Korean Startup Strix offers a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) platform that manages distributed energy resources (DER).  They offer a microgrid which is a next-generation power system that applies modern technology to the traditional unidirectional power grid.  Users are connected to the system by applying IoT devices and can utilize their DERs with minimum cost and time.  Furthermore, STRIX connects to customer’s DERs and energy market to monitor and provide real-time data.  Therefore, based on the customer’s preference, their system automatically operates their assets to efficiently consume electricity.

Strix is a big data-driven electricity specialized IT company.  They offer smart solutions that help to effectively manage energy business needs for the upcoming smart grid era.  They research and develop methods to efficiently produce and consume energy for daily lives.  Strix aims to develop user-friendly technology that allows customers to manage energy easily, leading to a new era where customers can directly buy and sell energy.

KEYS TO WINNING AT RUNWAY TO RISE SEOUL

1. Keep it simple and don’t get too technical.
2. A picture or explanation of the current traditional power grid to the microgrid.
3. Show the user experience for customers, how will they buy and sell energy?

Breakdown:

Strix has a great idea but there is some risk that their pitch could be too technical.  Will they be able to explain their business so that it is clearly understood?  Also a quick visual on the differences of power grids would be helpful.  They need to show WHY the switch to microgrids is the future.  Finally, they will need to show the user experience.  The concept of buying and selling energy by customers is fascinating but how does it work?  What would work best is to describe the common day using their system.  Then they can show graphs showing how much energy they saved throughout the day.

The post Runway to RISE Seoul: Korean Startup STRIX appeared first on Startup Radar.

What Santa Toeic provides you

The mechanism Santa Toeic has is unique. Santa Toeic analyzed 450,000 study data and 30 million answer data. After using machine learning, it created its own algorithm to predict if you are going to get the answer right or wrong.  This is even before you answer the question. Therefore, It gets rid of the questions that you will get right for sure. It rather will bring you only the questions that is necessary for you to know how to get it right.  Also, you don’t have to take lectures that has its own set of orders. It will suggest you only the lectures you need.  They will base this on how you’ve been studying among hundreds of lectures.

It provides a customized curriculum only for you. Every second, it calculates how your score can rise the fastest and most efficiently.  They will also suggest what problem sets you need to work on and what lectures you need to take. Therefore, helping you get the fastest time and the highest score.

Features of Santa Toeic

1. Ability analysis: It will analyze your current TOEIC skills and ability and will give you prediction for the score, rates of each part etc.
2. 13000 problem sets in every part: Throughout part 1-7, there are more than thousand problem sets and latest trend problem sets are updated every time.
3. 500 lectures in every part: Throughout part 1-7, more than 500 lectures are prepared and related notes will be given regarding each lecture.
4. A note of the wrong answers: Every problem sets and lectures you took are saved automatically and you can retake it using filters whenever you want.
5. Santa Voca: 1,100 vocabularies that will be on tests will be given to the users and will help you memorize those effectively using theories.
6. Specialties: Sample questions from previous TOEIC tests and other tips will be provided.

Already more than 250,000 people are using this services and they showed high satisfaction using Santatoeic. If you need to have higher TOEIC score in a short period, take a look at how Santa Toeic will benefit you.

The post Get Your Highest TOEIC score with Korean Startup Santa Toeic appeared first on Startup Radar.

In the United States, QR Code adoption is not nearly as high as it is in Asia.  In terms of IoT, there has been and continues to be an explosion of wearables.  IoT startups using those wearables to create a larger data set about human health.  So there have been a lot of data on ways to be able to count the steps, the heartbeats, and things like that to ultimately create interesting data sets.

What to do with Data Sets

What we at Cultivation Capital struggle with as an investment group is companies believing that they’ll collect whatever data set and it will be where all the value will be driven by the company.  But a lot of times they won’t be able to gather more data.  Or be more effective than big companies like Google or Facebook.  So I think it is very important to differentiate and understand how this can serve a specific segment.  Instead of just thinking that it will be valuable one day and be able to sell it for lots of money.

Creating Real Revenue Traction

Venture Capital firms like to take the least amount of risk possible.  The more traction a company can have the more groups that are interested in investing in them.  I think sometimes it can get frustrating for the entrepreneurs.  They might be thinking too big and they start to realize the difficulties in generating investment interest.  So the future you can get with developing the product and making it closer to real revenue traction, I think the more interest you will get from the financing markets.

The post Some Advice for IoT Startups Regarding Big Data appeared first on Startup Radar.

The Problem

Many people don’t realize that on average 26% of business customer records contains errors.  If they are not maintained bad data will grow by 24% per year.  Therefore this means that in less than 5 years your customer database will be worthless.  66% of this error is caused by human error which can be prevented.  Also, it costs you 10 times more to process a dirty record than it is to process a clean record.

