 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of Amazon Web Services, eight of its public sector summit online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great segment from Asia Pacific on the other side of the world from California about social impact, transforming, teaching and learning with cloud technology. We've got three great guests. Hugo Richard is the CEO and co-founder of DiceTech and Janine Peo, CEO and founder of Solve Education. Founders and CEOs of the startups of Gray, Vincent Qua, who's the APAC Regional Head of Education, Healthcare, Not-For-Profit and Research for AWS. The Ed Start big program, Vincent, thanks for coming on. Janine and Hugo, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having us, John. Thanks, John. We're not there in person. We're doing remote interviews. I'm really glad to have this topic because now more than ever, social change is happening. This next generation is building software and applications to solve big problems. And it's not like yesterday's problems. They're today's problems. And learning and mentoring and starting companies are all happening virtually, digitally and also in person. So the world's changing. So I got to ask you, Vincent, we'll start with you. Ed, Amazon is obviously a big start of builder culture. You got two great founders here, CEOs doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on at APAC. A lot of activity, I mean, reinvent and the summits out there are really popular. Give us an update on what's happening. Thank you. Thank you for the question, John. I think it's extremely exciting, especially in today's context, that we are seeing so much activities, especially in the education technology sector. One of the challenges that we saw from our education technology customers is that they are always looking for help and support in many of the innovation that they're trying to develop. The second area of observation that we had was that they are always alone with very limited resources and they usually do not know where to look for in terms of support and in terms of who they can reach out to from a community standpoint. That is actually how we started and developed this program called AWS at start. It is a program specifically for education technology companies that are targeting delivering innovative education solutions for the education sector. And we bring specific benefits to these education technology companies when they join the program AWS at start. Yeah, three specific areas first. One is that we support them with technical support, which is really, really key, trying to help them navigate in the various ranges of AWS services that allows them to develop innovative services. The second area is linking them and building a community of like-minded education technology founders and linking them also to investors and VCs. And lastly, of course, in supporting innovation, we support them with a bit of AWS top credits, promotional credits for them so that they can go and experiment and develop innovations for their customers. That's great stuff and I want to get into that program a little bit further because I think that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides, actually free credits or it's going to turn away free credits. We'll take the free credits all the time, all day long, but really it's about the innovation. Janine, I want to get your thoughts. How was Solve Education born? What problems were you solving? What made you start this company and tell us your story? Thank you so much for the question. So actually, my co-founder was invited to speak at the African Innovation Forum a couple of years back and the topic that he was sharing was, can Africa speak over the industrialization phase and go direct to the knowledge economy? And the discussion went towards in order to have access to the knowledge economy, you need knowledge. And how do you get knowledge well through education? So that's when everybody in the Congress was a bit stuck, right? And the advice was in order to scale fast, we need to figure out a way to not, while engaging the government and schools and teachers, but do not depend on them for the success of the Education Initiative. So, and that's what pain walk away from the conference. And when we met in Jakarta, we started talking about that also. So while I'm Singaporean, I worked in many developing countries. And the problem that we're trying to solve is, it might be shocking to you, but UNESCO recently published over 600 million children and youth are not learning. And that is a big number globally, right? And out of all the SDGs per se from UN, education and perhaps I'm biased because I'm a computer engineer, but I see that education is the only one that can be solved by transforming life versus the other SDGs like poverty or hunger, actually require a big amount of logistic coordination So we saw a very interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smartphones becoming more and more ubiquitous. And with that, we saw a very interesting opportunity for us to disseminate education through mobile technology. So we in self-education elevate people out of poverty through providing education and employment opportunities leveraging on tech. And our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we build an open platform that provides everyone an effective education. Hugo, how about your company? What problem did your youth solve? And how did it all get started? Tell us your vision. Sure, thanks, John. Well, look, it all started with a joke. One of the co-founder of Matthew had a child with severe learning disorder and dyslexia. And he made a joke one day about having an algorithm that could support those kids. And I took the joke seriously. So we're starting sitting down and trying to figure out how we can make this happen. So it turns out that dyslexia is the most common learning disorder in the world with an estimated 10 to 20% of the worldwide population with the disorder between context that's between 750 million up to 1.5 billion individual with that learning disorder. And so where we sort of try and tackle the problem is that we've identified that there's two key things for children with dyslexia. The first one is that knowing that it is dyslexia, meaning being assessed. And the second is, so what, what do we do about it? And so given our expertise in data science and AI, we clearly saw an opportunity of sort of building something that could assess individual children and adults with dyslexia. The big problem with the assessment is that it's very expensive. We've met a parent in the US specifically who paid up to $6,000 US for a diagnosis with an