in the financial services sector across Southeast Asia. As of now, Singapore remains Southeast Asia’s Fintech hotspot with over 490 fintech companies.

However, other markets are also generating interesting startups at a great pace. Today, Indonesia has around 262 fintech companies and is a booming market for digital payments, lending, and increasingly insurance.

Waves of development

The first wave of Fintech to be developed was focused on payments. 2C2P, Asiapay, iPay88 and Codapay are some examples of payment companies built in Southeast Asia. Many of these serve new online merchants, helping them to process payments from consumers.

Alongside this, we saw the creation of many e-Wallets that help consumers to store value and make purchases digitally.

Next came a wave of startups that made it easier to borrow money. The region has seen many online lenders, for example, Modalku and Funding Societies to name a few. These companies seek to help people and businesses borrow money more flexibly and efficiently than from traditional lenders and use technology and data to assess credit-worthiness in new ways.

Another wave of fintech innovation that is getting going and which has considerable potential is insurance. Both online insurance distribution platforms like Indonesia’s Cekpremi, and Malaysia’s Jirnexu, and direct insurers such as Thailand’s Sunday Insurance are growing fast.

We believe that future waves of fintech innovation will not be only about creating additional consumer-facing products but will also address B2B opportunities in areas such as security and data analytics.

One factor to note is the importance of regulation in the financial services sector. Central banks and regulators around the region have established ‘sandboxes’ designed to allow fintech players to test their services under relaxed regulations. These serve to encourage innovation in a controlled manner.

At the same time, digital financial services remains a highly scrutinised sector. For example, in late 2018 Indonesia’s OJK blocked websites and sent warnings to many of the peer-to-peer (P2P) lenders operating in the country in response to complaints about lending practices.

Digital platforms as opportunities for fintech

We believe that there is an opportunity for new digital platforms to play an important role in developing and distributing digital financial services that are tailored to the needs of their users.

Digital platforms enable connectivity, create new ways for people to exchange value, provide enhanced user experiences, facilitate trust between participants and help in data collection. This can lead to opportunities for fintech in areas like travel, logistics, healthcare, and retail to name a few.

Source

Some digital platforms in Southeast Asia, such as Grab and Go-jek are already offering related financial services that include payments, loans and insurance, both directly and in partnership with others.

Also Read: Need some advice for your startup? Check out these 11 contributor articles

The region is producing other large digital platforms across a number of different sectors, that have, or are building, financial services components to their business models. For example, Carro and Carsome in the automotive sector, PropertyGuru and 99.co in real estate, and Bukalapak and Tokopedia in retail.

Future opportunities for Fintech can be seen in digital platforms that serve various industry sectors which have not yet been materially disrupted by the internet. For instance, if shipping transactions are done on an online platform, then the platform is in a strong position to offer value-added services such as shipping insurance.

Likewise, if students are using a portal to apply for universities, they are likely to require associated services such as financing of school fees. Technology can be used to make these financial services more easily available and, quite often, more cheaply.

Fintech is not only about banks and insurers — many online transactions can have a financial dimension to them. As more and more sectors of Southeast Asia’s economy are transformed by the internet, the opportunities for tech startups to deliver the enabling digital financial services will multiply.

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Just 1 per cent blockchain adoption is expected. What about the other 99 per cent?

Bitcoin’s 2017 bull run from US$900 to US$20,000 (at its peak) has caught the world’s attention, bringing the once obscure distributed ledger technology mainstream.

Many industry newcomers have the misconception that blockchain is a newly emerged technology. However, the fact is that cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have been around since a decade ago, back when Satoshi Nakamoto first published the Bitcoin Whitepaper in 2008 and mined the genesis block of bitcoin a year later.

Source: Coinmarketcap

The hype and attention buoyed by the parabolic price action have also attracted more players to enter the industry.

Just three years ago, the total number of ICOs stood at 29, with total funds raised totalling US$90 million. In comparison, the total number of ICOs in 2018 stood at 1,257 and total funds raised US$7,852 million — which translates to a whopping 4,234 per cent and 8,624 per cent growth respectively!

Source: ICOData.io

Despite being around for so long, and having garnered positive news and directions, blockchain technology remains far from practical adoption.

A 2018 survey by Gartner has indicated that blockchain adoption rates are still low — one per cent today and only eight per cent expected by surveyed CIOs in the short term.

Meanwhile, user adoption of decentralised applications (dApps) on Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, remains surprisingly low. Daily users of all dApps averaged less than 10,000.

Yet, Ethereum has a multi-billion dollar market valuation at US$14 billion, highlighting that the prices of these cryptocurrencies are mostly driven by speculation and not use.

