I’m Ken. I came to Taiwan via acquisition originally, and I came back to Taiwan in order to work on product and innovation at Gogoro.
I’m Michael. I came to Taiwan originally because of my then-girlfriend, now wife. I am the tech lead, and I also co-founded a startup here in Taiwan called InLine.
Cool. I’m now feeling the peer pressure.
(laughter)
All right.
Cool. Which would you prefer, should I start with the two-minute pitch, or should I just show you the product?
Either way.
Let’s do the two-minute pitch here. What we’re focused on is a solution in the climate space. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to spell out the magnitude of the challenge.
Of course. You mean the magnitude of space? [laughs]
Well, yeah, exactly. There’s a growing number of people who are more and more concerned about this, but the thing is that the vast majority of them have no idea what they can do to make it happen. There’s some people who do. They’re fighting for systematic change.
They say you can’t get to systematic change, or you don’t usually, until you have about 25 percent of the population who really cares and who’s willing to take action on something.
That’s right.
That leaves us asking the question, “What about the 99 percent of us?” What do you do with all the people…
We can’t go to strike every Friday.
Right? Yeah, exactly.
As a public servant. We have no right to strike.
(laughter)
That’s basically what our focus is, is how can we help these people? The angle that is to make it as easy and motivational as possible for people to make better climate decisions.
I’ll skip the salesy thing. I’ll go straight into the product.
The demo?
Yeah, we’ll start out fake, and then we can show real. [Conducts demo]
People could be flying to the Pescadores, right? Anyway. [laughs]
That’s true. That’s true. That’s possible. User does whatever they want to. Where we identify an opportunity where they can make a better environmental decision, then we draw their attention to it.
I see that.
We help them to understand why something is better.
Are they going to plant trees to offset that, or is it actually a genuine energy reduction thing?
Yeah. We give full visibility into what we’re doing, and we encourage the community
Is this a browser plugin or something?
That’s part of it.
It says, “Woo-hoo,” OK.
Celebrating and making people feel good about themselves is one of the most motivating things you can do.
If I choose the non-friendly flight, do you say, “Boo-hoo,” or something?
(laughter)
Well, we could say, “Boo-hoo,” or we could just say, “Hey, you can’t win them all, but if you want to…”
That’s right, and turn the boo-hoo into a woo-hoo.
Yeah. Anytime we go to people and say, “You’re doing wrong,” then we get the uninstall. We’re just going to lose people with that.
Wouldn’t the customer say, “I have to download a lot of data about all the airline quality reports and things like that. Wouldn’t that be a lot of load on my hard disk,” or something like that?
It’s decentralized, so the customer installs something very lightweight, and when we send any data, it’s anonymous.
What do you mean anonymous? You certainly have the IP address in their browser…
We don’t log that. We don’t log that.
You don’t want that.
We don’t want it, and we don’t log it. We need to be transparent.
But it’s sent to you anyway?
Right, but I think the foundation of what we’re building is trust. We need to be transparent what we log, if we log it, and we need to be clear what we don’t, or what we’re not interested in. IP addresses, for sure, is not something we’re interested in.
I bring this up, because even if you are open source, there really is no way to ensure you’re not logging the IP addresses.
Yeah, you’re right.
We’ll disclose and provide as much tools as we can. We’ll adopt whatever best practices we can.
What if someone asks, “Can we have an in-house, on-premises server that I can reconfigure this plugin to talk to? Instead of to your servers, I want a bunch of static JSON, perhaps, just hosted somewhere in the intranet”?
In such restrictive environments, they are not allowed to make HTTP requests, other than to whitelisted domains, anyway. We have a very strong mandate to promote sustainability awareness, and so that’s actually a real question, is that is it possible to configure, that it goes to an on-premises server that I just clone it off GitHub or something?
I think that’s definitely something we need to consider in the future. I think, as a starting point, not right now, but if we want to scale bigger, definitely. I think that’s very interesting.
Your server is currently maintained manually?
As in, if you want to switch to a different cloud service, there’s no easy way to just, a few Docker files or whatever?
Actually, it is.
Oh, there is?
Technically, you’re able to provide on-premises. OK, that’s all good.
Technically, it’s not an issue software-wise.