educational psychologist. On the other side, we have a parent who waits 12 months before having a spot. So what we saw clearly is that the observable symptom of dyslexia are reading and everyone has a smartphone and your smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. So we started collecting audio recording from children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. And we then trained a model to recognize the likelihood of dyslexia by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnose dyslexic helping other undiagnosed dyslexic being diagnosed. So we have now an algorithm that can take about 10 minutes, which require no prior training, cost $20 US and anyone can use it to assess someone's likelihood of dyslexia. You know, this is the kind of thing that really changes the game because you also have learning progressions that are non-linear and different. You've got YouTube, you've got videos, you have knowledge bases, you've got community. Vincent mentioned that. Janine, you mentioned, you know, making the bits of driver and changing technology. So Janine and Hugo, please take a minute to explain. Okay, you got the idea. You're kicking the tires, you're putting it together. Now you got to actually start writing code. For us, we know education technology is not new, right? And education games are not new. But before we even started, we look at what's available and we quickly realized that the digital device is very rare. Most technology out there first are not designed for very low-end devices and also not designed for people who do not have internet at home. So with just that assessment, we quickly realized we need to do something about them. And but solving that problem is just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is efficacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices? And then the second thing is motivation. Again, it sounds really obvious, and people might think that marginalized communities are super motivated to learn. Well, I wouldn't say that they are not motivated, but just like all of us, behavioral change is really hard, right? I would love to work out every day, but I don't really get it, I don't really do that. So how do we use technology to induce that behavioral change so that we can help support their motivation to learn? So those are the different things that we work on. Yeah, and then a motivated community is even more impactful because then once the flywheel gets going, then it's powerful. Hugo, your reaction to, you know, you got the idea, you got the vision, you're starting to take one step in front of the other, you got AWS, take us through the progression on the startup. Yeah, sure. I mean, what Jane said is very likely to what we're trying to do, but for us, there's three key things that in order for us to be successful and help as much people as we can, that there's three things. The first one is reliability. The second one is accessibility and the other one is affordability. So the reliability means that we have been doing a lot of work in the scientific approach as to how we're gonna make this work. And so we have a couple of scientific publications and we had to collect data and, you know, sort of publish this into AI conferences and things like that. So make sure that we have the scientific evidence behind us that support us. And so what that means is that we had to have a large amount of data and put this to work, right? On the other side, the accessibility and affordability means that, like Jane said, you know, it needs to be on the cloud because if it's on the cloud, it's accessible for anyone with any device, with an internet connection, which is, you know, covering most of the globe. So it's a good start. And so the cloud obviously allows us to deliver the same experience and the same value to clients and parent and teacher and I didn't have professional around the world. And that's why, you know, it's been amazing to be able to use that technology. On the AI side as well, obviously, there is a lot of benefit of being able to leverage the computational power of the cloud to make better algorithm and better training. Well, we're going to come back to both of you on the AI question, I think that's super important. Vincent, I want to come back to you though, because in Asia Pacific and that side of the world, you still have the old guard, the incumbents around education and learning, but there is great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunities with Ed Stark. What trends are you seeing that are now favoring you because with COVID, you know, the world has almost kind of like been aligned in the sand is before COVID and after COVID. There's more demand for learning and education and community now than ever before, not just for education, the geopolitical landscape, everything around the younger generation, there's more channels, more data, more engagement. How are you looking at this? What's your vision of these trends? Can you share your thoughts on how that's impacting learning and teaching? So there are three things that I want to quickly touch on. Number one, I think government are beginning to recognize that they really need to change the way they approach solving social and economic problems. The pandemic has certainly calls into question that if you do not have a digital strategy, you can't find a better time to now develop and not just develop a digital strategy, but actually to put it in place. And so government are shifting very, very quickly into the cloud and adopting digital strategy and use digital strategy to address some of the key problems that they are facing and they have to solve them in a very short period of time. Hugo talked about speed, the agility of the cloud and that's why the cloud is so powerful for government to adopt. The second thing is that we saw a lot of schools closed down across the world, UNESCO reported what 1.5 billion students are out of schools. So how then do you continue teaching and learning when you don't have physical classroom open? And that's where education technology companies and heroes like Janine's company and others, there are so many of them around are able to come forward and offer their services and help schools go online, run classrooms online, continue to allow teaching and learning online. And this has really benefited the overall education system. The third thing that is happening is that I think tertiary education and maybe even K-12 education model will have to change. And they recognize that, again, it goes back to the digital strategy bit. They got to have a clear digital strategy and the education technology companies like what we have here