For those that have mixed up a client name or got a return call or can’t contact your customers, you have a problem that needs to be solved.  Research shows that 97% of businesses suffer from common customer contact errors.  Businesses with clean data can increase their profits by 15% on average.

Why do we have dirty data?

The current process of collecting, processing, and maintaining personal information is not helping.  Personal information is dynamic and changes over time.  Businesses rely on customers to notify them of any changes.  However, customers have hundreds of accounts and relationships and therefore are unlikely to notify you of a change in information.  Furthermore, the process of making a change such as calling, emailing, or in person is troublesome.  Most of these processes are usually manual which means that they are prone to error and are very costly to operate.

How Does Regit Work?

When an individual makes a change to their information on the Regit network, all their trust relationships are automatically notified of the change.  Regit is compliant because only pre-specified information is shared and only after the customer has provided their consent.

Businesses create an interaction, selects the required information, and sends the request for information to the individual on the Regit Platform.  Then the individual reviews the request and if they give their consent the required information is sent to the business with as little as one click.

How much is it?

Regit gives individuals the control of their own information.  The service is 100% free for individuals.  Businesses only pay for what they use.

The Regit platform will enable you to always have clean data so you can focus on your product, reduce costs, and be compliant with personal data and privacy requirements.  All this for the fraction of what it costs you currently.

The post Take Control of your Information with Regit appeared first on Startup Radar.

From a geographic standpoint, Korea offers an incredible opportunity in the agricultural industry.  The entire peninsula, only 20% of the land is arable.  You can actually grow food on.  So if you look at restricted resources and how you are going to make those resources more efficient and more effective, data management, data analysis, and data interpretation and innovation is really critical.

Korea needs to remember that data hygiene from the very beginning is very important.  They need to consider:

1.  If you are consistently collecting information from people
2.  If you don’t have a way of storing it.  Not just storing it on a server, but organizing it in a way that is easy to interpret, analyze and use that to deliver back to your customers.
3.  If the hygiene is not there you are eventually going to run into massive problems that will cost you time and money.

Data really isn’t just data. You have to find a business model. You have to find a way to monetize it.  Therefore if you are pulling together however many gigabytes of data per day that you can.  It only goes so far unless you find a way to package it and monetize it.  The agricultural sector is trying to figure out how to harmonize all of these different parts of the supply chain and how data can be utilized from beginning to end.  But if Korean startups don’t have a business model on how to monetize it, it is not going to work.  I am looking out for the day when many of the sectors I am looking at start to mature, and these business models really start to become profitable.

The post How Korea’s Agricultural Industry Should Use Big Data appeared first on Startup Radar.

South Korean Startups in the big data space need to understand that data is everywhere.  The question is not where the data is but rather who owns that data.  Blockchain as a technology tool has the ability to take away some of the issues in terms of who owns the data.  Which can be a very controversial component.  Something like agriculture and traceability, maybe farmers are concerned that Monsanto is going to own it or John Deer is going to own it or some other input company will own it.  So it is important to put it on the blockchain and know that it has public custody.   That information offers a lot more transparency into the system.

Creating Value with Big Data

If startups are going to start collecting a lot of information and put it into a database.  They will also need to write some tools and algorithms to ultimately create value.  It is important to be selling into a growing and profitable market and industry.  Therefore we’ve had some challenges with some of the startups we’ve worked with.  They had some really great big data solutions but for brick and mortar retail.  Therefore they were not struggling to maintain market shares.  Like any business, just because you can start counting it more effectively and efficiently.  Then ultimately provide insights, you definitely need to be doing it in an industry that is growing.  Because you need to find a willing customer base to pay for those sorts of things.

We are seeing a major demand for transparency and traceability for consumers.  So South Korean Startups should really want to know what it is Koreans are buying.  Where it is from.  What they are putting in their bodies.  We really expect that to continue and grow for a number of years and we are very interested in making investments across that sector.

Take Advantage of Free Datasets

There are a lot of really smart entrepreneurs that see that governments and other organizations actually freely give away some very valuable data that if they can start to build on top of that, they can build really powerful and effective businesses.  One investment that we have is in a company called Benson Hill which is taking a publically available genetic data about plants that are all different types of standards and what they are really doing is putting it into one standard, into one database that they can look at and are reselling this to a whole bunch of different customers.  So they didn’t need to go out and collect something that wasn’t available.  Most of this is publically available in the genome project which was primarily government funded but they were clever and smart enough to actually start organizing it and scrubbing it and putting it into a centralized database to build a product.  So I think there will be a major trend with entrepreneurs around the world taking advantage of free datasets that already exist and building applications on top of that.

The post South Korean Startups Need to Take Advantage of Free Data Sets appeared first on Startup Radar.

