DNA on BFM: 4G bragging rights and Maslow

By Karamjit Singh November 19, 2015

Disrupting a long-held psychological tool
MaGIC’s Demo Day for MAP a standout success

DNA on BFM: 4G bragging rights and Maslow I HAD to race across town to make it in time for today’s Tech Talk show on BFM Radio, as I was moderating the keynote speaker at today’s Malaysian Business Angels Network Summit in Kuala Lumpur.

With the theme of Futurising Asean Angels, the summit had over 250 participants gathering to listen to various speakers from the United Kingdom, the United States and across Asia share different aspects of angel investing.

Keynote speaker Anthony Clarke, chief executive officer (CEO) of London Business Angels, did a really good job, with an impactful presentation and a lively Q&A session after. I shared some of my key thoughts with BFM presenter Freda Liu on the angel scene in Malaysia.

The next conversation point was exciting because I disrupted Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory while talking about the 4G LTE (Fourth Generation/ Long-Term Evolution) bragging rights war going on between Maxis Communications and Digi Telecommunications.

If you take a step back from the claim and counter-claim between the two parties over who has the widest 4G LTE network, you realise that 4G is a built-for-data network technology.

And with life going digital, providing access to this data which sits on the Internet is becoming a very lucrative business – which means that those providing this access have all the reason to try and position themselves as the best and most reliable providers.

And this is where I offered my take on where data should sit in Maslow’s theory. Have a listen to the podcast and let me know if you agree!

Now if there’s one thing that I and everyone I met on Monday at Demo Day for MAP (the MaGIC Acceleration Programme) agreed upon, it was on the quality of the startups that pitched and the value of Demo Day as an excellent occasion for ecosystem players to network.

With around 150 investors in attendance, Demo Day was the culmination of an exercise which saw 50 startups from mainly South-East Asia spending four months at the Malaysian Global Centre for Creativity & Innovation (MaGIC), working on fast-tracking their startups.

With MaGIC now aiming to make Malaysia the startup capital of Asia, I also shared my thoughts on what role MAP could play in achieving this vision.

Meanwhile, Malaysia’s national ICT custodian Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) is focusing on bringing Digital Malaysia to reality.

It recently showcased the results of a pilot programme, Made For YouTube, it ran from December 2014, designed to help content creators come to the fore and leverage on YouTube as a new digital platform for them to reach viewers.

The objectives of this programme dovetail with one of the thrusts of Digital Malaysia that aims to turn Malaysians from consumers of content and services, into becoming producers.

Before ending the show, I congratulated the Kaodim founders for the US$4 million they just raised, and shared my thoughts on the one negative aspect of the new funding. Check out the podcast to hear what that was!