Software runs my life

Tag: asia

AsianGut Launched!

3 rice logoAsianGut officially launched today, with a great press release from the University of San Diego!

AsianGut actually started as my MBA major project, partnering up with a surgeon from KK Hospital in Singapore. We wanted to find a way to bring eastern and western approaches to gut health together, leveraging the best of both worlds.

We soon realised that American Gut was at the forefront of western efforts to use DNA sequencing of the gut microbiome to understand exactly what was going on inside us. I loved the citizen science nature of the project, which makes the anonymised data open access so any researcher around the world can work on it for the common good. Open access is a principle I hold very closely.

The launch of AsianGut represents me starting a non-profit distributor of American Gut kits into Singapore initially, and eventually Asia as a whole. There are many logistic, storage and other challenges to overcome, but I’m confident I can scale it up quickly. I’m doing it because I find it an exciting space, and one which can scale to have a really significant impact on humanity. Professionally there’s also a selfish benefit to me, I get the experience of becoming a non-profit director of a health-tech startup.

Now that the project has begun, the focus is on marketing and scaling the volume of samples so we can build the best profile of the multitude of Asian gut microbiomes. This will ensure future researchers can develop treatments and diet plans especially for us. I honestly have no idea what comes once we reach scale and establish strong perspectives on what good gut health even looks like. All I can hope is that we helped, and that we find a further direction that accelerates progress even more. So please sign up for a test today!!

Starting an INSEAD MBA

Tomorrow I am starting the Global Executive MBA Asia programme at INSEAD, Singapore. The decision was a huge one, and many months after doing the entrance exam I am finally ready to start. I wanted to capture my feelings before I start, because I truly hope that I see significant change upon reflecting at the end. We’ll see in 17 months.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i12TIv6e2c

 

Final Olympics 2012 YouTube Live gadget

YouTube Olympic streaming in 64 countries

Final Olympics 2012 YouTube Live gadget

YouTube.com/Olympics gadget currently Live

The London 2012 Olympics was the highest profile program I have worked on for YouTube. I was responsible for the IOC YouTube Channel – youtube.com/olympic. This channel only displayed the full content experience for 64 countries during the games across APAC; the largest being India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. These 64 countries received 11 live channels running 1200 live events in 1080p HD for 18hrs a day, plus nearly all archived content available. It was a huge process to get this content uploaded, named, categorised into playlists and keywords, and finally navigable in a custom gadget.

The result was well worth the effort, we received 72 million streams just during the 2 week period. Subsequently the content geo-restrictions were removed, and the channel view count has since broken the 100 million views mark. All the global statistics are wrapped up in this official blog post.

This first Olympics has built a solid subscriber base for future events, lifting the number of subscribers by 360k to almost 500k. This is a huge and engaged audience that will be waiting for the next big Olympics event to start. It was great to be a part of this program, and I hope it is seen as a template for how large events can play out online in the future.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén