>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's Virtual coverage of Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit Online. We couldn't be there in person, but we're doing remote interviews. I'm John Furrier, your host of the cube. 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 Dystech and Janine Teo CEO and founder of Solve Education founders and CEOs of startups is great Vincent Quah is the APAC Regional Head of Education, Healthcare Not-For-Profit and Research for AWS. (indistinct) big program. Vincent, thanks for coming on Janine and Hugo thank you for joining. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Thanks John So, 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 Amazon, obviously big (indistinct) culture. You got two great founders here and CEOs doing some great stuff. Tell us a little bit what's going on at APAC, a lot of activity. I mean re-invent 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're 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 not who they can reach out to from a community standpoint, that is actually how we started and developed this program called AWS EdStart. 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 joined the program, AWS EdStart. Yeah, three specific areas, 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 leaking 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 Cloud credits, promotional credits for them so that they can go and experiment and develop innovations for their customers. >> That's great stuff I want to get into that program a little bit further because I think, you know, that's a great example of kind of benefits AWS provides (indistinct) free credits or, no one is 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 an African Innovation Forum couple of years back, and the topic that he was sharing with, how can Africa skip over the industrialization phase and go direct to the knowledge economy and that discussion went towards, in order to have access to the knowledge commonly 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, you know, engaging the government and schools and teachers, but not depend on them for the success of the education initiative. So, and that's was what (indistinct) 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 (indistinct) versus the other SDGs like, you know, poverty or hunger, right? Actually require big amount of logistic coordination and so on. So we saw a very interesting trend with mobile phones, particularly smart phones 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 on a public through providing education and employment opportunities, (indistinct) on tech. And we.. our vision is to enable people to empower themselves. And what we do is that we build an open platform that provides everyone active education. >> Hugo How about your company? What problem are you solving? How did it all get started? Tell us your vision. >> Thanks, John. Well, look, it all started with a joke, one of the co-founder, Matthew, had a, he has a child who has severe learning disorder and dyslexia, and he made a joke one day about having (indistinct) that could support those kids. And I took the joke seriously. So we started sitting down and, you know, 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. We have an estimated 10 to 20% of the worldwide population with the disorder, due to in context, that's between 750 million up to 1.5 billion individuals 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 one is, so what, what do we do about it? And so given all 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 parents in the U.S. specifically who paid up to 6,000 U.S. Dollars for a diagnosis with an educational psychologist. On the other side, we have parents who wait 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 (indistinct) from smartphone is actually really good to record your voice. So we started collecting audio recordings from children and adults who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. And we then try to model and to recognize the likelihood of dyslexia by analyzing audio recording. So in theory, it's like diagnosed dyslexic, helping other undiagnosed dyslexic being diagnosed. So we have now (indistinct) them. That can take about 10 minutes, which requires no prior training costs, 20 U.S. Dollar, 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 for questions that are nonlinear 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. This is the kind of thing that seems obvious now as look at it, but now you've got to put it into action. So, you know, one of the benefits of Cloud on AWS, we'll give a plug for Vincent's company here is that you can move faster. And that's something that Andy Jassy always talks about and Teresa Carlson, being builders and moving fast, but you got to build it. 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've got to actually start writing code. What happens next? Janine, we'll start with you. >> Well, what happens next? Okay. So 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 divide is very real, most technology out there first are not designed for (indistinct) 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, and that's something that problem is. One is just one part of the whole puzzle. There's two other very important things. One is advocacy. Can we prove that we can teach through mobile devices? And then the second thing is motivation. And again, it's also really obvious, but, and people might think that, you know, 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 workout everyday, but you know, I don't really do that. So how do we use technology to, you know, 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, certainly with it. >> 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 put, take one step in front of the other. You got AWS, take us through the progression on the startup. >> Yeah, sure. I mean, what Janine said is, very likely to, 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, it is 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 are we going to make this work And so we've.. 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 it makes sure that we have the scientific evidence behind us that support us. And so what that means is that we have to have a large amount of data and then put this to work, right on the other side of the accessibility and affordability means that Janine 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 allow us to deliver the same experience and the same value to clients and parent and teacher and (indistinct) professional around the world. And that's why, you know, it's been amazing, to be able to use the 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. >> (indistinct) 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's great penetration with mobile and broadband. You have great trends as a tailwind for Amazon and these kinds of opportunities EdStart, what trends are you seeing that are now favoring you? Because with COVID, you know, the world is almost kind of like been a line 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 is more channels, more data, the 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're three things that I want to quickly touch on. Number one, I think governments 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. Right, We will talk 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 close down across the world, UNESCO reported, what 1.5 billion students 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 (indistinct) education