2017-08-31 EON Reality visit

I’ve been told that you’re very smart, and you understand things very easy, [laughs] so it’s going to be a pleasure to present...

How can I help? Oh, yeah. We’ll be recording this. We’ll make a transcript, and we’ll send it to you for editing for 10 days before publishing.

OK.

Great.

I heard that you are very transparent.

Radically, actually.

Radically transparent.

[laughs]

I come from Sweden, and I don’t know if you’re probably familiar that Sweden has...It was very transparent. We have a personal number. All records are open. I don’t mind that. [laughs]

Awesome.

Why are we here? To be honest, to get a little bit of advice. We have an idea of investing in Taiwan modeled after what we done in 30 other countries around the world. I understand that you are heading the digital aspects.

Or advising, but yes.

That’s why we’d like to get some advice, because you’re familiar with how things work in California, or US. I understand that you have background there, and you’re also very familiar with Taiwan. What I’d like to do is, in interest of your time, to spend no more than 15 to 20 minutes quickly, to give you...

That’s fine. I don’t have anything else afterwards. [laughs]

15, 20 minutes to give you an orientation, and then to get your thoughts about this.

Without further ado, if you don’t mind, I’ll get started. Just a quick introduction, so you know who’s around the table.

I’m based in Singapore. I’m heading up our Asia market development, from Sweden originally, also, so it’s good to hear your colleague’s experience in Copenhagen.

Denmark, Sweden. We have the Scandinavian side here.

That’s great.

That’s me.

I’m Clement Chen from USBCT, with David.

Fion Liao. Good to meet you again.

Nice meeting you again.

Chung-Sheng Ko. I’m also the local partner with David.

I’m David, USBCT. Good to see you again.

Very good to see you again.

I hope you remember me.

Of course.

Is that light OK for you, or would you like us to dim a little bit? Is that comfortable?

It’s fine for me.

Very quickly, about EON. We are essentially a company that we work in virtual reality for many years, and we focused on augmented and virtual reality for knowledge transfer.

We are a mission-driven company. I come from a country where I get my two master’s and almost my PhD. I didn’t ever took my PhD, but if I would, it would have been free also.

I believe that knowledge should be made available, accessible, and affordable. In fact, knowledge is a human right. This is a little bit of our purpose as a company.

We see there’s a big problem today -- I’m sure the most is familiar with this -- is there’s a reason we look at jobs and how jobs are created. I would summarize it in four elements. One has to do with education -- US have a little bit of a broken education -- longer life and mostly, globalization. Those things impact jobs.

The one job killer, the biggest job killer at the moment is technology disruption. Paradoxically, it’s technology disruption that also creates the new jobs. You can say lights go out here. Lights come up there. Unfortunately, not as many as they kill.

It’s a little bit like lamps blinking. The problem is that this pace of change is accelerating. The current ways we have to transfer knowledge is not fast enough to cope with this change.

We see it manifesting itself in many ways. One is in the knowledge race. You have to teach more with less -- less time, less money. Knowledge is almost doubling every year versus every 25 years, 50 years ago. That’s one problem.

Plus, you have growing gap. How do you teach more with less time and less money? You also have a growing gap with jobs. These are smart jobs in US. You can see how the three and a half million new smart jobs, two million remain unfilled. Again, the gap is growing.

We have a question that’s how do we fill these growing gaps? It’s a bit like "Matrix". You have the positive and a green pill and the red pill. A positive scenario and a negative scenario. I believe in a positive scenario.

Let’s start with the negative first. The negative scenario would be to use more automation. Something like this. You have more and more humans that are displaced for more jobs. You’re increasing a society where a big portion of it are not employed. Perhaps not employable.

In rich countries like US or Sweden, we have to worry what we do with these people. Many suggest a universal basic income. As you know, a job is more than a salary. It’s also a purpose, dignity, family. Personally, I don’t think that’s a good idea.

You don’t think social media is a dignified purpose within life?

No. You can do art. You can do anything. This reminds me a little bit of Matrix. The only think I’m missing is the fluids where you get your body, and you get your injections.

Perhaps we’re getting there. [laughs]

That’s a possibility, right? I believe in something different. I believe in what I referred to as human 2.0. In fact, I’m not the only crazy person. 30 other governments have joined us, so far, around the world. Those are pretty important governments.

What is this all about? Metaphorically speaking, instead of being crushed by this AI tsunami, we can surf it. We can allow humans to live in a symbiotic relation with machine. We can take advantage of the machine, and we can empower humans to grow beyond their current human constraints.

