Since it was launched about four years ago, a total of 13 products and services have emerged, including the Tojo toy platform that the company unveiled in June last year and for which it began filling pre-orders in January.

Toio is the first product for children made by the in-house incubator. Children use a controller to make small cubes equipped with motors and sensors move around on a tabletop or floor. The cubes are a base upon which users can build robots or vehicles, and they can use the moving objects to play action games and do puzzles.

Toio is based on a study by Sony Computer Science Laboratories and is recommended for children aged six and up. While the platform was still in development, students played with it in a collaboration with a neighbouring elementary school. They tended to concentrate for a long time, because of the platform’s characteristic of allowing users to modify and operate the cubes any way they like.

“I like to present my products whenever I come up with something interesting,” said Sony senior manager Akichika Tanaka. “I think Sony style means changing lifestyles by creating new value.”

The incubator started under the prodding of Sony president and chief executive officer Kazuo Hirai. As of March 2017, the company had held nine auditions in which a total of about 1,600 participants submitted about 600 entries.

“We are encouraging open innovation through greater networking and bringing together individuals from both inside and outside the company,” said Hirai at the 2015 IFA electronics show in Berlin.

“By encouraging entrepreneurship and pursuing unconventional ideas and ventures, we continue to create an ecosystem essential to the development and growth of new businesses,” Hirai said, while holding new products developed through the seed acceleration programme in his hands.

New products and services from the program have been garnering a lot of attention among various industries. For instance, the “wena wrist” project proposed that analogue watches could be turned into smartwatches.

The employee who proposed this was new to the company, but even they could collect about 100 million yen using a crowd-funding framework established by Sony and seek for it to become a full-fledged business. There is also the Huis Remote Controller, which allows users to arrange their remote control buttons as they like, and a personal aromatherapy diffuser that contains five different aromas. In April 2016, Sony expanded the European branch of its incubator. The company later launched its smart office solutions business, which was selected by the European seed acceleration programme and introduced to European countries in September last year. This service aims to solve common office problems such as finding available meeting rooms and locating colleagues.

Sony has forecast an operating profit of 720 billion for the year ending March, the best ever in its 72-year history. Hirai will step down from his post on April 1 and become chairman of the company without representation rights. Some observers are saying that the time has come to move the incubation program from a symbol of organisational reform to a fully developed business.

The Mekong Business Challenge (MBC), an annual competition that launched in Phnom Penh 12 years ago, welcomed 11 entrepreneurial teams from six nations at their contest held in Bhutan last week. The grand prize for the first-place team was a spot in the International Business Model Challenge competition in the US in May.

Stephen Paterson, co-founder and organiser of the MBC, said the contest’s judges – which included representatives from international companies including McKinsey & Company, Google and ManuLife – were impressed by the initiative taken by the Cambodian team in pursuing expansion options for their startup.

“Eco-Plastic came in second in the Cambodian competition [last month], but since [then] they have made so much progress,” Paterson said. “We want to emphasise methodology in our judging, and our criteria takes a look at the failures these teams have had to overcome to make their business models more realistic.”

Since taking home the silver medal, the Eco-Plastic team – female duo Bunhourng Tan and Sokanha Ly – have received funding from a US investor, travelled to China to tour plastic recycling facilities and met with the Ministry of Public Works and Transport to discuss implementing their idea.

“We had a great honour to meet the [Transport] Minister, His Excellency Sun Chanthol, who was very supportive of our idea,” said Sokhana. “We got permission to use the ministry’s laboratory to build and test our samples there, before we went to the MBC.”

“Plastic waste is a curse to the environment, to health and to the economy and people face a high risk driving on roads in Cambodia, which are often poorly constructed and damaged by high traffic,” Sokhana said. “By establishing Eco-Plastic, we can use plastic waste to improve our roads, transforming landfill waste into a roadfill product.”

Teammate Tan said that the pair had learned a lot since first coming up with their idea at the end of 2016, having entered several different local startup competitions and coming away with different lessons each time.

“During the last year, we’ve been to many startup competitions and throughout the programmes, our team gained more hands-on experience,” she said. “It’s been quite a journey, of going up and down, of failing and of learning from mistakes, of listening and then adjusting to incorporate the feedback.”

Though a Bhutanese team took first place for their startup called Shogjur – which has already turned a profit from sales of recycled paper jewellery and souvenirs – the runner-up Cambodian team won a pair of laptops and has been encouraged to bring the Eco-Plastic business model to the US competition in May via another application process.

“The Eco-Plastic team will be applying for the open spot” in the US competition, Paterson said, adding he had “a very strong feeling they’ll get it”.

Cambodia’s win in a regional competition was a sign of the growing entrepreneurial scene in the Kingdom, according to Paterson, and was likely due in-part to the many local programs and competitions that cater to university students. The next step for the Kingdom’s startups would be to think bigger.

“There are businesses attracting small- to medium-size returns, but there’s still a lack of investable ideas,” he said. “There is still a lack of projects that can be scaled up to a larger level.”