Also Read: Today’s top tech news, March 27: Indian student housing startup Stanza Living raises US$4.4M funding

So what exactly is holding blockchain technology back from mainstream adoption? We explore a few possible factors in this article.

Scalability of technology

Current technology limitations — such as scalability — remain a significant issue facing blockchain technology.

The scalability trilemma as termed by Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin states that blockchain systems can only effectively possess two out of three components — either decentralisation, scalability or security hence trade-offs are almost inevitable.

CryptoKitties, a ERC20 dApp enabling players to buy and breed digital kittens on the Ethereum network is a prime example highlighting current technical limitations of blockchain technology. This single dApp alone has resulted in the congestion of the entire ethereum network, highlighting the difficulties in scalability with decentralisation.

In December 2017, unprocessed ethereum transactions were reported to rise up six-folds resulting in Cryptokitties having to increase their “birthing” (transaction) fees to minimise network congestion.

It is promising to note that improvements to current technological limitations are actively being explored, such as the recent Ethereum Constantinople hard fork and new structures like the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) aiming to solve current limitations with blockchain technology.

Expectations outpacing usefulness

The state of ICOs draws parallel to the infamous Fyre Festival saga, with charismatic millennial founders over-promising and under-delivering by “selling a dream”.

The “80 per cent marketing, 20 per cent product” framework seems to ring true for many projects, with a recent E&Y report showing that only 29 per cent of 2017 ICOs have delivered a product.

Hence, it is important for investors and the public to do their own due diligence while assessing any opportunities. Reverse ICOs, ICOs founded by already established businesses with a proven team, communities and use cases may just prove to be an effective filter.

Lack of trust in a trustless system

Public sentiment and perception of the industry have been low, especially with the current bear market and bad actors in the industry.

In recent news, we have investors being locked out of US$190m after the death of an exchange founder, exchanges with 9.4 per cent of its total holdings stolen and a 20 per cent spike in money laundering cases in Japan last year.

It is no wonder that there is currently a lack of trust in the system, with regulatory and security issues being frequent occurrences.

Misconceptions fuelled by lack of education

Understandably, it has been tough for investors and the public to really get to know what cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are all about, with the technical jargons and the ever-evolving landscape.

This has led to common misconceptions such as:

1. Bitcoin = cryptocurrencies = blockchain technology
Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are not interchangeable terms. Bitcoin is a form of cryptocurrency, while cryptocurrencies are forms of digital assets as mediums of exchange.

Blockchain technology is a form of distributed ledger, a technology underlying cryptocurrencies enabling peer-to-peer transactions.

2. Blockchain technology is only for cryptocurrencies and payment
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies may go like peanut butter and jelly. However, it is not the only use case for blockchain, a distributed ledger technology that spans across multiple industries and used cases.

Also Read: Paving the journey for our app users is a rocky road

3. Price volatility and bear market reflect the current state of technological progress
Blockchain technology, as the underlying distributed ledger technology, should not be conflated with the incentive layer of public blockchains, namely cryptocurrencies. As Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak shared in a CoinTelegraph interview, people should focus on Bitcoin value creation rather than being preoccupied with price.

No moonbois or lambos but the future remains bright

Despite such factors, holding the adoption of blockchain technology back, we still believe in the vast potential of blockchain technology, with its ability to impact and improve different industries.

According to a recent report from US-based market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), global blockchain spending will account for almost US$2.9 billion in 2019, which is an 88.7 per cent increase from 2018.

With such positive projected growth and the involvement of big corporates and institutions — such as NYSE which recently launched digital assets platform Bakkt and corporates such as IBM’s well-known active involvement in blockchain technology — there’s still long-term growth and opportunities for the industry.

In order for the industry to mature and grow, we believe that education is key.

Investors, projects, users and the wider communities should look past the hype and instead learn more about the true state and merits of blockchain technology and explore how it could be used to solve problems or enhance existing solutions in different industries.

In time and with solid development, trust will slowly be built up.

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Image Credits: maxuser

Disclaimer: Nothing written, posted or said by representatives of ArcadierX, its community managers, or community members should be interpreted as, taken as, or constitutes investment advice. All written comments are opinions of individuals and any investment is a risk that individuals take themselves.

ArcadierX is a leading marketplace builder Arcadier’s blockchain initiative to onboard users with a blockchain enhanced platform. For more insights and developments about blockchain and eCommerce, check us out on medium. 

How can we expedite the rate of blockchain tech adoption? Continue the discussion with us on Telegram.

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Oxfordcaps works directly with universities and colleges as well to build a tailored experience for the student community, both via on-campus and off-campus housing

Oxfordcaps, a branded and tech-enabled student housing startup with operations in India and Singapore, has raised S$11 million (US$8.15 million) in Series A funding led by Times Internet, a digital unit of India’s leading media company, The Times of India Group.