today are just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get to addressing and giving a solution very, very quickly. Well, I know you're being kind of polite to the old guard, but I'm not that polite, I'll just say it. There's some old technology out there and Jenny and Hugo, you're young enough not to know what IT means because you're born in the cloud. So that's good for you. I remember what I teach like, in fact, there's a joke here in the United States that with everyone at home, the teachers have turned into the IT department, meaning they're helping the parents and the kids figure out how to go on mute and how to configure a network as a translation if their routers don't work, real problems. I mean, this was technology, schools were operating with low tech. You had Zooms out there, you got video conferencing, you got all kinds of things, but now there's all that support that's involved. And so what's happening is it's highlighting the real problems of the institutional technology. So Vincent, I'll start with you. This is a big problem. So cloud solves that one. You guys have pretty much helped IT do things that they don't want to do anymore by automation. This is an opportunity, not necessarily it's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. Can you just quickly talk about how you see the cloud, helping all this manual training and learning new tools? We are all now living in a cloud empowered economy. Whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services. We are powered by the cloud and a lot of them are powered by the AWS cloud, but we don't know about it. A lot of people just don't know, right? Whether you are watching Netflix, well, in the old days, you're buying tickets and booking hotels on Expedia or now you're actually playing games on Epic Entertainment, playing Fortnite and all those kinds of games, you're already using and a consumer of the cloud. And so one of the big ideas that we have is we really want to educate and create awareness of cloud computing for every single person. If it can be used for innovation and to bring about benefits to society, that is a common knowledge that everyone needs to have. And so the first big idea is wanna make sure that everyone actually is educated on cloud literacy. The second thing is for those who have not embarked on a clear cloud strategy, this is the time. Don't wait for another pandemic to happen because you wanna be ready, you wanna be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with and you wanna get ahead of the curve. And so education, training yourself, getting some learning done. And that's really very, very important as the next step to prepare yourself to face the uncertainty. And having programs like AWS EdStar actually helps to empower and catalyze innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you, John. Congratulations on the EdStart. We'll get into that real quickly, EdStart. But let's first get the born in the cloud generation, Janine and Yugo. You guys are competing. You got to get your apps out there, you got to get your solutions. You're born in the cloud. You have to go compete with the existing solutions. How do you view that? What's your strategy? What's your mindset? Janine, we'll start with you. So for us, we are very aware that we are solving a problem that has never been solved, right? If not, we wouldn't have so many people who are not learning. So this is a very big problem and being able to leverage on cloud technology means that we are able to just focus on what we do best, right? How do we make sure that learning is sufficient and learning is effective? And how do we keep people motivated and all those sort of great things? Leveraging on game mechanics, social network and incentives. And then while we do that on the cloud side, we can just put that almost ourselves everything to AWS cloud technology to help us not worry about that. And you were absolutely right. The pandemic actually woke up a lot of people and hand organizations like myself. We start to get queries from governments and other even big NGOs on, you know, because before COVID, we had to really do our best to convince them until our throat's dry. And, you know, we appreciate this opportunity. And also we want to help people realize that in order to, by adopting either a blended approach or adopting technology means that you can do mass customization of learning as well. And that's what we could do to really push learning to the next level. So, and there are a few other creative things that we've done with governments, for example, with the government of East Java on top of just using the education platform as it is and our education platform, which is an education game done of civilization. They have added in a module that teaches COVID because, you know, there's healthcare system is really under a lot of strain there, right? And adding this component in and the most popular mini game in that component is this game called hopes on not. And it teaches people to identify what's fake news and what's real news. And that really went very popular and very well in that region of 35 million people. So, tech became not only just boring school subjects but it can be used to teach many different things. And following that project, we are working with the federal government of Indonesia to talk about anti-stunting and even a very difficult topic like sex education as well. Yeah. And the learning is non-linear, it's horizontally scalable. It's network graph, so you can learn, share about news and this is contextual data. It's not just learning, it's everything. It's not like, you know, linear learning. It's a whole nother ballgame. Hugo, your competitive strategy, you're out there now. You got the COVID world. How are you competing? How is Amazon helping you? Absolutely, John. Look, this is an interesting one because the current competitor that we have are educational psychologists. They're not at tech. So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitor per se. I would say that we're competing against an old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to empower people to be comfortable with having a machine, you know, analyzing your kids audio recording and telling you if it's likely to be dyslexia. And this concept, obviously, is very new. You know, we can see this in other industry with IR. You know, you have the app that Stanford created to diagnose skin cancer by taking a photo of your skin. So it's being done in different industry. So the biggest challenge for us is really about the old way of doing things. What's been really interesting for us is that, you know, education is lifelong. You