model will have to change. And they recognize that, you know, again, it goes back to the digital strategy that they've got to have a clear digital strategy and the education technology companies like what, who we have here today. Just the great partners that the education system need to look at to help them solve some of these problems and get to addressing 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 be, say it. There's some old technology out there and Janine 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, there's a joke here in the United States so 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 unmute and how to configure a network address translation if their routers don't work, real problems. I mean, this was technology, schools were operating with low tech Zoom's out there. You've got video conferencing, you've 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.. There's a problem today, but it's an opportunity tomorrow. Could you just quickly talk about how you see the Cloud, helping all this manual training and learning new tools. >> Absolutely. So I want to say and put forth a hypothesis and that hypothesis is simply this. We are all now living in a Cloud empowered economy, whether we like it or not, we are touching and using services that 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, you know, 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 top 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, want to 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 want to be ready. You want to be prepared for the unknown, which is what a lot of people are faced with. And you want to get ahead of the curve. And so education, training yourself, getting some learning done. And that's really very, very important as a next step to prepare yourself to face the uncertainty and having programs like AWS EdStart actually helps to empower and catalyze innovation in the education industry that our two founders have actually demonstrated. So back to you, John. >> Congratulation on the EdStart, we'll get into that and real quickly, EdStart but let's first get the born in the Cloud generation Janine and Hugo you guys are competing, you got to get your apps out there. You've 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 get 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 has 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 (indistinct) are dry >> (indistinct) knock on doors and convince people. >> Yes. And now we don't have to do that. It's the other way around. So we are really, 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 an educational platform, which is education (indistinct) on our civilization, they have added in a module that teaches COVID because, you know, their health care 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 Hoax Or 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 25 million people. So that 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 (indistinct) and even a very difficult topic like sex education as well. >> Yeah. And the learning is nonlinear, 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's Amazon helping you? >> Absolutely John, look, this is an interesting one because the common competitor that we have are educational psychologist, they're not at tech. So I wouldn't say that we're competing against a competitor per se. I would say that we are competing against some old way of doing things. The challenge for us is to empower people, to be comfortable with having a machine, you know, analyzing your kid's 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 AI, 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 pot 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, 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're 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 the job and, you know, achieve success. So, you know, we're not competing against 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 competing against is an old way of doing things. >> And that's exactly why the Cloud's 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 that's how Amazon does so well, by the way, you can take all our recordings from theCUBE interviews, all my interviews and let me know how I do, okay. So got all the, got all the voice recordings for my interview. I'm sure the test will come back challenging. So take a look at that. >> 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 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 EdStart mean for them? How does it work? Would you would recommend it? And what are some of the learnings that you have from working with EdStart? Janine We'll start with you. >> For me. So I would, for me, I would definitely highly recommend EdStart. And the reason is because EdStart, our relationship with EdStart, is almost not like a client-supplier relationship it's almost like business partners. So they not only help us with providing the technology. But on top of that, they have their system architects to work with my tech team and they have, you know, open technical hours for us to interact. And on top of that, they do many other things like building a community where, you know, people like me and Google can meet. And also other opportunities like getting out there, right? As you know, all of the startups run on a very thin budget. So how do we not pour millions of dollars into getting all that out there is another big benefit as well. So I'll definitely very much recommend EdStart. And I think another big thing is this, right? Now that we have COVID and we have demands coming from all other places including like, even (indistinct) 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. I think, at 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, EdStart your observations, experience and learnings from working with AWS. >> Absolutely. Look, there's a lot to say, so I'll try and make it short for anyone, but, so for us and me personally, and also as an individual and as a founder, it's really been a 365 sort of support. So like Janine mentioned, there's the community where you can connect with existing entrepreneur. You can connect with experts in different industry. You can ask technical experts and have a, you know, 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, you know, 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 secured and all that sort of thing has been really helpful in terms of moving forward with discussion with potential client and government as well. So there's also the business aspect side of things, where when people see you, there's a perceived value that, you know, 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 AppSec review process as you do deals is a lot easier when you're on AWS. Vincent we're a little bit over time. What a great panel here. Close us out, share with us what's next for you guys. You've got a great startup ecosystem and doing some great work out there and 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 disruptive innovation. And the AWS Cloud is really the platform where so many of our Ed Techs, whether it's (indistinct) Health Tech, Gulf Tech, 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 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 Teresa Carlson and Andy Jassy and 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 starting to see that blending. And you've 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 having us >> thanks John >> 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. 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