Facebook’s reputation has taken a massive hit in the past week, after the revelation that it allowed Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy working for the Donald Trump campaign, to wrongfully harvest the profiles of 50 million Facebook users without their permission to identify and target potential voters during the 2016 US election.

The incident greatly undercut the public’s trust in Facebook and ignited serious privacy concerns that many speculate could set off a mass exodus of users worldwide from the social network.

Though South Korean accounts were not included among the Facebook profiles breached in the recent scandal, many users here are alarmed over the safety of their data stored on Facebook.

“Facebook has been complacent about its data security, to the point of irresponsibility. I know a lot of people are shutting down their accounts, but there are many others who are afraid to cut off the relationships they’ve built over the network,” said Kim So-jung, a 29-year-old office worker in Seoul who has been using Facebook for the past 14 years.

“Unless Facebook comes up with a way to remedy the situation and gain back trust, it won’t be long before it is replaced by another viable social network.”

Amid mounting criticism, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week issued a formal apology and a timeline of the events that had happened. The firm also announced a set of new measures to strengthen its data protection mechanisms in order to regain the public’s trust.

“I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook.

In 2007, Facebook launched a new platform that allowed people to log into apps and share a part of their own profiles and the identity of their friends. Through this platform, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan in 2013 created a personality quiz app which was installed by 300,000 people, collecting the data of those users as well as their friends.

Then in 2014, Facebook changed the app-sharing platform to significantly limit the data apps could access, in order to prevent abuse. This meant apps could no longer ask for data about a person’s friends unless they had also authorized the app.

In 2015, Facebook became aware that Kogan had sold the data from his app to Cambridge Analytica, and asked the firm to delete the information.

However, a string of news reports last week revealed that Cambridge Analytica had not deleted the data, but used them to target potential voters during the 2016 US presidential election.

Facebook is now facing investigations, probes and hearings from authorities in the US, the UK, the European Union and Canada, while some of its major advertising clients are considering to stop placing ads on the social network.

Facebook said it would investigate all the apps that had access to large amounts of information prior to Facebook’s 2014 policy change to address potential data misuse. The social network will also turn off access for unused apps, restrict the data that an app can request, make app management and control easier and more visible for users and reward those who find misuses of data by app developers.

Despite Zuckerberg’s plans for a privacy policy revamp, criticisms of Facebook linger, and the CEO is expected to be summoned for questioning by authorities in the US and elsewhere.

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook’s shares have continued to slide, by a total of around 10 per cent this week.

Meanwhile, Facebook was ordered to pay a 396 million won ($369,600) penalty in Korea earlier this week, for causing slower internet speeds by re-routing networks while negotiating network usage fees with local internet service providers.

The penalty, handed by the Korea Communications Commission, addresses a dispute among Facebook and local ISPs that had been ongoing since 2015, and is unrelated to the ongoing data breach incident involving Facebook.

Ainun Najib, the head of data for ride-hailing company Grab in Malaysia, said the reason for the talent shortage might be the education system, which was not designed to produce data scientists.

He said the phenomenon was not limited to Indonesia, as data science was relatively new and had only grown significantly in recent years.

“With no formal background in education, data scientist talents turned to other fields. Academics are now trying to fill that void,” he said.

Algoritma, a startup company, was founded at the end of 2017 as the first data science academy in Indonesia. Ainun said Grab tried to create an environment that would attract talent.

“Grab employees come from 45 countries,” he added.

Andreas Hadimulyono, a Grab warehouse engineer, pointed to mapping and traffic data that could be used to locate the best routes while using Grab’s transport services.

“In this instance, we use data on locations, traffic and time.

Which route to take

Even choosing a particular exit at one mall could make a difference in [deciding] which route to take. All of that is based on data,” he said.

Ainun said data scientists needed to master three different skill sets: business science and the understanding of marketing and consumers; analytical ability related to mathematics and statistics; and technical ability, particularly in coding and hacking.

Hai said that the development of e-commerce must be accompanied with quality logistics services as logistics are crucial for online sales.

According to the ministry, since 2015, though logistics and delivery services have grown rapidly, they have not met the needs of e-commerce.

High logistics and delivery costs in online sales has led to online purchase prices not being much lower than for traditional purchases, Hai said, adding that the quality of delivery services is low.

In Vietnam, logistics enterprises and e-commerce firms are mainly small and medium sized, their scale of operation is not large, they lack professionalism, and they lack close links to serve customers.

This is one of the reasons that online purchasing is unattractive to consumers and why logistics for e-commerce has not developed. Therefore, improving the efficiency of |logistics services to support e-commerce is urgent.

To tackle the problem, the Department of Import-Export and the Department of E-Commerce and Digital Economy will hold a workshop themed “Logistics and E-Commerce: Companion for Development” on April 10.

The workshop aims to find causes |for the weak links and propose practical solutions.

The seminar will feature State management agencies in logistics and e-commerce, associations, enterprises, as well as research and training organisations in logistics and e-commerce.