Yeah, it’s just not a topic of conversation or a use case that we’re talked about extensively on our end, to be perfectly honest.
Here’s what we’re working on, and we’ve got a lot of things to learn and to validate. We’re here talking to you, because we’re hoping to get feedback that can make us better.
Why Melio? It’s a small payment service already.
It’s short for ameliorate, which means…
Sure. It’s a great name, except… [laughs]
We’ve got to come up with something different. We just haven’t done it right now.
Feedback would be very much appreciated, and you have the ability to support in a way that can create a huge shortcut.
Our ability to tap into talent pools that care about this issue can make a huge difference for us. Enough of the pitch. Any questions?
Yeah, there’s a startup that we incubated in the last batch last year called the Sustain Hub that analyze all the GRI reports and so on of the publicly listed companies in Taiwan using machine learning. It basically extract the kind of structured data that you make visible from their company displays.
I think they’re your natural allies. They’re also, another thing called 透明足跡, the Transparent Trail. I think they just go with their Dayi, their Taiwanese Hoklo name, T-H-A-U-B-I-N-G, which is guaranteed to not have trademark problems.
(laughter)
They just won the Presidential Hackathon. They basically used a plugin, but in augmented reality, which is a fancy term to say that they scanned a barcode for the purchase on the supermarket or convenience store.
Instead of displaying the price for the money, they displayed the price for the environment. It’s a really good experience, allowed to just scan a bunch of cookies and see that some of them are green, and some of them, not so much.
That’s cool.
They’re, I think, also open source, at least open API, and they’re also your natural allies. They already have done all the work to get the negative environment impact stuff figured out. They convinced people to just work with the boo-hoo part without getting uninstalled.
I think that’s an important thing, because at some point, you need to do some boo-hoo, not all woo-hoo. It’s just in the very initial MVP thing – and I hear you – that it’s always better to start with a Pokémon Go, like all fun part of it.
(laughter)
That’s that. Also, the browser plugin is going to feel unfamiliar to younger generations. That’s a real problem.
It’s a limiting factor, for sure.
Unless you magically work with Chrome on mobile, which I don’t think you do…
Not yet, no.
Right. That’s going to be a problem.
It’s a good point, and it’s something we talked about extensively.
What was your initial thoughts?
We did…
…convince everybody to use Firefox? [laughs]
Maybe not. [laughs]
We ended up testing a lot of features to basically say, “How can we create value for people down the motivational curve?” We’ve got a number of features that have been identified that really seem to work pretty well from a mobile perspective.
Unless there’s some kind of technology evolution from a browser or OS perspective, we can’t do that. It’s more of a manual effort. We hope for some progress on the technical side.
Which is not unrealistic.
Which is not unrealistic. I would bet that it’s going to happen, but we also have features that if we build up…
There is Web extension support in mobile browser, it’s just, it’s not a very popular browser. It’s called the Firefox browser.
I didn’t know Firefox has extension support on mobile.
They do.
That’s interesting.
They do.
Cool, I will definitely check it out.
Standard-wise, too. You run all the standard plugins.
Oh, that’s cool.
I’m just saying that, because you’re developing in what extension spec? I hope, which is cross-browser. Well, theoretically, but anyway, it should, without too much fanfare, just work on Firefox for mobile.
I will definitely check that out. That’s very interesting. Like Ken said, right now, we can’t do it for other browsers on mobile, but things are opening up.
Oh, yeah, I know, I know. Very exciting times.
(laughter)
Yeah, very exciting times. I am looking forward to some changes.
I’m looking forward to a change, yes.
I guess I’m saying I’m hoping further down the road, there will be more opportunity to plug into browsers on mobile, but we also have some other ideas that will work better on mobile right now.
Although I do think the US and EU is now having more success on the search front instead of on the Chrome browser front. You may take some time for the change that you’re wishing to see happen to actually happen to you.
Firefox mobile, if it doesn’t cost you too much to just test whether it works…
I will definitely do that.
…I think it’s a good existential proof, because it then motivates the younger people to think twice about choosing the default browser. Then if they go to Firefox, not because of µBlock or whatever…Which is actually another very good reason.
