Minds Behind Maps Kuo-Yu 'Slayer' Chuang: Leveraging Taiwan's Unique Infrastructure to Support Disaster Response - MBM#39
Kuo-Yu 'Slayer' Chuang is the co-founder of GeoThings, a Taiwanese company leveraging SMS to share GPS location, images & any useful information for disaster response. He was also on the board of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team; and has focused on applying mapping to supporting humanitarian endeavours mostly in Asia.
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About Slayer:
Shownotes:
- Cell Tower data source (used in the intro animation): OpenCellid
- GeoThings
- CrisisMappers
- Asian Development Bank
- Open GeoSMS Standard
- HOT: Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
- ITRI: Industrial Technology Research Institute
- Line
- Book Podcast (and games) recommendations:
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:20) Conversation starts: Slayer describes himself
(07:47) Tech, Preparation & Emergency Situations
(12:18) Deciding what to work on
(16:56) From Idea to Application
(22:03) Focusing on Humanitarian Applications
(26:17) Apps are only useful if people have phones
(31:42) Mobile App or SMS?
(33:30) Aggregating data (Command center)
(36:25) Dealing with Sensitive Data
(40:25) Emergency phone notifications
(42:27) Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
(48:54) State of OpenStreetMap (& open source) in Taiwan
(53:44) Language barrier in Open Source & Programming
(58:26) Line, the most popular app in Taiwan
(01:05:55) Tech literacy
(01:11:06) Taiwan's jump directly to mobile
(01:16:22) Social Enterprise Company
(01:19:40) The Incentives of a Social Entreprise
(01:24:19) GeoThing's Business Model
(01:27:46) Long term support
(01:36:42) Geopolitics of working in Taiwan
(01:47:57) Book/podcast (& games) recommendations
(01:52:04) Sidetrack conversation on Xbox's business model
(01:54:49) Launching a Patreon
- Support on Patreon
- Website
- My Twitter
- Podcast Twitter
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- Edited by Peter Xiong. Find more of his work