Everyplace in the world whether it is Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, food is grown.  It is all over the place.  There is a certain element to farming or agriculture that is very sensitive and uncontrollable which is the weather.  Many livelihoods are greatly affected by temperature, by droughts, by other forces of weather.  Many farmers are starting to try to hedge the risk, against some of the downfalls that can overtake them before a harvest.  So they are taking out insurance policies with larger insurance companies but one of the issues that the insurance companies are running into is that they really have no way of interpreting what is a risky parcel of land and what is a profitable part of the land.  So we made an investment in an international company located out of Buenos Aries called S4.  What S4 does is that it collects weather data from other agronomics sources of data and what they do is that they pool all of this together and what this enables is financial services for firms or insurance companies can take this abrogation of data and build out actuarial tables, insurance policies and figure out how to assign premiums and thresholds.  Financial institutions can figure out how has this land performed in the past.  What are the current commodity prices and what kind of credit lines I can issue to these farmers?  So S4 from a B2B standpoint has really figured out agronomic data into something that can be used by financial services companies.

The industry that I come from we really look at two things.  One, where are you in relation to your customer.  Two, how are you going to leverage the region or the geography that you occupy.  We have really come to the conclusion that if you are going to be a successful agriculture company, no matter what kind of data set that you have it is important to have a global presence. I think you should have the vision to have a global presence, but to leverage the geography that you are currently occupying is certainly a good indicator of future success.

One of the major issues that we flagged is some of the regulatory hurdles that Agro businesses are facing as it pertains to the government.  Most recently U.S. beef is now allowed to be sold in China and the regulatory hurdles for that beef to be imported is significantly high.  So by utilizing blockchain technology from a traceability standpoint to understand where that cow came from, what it was feed, did it receive any vaccinations or antibiotics.  Those are all very important things that can be delivered to the regulators and to the entire supply chain all the way to the consumer including the government which this has to get over, so I think blockchain is going to play a big role in overcoming some of the large regulatory obstacles that people across the world are currently facing.

The United States Department of Agriculture publishes statistics every quarter annually very consistently.  The way that they collect their data is through postcards.  This is a very primitive way of gathering information that has a massive financial impact.  So we are working with a company right now that is trying to figure out ways of using big data professionally as more and more farmers are now using mobile phones and they can use that to deliver information back to the USDA.  So now somebody does not have to sit in a dark room and count up statistics on these postcards.  This would be one example of how they can collect more accurate information as well as more information that would make all of the analysis more statistically significant.

The post How Agriculture Startups are using Big Data appeared first on Startup Radar.

Cultivation Capital mostly invests in B2B startups, so when we look at opportunities in industries such as big data, we are really looking for a startup that is either developing some hard to collect data sets that will ultimately be valuable for other businesses that they can sell into.  Or tools that help some of these large enterprises better collect and manage their own data.  Ultimately the big data pieces are a means to an end.  You ultimately are trying to develop an application that is going to improve the business productivity for one of our end customers.

Label Insight

We have a portfolio company that is international by birth.  They have two co-founders from New Zealand, one from India, and they all met in Hong Kong.  They started a business called Label Insight because of a family issue.  Their dad got sick and needed to change his diet in order to improve his health.  So they went to the grocery store and were looking at different packages.  They realized that they didn’t have the ability to search and really look at consumer packaged goods and food.  Look at them in a way that would really help them quickly identify the types of food he could eat.  So they started this business by analyzing the nutritional labels for many different products.  Then put them in an Amazon cloud database.  Then ultimately they were able to build a number of ways to search that data set.  Now it serves a whole bunch of customers.

So they have e-commerce customers who want to be able to sell different food products.  But were struggling for a way that could be searched.  So people wanted to search for gluten-free products.  They wanted to search for products that were for specific diets.  They can provide a service to that segment but then they also sell to retailers like Target and Wallmart.  Those retailers are ultimately trying to develop more of their own products because they are encountering so much competition from Amazon.

Another component is selling to groups like Unilever. They want to use this data to be able to ultimately develop future products.  I think this is a good example of just a couple of people who started collecting a lot of information.  Then had a very high bar for quality in what they needed to put into the database.  Ultimately they were able to build a very powerful tool that can serve a lot of different customers.

Have a Global Mindset

We have invested in companies all over the world and I think companies and startups can sell in many countries we tend to tell them to try to focus on an industry or a certain customer segment but in a lot of cases that customer segment will be all over the world.  So, it is certainly important to have a global mindset from the get-go in order to be successful.

There are a lot of issues in trying to build a company across borders.  Label Insights can only sell in the U.S. and Canada because labeling standards for foods are different everywhere in the world.  Languages are also different.  So the language barriers and the different regulatory environment definitely affects your ability to scale globally.  So that is certainly a challenge, but it also creates a lot of value for customers and so many large enterprise companies really are global businesses anyways.  When they are looking for service providers as startups, being able to help companies on a global basis makes them a lot more attractive vendor.

The post How Big Data can be used to Help Startups go Global appeared first on Startup Radar.