The Asia Tech Podcast learned a lot from Mary Jo Schrade, Assistant General Counsel, Regional Lead, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit Asia.  Mary Jo oversees the initiatives, programs, and strategies related to Microsoft Asia’s efforts to prevent or disrupt organized cybercrime and online tech support scams through public-private partnerships, coordinated enforcement, and customer engagements relating to cybersecurity and Microsoft's digital trust commitment to its customers. Some of the topics that Mary Jo and I discussed included: The digital security landscape and the trends in Asia Statistics on the sophistication and complexity of recent cyberattacks The nature of tech support scams and the impact on individuals and companies The impact of COVID-19 on the number and scope of cyberattacks in the past 12 months What consumers can do to protect themselves from any kind of cyber attack, digital security breach, and scams in general Microsoft's strategy to combat scams The role that governments play in this space The importance of collaboration between companies and governments to tackle such scams Read more about such scams from Mary Jo's blogpost and check out the full Microsoft 2021 Global Tech Support Scams Research Report

The Asia Tech Podcast was joined by Lorenzo Peracchione, a co-Founder and COO at Bukukas, a financial bookkeeping application and potentially so much more for Indonesia's MSMEs and Warungs.  You may notice in the recording the moment in which Lorenzo and I realize we had met each other in person, years earlier, in Singapore. Some of the things that Lorenzo and I covered in our conversation: Most of Lorenzo's professional life has been in Southeast Asia The early days of building Lazada in Indonesia Moving to Thailand to launch Luxola until it was acquired by Sephora The founding of BukuKas and Lorenzo's friendship and professional relationship with his co-Founder Krishnan Menon What makes a great founding team The massive gap of available digital services for 60 million MSMEs and Warungs in Indonesia tailored to their needs The power of the entrepreneurial culture in Indonesia The simplicity of use and understanding for BukuKas' first product Tokko and the integration of Social and Conversational Commerce The importance of data and data analysis The mantra that states, "If BukuKas can help make the merchants successful, then BukuKas can be successful."

The Asia Tech Podcast had an enjoyable and interesting conversation with Claudia Kolonas, a Founder of Pluang, an all-in-one investment app that is meant to promote financial inclusion in Indonesia. Some of the topics Claudia and I covered: Financial literacy on the road to financial inclusion Many Indonesians are introduced to finance on Facebook and Instagram The impact of ‘influencers’ Making an investment should have low monetary barriers to entry and should be frictionless How her background help shaped her views on financial inclusion The importance of portfolio diversification across varied asset classes and currencies Both commodities and crypto have a proper place in a portfolio Harvard Business School and Business at the “Base of the Pyramid” The importance of liquidity and compounding Building a company culture of experimentation Follow Michael Waitze and the Asia Tech Podcast here: Facebook – Michael Waitze Facebook – Asia Tech Podcast LinkedIn – Michael Waitze Twitter – Michael Waitze Asia Tech Podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by the podcast creators, hosts, and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of Podcast Network Asia. Any content provided by the people on the podcast are of their own opinion, and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Tanya Rolfe, a Managing Partner at Her Capital,  joined the Asia Tech Podcast for an across the board awesome discussion about women in tech and venture capital.  Her Capital is a female-led seed fund in Singapore investing in female-founded, scalable businesses operating in Southeast Asia. Some of the topics Tanya and I covered included: The founding of the Ladies Investment Club (LIC) Investing in transformative technologies The buying power of female consumers Sustainable solutions for the world’s most pressing social challenges The importance of women becoming investors How to enable organizations to be diverse from the outset and beyond Do female-founded companies outperform? Are the ROIs better? Follow Michael Waitze and the Asia Tech Podcast here: Facebook – Michael Waitze Facebook – Asia Tech Podcast LinkedIn – Michael Waitze Twitter – Michael Waitze Asia Tech Podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by the podcast creators, hosts, and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of Podcast Network Asia. Any content provided by the people on the podcast are of their own opinion, and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

The Asia Tech Podcast was joined by Paul Meinshausen, a co-founder of Aampe. Aampe uses automated, rapid learning to personalize notifications. Paul’s career started doing statistical analysis for the U.S. Department of Defense – which included a deployment to Afghanistan. His role was to try to understand why people do things and get them to do some things less and some things more.  It was here that Paul learned a lot about the limits of behavioral science in complex environments. Some of the topics that Paul and I discussed included: Building a startup in India and exiting What are the real reasons apps get developed? With low barriers to entry and almost unlimited competition, user engagement design needs to evolve The era of spending large sums of money on Facebook ads to acquire ads is over Continuous, automated experimentation is just as important as machine learning on raw data Not understanding the subtle differences can cause investment in the wrong level of data science Companies like Facebook and Google have succeeded as much due to massive experimentation as to traditional machine learning The implication of the scarcity of time and attention What personalization means for media companies The state of tech and startups in Southeast Asia Follow Michael Waitze and the Asia Tech Podcast here: Facebook – Michael Waitze Facebook – Asia Tech Podcast LinkedIn – Michael Waitze Twitter – Michael Waitze Asia Tech Podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by the podcast creators, hosts, and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of Podcast Network Asia. Any content provided by the people on the podcast are of their own opinion, and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

The Asia Tech Podcast was joined by Dr. Ayesha Khanna, a co-Founder and the CEO of ADDO AI. ADDO AI leverages data asa strategic asset to help companies become more competitive. Some of the topics we discussed: Growing up in an open-minded family that always encouraged her Always feeling accepted in male-dominated fields throughout her education Entrepreneurialism and building your own things from scratch Supporting female entrepreneurs through HSBC Jade and #SupportEntrepreneHER Being a role model for other entrepreneurs Some common challenges faced by female Entrepreneurs Follow Michael Waitze and the Asia Tech Podcast here: Facebook – Michael Waitze Facebook – Asia Tech Podcast LinkedIn – Michael Waitze Twitter – Michael Waitze Asia Tech Podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by the podcast creators, hosts, and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of Podcast Network Asia. Any content provided by the people on the podcast are of their own opinion, and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

The Asia Tech Podcast ventured (virtually) Down Under to James Fyfe and Blake Lockley, the co-Founders of Portant. Portant is an automated reporting platform that empowers you to create stunning reports with less effort...but the goal is to be much more than that. These two guys were great and they took the recording so seriously that they actually went to a studio and used some super microphones and even had a green screen with the Sydney Harbour Bridge displayed behind them. They were also quite serious about building Portant into something large and influential. Some of the topics we discussed included: The founding of Portant and the belief that people are wasting their potential on monotonous tasks at work James and Blake (sounds like a duo in a buddy cop movie) want people to have a better work-life balance The understanding that people enjoy the creative parts of their jobs the most and do not want to get bogged down in repetition The work that can be automated should be automated so that humans can do the creative work that only humans can do They take their company seriously, but their titles...no so much

The Asia Tech Podcast enjoyed speaking with Xania Wong, a co-founder and the CEO of JOBDOH. JOBDOH is an AI-based HR and Fintech solution offering end-to-end services from job search to payroll stretching for employers and employees. Some of the topics that Xania and I discussed: The difficulty in hiring in this environment, particularly for part-time workers Digital transformation across the job hiring and payments spectrum Canadian born and raised in Hong Kong Building multiple businesses, including a wine business How she can be quite nerdy, but that may not be immediately obvious How her CFA is super handy now that JOBDOH is also building financial products What it means to be part of the ‘Slash’ generation Follow Michael Waitze and the Asia Tech Podcast here: Facebook – Michael Waitze Facebook – Asia Tech Podcast LinkedIn – Michael Waitze Twitter – Michael Waitze Asia Tech Podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by the podcast creators, hosts, and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of Podcast Network Asia. Any content provided by the people on the podcast are of their own opinion, and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

The Asia Tech Podcast was excited to be joined by Gokul Ganapathi and Vikas Anand from botminds.ai. Gokul is the co-founder and the CEO while Vikas is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing. The Botminds platform contains all of the intelligent modular building blocks to combine and create no-code intelligent automation. Some of the fascinating topics we discussed included: What is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and why is it important? How is IDP different from what most enterprises are doing now? How does IDP work in a no-code environment? What are some of the challenges to getting document capture correct? Can seemingly unrelated documents be recognized as related by IDP? How can Artificial Intelligence be applied to Robotic Process Automation to create scalable Intelligent Process Automation (IPA)? Are enterprises ready for a no-code environment? How has the exponential increase in compute power, the decrease in storage costs, and the ubiquity of cloud computing changed the way enterprises can take advantage of both Intelligent Document Processing and Intelligent Process Automation? Follow Michael Waitze and the Asia Tech Podcast here: Facebook - Michael Waitze Facebook - Asia Tech Podcast LinkedIn - Michael Waitze Twitter - Michael Waitze Asia Tech Podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by the podcast creators, hosts, and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of Podcast Network Asia. Any content provided by the people on the podcast are of their own opinion, and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

The Asia Tech Podcast had a lot of fun talking to Hayden Hughes, a co-founder and the CEO of Alpha Impact. Alpha Impact is a social trading platform for cryptocurrencies that lets users keep funds in their own accounts. Built by two banking veterans with experience in the crypto and traditional financial services industries, the founders’ philosophy is that investing in cryptocurrencies needs to become safer and better understood in order to gain mass adoption. Some of the topics that Hayden and I covered: Participating in the Antler program in Singapore Dropping out of the University of British Columbia and building his first business Social trading and copying the trading strategies of verified and vetted top crypto traders Non-custodial trading and why it is better to keep your money in your own account The benefits of being in Singapore and its progressive regulatory and funding environment The non-traditional way in which Alpha Impact raised funds for business expansion Finding an investment and trading strategy that works best for you It is still early days in the crypto trading markets Follow Michael Waitze and the Asia Tech Podcast here: Facebook – Michael Waitze Facebook – Asia Tech Podcast LinkedIn – Michael Waitze Twitter – Michael Waitze Asia Tech Podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed by the podcast creators, hosts, and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of Podcast Network Asia. Any content provided by the people on the podcast are of their own opinion, and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.