Existing investors Bangalore-based Kalaari Capital and 500 Startups also co-invested in this round.

The new capital will be used for fuelling its growth with expansion into 10-plus cities in India and standardisation of its student housing product. Oxfordcaps aims to grow its operations across education hubs in India, including Delhi, Noida, Greater Noida, Dehradun, Indore, Jaipur, Pune, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad.

Founded by INSEAD graduate Annu Talreja (CEO) and IIM-Calcutta alum Priyanka Gera (COO), Oxfordcaps provides a technology-driven living experience to Gen Z students in India and Singapore.

Also Read: How Nurul Hussain’s Codette Project helps Muslim women get into tech and be successful

The company operates via three sub-brands and caters to students across price segments, including Oxfordcaps Premium Residences, Oxfordcaps Student Residences, and Oxfordcaps Dorms for the budget segment. It offers fully-fitted out and custom designed residences with full- stack service model, including wifi, laundry, nutritious meals, professional housekeeping and an array of events and activities focused on career development and lifestyle for students.

With Gen Z’ers at the core of its business, it is also investing heavily on technology, particularly focusing on IoT and Deep Learning architectures, to provide a customised and engaging living experience for students.

The startup works directly with universities and colleges as well to build a tailored experience for the student community, both via on-campus and off-campus housing.

The founders claim the firm has clocked a 30x growth in less than 10 months since its launch in India, and has expanded from 200 beds to acquisition of over 6,000 beds.

Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari Capital, said: “More than 10.4 million students across India migrate to cities every year to pursue their academic dreams. However, student housing today suffers from a high level of fragmentation, lack of quality solutions, price transparency, reliability and complete lack of tech enablement of processes. OxfordCaps is addressing this gap.”

“An avalanche of institutional capital is pouring into the fast growing student accommodation sector. We are confidently doubling-down on our initial investment in OxfordCaps to further propel their mission of providing an unparalleled student housing experience,” said Vishal Harnal, General Partner at 500 Startups.

In 2017, Oxfordcaps received seed funding from 500 Startups, ReadyVentures and a group of undisclosed angel investors. In the same year, Your-Space.in, another student housing startup from India, secured US$500,000 in angel funding from a group of unnamed High Net-worth Individuals.

Placio, yet another startup operating in this vertical, announced a US$2 million in pre-Series A round from Singapore-based private equity fund Prestellar Ventures in 2018.

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Starting with Indonesia, the integration will see public transportation options available on the app with Trip Planner feature

Grab announced today that it officially operates mass market transportation services with public transit integration onto its app in Southeast Asia, starting with Jabodetabek area in Indonesia since three weeks ago. Grab offers first-mile-last-mile trips through a new Trip Planner (“Rute” in Indonesian) feature.

Grab also connects GrabBike and GrabCar to its first-mile-last-mile trips to and from public transit stations or bus stops in order to complement the public transportation options.

The Trip Planner feature will continue rolling out in other Southeast Asian cities in the coming weeks, along with its bus travel marketplace.

Leveraging its partnership with cities, public transit agencies and private companies, the new public transit and bus offerings cater to mass market consumers and provide access to transportation services that are affordable enough for everyday use. The two new features will offer mass transit options that are up to 70 per cent cheaper than private-hire car-hailing services.

“Today, in Jakarta for example, more than 70 per cent of daily trips are taken on motorcycles and private cars rather than public transportation when commuting to and from city centres. These trends underpin the massive congestion problems plaguing the city. Our long term vision is to make people ’s everyday commute so reliable and seamless that they eventually choose to leave their vehicles at home. Mass transit – via buses, shuttles or high-quality public transport – is the only way to achieve this without adding cars to the roads,” said Ngiam Xinwei, Head of Marketplace and Shared Mobility of Grab.

Also Read: Student housing startup Oxfordcaps secures US$8.15M led by Times Internet

Trip Planner feature enables users to plan their journey with accurate public transportation information and end-to-end directions within the Grab app. Grab also seized the new MRT Jakarta launch momentum to introduce this feature and collaborated with MRT Jakarta to integrate its public transit information into the Grab app.

Grab said it will also provide shelters for pick-ups and drop-offs near the stations to better serve users’ first-mile-last-mile needs and ensure the safety of driver-partners and passengers.

“Through the integration of real-time transit schedules on the Grab platform, we believe that we can increase our ridership by tapping into the wide user base of Grab. More people will have better visibility, predictability, and reliability of when the next train will arrive and plan in advance,” said William Sabandar, President Director, MRT Jakarta.

Besides the new MRT lines, the Grab app will also display live public transit schedules from commuter rail, Airport Rail Link, Transjakarta public bus services, as well as more than 50 fixed schedules of public buses across Jabodetabek.

