Lynk News & Insights

Check out our exclusive interviews on video with Thibault Corens, the CTO and Co-Founder, of Presso,  and Charles Oh, COO and Co-Founder of Booqed.  We had the chance to interview these two finalists of the ultimate pitch competition at RISE 2019, and discuss their trending innovations.

The two companies featured are experts in providing on-demand solutions after having understood consumers’ daily pain points, such as with Presso’s smart hardware solution, and with Booqed’s smart mobile solution. Both are commendable concepts in business-to-business (B2B) contexts, and also for the individual consumer. Thus, we are featuring them to champion their innovative contributions to the fourth industrial revolution as envisioned by the World Economic Forum.

Presso’s innovation to mankind is one that saves an enormous amount of time from the chore of laundry and/or dry cleaning. Their smart solution takes only 5 minutes for your clothing item to go through the entire dry-cleaning process, boasting its patent process which takes 100 times less water and 3 times less electricity per garment as opposed to traditional laundry. Presso has had successful trial runs not only at individual users’ houses but also in large hotel groups’ guest rooms, stationed for both direct usages of the hotel guest, and also for the use of the back-end hospitality staff as well.

Thibault walks us through how himself and his college batchmate came up with Presso, “In freshman year, we had our own separate startups, but when we came together, we realised we both really hated doing laundry. He explains that’s how he and his co-founder decided to reinvent the laundry and washing machine industry. “We looked at dry cleaning as it’s really old and overused. It’s really bad for your clothes as well which a lot of people don’t know.”

Booqed has introduced yet another revolutionary smart-app for both business and individual users to solve the pressing fight for a quiet and up-to-par working space on demand. Charles shares how the team at Booqed experienced these pain points themselves, before introducing their solution, “One of my co-founders and I, David, we used to work for a fund previously, which required a lot of traveling throughout Asia and Europe. We would always have meeting or calls at noisy coffee shops, or at a hotel lobby. I mean no joke, especially if you’re traveling through South-East Asia, it’s hard to find a quiet place, especially when you need to do important calls when you’re working on a deal.”

Charles shares how the boost in traction of on-demand services, such as that of Uber in Asia, led his team to think if you can order a car on your phone, why can’t you just book a meeting room through your phone? He recalls in retrospect, “I remember thinking how hard can that be? It is quite hard. A lot harder than we thought, but that’s how we started.”

Thibault stressed how Presso was not replacing the human capital involved in the traditional laundry industry, but instead streamlining the processes and augmenting the user’s intelligence, abilities, and experience as his team’s contribution to the fourth industrial revolution – not forgetting the environmentally-friendly efficiencies introduced by this new way of dry-cleaning. Charles also takes a similar viewpoint as to how repurposing and democratising access to the use of already existing spaces are, in fact, another augmentation to the individuals’ day-to-day user experience, even when considering business to business (B2B) functionality, as he sees with the rise of co-working spaces in Asia especially now.

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Check out our exclusive interviews on video with Adarsh Warrier, the CEO and Co-Founder, of Vicara (the “KAI”) and Jaehee Chang, CMO of TOROOC (the “LIKU” robot). We had the chance to catch up with these two finalists of the Machine Demo Competition at RISE 2019 and discuss how they are using technology to positively influence the fourth industrial revolution.

The two finalists are experts in artificial intelligence integrated into the average human’s daily lives, be it from industrial settings at work or even having a companion at home. We are featuring them to champion their innovative contributions to the fourth industrial revolution as envisioned by the World Economic Forum.

The KAI’s wide range of applicability to human life that eliminates bottlenecks in day-to-day activities using technology. Adarsh shares how their invention augments human capabilities to perform better, if not as well as a machine’s precision. The KAI introduces the benefits of technological innovations of improving human capabilities rather than replacing human capital with machine capital.

“Some processes and machines can do some part of it and the humans can do some part of it, the objective is for both to be equally optimised. When a machine works better, the bottleneck will always be with the human. We are trying to create technology to augment the human capabilities so that they can work or communicate better or faster, and hence be more productive, and not be the bottleneck in the process” 

LIKU’s unique positioning of incorporating smart, active, ‘social intelligence’ and ‘core robotics technology’ is another key area of innovations in technology. Similarly to the KAI, LIKU is also focusing on harnessing benefits to other areas of human life, as shared by Jaehee. “This is an autonomous robot running on artificial intelligence, so it has its own emotions and decision-making processes, compared to other remote-controlled robots or being run by commands.” 

“We are building robots for humans, for us, for people. People should not be intimidated by having technologies such as robots in their houses. Right now, LIKU speaks its own language to express its emotions, but we believe that eventually, LIKU will speak the human languages”

She concludes with, “In terms of time and resources, we don’t have enough of them. Looking at robots, they’re considered a business of the future, but we need time and enough resources to bring this future to the present.”

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In celebration of World Entrepreneur Day and Women’s Equality Day, we are excited to present to you our exclusive interview with our all-star female Junior Associate from the Global Client Success Team, Amanda Liusnando, on her recent success at the Photonis Science Challenge. Amanda along with one other teammate, under the team, Oligolight, won first place for their innovative biotech idea. They won rewards of 5000 euros cash prize and an all-expenses-paid trip to Bordeaux for their final pitch.

Can you tell us more about your winning idea at the Photonis Challenge?

The challenge is to help Photonis to develop new products, find new markets and applications, and identify ways to become integrated higher up in the value chain. Our idea was actually following the innovative consumer trends of wearable devices, incorporated with uses optics that are used in biomarker detection. I would love to share more with you but as our idea is actually being adapted for further research and development, I would have to spare the specifics for now. We are excited about the further development of our winning idea! Stay tuned till we are able to share more updates on this!

How did you hear about this challenge and how did you form a team?
As my teammate and I were studying the same major of biotechnology, we shared many classes together and had many similar projects assignments on the idea of the ‘future of biotechnology’. This typically extended to also considering the feasibility of the technology and the business practicality of our ideas. So last year when the Bayer Challenge related to biotechnology came up, my teammate and I decided to put our in-class projects experience to the test, and we won third place actually, which was a trip to Germany as part of our pitch presentation!

We heard about the Photonis competition from the same initial platform that we learned about Bayer Challenge from, Agorize, and as we really enjoyed our time working at last year’s challenge, we thought it would be great for us to join another challenge together. The whole process from ideation to pitching is extremely exciting despite the workload. We especially enjoyed coming up with fun taglines for our product ideas

What was your inspiration for your innovative idea?
Our inspiration came from the impact that is being built on the advancements in genomics, nanotechnology, in particular as part of the transition to the precision medicine era of healthcare.

How did you balance your work responsibilities with competing?
After coming up with our final idea, we decided to split all tasks between the two of us. I led more of the business analysis, while my teammate led the technical analysis. We always gave each other constructive and regular feedback. This was our second year competing together in this competition, and so we knew our strengths better.  

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