That’s the theory of this. We think that the potential is to empower quite a lot of people. This is not a small thing. It’s 3.8 billion, to be precise.

Everybody.

More or less everybody.

[laughs]

Why do I believe this will work? I’m a history buff. I like archaeology and history. If you look at what we’ve done the last 70,000 years, since we left Africa, and how humans are, we are curious.

I used to be a kid, put my finger in mud, and taste it. "Oh, now I know how mud taste. It’s not chocolate."

We have that curiosity and thirst for knowledge. We are greedy also. Those two combination convince me that a big company, if some company in Taiwan can get a gentleman from Angola and make $300, and we can give him some way to empower him making like a Frankfurt worker that makes $65,000 euro, he will do it, because it’s financially viable.

That’s all theoretical, but let’s put it in practice. How do we do it? Today you may have...not you, you special person.

Let’s say normal person, like me, may have 40 percent of my cortex residing into this device. The problem is...

What is this?

This is just a phone.

It’s a phone?

Just a phone. Nothing special, but a lot of information that you have resides here, right?

Sure.

The problem is that you are interacting with this device at the speed of thumb. It’s very slow. It’s like AOL back in the ’90s.

The question is how can we shorten the distance of the communication to device. Neural lace, 30, 50 years, that’s my bet. Elon Musk, I love him, but by the time he’s getting fixed machines, more or less, have taken a big chunk of what we’re supposed to do.

I think the solution today is to use things like augmented virtual reality, today, fueled by artificial intelligence, IoT, big data, and so on. That’s our theory. Now how do you do that practically?

There’s three components to this. One component has to do with the ability to, for example...I’ve been in this business for 26 years. I used to do aircraft simulator, and then became nuclear power plant simulators, that then became, now, simulators on the phone.

Here, this is the most banal example I can use. This is training someone how to replace a Frymaster at McDonald’s. I couldn’t find a more simple example.

There’s 36,00 restaurant. You have two people in two different locations. A more simple example is this. This is a company called Aranco. They’re a pretty big company.

This used to be, at one point, $1.8 million simulator. We’ll start it. This is for your benefit. The volume is on. It’ll come on in a second. It’s gaze controlled.

I start the engine now. I have that on. All the functionalities of the physical environment works. I’m sure the Minister wants to try it?

Sure.

If you look left and right, actually move your head around.

I have to move my head?

You have to move your head.

Not my eyeballs?

No, no.

Well then it’s not really gaze-controlled.

It’s like you are in reality. Look up. Look down. You are in that room, basically. It’s that instead of using a headset, or Vive...by the way, we do use HTC Vive and 32 other systems. Then the other one.

Which one?

Some type of AR environment. That’s what you saw there -- if you have the card -- that is a virtual reality environment, in a very simplistic way. You can also seamlessly do...sorry.

She has seen the cardiac ECG already, last this time.

Yeah, we’ll show that in a second.

We looked at that last time.

You saw that?

Yeah, cardiac ECG.

No, I’ll show something more simple. This is the whole new car. I want the old car.

I don’t have that car here.

[laughs] You don’t have it? It’s in my bag. It’s in my bag, there.

That’s OK.

No worries, we got it.

We got a demo last time.

You got a demo last time, so I’m not going to bore you with that. This is virtual training. You train in a facility on this, and then you take the snackable content with you at home, and recap it, but this is not going to solve the problem, the problem I was talking about.

The real problem there is how do you take knowledge injections when you need it, as you need it, in the context you need it? Let’s say you’re going to do, today, a step-by-step repair operation for an AR device.

That’s when we came up with this knowledge injection. Knowledge injection is all about, for example, Exxon...

...BP are using this type of environment.

Environmental annotations.

Where you get guided solutions, where you can put the knowledge injection associated with a component, and then you can do different operations.

This is not science fiction. I was just recording. This is an anchor point, creating a physical environment, and then not only provide you with the instructions, but actually showing which buttons to push and doing quality assurance that you’ve done, validating what you’ve done.

That becomes, now, suddenly, a little bit more powerful, because now you can connect this with AI, connect this with IoT.

Then there’s a problem, still, that normal teachers in Taiwan, and anywhere in the world, 98 percent of them will never program a curriculum. Most of them, 90 percent, maybe more in Taiwan, knows how to use PowerPoint. [laughs] That’s the upper level.