know, you have a big part in school, but when you're an adult, you learn. And, you know, we've been doing some very interesting work with the justice department where, you know, we look at inmate and, you know, often when people go to jail, they have, you know, some literacy difficulty. And so we've been doing some very interesting work in this field. We are also doing some very interesting work with HR and company who want to understand their staff and put management in place so that every single person in the company are empowered to do their job and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against an ed tech and often when we talk to other ed tech company, we come before, you know, we don't provide a learning solution, we provide an assessment solution, an E assessment solution. So really, John, what we're competing against is an old way of doing things. And that's exactly why cloud is so successful. You change the economics. You're actually a net new benefit. And I think the cloud gives you speed and your only challenge is getting the word out because the economics are just game changing, right? So again, that's how Amazon does so well. By the way, you can take all our recordings from the CUBE interviews, all my interviews and let me know how I do, okay? So got all the voice recordings from my interviews. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that. Absolutely, absolutely. Vincent, I want to come back to you, but I want to ask the two founders real quick. For the folks watching, okay, and hear about Amazon, they know the history. They know the startups that started on Amazon that became unicorns that went public. I mean, just a long list of successes born in the cloud. You get big, you pay when you're successful. Love that business model. But for the folks watching that are in the virtual garages or in their houses innovating and building out new ideas, what does Ed Start mean for them? How does it work? Would you recommend it? And what are some of the learnings that you have from work with Ed Start? Our relationship with Ed Start is almost not like client supplier relationship. It's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with the tech, they're providing the technology, but on top of that, they have their system architects to work with my tech team and they have open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things like building a community where people like me and Hugo can meet and also other opportunities like getting out the word out there, right? As you know, all of their startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting our word out there is another big benefit as well. So definitely very much recommend Ed Start. And I think another big thing is this, right? Now that we have COVID and we have demand coming from all of the place, including like even a level of interest alloy from the government of Gambia, you know? So how do we quickly deploy our technology right there? Or how do we deploy our technology from the people who are demanding our solution in Nigeria, right? With technology it is almost brainless. Yeah, the great enabling technology ecosystem to support you and they got the regions too. So the regions do help. I love, we call them cube regions because we're on Amazon, we have our cloud. Hugo, Ed Start, your observations, experience and learnings from working with AWS? Absolutely, look, this is a lot to say. So I'll try and make it short for anyone. But so for us and me personally, also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Janine mentioned, there is the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur. You can connect with experts in different industry. You can ask technical experts and have an office hour every week. Like you said, Janine, with your tech team talking to a cloud architect just to unlock any problem that you may have. And on the business side, I would add something which for us has been really useful is the fact that when we've approached government, being able to say that we have the support of AWS and that we work with them to establish data integrity, making sure everything is properly secure and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms of moving forward with discussion with potential clients and government as well. So there's also the business aspects out of things where when people see you, there's a passive value that your entourage is smart people and people who are capable of doing great things. So that's been also really helpful. You know, that's a great point. The app sec review process as you do deals is a lot easier when you're on AWS. Vincent, we're a little bit over time with a great panel here. Close us out, share with us what's next for you guys. You got a great startup ecosystem. You're doing some great work out there in education as well, healthcare. How's your world going on? Take a minute to explain what's going on in your world. John, I'm part of the public sector team worldwide in AWS. We have very clear mission statements. And the first is, you know, we want to bring about destructive innovation. And the AWS cloud is really the platform where so many of our ad techs, whether it's ad techs, health tech, graph techs or all those who are developing solutions to help our governments and our education institutions, our healthcare institutions to really be better at what they do. We want to bring about those disruptive innovations to the market as fast as possible. It's just an honor and a privilege for us to be working. And why is that important? It's because it's linked to our second mission, which is to really make the world a better place, to really deliver the impact. The kind of work that Hugo and Janine are doing, we cannot do it by ourselves. We need specialists and really people with brilliant ideas and think big vision to be able to carry out what they are doing. And so we're just honored and privileged to be part of their work and in delivering this impact to society. The expansion of AWS out in your area has been phenomenal growth. I've been saying to Theresa Carlson and Andy Chastain, the folks at AWS for many, many years that when you move fast with innovation, the public sector and the private partnerships come together, you start to see that blending and you got some great founders here making a social impact, transforming teaching and learning. So congratulations, Janine and Hugo, thank you for sharing your story on theCUBE. Thanks for joining. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Virtual. We're remote, we're not in person this year because of the pandemic. You're watching AWS Public Sector Online Summit. Thank you for watching.