 We're here at ITU World 2016 in Bangkok and I'm delighted to be with Quirly, a tech entrepreneur who's part of the judging team here, focusing on the start-ups, which is a very important part of the telecom event. Quirly, can you tell us what you've seen on the show floor and what's impressed you? Well, first of all, I've never been to the event before, so I was blown away by how many countries are here and what the delegates have brought to the event. But I was most impressed with judging the start-ups. There were multiple start-ups I saw that I would be interested in investing in and some ideas that I saw that I wish I would have thought of that were quite brilliant. And can you tell us a little bit about some of those ideas? Sure. You know, there was a company called Africa, the gentleman has made a device that detects smoke or alcohol in the breath or whatever for public transit systems or if you have a fleet management system, but the way he did it was very bootstrapped and I like the technology, I like the sensors, I like the general approach. Some of my other favorites is a company that does factory efficiency. What I thought was fascinating is you think about factories and they're highly automated and we often confuse automation with efficiency and that's not quite the case. And so, you know, the fact that they were going into that industry, which is something I don't think a lot of people would try to go into was very fascinating to me. Traditionally, I've always went into industries that may not look as attractive as they do to me to other entrepreneurs, so I find myself very interested in business opportunities of that nature. And of course, there's a big focus here on start-ups from emerging economies. Here's somebody who would attend a lot of tech events around the world. Is that something that's more and more becoming important to the focus on emerging economies and supporting start-up ecosystem there? Yeah, I think that, you know, kind of what happened in Silicon Valley and spread to Austin, where I'm at, and New York and other parts around the world, you look at Tech City and London and other places, is now going into these emerging markets. But there's a different approach and it's fundamentally different in that they don't have the same amount of resources, the same amount of scale of community. And so, I think that you find the projects are a lot more akin to the beginning of a Silicon Valley, rather than what you see in a lot of start-up scenes around the world. That is to say that these are smaller groups of entrepreneurs having to be much more creative with the products they're creating, the services they're creating. And I think as a part of that, they come out with what I'm thinking are much better products in several cases. And the tech sector, there is a major challenge in terms of gender equality, not enough women participating in, especially in leadership area of the tech sector, not enough girls studying, computing, et cetera, in engineering, that's something that you're very passionate about. Can you tell us a little bit what's behind that and where did your interest come from in tackling the gender digital divide? Sure. So, I started my career in a very skewed viewpoint. When I was at Apple, I worked for multiple women, when I was both doing phone support and then in training and then even in R&D. When I was at IBM, I also had female peers and female bosses. And so, in 2013, I was invited to participate in a British Airways Innovation Flight. And on that flight, I was assigned to a team to work on the issue of getting more women into STEM. And it was very eye-opening to see the data we were presented with on how much of a gender imbalance there is. And so, ever since then, it's become a passion project for myself. And so, very excited to be participating in some of those meetings here as well. And ITU, of course, is the UN agency for ICTs. So, how is a tech entrepreneur from Austin, Texas, getting on with the United Nations? What's your perspective on this very complex and interesting international relations? Well, it's fascinating. I mean, in a lot of my travels, I've experienced other regulatory systems and other, you know, all kind of cultural diversity. What's interesting about the UN is working with ITU to really see the scope, right? It's not just, okay, you're working in eight countries or several countries. There's 193 members. The ITU is touching them all at various levels. In some countries, access is an issue. In other countries, it's the equality issue. More so, it's been fascinating. And so, I think what I'm most interested in is taking the ITU and the UN, which is an older organization, and kind of moving them into being a startup themselves, right? And at the same time, I'm going from the startup world, and I'm learning from them a lot of the protocols and a lot of the histories of some of these problems and things of that nature. So, it's a very good exchange. And last question, Merlee. Today, you were also involved in a working meeting for something called the Equals Partnership. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes. So Equals is a partnership, a public-private partnership for gender equality in the digital age. It's something that I'm participating in the founding of, and I'm super excited about. Basically, a lot of organizations out there are working on gender equality, but there needs to be a transfer of information between them. There needs to be a collaborative environment in which it can work, and so Equals is providing that. So it's providing some leadership in the area of developing access skills and leaders. And so it's a very exciting scope, again, as with most ITU things, it's very large. But for example, in the leadership area today, we have set a fourth of a plan to build a 193-member group of both men and women who are going to be the Equals Lead Champions in the various member states so that we can start collecting data specific to regions and use that to figure out what commonality there is between the challenges that are being faced by the tech entrepreneurs or just the people in general with gender equality in those areas. Barley, thank you very much for joining us here today.