What we did is to say how do we take that know-how, their single matter expertise -- they may be expert in biology, or chemistry, or whatever -- and allow them to create this content themselves?

That’s why we created something called Creator AVR. The idea is to take what we do 80 percent of the time, in terms of interaction creation.

Once we get the models in -- it can import from 120 formats, 55 native CAD -- we can then create the interaction on the spot, in a way that normal people can learn from it. In a second you’ll see.

That’s the expert. If you look at that device, of course you can switch between AR/VR seamlessly.

This is your phone.

Thank you. You can switch for that. What you see there is the interaction environment. I know that one of your colleagues in Denmark has been dong interaction design.

We look at templates. What is it normally you do? You dissect. You identify. You can build all these environments, and then publish them seamlessly from a phone, all the way to high-end headsets, so 32 different publishing formats.

You could also use this virtual trainer. In this case we use 32 different devices, from HTC to Oculus. We are totally agnostic in this regard.

HoloLens?

HoloLens, of course. You’ll see the next example is HoloLens, because we use that for AR Assist.

We also built the world’s largest library for learning, because we have centers around the world, and all centers have a factory. That’s AR Assist. That’s, by the way, HoloLens, so the gentleman there is wearing a HoloLens.

This is a typical knowledge injection. You have a robot, a man that works in symbiosis with the machine. The green arrows are generated automatically.

Once you create the VR experience, you can actually translate it to AR. You can kill two birds with one stone. We don’t see a big difference between one or the other.

Now you get the step-by-step instructions what to do, and you’ll get your quality assurance report by the time you’re done.

Why 3.8 billion people? Today, of the three billion workers that exist, there’s two and a half billion that don’t have any type of ICT in their daily work. It’s a huge opportunity. Now, with a billion of these devices, suddenly it’s possible to do it at the cost efficient rate. There’s about 1.3 billion students today that need fast knowledge.

We’ve been around for 18 years. I sometimes joke about it. I couldn’t go for vacation for the first 10 years. It’s all in the last four, five years that this is taking off. What we learned during the first 10 years is where’s the value. We started with 29 segments. We’re now down to six, where we know we have an enormous value versus the others.

Then we developed the platform, then we created the global network. Now we have more than 42 million viewers. What’s the value for industry? Money. Service technician training, we took them from classical training to augmented reality.

This is a mining equipment company. They successfully reduced the cost 92 percent, operator training 63 percent. When I started with university, originally it was the Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University. All these fancy, very expensive universities.

With time, as the price lowered, we went to second-tier and vocational training, and now we’re down to K-12. Cheaper, better, faster equipment expand the usage.

What’s the value proposition? People learn faster, remember longer, made better decision, attention level goes up. You know all this. We also worked with governments. Why governments? Smart governments, like Singapore, or everywhere in the world, start to realize the value.

One single example. This is an example of an ophthalmology application that’s currently used by hospitals and universities, everyone from Yale to Stanford. It does everything you would expect -- you can dissect the eye. You can look in the eye -- but it does something you may not have expected, which is injecting various dysfunctions.

You can change inject cranial nervous function. Then you have to analyze the patient, and the patient will behave as they had that pathology. The books, whether it costing some dollars, our application costs $20. It’s a cheap way to do it.

The idea is you create that content once, then publish many times. You can have it in a room-sized environment. You can have it in desktop environment. You can have it on a phone, obviously. Create it once. Use it many times. Agnostic.

The workers -- let’s say, I know Taiwan used to very big on semiconductors, this is very big -- are using this knowledge injection to actually get the step-by-step instructions what to do. That’s how it...

Why is it blooming now? Why did it take so long time? You can argue many reasons, but one reason is that the hardware wasn’t affordable until recently.

Where’s the market? According to Goldman Sachs 85 percent comes from non-gaming sources, so education, health. According to Gartner, by 2020, 36 months from now, half of the top 50,000 companies would have implemented projects. By 2019, there will be a switch between consumer, today’s bigger usage. It will be the other way around.

Most people -- this you’re probably familiar with -- think about the top of the iceberg. They see the gadgets. That’s not so important. [laughs]

To do real implementation you have to be able to take existing data. You have to be able to support a lot of different systems. You have to be able to be compliant with all the new image recognition solutions and, at the same time, support various engines and be complaint with various AI, IoT devices. That’s what we’re doing.

You have the layer with the product. You have the platform that agnostically supports all these things. You have the system that you have the freedom to choose, and different systems for different type of application or budget, then you put your application on top. That’s how we do it.

