How Malaysia helps bolster the less glamourous side of tech

Behind the glitz and glamour of things often sold to us in the market—property, entertainment, and even retail fashion among many others—comes the backbone of every successful industry: rigorous and quality work transpiring behind the scenes.

For all the luxurious rooms mounted and sold as homes are engineers and architects working side by side with labourers to create urban spaces. For all the film epics we have seen transcend beyond the silver screen are cinematographers and production staff rearing realities straight out of the imagination. And for every iconic look churned out by fashion houses are designers and tailors collaborating creatively to dress the everyday consumer.

All of these are examples of things that encompass diligent, unglamorous, and unnoticed work neatly tucked underneath the shiny finished products we see in the market.

It is in this thread of logic that the tech industry understands the insurmountable back-end work that needs to be done for its own industry.

With data and design working hand in hand, the tech industry is beginning to distribute its focus not only to refining the interface and polishing user experience, but as well as furnishing their back-ends with necessary help.

As one of the leading startup ecosystems in South East Asia, Malaysia finds itself at the forefronts of providing solutions to various back-end problems being dealt with by industries across the tech spectrum.

We spoke to four of Malaysia’s leading startups today, RunCloud, Neuroware, Supahands, and Blinkware to know how they’re doing their part in providing these solutions in startup fashion.

Creating back-end solutions to a data-driven industry

“Supahands helps Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) companies train their algorithms,” said Mark Koh, CEO and co-founder of Supahands. “With our combined workforce of 2,500 remote gig workers (known as SupaAgents), we prepare clean and accurate training data for clients with our Image Annotation, Data Transcription and Tagging & Categorization tools.”

Adept to the inner workings of data, Supahands implores 2,500 trained and vetted “SupaAgents” to man the forts for companies that struggle in terms of coming up and cleaning structured datasets for their AI, or those who have issues with the overwhelming amount of data that they have.

These are companies that often lack the tools and manpower to translate raw data into cleaned datasets. Having their data scientists or engineers with PhD qualifications do such work would be a waste of thousands of hours, which is why many would traditionally resort to the costly decision of hiring more staff internally, which can increase overheads by up to 75%.

Also read: 3 startups shaping AI in Southeast Asia

Supahands’ job is to prepare clean and structured datasets at the fraction of the time and cost needed, an example of the many ways the Malaysian startup ecosystem is coming up with ways to revolutionise tech in the back-end.

Cleaning up the messy side of tech
On the other side of the spectrum, we have Neuroware which provides blockchain infrastructure to enterprise clients.

“We offer organizations their own customized private APIs, which are able to connect to a multitude of services across a range of blockchains. Neuroware is currently being used by the Securities Commission of Malaysia in a pilot project to help improve the efficiency of secondary markets for unlisted private companies,” said Neuroware CEO and founder Mark Smalley.

Working largely with regulated financial institutions and government agencies, Neuroware offers a solution to the problem of not having a single unified API where organizations are forced to subscribe to half a dozen different services, and in-turn, manage terabytes of data synchronization across multiple clouds.

With Neuroware’s services, organizations are able to focus on launching new products and applications, rather than the management of the complicated infrastructure behind the scenes.

In a nutshell, what Neuroware does is streamline complex data structures under one convenient API.

Source: YahooNews