“When I was at P&G, we only did TV [marketing] in Southeast Asia, because TV gives brand equity [more than other mediums],” Xia tells The Edge Singapore. “It has the biggest influence on purchasing intent in Southeast Asia.” The former Asia-Pacific regional senior brand manager left the fast-moving consumer goods company P&G to help found Cloud Wings in February this year.
Cloud Wings expects to close three partnerships with broadcasters and TV channels in North America and Asia. “One of [Cloud Wings’ partners] owns an e-commerce platform,” Xia adds. The app will be rolled out live to “millions of users” this year.
Academic start
Cloud Wings’ app — called HEY! Shake — builds on technology created by NTU associate professor Wen Yonggang. “Six years ago, we started developing the technology, but the demand was not there,” says Wen, director of the innovation lab at NTU’s school of computer science and engineering, “Now, the mobile commerce market is mature enough for us to roll out this app.”
Xia, a former student of Wen’s, had helped out with the research. Earlier this year, Xia and 16 others — many of whom were also Wen’s students — came together to form Cloud Wings.
HEY! Shake uses a patent-pending technology called AirSense. The team helps advertisers and TV content owners encode inaudible sound patterns in the audio tracks of TV content. The app, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology, reads the sound patterns and uses them to direct viewers to relevant websites.
“We chose [audio technology] instead of visual-based technology because it is more effective,” Wen says. “Visual-based technology is limited by distance, lighting and camera angles.” Cloud Wings’ audio technology can track sound patterns in video clips from up to 30m away in a noisy environment. The technology takes less than one second to interpret the video content, he says, whereas other similar applications could take up to 15 seconds.
The team at Cloud Wings has been testing the technology every two weeks. “We achieved 99% accuracy with our technology,” says Xia, adding that the technology can work even with the likes of Netflix, Instagram and digital signboards.
Tough fight for marketing dollars
Cloud Wings is among a growing number of start-ups going after the trillion-dollar marketing industry. Singapore-based AI start-up ViSenze, which has raised US$14 million from investors that include Rakuten Ventures, SPH Media Fund and UOB Venture Management, allows users to take a photograph of an item using a smartphone and upload the photo to an e-commerce site to find similar items. It launched its Visual Commerce Platform in March this year. The system analyses images and video content, then automatically links them to products from online retailers.
Another local player is Wootag, which has a self-service platform for marketers to encode links to their videos. These videos can then be put up on popular platforms such as Facebook. The technology has won over customers such as Nestlé and Unilever, as well as some banks in Singapore.
The start-up is in the midst of a pre-Series A funding round with prominent venture capitalists in Singapore. These start-ups are competing against tech giants with far greater R&D budgets and resources. “The market is becoming more competitive with tech giants such as Google, YouTube, Facebook and Microsoft doubling down on AI and creating their own in-house [marketing] solutions,” says ViSenze co-founder Oliver Tan. “But the good thing for start-ups is that there is no monopoly in AI, so I would say it is still possible for start-ups to be very good or even better than these tech giants in a particular tech [market segment].”
One way to compete is to offer marketers meaningful insights from data. Wootag founder Raj Sunder says the company has developed algorithms to track what users do. “For instance, we know if they pick up an item [to put into the cart] but do not buy it.”
At Cloud Wings, Xia is hoping to woo sceptical marketers with a pay-per-sale model. “It gives our customers more confidence that it can work,” he says.
The app is currently live on NTU’s campus, where students can shake their way to on-campus discounts, activities and news. Cloud Wings has received grants from various government agencies and the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. It also raised an undisclosed seed round from venture capitalists and angel investors earlier this year. Xia says the startup has enough cash to carry out its plans comfortably.
This article first appeared in Issue 796 (Sept 11) of The Edge Singapore