Where is this going? I’m not going to take time with that today. In essence, we think we can go from 20-second bandwidth to, perhaps, two to three seconds over the next...

It’s easy to predict three years. It’s difficult to predict 10 years. It’s impossible to predict more than that.

We can create the future. We don’t have to predict it.

Exactly, I love that. [laughs] That’s what we do.

Why am I here in Taiwan? As we speak, there’s 136 cities that are visited by our troops from different locations. I happened to join the Asia team, because I think Asia is the future.

We are here because we want to co-invest in a center. The center consists of four elements. The most important element is to disseminate this into a country, reaching million of people.

To do that we have a center. This happens to be in France. This one is about 15,000 square feet to 20,000 square feet. It has about 28 trucks of equipment, in terms of various ways to publish that industry and education publishes today, all seamlessly adapted, from room-sized to pocket size.

That’s one element. The second element of this is the factory. That’s where the intellectual property encapsulation is happening.

That’s where, in this case, French students that we have trained become part-employed, in this environment, and develop French content for French people. Same thing in China. Chinese people, Chinese people, and so on. That’s the second element.

The factory, I have a 30-second video.

IDC’s addressing the VR and AR content by providing training for new content creators and building an app and content factory that acts as a regional distribution hub. EON Reality co-invests in IDCs with local governments and academic institutions around the world.

This investment includes a state of the art virtual reality and augmented reality center, content capacity building school, job creation, a sustainable revenue model, the world’s largest VR and AR library, a global distribution network, training curriculum, and more.

To do this, where do we recruit the students? We start with a school, and typically the school has 100 students. In China, we started with 200.

What we do is four months theory. We train them on all aspects of virtual reality, and then eight months of project base learning. During that learning phase, they actually do real projects.

The best ones that want to work for us, we’d love to hire them. The ones that won’t work for us, they can work with the industry.

Last, but very important, is the sustainability aspect. All the centers are sustainable and a growth engine. 30 sites so far. Another 70 are on the way.

How are the centers sustainable? Our philosophy is Human 2.0. Our delivery mechanism is the AVR platform. The vehicle to actually get it everywhere, boots on the ground, is the IDCs.

With that we can focus on the key segments. Our key segments, number one is education. Energy, aerospace, medical, manufacturing, security. There’s another six that are secondary, but those are where the value is best.

How does this work financially? When we said, for example, in Ethiopia we have a big...

Someone asked me, "But Taiwan is a little bit behind. Will it be possible to do it?" I said, "If I’ve done it in South Africa, Ethiopia, and some places like that, I think we can do it in Taiwan."

Really?

I think so.

I’m joking.

It would be challenging.

Let me tell you, and you tell me why not. I’m happy to.

What we do is a worker, we have this platform. It costs, in US, $41 per month to take advantage of the platform. That’s your knowledge -- the pill.

Make money on that, we make money on the systems, and we make some money on the applications. Applications are owned locally, and so on. We have a hub, and then we do satellites in various cities, and then we get it out to the local environment.

On the student side we charge $12 US, but in Ethiopia, for the same platform, we charge 27 cents. It’s not necessarily because we are egalitarian, which we are.

The idea is that there we need a contract with seven million students. They have a big population. They want to take the economy from $75 billion to $250 billion, and they have identified which barrier they want to address to make this leap. Very smart government, but the way.

I’ll skip a few slides. This is interesting. Here we’re working in France with Union of Metallurgical Industries, and they train 130,000 people per year. We started with a small pilot, and now we’re doing big rollouts.

National rollouts, education, also France. I took that as an example. Then Minister of Economy Macron, now President supporting this. The pilot went very, very successfully. Now we’re rolling out.

I’ll skip a few. This is, by the way, our office in China, pretty big office. 3,000 square meters, main office. Ethiopia, that’s the Minister of Education. We signed an agreement to rollout. Romania, Mexico, and so on.

The model, in essence, is that we start with very few pilots with maybe 300 workers, and then we expand. We start with small education institution, and we have the KPIs, and we expand.

What do we need to make it happen? One, we need the physical space. We rent, normally, space. We pay for it. We don’t expect anything for free.

We put a showroom with the 20 trucks of equipment. We bring teachers from Silicon Valley and VR experts, the best ones, for five years to live in the country, transfer all the secrets, all the information to the teachers in Taiwan and the students.