The uBlock origin, to be precise, but also, because of the not-named-Melio, but we don’t know what extension [laughs] then that’s an extra thing for them to say. Like, “I support the open Web and the environment.”
Yeah, definitely. I was also very happy to see the changes in Safari, which now supports Chrome extensions almost out of the box. Safari on mobile, that’s super exciting. I didn’t know. I will definitely check it out, probably today.
All that stuff is obviously really important and very helpful. If we end up building out some kind of trusted presence, some kind of trusted brand, then we’re hoping to have the good problem solve.
Definitely.
That’s where we hope, but can we get there? Who knows?
Of course, you can. The Presidential Hackathon winners win because they mobilize tens of thousands of people. The scan thing, the top topping thing is one thing. The other thing is this Feng Cha thing, which is the tea-serving app.
What it does is that it shows you how many plastic bottles you have saved by choosing to use refill stations. Hey, we are in a Social Innovation Lab which has a refill station that offers three different water temperatures.
You can just have a, I don’t know, conversation with people around you that also cares about saving plastic bottles. The great thing is that they designed it like Pokémon Go, so if you keep checking in every day, eventually, you get a sufficient number of points. That actually gets you some tea.
What’s the name of app?
It’s called Feng Cha, or the tea-serving app. The company is called Circuplus. I think it’s C-I-R-C-U-P-L-U-S, Circuplus. Yeah. Just this one, they recruited more than 8,000 people. Not too bad.
Oh, that’s awesome.
For the mobile factor, I think this is really good, because then it becomes a platform upon which that you can push, I don’t know, heat warmings, drink water. It ties in, definitely is this. Also, more informed choices.
Whether it’s the barcode-scanning app, the tea-serving app, and so on, they’re based on the same thing, which is to make the external environmental cost apparent, explicit. As long as your values are aligned, I think you can just work like on a machine-to-machine API and reuse these existing, trusted endpoints, instead of just building your own Line bot or something.
Which may or may not work, probably wouldn’t work.
OK, cool.
That sounds great.
Circuplus, OK.
Do you have any other feedback or any other advice for us?
Yeah, I think the main thing that’s required in Taiwan is just to work with an established brand that has social trust. As I mentioned, if you say you are not looking the IP addresses and secretly selling it to advertisers, there’s bound to be someone that’s already trusted that goes out and says, “Hey, we use their API, and they’re a trustworthy bunch.
“They even allowed us to rebuild the Docker files. After inspecting the server code, even though it’s not open source, we did inspect the server code, and it’s very kosher,” and so on. Something equivalent to that must be…
It’s definitely something we’re planning to do, yeah.
All the teams, the Circuplus one, the barcode-scanning one, so on, and so forth, these are Presidential Hackathon champions that has this social street credibility. I think that’s the first step, and then I think it’s a good idea.
Where would you suggest is the best source for us to tap into talent sources? We’re able to find people of pretty good technical talent, but the overlap between that and care about…
Just today is the bimonthly G-0-V, g0v Hackathon.
I think we’ve got a member of our team who’s there right now, actually.
Oh, really? OK, that’s awesome. There’s going to be a very large summit in Tainan around the end of the year, the g0v Summit. That’s where all the developer communities, not just in Taiwan, but I believe from abroad as well, is going to get here.
Sometimes virtually, of course, this being 2020, but [laughs] at least their attention is here. There’s any number of unconferences. If you haven’t submitted a talk, maybe you can do an unconference. If you go to the summit website, I think it’s December 6th.
Yours truly will also be there to talk about defending democracy, very exciting stuff. Then there’s any number of unconferences where you can just mingle with people and just recruit. Most people who are there have done something like that already, like the News Culpa, which is a disinformation-fighting Chrome plugin.
There’s one about labor law violations that’s displayed on 104-1111, those job hunting websites, and so on. There’s many g0v people that have done already, in some sort, the same kind of thing you’re doing, except it’s on the social, not the environment, purposes. That will save a lot of onboarding time, I hope.
That would be awesome. Any questions for us?
No, I think it’s very clear.
OK, cool.
Awesome.
Well, thank you very much for your time. Really do appreciate it.
I’ll send you the transcript. We can coedit and publish.
Sounds good.
Awesome. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much.
Very nice to meet you.
Thank you.