Page 43 - Forbes - Asia (July - August 2018)

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
ViSenze: Transforming the Online In 2012, the Singapore-listed company
Shopping Experience opened an Innovation Centre to research
Singapore-based tech start-up ViSenze new raw materials and develop custom-
is changing the way that consumers ized sustainable concrete products to
shop online. The company is a pioneer meet the evolving needs of its custom-
in developing advanced visual-search ers. For instance, it is the only company
and image-recognition solutions to help in Southeast Asia to offer radiation-
businesses in e-commerce, retail and shielding concrete that can be used in
content publishing. facilities such as hospitals and nuclear
The company has signed up global power plants. Its special concrete allows
retailers such as Rakuten, Uniqlo and walls of a proton therapy room to be just
ASOS. These retailers use ViSenze to 1.6-meters thick, down from the conven-
convert images into product-search tional six meters. This results in significant
opportunities that can improve their space and cost savings for its customers.
conversion rates. For instance, when a ViSenze Co-Founder and
customer uploads a picture of a product Chief Executive Officer, Oliver Tan
to an e-commerce website, ViSenze can
recommend similar items in that retail- networking capabilities, our facility with
er’s inventory. languages and cultures are very impor-
ViSenze was established in 2012 tant traits that companies like ViSenze
through a research collaboration have,” he added.
between the National University of Sin- In India, for instance, ViSenze has tied
gapore and China’s Tsinghua Univer- up with fashion e-retailer Myntra to help its
sity. The company’s founders saw a gap six million users navigate its store through
for visual searches in the e-commerce image recognition.
space, which they sought to fill. The company also continues to roll
out new innovative product
offerings. Earlier this year, it
unveiled a tool called Shop-
pable User Generated Content, May Ng, Chief Executive Officer,
which understands and tags Pan-United Corporation Ltd
user-generated content, mak-
ing items within images easy to Beyond new products, the company
discover, search and purchase. started to digitalize its operations in 2012
The tool also offers retailers to optimize its production, operations
insights into how their products and supply-chain effectiveness. Two years
are being used through images later, a Command Centre was launched to
shared online. oversee these digitalization efforts.
“There is growing evidence “Although there is significant infrastruc-
An example of ViSenze’s visual-search technology that consumers no longer tural development in the region, we expect
desire perfectly polished visu- market conditions to remain highly com-
“One of the technologies we focused als, and instead, are drawn to authentic petitive. So we must continue to be rele-
on was computer vision, because we user-generated content,” said Tan. vant. That is why we have transitioned from
found that the web is very visual. Yet we He added Singapore’s robust intel- being simply a brick-and-mortar concrete
found that people were searching the lectual property (IP) regime has
web using keywords. The challenge was helped the company with its inno-
how could we search the visual web using vation efforts. “For us, having IP
keywords, because there is language dif- sitting on a shelf is of no relevance
ficulty and mismatch in products taxono- to us. We need to monetize and
mies,” said Oliver Tan, Co-founder and translate all these IPs sitting on a
Chief Executive Officer of ViSenze. shelf into practical solutions that
Right from the start, ViSenze’s found- can be used.”
ers had their eye on the global market.
“We didn’t bother starting small. From Pan-United Corporation Ltd:
the get-go, we wanted to test our tech- Innovating Beyond Bricks
nology at a regional scale,” said Tan. The and Mortar
company has offices in the U.S., the U.K., It may be a 60-year-old company
India, China and Singapore. dealing, literally, in bricks and mor- Pan-United’s Innovation Centre has created
“Most Singapore companies who have tar, but Pan-United Corporation more than 300 specialized concrete products
overseas business start from day one has in recent years embraced the that have made the company a global leader in
being international. Very naturally our digital revolution with open arms. concrete technologies.

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