We put the entrepreneurial school. We try to recruit 100 students. Normally not a problem. Then we put the platforms and five years’ maintenance, support, and upgrades. Then, once we’ve done that, it’s very simple. We inaugurate the center. We put the whole thing together.

I just completed an operation in Norway. We had the Prime Minister, all the top ministers, and then we had the CEOs of the top six industries. The CEO of biggest offshore company, the biggest shipping company, fishery, and so on.

We tried to focus on the industries that are relevant for the country. Once we do that, then we take small pilots. This is not spraying and praying. We focus on some areas, because obviously our most limited resource is not money. It’s people. It takes time, so you want to start top-down.

Space-wise, as I said, 1,500 square meters. In terms of education we tried to be agnostic. There, also, four months -- it used to be three months. Now it’s four months -- theory, eight months project base learning.

We develop a curriculum that’s quite advanced. That’s been accredited in many different countries around the world. It’s supposedly the best -- we’ve been receiving awards -- curriculum for begin not theoretical, but practical, actually applying this.

People get a entry salary of $85,000. Even guys in South Africa.

We apply the same in China, for example, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Then sometimes students don’t want to do a project. They are crazy. They want to have their own ideas. Instead of rejecting that, we embrace it. Say, "OK, come with your idea. If it’s a good idea, we’ll introduce it to customers." Then you say, "Recruit 10 students from the group and do a prototype, a map, a product, or even a company."

Here’s a crazy one. This guy came up with an idea to do a sports application, and then, two years later, he’s actually the CEO of EON Sports.

EON Sports and creators of SIIDEKIQ. SIDEKIQ is a virtual...

He became $25 million market cap. Alibaba wants to buy him out. He said no. Top three company in sports in the world, and so on.

How do we fund this? We come in with $20.9 million, with co-investment 19.18 AVR systems, the platform, development lab. We pay five years for our teachers that we bring and live here and the project experts.

76 percent of the investment. 24, the percent, is our local partner. What do we expect from the local partner? Three things. One is to help us recruit the students. Normally, not a problem.

Two, provide subject-matter experts. Let’s say we want to encapsulate knowledge around CNC machines. Then we need to talk with someone with someone that really understands that, that we then put together with us, then a co-investment in $6.6 million, which corresponds to 24 percent. That’s basically it.

Locations, Manchester City. There we work with the local government, Sir Richard Leese, the mayor, and then with the universities.

Laval, same thing with the government. China, we work with China Merchants group, which is government owned, fourth largest company in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Singapore, we work with the government, but they gave the money to a university, and then they continued. Pretoria, government. Melbourne, Deakin University, but also government.

India, government folks in vocational training. I just was there for a week. We are doing 10 centers there, likewise in China. I’m going there tonight. Ethiopia, we talked about. Belgium, Greece, and so on and so forth.

I also, two weeks ago, fired myself. [laughs] I used to be the chairman. I’m still the largest shareholder in the company, but because I’m so passionate about this Human 2.0 I say I want to dedicate my next 20 years. By the time, I’m 55, so 75, god willing, if I have the health, we should do this Human 2.0 project.

I realize that our little company cannot do it alone, so I have to team up with governments, big corporations, but that’s the vision. Even if we do half, I’ll be very happy.

Today we are 42 million. [laughs] It’s a big long way to 3.8. Instead, our new chairman used to be the president of General Electric, ran 40,000 people. I’ve known him for 18 years. I’ve been on advisory board.

David is our new CEO. He used to run British Airways, and also used to run an online company that he took to half a billion.

Very smart guys, and they will help us with the Nasdaq. Our company’s going on Nasdaq for market capital, approximately, of $2.3 billion.

That’s it. Summary, what’s the best? If we were to do this together, find a way to do it, it would be a state of the art center. I would say, by far, the largest in the region.

There will be a school where we offer students to become experts in this area at no cost. We don’t charge for the school, but obviously we employ most of the students.

It will be an entrepreneurial school that stimulates people coming up with their own idea, creating their own intellectual property outside our activity. The best one we’d love to invest in.

It will be a bridge to employment, obviously. They will get access to the world’s largest library for learning, which grows every day, because it’s almost like crowdsourcing, and consistent content. We do it in a very qualitative way.

There will be local IP development. I always joke about this, but at this point in my presentation I had Sir Richard Leese to say, "Dan, thank you for your enthusiastic presentation, but I must say, sincerely, one thing."

I said, "OK, what is it?" "Listen, we don’t want to develop content for you Americans." I said, "First of all, I’m not American." [laughs] "I’m Swedish." "But what would like to do?"

