VR eye-tracking, blockchain money remittance, conversational AI startups win K-Global Demo Day
Eva Yoo/TechNode
Dec 20, 2017
The three winners of K-Global Demo Day were VR eye-tracking startup Visual Camp, conversational AI startup MrS.ai and blockchain money remittance startup Moin. K-Global demo day is part of the South Korean government’s effort to foster interaction between South Korean startups and Chinese startups.
On the day itself, December 12, five Chinese startups and 10 Korean startups climbed on stage at Shanghai’s Jin Jiang Hotel to pitch to five judges including Strikingly CEO David Chen, partner at NIO Capital Junyi Zhang, Vice President of Sky9 Capital (云九资本), Fred Young and Professor and Adviser to International BU, III. C. Jimmy Shih. The event was hosted by K-ICT Born2Global Centre, a startup incubator operated by South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and organized by Shanghai-based startup accelerator XNODE.
“There are two startups winning second place. Moin, the first one, is using an emerging technology that could disrupt the current system. Although China has a very strict law on financial matters, she is accepting new technology until proved otherwise. The next one, MrS.ai, uses a natural language technology specializing in Mandarin, that could better fit to the Chinese market,” Professor and Adviser to International BU, III. C. Jimmy Shih commented on each company as he announced the winners of the demo day. “The first place goes to VisualCamp whose technology will be a strike to most mobile commerce in the future.”
“There were also high tech companies like Moin that focus on blockchain tech and building channels to transfer money. The bitcoin price has exceeded $10,000, but is really hard to work on it in China. Korea is special market, and has the potential for its bitcoin market to be the largest in the world,” Vice President of Sky9 Capital, Fred Young commented. Sky9 Capital runs a US dollar fund in China focusing on early stage internet companies and innovative companies in consumer and technology sectors, and has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Silicon Valley.
“As for AI, it’s hard to handle Mandarin in AI, since it’s a much more complicated language. So MrS.ai has a very unique competitiveness and has the chance to win in the market. For Chinese startups, the AI market is large and a lot of companies and brands need AI services.”
Eye tracking is crucial to both virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology-based verticals such as games, e-commerce, content, and social media. US eye tracking technology player Eye Tribe was acquired by Facebook, Eyefluence was acquired by Google in 2016, and SMI was acquired by Apple in 2017. South Korean startup VisualCamp is a VR eye-tracking technology provider and their technology is currently mounted on Samsung Electronics’ all-in-one-type Exynos VR HMD (head-mounted display). As VR HMD is moving from PC connected, mobile connected, then to all-in-on device, keeping low CPU occupation rate becomes important. On Exynos 8890, their technology takes less than 4% of CPU occupation rate. Compared to their competitors in the same arena, their solution run on all three HMDs including desktop, mobile and all-in-one, and runs on five operating systems, including Android, Windows, Linux, Linux Arm and Mac OS. Based on the eyeball and gaze data, the Seoul-based company also analyzes user intention.
Press Release: http://technode.com/2017/12/20/k-global-demo-day/