Simply by entering a current location and destination via Trip Planner, commuters are able to view available public transit routes nearby that will get them to their destination, along with real-time departure and arrival times for some of the public transport services. They will also receive walking directions or recommendations of first-mile-last-mile transportation options such as GrabBike or GrabCar to and from public transit that they can book right away.

Furthermore, not only public transit partners will get increased ridership, access to Grab’s network of ride-sharing services, and journey planning, they will also get to understand how commuters use public transportation services in-app and identify any gaps in existing public services that need to be plugged to improve accessibility for all.

As for “Bus” feature, Grab will pilot the marketplace over the next few months across key Southeast Asian cities. Grab will allow users to pre-book a seat at a price point lower than ride-hailing services, on a route provided by Grab’s bus partners, eliminating queuing and bridge the transit gap for people living in underserved areas where getting to and from city centres remains a hassle.

Also Read: Government-backed blockchain accelerator Tribe adds BMW, Intel, Nielsen as partners

Bus operators will be able to efficiently manage and operate their bus fleet by getting full visibility of user demand information in advance. They can better allocate their available supply, and unlock new opportunities to serve unmet transportation demand.

“Ultimately, the mass mobility ecosystem we want to build is one that allows anyone to plan their trip end-to-end, book, buy electronic tickets, and pay for their entire journey across all modes of transportation, public or private, through one integrated payment system, while reaping the benefits of GrabRewards loyalty programme simply by going about their daily commute,” Ngiam added.
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Image Credit: Grab

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There’s no denying that IoT is ushering in a safer future for everyone

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is known for changing the way we conduct businesses with one another, but little attention is being paid to the abundance of ways it is revolutionizing modern safety and public health.

As we become ever more interconnected, our ability to predict public health crises and avoid common fatalities is becoming better and better.

Here’s how the IoT can increase safety, and how some companies and government officials are already working hand in hand to harness the power of technology in the pursuit of saving lives.

Our roads are becoming safer

First and foremost, the IoT promises to reinvent modern roadways and make cars much safer.

Most people think about autonomous cars when they consider the future of transportation, and it’s indeed true that self-driving vehicles will be a major part of tomorrow’s cities.

Also Read: Ride-hailing behemoth Grab now serves mass public transportation in Southeast Asia

What few people realise is the way autonomous vehicles interact with their local environments to mitigate traffic fatalities and save countless pedestrian lives.

Given that the pedestrian fatality rate is increasing alarmingly in many regions, the need for interconnected vehicles that communicate in order to avoid collisions is more important than ever.

In the future, your distracting smartphone may communicate with the car or truck barreling down a sensory-laden road towards you, and divert the vehicle just in time to avoid a deadly collision.

The interconnected cities of the future are often imagined as surveillance nightmares, but although it’s true that privacy concerns will be around for years to come, one positive consequence is avoiding car accidents by a longshot.

The IoT is also reshaping city experiences as a whole, making things more pleasant for pedestrians and everyday citizens trying to go about their business.

Modern city planning is finding itself supercharged thanks to the introduction of intelligent planning software. For instance, reshaping our public work and enabling us to free up congested areas that have long suffered from traffic.

More efficient public transit schemes are in the work, and data analysis will also be conducted on the local climate to determine which areas of the city have more breathable air and fresher water.

The creation of a “smart environment” that can detect pollution at the speed of light is one of the most impressive ways that the IoT has done. This has increased the safety and longevity of the planet amidst climate change.

However, this is only the start and the true capabilities of the IoT are only just being discovered.

AI assistants are becoming home guards

The IoT is most notably taking shape in the living rooms across America, where smart AI assistants like Amazon’s Alexa have nestled into the role of household objects.

Also Read: Non-profit organisation Supply Chain Asia to launch tech accelerator program

The rise of Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa isn’t just good from a commercial standpoint, these devices can do so much more than help you order milk or play your favourite tunes.

In the future, AI assistants will be used as home security devices, alerting authorities whenever something goes wrong and enabling you to harness the power of data to make your home an ‘impenetrable fortress’.

Security companies have already moved heaven and earth to announce huge partnerships with Google and other home assistant manufacturers in an effort to make people feel safer than ever.

Home assistants becoming the future of home security is just another way the IoT is going to increase safety enjoyed in the 21st century.

Make no mistake, the IoT is upending every aspect of our lives from business to security to who knows what.

While some might continue to doubt the interconnectedness movement, the growth of sensory technology in our everyday lives is clearly a positive development that should be welcomed from the viewpoint of public health.

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Image Credits: gargantiopa

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As the VC firm nears its 10th anniversary, East Ventures Partner Melisa Irene looked back into some of the most important milestones it has made

Entering the first decade since its launch in Indonesia, East Ventures Partner Melisa Irene sits down with e27 to discuss the most important milestones that the venture capital (VC) firm has made, especially in the past one year.