They said, "Listen. I have four million people in my area. I have 43 four-year universities. I have Europe’s largest colleges, 300,000 students. What I like to do, I want to drink my own champagne first. What I mean is that if this technology can help us uplift, forget about making 12 times more money."

"Just say 40 percent better, faster knowledge transfer and can help uplift my people. For me, that’s valued 40 to 100 times more than making $50 million and outsourcing this because I want to take benefit of this before I get it to other people." I said, "That makes sense."

We established the KPIs and then, we went from there. With that, I’ll stop there. Before I ask for your advice, maybe you have any questions?

No, it all makes perfect sense. Do you have a neural lace lab?

I’m sorry?

Do you actually work with a neural lace lab?

Neural lace lab? No. I know, it’s a joke. I got that part but seriously, I looked into it and it will get there. In fact, if you saw my slide, probably the next 20, 30, 40...

That’s exactly right because you are imagining 30-years of innovation.

You see, 2037, we get neural lace. I’ve read everything about it. I’m a science fiction buff. The problem is, it’s becoming difficult by then to imagine what you cannot do. If you put this together, neural lace, and you put data roamers, and you put all this together, it becomes very complicated to see what humanity cannot do.

Right now, I’m not worried about that. I’m just the bridge-maker. I’m the gap. I’m trying to get us from where we are today...AVR will be just an intermediary period, maybe 20, 30 years, allows us to leapfrog to neural lace because we can’t wait for neural lace. That’s not going to happen.

One thing with your Human 2.0 vision, I think what your vision distinguishes between the Matrix-like scenario is that it enables humans to still feel useful in a society and focus people’s attention on each other instead of through some fake intermediaries, right? That was the main idea?

Correct.

Then I do worry about the current generation of VR/AR devices because it requires a lot of extrapolation to the person in the environment for their brains to fill in because the device doesn’t really know where my eyes are looking and the device doesn’t really capture my minor expressions.

If we use that for communication, then it’s not actually represented in the other side. It’s mostly extrapolated...

That’s a poor version.

Exactly. At some point, in the office next door, they’ve got all the VR devices and there’s an uncanny valley, like a period where the VR/AR gets almost good enough but not quite. Then, it does create a jarring experience for people who spend extended time in it because it’s too...finding details on parts that’s not fine.

They shouldn’t be finding any details on the parts that my eyes are not looking but it’s not detailed enough in the parts that I actually look, which my eyes focused on and things like that.

I agree.

Yes.

Also, to be honest with you, there’s many times I come in, I was, two weeks ago, in the biggest nuclear power plant in the US, in Palo Verde, and the first thing the guy came in and said, "Oh, headset? I can’t take...I get headache."

The discussion would have been over if that was our focus, headsets only. Then, I said, "How about this room?" Then, we had an IQ. Then, I said, "OK, now you’re talking. More screens." First of all, the headsets -- we were just speculating about this -- it’s probably two, three years left.

Nobody’s going to go with a brick in front of their head. I think what we’re going towards is glasses and these glasses can use opacity and can transition easily from AR to VR but it’s going to take some time.

Meanwhile, I think this, what you have right there, there’s a billion of them. It’s actually a very good way to do AR knowledge injection. For the things we are doing, what you are talking about is there. Human communication, which requires a lot of aspects.

Like three or five years in the future.

Correct. We are now on the basic, how do I replace a fry master? [laughs] Basic but it’s useful. People are willing to pay for it and we help bit by bit.

The contents are still going to be useful.

The contents will be reusable. We have content that’s six or seven years old that still is very useful. It is exciting but the challenge here is, how do you create this PPP, private-public partnership? If you look at how we done it in other locations, and then, I’ll ask you for the device. This is the last slide.

How we did it for other locations...70 percent of our centers...because we tried first to do it with private people. Private people, what happens is they look immediately to help close the center. [laughs] Meaning that, we met a company here and they said, "Yes, you can do it but you cannot work with this company and this company." That’s not what we want to do.

We want to do it in an open way. The way we done it, for example, in the UK, 70 percent of cases, we came in with 75 percent of the money. The local government, in this case, manages to provide us a grant but it’s not free money because we agreed on the KPIs. For example, uplift X amount of people. Deliver this based on these priorities.

Based on that, as long as we fulfill the KPI, it is a grant. If we don’t or don’t achieve the goals, they have the right to get some back. This is the way we did it in Manchester. We did the same in France. In Singapore, the money went to a university, so that’s 20 percent.

