Higher functioning for start-ups
The IBM Watson Business Case Competition was recently launched in Thailand for the first time to encourage the talent to get creative and leverage technology to add value and competitiveness to financial technology.
Through a collaboration between IBM and Digital Ventures, participating teams must use the disruptive capabilities of IBM Watson cognitive technology.
IBM Watson is a technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data.
Cognitive technology integrates five fields of study covering big data and analytics; artificial intelligence; cognitive experience including human-computer interaction, speech, translation, machine vision and visualisation; cognitive knowledge including knowledge representation, ontologies, semantics and context, as well as computing infrastructure.
The technology has been adopted in 20 countries across 45 industries such as finance, retail, healthcare, tourism, education, research, food and energy. Bumrungrad International Hospital claims to have been the first hospital in Thailand to apply IBM Watson to oncology for lung, liver, colon and breast cancer treatment.
The competition will serve as the stage for students and start-ups to learn and to showcase their potential. Studies have shown that nine out of 10 start-ups fail due to absence of market need. The competition focuses on solutions that enable business adaptation in a quantum-leap manner, rather than perfect IT solutions without business feasibility.
According to IBM Thailand general manager Parnsiree Amatayakul, 88% of data today is unstructured. Images, voice, video and other unstructured content is too massive for current programming to fully harness. Right now, only 15% of organisations benefit from data analytics for their internal use.
The day every business is ready and fully digitised, the ability to gain insights and benefit from such big data will be the key to make a difference and enhance business competitiveness. Cognitive is the next step of every business. Those who have vision and start first will have an edge.
As part of the competition, 10 teams will be selected to compete and will be announced on Sept 6, and the three finalists will present their final business cases on Oct 11.
The competition winner will get a trip to broaden their views on business and technology while exploring more business opportunities at the LAUNCH Festival, the world’s largest start-up conference, held every year in San Francisco. The winning team will also receive an investment of up to 1 million baht venture capital from Digital Ventures.