The firm was founded in 2010 with the goal to help propel Indonesia forward through the use of technology, and in 2018, it has seen what Irene described as “the accumulation” of all the things they have worked for.

“… We believe that we should begin by building the ecosystem as a supporting infrastructure. When we have managed to successfully build an infrastructure, we are going to enable other businesses to be built upon this existing infrastructure. That way we can make greater impact,” she explains.

Irene gives an example of Tokopedia which started out as an online marketplace that enables small- and medium-sized businesses to build an online presence, supported by features such as cashless payment, which is currently being provided by OVO.

In addition to building an ecosystem, East Ventures had also proven that it is able to grow a business “very fast” by solving “invisible problems” as done by their portfolio company Warung Pintar (a New Retail platform that works with street stalls or warung) and Fore (an on-demand coffee service).

In less than 1.5 years, Warung Pintar has worked with more than 1,000 warungs while Fore has operated 30 outlets in just six months.

Also Read: Ladies, tell us about your startup and win 5 FREE Echelon Asia Summit 2019 tickets!

“We also want to prove our recent learning that the time it takes for founders to innovate is getting shorter and shorter,” Irene says.

The firm was the investor behind some of the leading tech startups in Indonesia, including unicorns Tokopedia and Traveloka.

It has also seen exits such as the acquisition of O2O e-commerce platform Kudo by Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant Grab in 2017.

What’s trending in Indonesia?

For the future, East Ventures wants to continue on working to realise its vision to help Indonesia; it also aims to continue on seizing new opportunities in the market.

Some of the most exciting themes in the market currently include O2O (online-to-offline and vice versa) and New Retail.

“There will be more online-only services acquiring their customers through offline means; it has started to make sense as online means have begun to get too costly,” Irene points out.

Also Read: Ladies, share this article and win tickets to Echelon Asia Summit 2019!

Irene also believes that certain aspects of logistics industry has called for new innovation.

“Players will go beyond last-mile delivery; they will also touch the distribution process as a whole, including from its back-end,” she explains.

Businesses will also continue on building upon the existing infrastructure, which Irene sees as a great news as companies “can now focus on their creativity in innovating a certain industry.”

“For example, with Fore, we don’t build our own e-commerce platform. We also don’t build our own fleet or marketing agency. We simply innovate how people consume coffee by utilising the existing ecosystem, using services such as Moka POS or Go-Food,” she further elaborates.

“From the perspective of big data, this can also be really attractive … It is able to provide feedback to business players on which industry to enter. In the end, we will have a clearer mapping of our whole ecosystem and it will enable us to make progress faster,” she adds.

Also Read: How Nurul Hussain’s Codette Project helps Muslim women get into tech and be successful

Another exciting change that is set to happen in 2019 is that many light-asset companies are going to make a move to become more heavy-asset. While a greater prospect for IPO is never guaranteed, Irene sees that these changes will open more opportunities for exit through IPO.

“We need to consider timing, but the door is opened more widely,” she closes.

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Don’t miss Melisa Irene at Echelon Asia Summit 2019! Get your tickets at US$10 here.

Image Credit: East Ventures

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We’re more connected than ever, but also as disconnected

Recently, a prolific developer by the name of _unwriter released the world’s first native Bitcoin web browser, Bottle. It provides a hint of what’s to come if we choose to rethink how we build applications on a new type of data plumbing system.

On the landing page, _unwriter responds to the question “Why a standalone browser instead of building as an extension for existing browsers, or waiting for mainstream browser support?” with the below statement:

“Many things we take for granted in the old “web browsing” experience — including the security model — no longer apply in the new world of Bitcoin. The thing is, Bitcoin is NOT “the next web”. In many ways, it’s completely opposite of what the WWW is, which is why Bitcoin is so powerful.

That’s why it’s more beneficial to start from scratch instead of forking an existing full-fledged browser built for the existing WWW, with many legacy features that can constrain future directions. We can create a new user interaction model optimised for the new Bitcoin world order.”

Bitcoin

What’s occurring right now in the BSV (Bitcoin SV) ecosystem is a flurry of developments that require a different type of thinking.

You can’t solve problems using the same thinking that caused them.

This is what made Bitcoin so “revolutionary” back in the day, because it got people thinking differently about the world.

Unfortunately, if you’ve been paying close attention to what’s happened over the last decade, the Bitcoin most people know (BTC) has been subverted (via the promise of Lightning Network as a scaling solution) to something that is no different to what we already have. In my opinion, this has been Bitcoin’s biggest setback.

Fortunately, Bitcoin had a way of preserving itself through what was known as forks. As a result, two key hard forks took place over the last couple years, which resulted in Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV (BSV).

Whenever an attempt to alter the Bitcoin protocol as of v0.1 occurs, that new chain is considered the fork (regardless of the ticker, e.g. BTC/BCH/BSV). This is why there’s been so much contention around “who is the true Bitcoin?”

Social networks

Bitcoin was built around the concept of Small World Networks (SWN) and is known to be an incomplete graph:

Like nature, or reality itself, it is neither perfect (Regular, High L, High C) nor completely random (Low L, Low C). If looked at through the lens of a security expert, it is not completely secure — but secure enough with the economic incentives used to combat some of the potential attack vectors.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. are also based around this concept of SWNs.

Another way of understanding SWNs is through the concept of 6 Degrees of Separation. You may be familiar with the term from the 1993 movie of the same name, or even witnessed it unknowingly when looking at first, second, or third degree contacts on LinkedIn.

Also Read: How Nurul Hussain’s Codette Project helps Muslim women get into tech and be successful

Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are at most six social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.

It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and popularised in an eponymous 1990 play written by John Guare. It is sometimes generalised as the average social distance since it seems logarithmic in comparison to the size of the population.

As mentioned, LinkedIn will show you up to third-degree connections. I have rarely (if ever) met anyone outside of first or second-degree connections. And, since the maximum is six, LinkedIn shows just how small our world feels, and this is important if you want to understand why companies like Facebook are now shifting their mission statement towards more meaningful connections over sheer numbers.

Sense of community

According to the American Psychology Association, a “sense of community” is the feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that their needs will be met through their commitment to be together.

This sense of community is an important factor in determining trust levels within a group. The higher the trust, the higher the sense of connectedness and camaraderie.

However, it is important to note that connectedness does not mean connection.

Back to talking about Facebook, after it shifted their mission statement, organic business page visibility was greatly reduced (unless paid via ads) and the algorithm was shifted to display actual friends and family posts and increase focus on smaller, tighter-knit Facebook Groups.

In the beginning stages of the social network era, we saw an explosion of open platforms. Now, we’re starting to see a contraction whereby individuals are preferring smaller messenger groups and/or more intimate viewing experiences (e.g. Snapchat/Instagram Stories).

This is echoed by Dr Craig S. Wright:

“It is not open platforms people seek but rather closed personal groups and communication with people in a way that allows them to build trust over time. People need to be able to decide what they will consider public, private, or even somewhere in between. Importantly, such a system would include a means to attribute information to a source and stop the widespread misinformation campaigns that have been occurring.”

If you’ve lived long enough in this world, you will know that over time it’s far better to have a small, close group of friends than it is to have many acquaintances that you have no real deep relationships with.

Communities, or that “sense of community”, comes from high trust, strong bonds, and deep relationships with fewer people.

Why? Because it’s harder to go deep with more people — there just isn’t enough of you, or your time, to create authentic relationships both ways through volume. But, you can leverage the “small world effect” to achieve that sense of community.

Drake sums up this dilemma well in his song Fear:

“Yeah, and plus things are just surreal at home
People think I’ve changed just cause my appeal has grown
And now security follow me everywhere,
So I’m never actually am alone, I just always feel alone”

More connected than ever, but also disconnected. The same applies to the world of Bitcoin.

The network stays decentralised enough through a minimum number of “hops” (or degrees of separation) between nodes. This makes it so that not every single individual in the world needs to be a “node” (a computer or CPU used to check, validate or mine Bitcoin). Only a few need to be, so that the rest of the network can feel free to transact safely.

Because, at the end of the day, despite how rational we think we are, the majority of humans are driven by emotions.

Tying it all together

So what does this all mean for the future of social media?

If we think of Bitcoin, not just as cash or a “store of value, but a system, we can start to rethink many of the applications we currently have in the world with new eyes.

Example #1: social media

We are seeing an increase in the abuse of automation in the form of bots, anonymous trolls, and cyber-bullying.

Imagine a world where you may need to pay (in the form of micro-transactions) in order to comment, post, or reply. Mind you, this is already taking place on various sites such as Yours.org and Steem.it.

If someone really wanted to post negative things, en masse, it may cost them an arm and a leg to do so. Now, some will, of course, be willing to pay this, but then what?

Well, if data/transactions are being sent via Bitcoin (as the underlying plumbing system), all things get traced back to its source. It makes it very easy to track down if absolutely needed.

This starts to shift people towards more honest behaviour, as it brings in accountability.

Example #2: identity

With personal keys, Bitcoin removes the need for things like usernames, passwords, 2FA, etc.