When the government, don’t provide us the grant, they provide it to a university and we have to donate our 20.9. The university owns the center and we get access to it. For us, it’s no different. We can do either one or the other.

US, we did it also through a university. Norway, we did it through a government. They set up a cluster. Belgium, they did it different. They have an investment arm, so they actually invested in the entity. Cape Town, they gave the money to a university and so on and so forth.

Czech Republic was through the EU. Greece was through government grant. Serbia, this minister became, actually, the prime minister, first female prime minister and so on. I would say, 70 percent is government grants. 20 percent is government investing in university and we, making a foreign investment in that university, or donation. Then, 10 percent, private.

Now, comes my question. Given your experience, what would you advise us, what do you think would be the most -- it’s assuming you find this interesting for Taiwan -- what would you recommend us would be the best path to make it happen?

In Taiwan, public universities are not companies, in the strict sense. They are more like units in the Ministry of Education.

If you do want to work directly with universities, it will have either to be private universities, or you will have to find yourself a way into fulfilling some specific Ministry of Education goals, which I’m not aware of anything corresponding to your plan, at this moment.

For K-12, there are KPIs around digital and media literacy in K-12 curriculum but it’s not strictly vocational in the way that you displayed it. It’s more about...

STEM?

Exactly.

We do it, for example, in Singapore, I didn’t say this much but the biggest market now is actually K-12, if you look at number of students because it’s like a pyramid.

Then, we do develop courses. I would say, the value is everything physical, practical, whether it’s chemistry, physics, biology, more so than relativity theory because that’s more of a theoretical thing. It has to be something with interaction with a practical thing.

It had to be designed in a social way, in the sense that five or six children interacting with a single object, settings like that. For K-12, I’m not aware of anything specific like the thing you offer here, in the K-12 curriculum that’s taking effect about a year and a half from now.

In addition to the K-12 curriculum, there are also experimental schools.

Taiwan does have a very vibrant alternate schooling system in the K-12 and private universities above K-12, so that is one venue. I’m not very well connected to that private university scene but it is a possibility.

The other possibility would be regional governments, where you mention that you’ve been approaching. I think, in our last meeting, you mentioned Taichung, Taoyuan, and Kaohsiung, something like that.

We’ll be presenting there in two weeks. The Smart City exhibition, we’ll be presenting. We’re still talking to them.

Right. Even if the national government doesn’t have exactly a corresponding plan, perhaps the regional governments do. If the regional governments see that it is important, like the Kaohsiung city did, to have AVR industry as its local cluster, then it will have the sufficient land and planning in that region to develop this kind of ecosystem.

That would be business between the private sector and the city government. It wouldn’t be a national level investment. That’s two different levels.

We have had success regionally. I have a question, though. We were having a meeting here yesterday here, and I gave an example of what happened in Thailand. I was in Thailand last week. The government there set up something for the digital economy called Thailand 4.0.

They create a new scheme, similar to what Italy has and almost every country has, where if there’s a foreign investment, and want to put 75 percent on investment and the local government can support 25 percent grant, assuming certain criteria and that is an impact to many.

What we were told yesterday is that there is a similar scheme here in Taiwan. Are you aware of this scheme?

Mm-hmm.

In that case, would you be interested or willing to help us to get to the right contacts to apply for such a scheme?

There are many such plans. I’m not sure which one you’re referring to.

MOE has a grant on global IT Innovation culture.

In November, there’s going to be the private investment company.

Right, there is that. It is called Taiwania Capital Management. Which is, I think, AI and IoT-focused at this point but they may do some AVR as well.

There’s virtually one per ministry interested in it. There’s one for MOEA, actually two for MOEA, one for MOE, and one for MOST, but the MOST one works with the NDC.

I think those are the four primary programs. I’m not directly in touch with any one of them. [laughs] I just read some bi-weekly reports.

I guess the question then, and we don’t have to answer them today, is that based on your understanding of what we would like to achieve, which would you recommend? A, would be the most suitable and B, the probability is reasonable to engage with that, if it is or not, I should say. [laughs]

Honestly, I’m not involved in the case selection process or the review process of any of those four funds. I’m aware of their existence and what kind of companies that they produced, but I’m not involved in the process at all, so I have no idea about the criteria that they use to pick the investments.

We have, normally, a 95 percent success rate but I’ve learned from the past, these two things. You have to do, what I call top-down, bottom-up. You have to get blessing, or at least general interest, from a minister level person or higher.

Then, you do have to engage with the people that actually make the decisions, which is not the minister. The minister goes, this is interesting. If you do both, with this type of offer, our success has been high. We had a chance to meet the working people but we haven’t had a chance to get to the minister yet in each department.

I believe many trust your judgment in terms of what technology is feasible and what is not and you have a great amount of respect. If you could consider to give your recommendation to, for example, a minister to spend 30 minutes with us, worst case scenario, they learn a little bit more about what is happening in this sector.

I think that would be very helpful for us. Would you be open to do that?

What I will do is that after each of our meetings, I will do a full transcript of what has been spoken here, and you can edit for brevity, making the message more powerful.

OK, so we can use that?

Right. You can use that. Maybe not the neural lace part; other parts.

Feel free to use the transcript’s URL, which I relinquish all copyrights. Go ahead and use it in however way you want. Maybe we can do a short summary as a summary statement or whatever. I think that’s the extent that I can help.

That’s great.

I can certainly lend my URL, which is the PDIS site, the https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw website that we use to capture all the transcripts that we have made in all our discussions that we had there. We have plenty of meetings with companies.

For example, there was a Bitcoin company here and talking about how they want taxation regulations to be changed to be considered a virtual currency instead of a virtual good, which was repeatedly taxed and so on. Then, that company used its transcript and forwarded it to the Minister of Finance, but the tax code did not change.

I think that’s a bit more different than what we’re trying to do.

Exactly. It is, actually, very challenging to reclassify Bitcoin into any of those terms because when the terms were made, there was no Bitcoin, so it doesn’t really clearly fit into any of those slots for the central bank. That was that.

Feel free to use the same model and communicate either with regional leadership or with other ministries.

Audrey, you mentioned last time, correct me if I’m wrong, once an IDC like this, Taiwan needs it and is actually planning something like this, but it’s about four to five years out?

Well just today, that plan got the budget from the parliament.

This is something you feel is needed now and it’s in the planning stages but it’s going to be four to five years if Taiwan is able to do it.

I would encourage you to look at the detail plan. It’s at http://achievement.ey.gov.tw/cp.aspx?n=1E42BEB0F68720CB&s=0E1FF5CBE8AF0056 -- if you just go to the ey.gov.tw website, you can see the special budget. Then, if you click the special budget, it will lead you to a page where all the currently -- well, today -- approved special budget items are there. That’s the red square here.

This includes the DIGI⁺ program?

The one-time hardware part of DIGI⁺ are there. The recurrent parts, we can’t use the special budget. It’s all at DIGI⁺ webside, http://www.digi.ey.gov.tw/. Here you will see this AVR science mark hub project.

Who’s heading that?

The Kaohsiung city and the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The MOEA.

That’s the person we need to reach.

I would encourage you to read the KPIs there because it was done in a bottom-up fashion. Also, they consulted the existing AVR companies. There’s a lot of people doing special effects and things like that, around that area. They talked with them and so everybody felt that it’s reasonable in that region. Then, they proposed it to the national level for the special budget.

If you are looking for alignment with KPI, I would highly encourage you to compare your KPIs in other governments with the KPI that’s outlined in this special budget item. That’s the most relevant part.

All the others, I think, would require a lot of adaptation of your program to fit the Minister of Education’s K-12 or the Ministry of Science and Technology’s AI-based platform, in which AVR is still important but more like a facilitating tool.

Yeah, it’s a vehicle to inject AI.

Exactly.

That’s right. Excellent. I really appreciate that advice. It was an honor and pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking so much of your time. We’ll be back in Taiwan and this gentleman lives in the area, so...

Yeah, Singapore.

How far is it?

It’s one half hour.

Nothing. I have to fly here. [laughs]

It’s in a nearby time zone, we could meeting VR.

Virtually.

Then, the last point is that if the minister travels to any of the locations, UK, France, I know that you are speaking sometimes in France.

That’s right.

Vous parlez Français?

A little bit.

A little bit, OK. I just bought a house there because I enjoy France, not only enjoy France but we have a growing activity. As you know, France is hosting the La Valle, which is the number one place for research meetings. My house is just there. Our center is just there, also. I would love to host you when you come next time or if you go to California, likewise.

Let’s keep that contact and we will do what you just suggested. We’ll take advantage of your offer. We will try to get to the ministers that have, as you suggested, the AVR projects first and see where they take us. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

It was a pleasure. Thank you.