You hold your keys. Other providers then need to request access to your data from which you could potentially be paid for directly, and in real-time, versus how it’s currently set up, whereby you give your data over freely and then lose out on any money made by third-parties selling your data.

Also Read: Student housing startup Oxfordcaps secures US$8.15M led by Times Internet

Example #3: copyright

Whenever something like an image, video, audio file, etc. gets copied, the piece of data’s original source (currently contained via OP_RETURN within a Bitcoin transaction) can be traced back and attributed correctly to the source owner and their original transaction ID.

It is immutable.

Another useful example may come in the form of global, federated search. A fellow community management expert, Rachel Happe, shares:

“With Bitcoin underpinning everything, this becomes a reality, as all data becomes traceable/interlinked, while privacy still remains intact and secure (just not anonymous). We cry out for federated search, but also seek privacy. Bitcoin (as a system) is that near-perfect middle ground.”

Now, we haven’t even covered how communities have formed around Bitcoin (as an idea) itself, but if we wish to truly innovate, we must discard all that we think we know.

We must start from scratch, but with lessons learned from the past. Is Bitcoin (as a system) still worth keeping an eye on, in terms of reshaping our global financial/social infrastructure?

Let’s see.

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Image Credits: antonioguillem

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Plus, Alibaba buys Israeli AR company and Dathena raises funding

Vietnamese social influencer startup raises “seven-digit” Series A — [e27]</h3

Hiip, a startup offering an automated influencer platform to help brands and advertisers connect with social influencers in Vietnam and Thailand, has secured a “7-digit Series A round” led by Thai VC firm Vnet Capital.

Japan Strategic Capital, Tokyo-listed marketing technology company Rentracks and Singapore-based Vulpes Investment Management have also joined the round.

Launched in April 2016, Hiip is an online platform to help connect brands, advertisers directly with the appropriate impact on the first social network in Vietnam and Thailand. Using AI and Big Data technologies, the platform helps brands and advertisers to reach target customers, build brand reputation and increase sales by connecting directly with a network of thousands of influencers to promote products product, service or specific campaigns.

Taiwan vacation rental startup AsiaYo expands to Singapore and Malaysia — [Press Release]

AsiaYo, a travel startup that recently raised US$7 million from Alibaba Taiwan Entrepreneurs Fund and China Development Financial, announced today plans to expand to Singapore and Malaysia. In Southeast Asia, the company already has a presence in Thailand.

The company will launch their service in Singapore and Malaysia during the second quarter of 2019. It also plans to expand to Japan in H2 2019.

AsiaYo is a vacation rental platform based in Taiwan that claims to have over 60,000 listings across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Thailand.

Alibaba buys Infinity Augmented Reality, an Israel VR company — [TechCrunch]

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has bought Infinity Augmented Reality, an Israeli startup focussed on virtual reality, according to TechCrunch.

Alibaba had led Infinity’s Series C funding round in 2016 and has worked with the company on numerous projects since that time.

The company has built a platform that makes it easier for companies to integrate augmented and virtual reality into their apps. As part of the deal, Infinity’s R&D team will work out of Alibaba’s Israel Machine Laboratory based in Tel Aviv.

Singapore AI data protection startup raises funding — [e27]

Singapore-based Dathena, an AI-based data protection and privacy management platform, has announced the closing of a funding round led by MS&AD Ventures Inc. Participating in the round are existing investors CerraCap Ventures and Demetis.

Dathena said it will use the funding to support the global deployment of new customers. Later this year, the company plans to have another funding round to enable further scaling.

Singtel appoints McKinsey veteran to board — [Press Release]

The Singaporean telco Singtel announced today it has appointed Dominic Barton as an Independent Director of the company Board, effective immediately. The news brings the total number of people on the Singtel board to 12.

Barton has a long history at McKinsey and worked as the Global Managing Partner for nine years. He also is the Chair of the Board for Teck Resources, a Canadian mining company.

“The diversity of his experience will be invaluable as Singtel’s digital transformation takes the Group into businesses and partnerships that cut across multiple industries. I’m delighted to welcome Dominic to the Singtel board,” said Singtel Chairman Simon Israel in a statement.

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Photo by Gian Cescon on Unsplash

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80 per cent of Singaporeans use the internet every day, and the online market is growing steadily

According to Statista.com, by 2021, e-commerce shares in retail sales worldwide would have reached a staggering 17.5 per cent, growing from 10.2 per cent in 2017.

E-commerce penetrates markets all over the world, and buying online is becoming a common routine. In most countries, you can easily purchase clothes, order food or book tickets with your smartphone.

In this article, we will talk about the dropshipping business model, its features and dropshipping in Singapore.

Dropshipping vs traditional retail

Dropshipping is a form of retail business that became popular with the development of the internet and e-commerce.

In the traditional retail model, an entrepreneur buys products from a wholesaler or manufacturer, stocks them in a warehouse and then resells them to a customer.

Also Read: ClauseMatch commences APAC operations with new Singapore office

Although this scheme is a thousand years old, it has quite distinct drawbacks.

The owner of a store has to keep products in stock which causes additional expenses like renting a warehouse and increase in prices to compensate these expenses.

But the worst part of traditional retail is that you can never accurately predict the demand for your goods.

Since entrepreneurs purchase products beforehand, being unable to sell them means failed investment.

The dropshipping model implies shipping products directly from manufacturer/wholesaler to clients with the retailer serving as a mediator taking care of promotion and customer service.

This results in a number of strategic advantages:

1. The entrepreneur purchases products from the wholesaler/manufacturer only after receiving an order from a customer. It means there’s no need to predict demand fluctuations: if customers lose interest in the given goods, the entrepreneur simply stops ordering them from the wholesaler.

2. Since products are sent directly to customers, there’s no need to rent a warehouse, which saves you money, time and effort.

3. For the same reason, it is possible to do dropshipping business online. An entrepreneur can create a web store using the information and media from the wholesaler, but doesn’t need to have a real stock of goods.

4. Since a potential owner of a dropshipping business doesn’t have to invest in bulk purchase and warehouse, it is possible to start this business with a relatively little budget. As a result, almost anyone can use this model and even try it as an additional source of income without quitting their main job.

However, this model has a number of drawbacks as well:

• It is usually the dropshipping store owners who takes care of clients’ complaints and refunds.
• In this business, errors in shipment and inventory issues are a common problem.
• Since entrepreneurs can’t even see the products they sell, they have no control over their quality. Same goes for quality and speed of delivery.

Still, despite these disadvantages, a lot of people find this model quite profitable.

Why do you need to start dropshipping in Singapore?

Dropshipping requires only a computer and an internet connection, so one can dropship from anywhere in the world.

Also Read: Singaporean fintech Hydra X partners with Chicago-based Seed CX

However, the choice of sale markets depend on many factors like the demand for the products within the given niche, the purchasing power of the population, the frequency of online deals in the given country and the availability of free shipment.

Thus, this is what makes Singapore a good candidate for dropshipping:

• According to Eshopworld.com, by 2021, the number of e-commerce users in Singapore will reach 4.1 million, with each spending online an average of US$1234.
• According to Statista.com, e-commerce user penetration in Singaporean retail equals to 69.6 per cent and by 2023 will reach 73.2 per cent.
• According to Hashmeta.com, 70 per cent of Singaporeans are active social media users, which is an important statistic for e-commerce.
• Due to the high costs of living and high prices, online stores importing goods from ‘cheaper’ countries (mostly from China) can easily compete with local retailers.
• Most online stores (including dropshipping ones) use the English language which is one of the official languages in Singapore.
• While there are big companies using dropshipping business model, individual entrepreneurs can open online dropshipping stores too. It’s become a common practice to order products from popular wholesaler platforms such as Salehoo, Amazon and AliExpress.

About 80 per cent of Singaporeans use the internet every day, and the online market is growing steadily. In fact, the e-commerce industry in Singapore is expected to be worth US$5.4 billion by 2025.

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The home maintenance service joins forces with OrangeTee & Tie to let property agents and clients book housekeeping services

Home service platform Helpling announces that it will be integrated into Singaporean OrangeTee & Tie’s property agents app to bring housekeeping services booking to agents and their clients.

With this partnership, Helpling will have access to a network of over 4,200 property agents who are on board to provide on-demand home services in Singapore. OrangeTee & Tie’s agents can now book professional housekeepers to clean the property before presentation through the Helpling platform using the Agent App.

Besides booking cleaners, agents can also refer their clients to Helpling.

Coining the integration as “Services 4.0 technologies”, the app will provide cloud-native applications to accelerate their digital transformation and deliver better customer experience.

“It is important that our agents are provided with a seamless experience of booking home cleaning services for their clients. This strategic partnership with Helpling will help OrangeTee
& Tie agents provide personalised services via our app and it will definitely add value along the whole customer journey,” said Steven Tan, Managing Director of OrangeTee & Tie.

Also Read: In fintech, Asia is giving the West a run for its money: Alex Manson of Standard Chartered’s investment arm

James Lim, Managing Director (Asia-Pacific) of Helpling, said, “Having a clean home at a
house viewing is key to making or breaking a deal. The pairing with OrangeTee & Tie will give new impetus to Helpling’s mission of delivering hotel-grade housekeeping to households islandwide.”

All OrangeTee & Tie agents and their clients will get to enjoy US$20 off their first cleaning as part of the launch.

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Photo by Volha Flaxeco on Unsplash

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