Aggregate Farming Platform Empowers Small Farmers in India at No Cost

Posted by Amanda Del Signore on Tue, Nov 01, 2022 @ 09:38 AM

Stevie-winner Agribid Private Limited is a farmer-friendly business-to-business marketplace specializing in the sale and purchase of agri-commodities with every stakeholder along the agribusiness chain, including farmers, traders, corporate consumers, and global buyers.

undefined-1Launched in late 2020 by Ashutosh Mishra, Manoj Suvarna, and Chetan Suvarna, it is their company vision to be the most preferred marketplace for agri-products globally. Since launching, 300 farmer producer organizations (FPOs) have signed up to benefit from Agribid’s business model.

Agribid sees that the plight of small farmers across India is due to fragmented land holding. In the market, a small farmer does not have any control on price—not due to a lack of trading options—but in accordance with the concept of economies of size: the average cost per unit of production decreases as the size of the farm increases. With an average land holding of 2 to 3 acres each, a small farmer can produce a crop of 2 to 5 MT. Such a low quantity would never interest a big trader who is looking for 1 truck load (10 MT) minimum size for optimizing logistical costs.


According to Agribid, the solution is aggregation. Using their integrated platform, they seek to empower farmers by aggregating them in order to achieve the best price from buyers across India and globally.

In addition, as a company policy, Agribid does not charge farmers for their services—aggregation will be free for life to all participating farmers. In fact, the company has committed to sharing a portion of revenue with the FPOs who have joined. Agribid expects the farmers to utilize these extra funds to improve farmer welfare, machinery, and storage facilities.

Agribid plans to expand the Indian base from 11 to 23 states and its global presence from three countries to nine. Since winning their Stevie Award, they have been named one of the 20 Most Promising Startups to Watch in 2022 by Business Connect. 

Agribid won a Bronze Stevie Award for Most Innovative Startup – Business Services Industry in the
2022 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards.

Interested in entering the 2023 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards?

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Topics: Asia-Pacific Business Awards, Asia-Pacific Market, Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, AsiaPacificStevieAwards

The Power of Cultural History in Cross-Media Marketing

Posted by Amanda Del Signore on Wed, Oct 26, 2022 @ 11:00 AM

Stevie-winner BCW is the global communications agency built to move people. BCW partners with clients in the B2B, consumer, corporate, crisis management, healthcare, public affairs, purpose and technology sectors to set strategic direction for all communications and create powerful and unexpected ideas that earn attention.

BCW_logo_APSA22Through an “earned-plus” offer—earned media plus paid media, creative technology, data, AI and an expanding suite of innovative capabilities—BCW moves people with power and precision to move its clients forward.

One such client is Chinese laser projection specialist Formovie. Formovie planned to launch its “T1” flagship laser projector in an effort to reinforce its leading position in the highly competitive China laser market. Formovie and BCW came together to develop a comprehensive marketing campaign, which earlier this year won a Bronze Asia-Pacific Stevie Award for Innovation in Cross-Media Marketing.

Considering the wide array of existing product choices and increasingly discerning consumers, Formovie faced some big challenges in building a unique product story and developing effective touch points with consumers. What they did was initiate a cross-media launch campaign that aimed to:

  • Exposure goal—generate 30 million impressions total.
  • Engagement goal—engage with 40 key media & influencers in the consumer projection segment with positive endorsement on product experience.
  • Business goal—help with T1 product sales on e-commerce platforms.

According to research, more than 60% of potential laser projector consumers are enthusiastic about an “exquisite lifestyle” that integrates history, art, symphony, etc. Based on this insight, instead of a traditional press event, Formovie launched a cross-over campaign titled “Breathing life to Dunhuang” integrating imagery and connotations of one of the most famous cultural relics in China: The Mogao Caves in Dunhuang. Dunhuang was the first trading town reached by foreign merchants entering Chinese-administered territories along the Silk Road from the west. The city is the site of the renowned Mogao Caves, which form a system of 500 Buddhist temples, some of which were dug out as early as AD366, which were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.

Dunhuang was the first trading town reached by foreign merchants entering Chinese-administered territory from the west. The city is the site of the renowned Mogao Caves, which were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.

At its foundation, the marketing campaign was a tech-centric, projection-based mini-art show. Commercial laser shows are often used for illumination projects like this; instead, Formovie’s new cinema-pro quality, consumer laser projector T1 was utilized to reproduce the historical relics of frescos from Dunhuang.

By merging the most advanced laser technology with traditional Chinese culture, the team created an appealing product story across media channels, including traditional media, digital platforms, advertising, as well as e-commerce channels.

As a cultural icon with nation-wide recognition, Dunhuang successfully helped attract attention from audiences with large-scale advertising placement. Dunhuang images were also utilized to produce the boot screen picture, product packages, and a scarf gift as exclusive incentives to boost sales. Riding on the momentum generated from media and influencers, the topic “digital representations of Chinese cultural heritage with T1” led to larger scale exposure and discussion as a result.

The campaign was a success, surpassing all targets:

  • Exposure goal— 32 million impressions were generated from all media platforms; search engine data show that the number of searches about T1 increased 1,378% within a month.
  • Engagement goal— More than 60 key influencers in the consumer projection industry shared articles, videos, or posts with positive endorsement, generating 100K+ engagement.
  • Business goal— Dunhuang-themed packages and gifts helped drive sales by more than $500k within 24 hours on Tmall (formerly Taobao Mall), a Chinese-language website for business-to-consumer online retail, operated in China by Alibaba Group.

The integrated campaign “Breathing life to Dunhuang” created a unique story of how traditional Chinese culture from centuries ago can be revitalized today by innovative Formovie products. Cross-media approaches including traditional media, digital platforms, advertising, as well as e-commerce channels were utilized to communicate with audiences throughout their decision-making journey with excellent results.

BCW won a Bronze Award for Innovation in Cross-Media Marketing in the 2022 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards.

Interested in entering the 2023 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards?

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Topics: Asia-Pacific Business Awards, Asia-Pacific Market, Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, AsiaPacificStevieAwards

Aussie Broadband’s Self-Service Customer Portal and App Provide Convenience While Easing Burden on Support Staff

Posted by Amanda Del Signore on Mon, Oct 24, 2022 @ 05:00 AM

Stevie-winner Aussie Broadband is a rapidly growing, Australian internet service provider with a reputation for providing high-quality internet and transparent customer service. In 2020, Aussie Broadband launched Carbon, a free self-service portal that allows customers to control all of their Aussie Broadband services from one central location.

Carbon is designed to take the delays and confusion out of ordering new services, with many products and services able to be ordered directly in the platform and with transparent pricing displayed.

Rather than wait for months to order and receive new business services, Carbon users can access free quotes, place their own orders, and control everything from hardware dispatch to service activation, all from a central portal. Carbon enables businesses to turn on a service at any location where NBN (Australia’s National Broadband Network) has been before; activation is extremely fast thanks to Aussie's clever, efficient integration with NBN's systems. 

Aussie Broadband LogoCustomers using Carbon can now:

  • Purchase and customize their products and services online, including internet services, data center connections, MPLS networks, SD-WAN networks, hosted PBX and more. 
  • Manage and test their services at scale, allowing them to create simple internet services, while managing billing, technical support and ordering. 
  • Apply configurations to their services within seconds, as well as take advantage of single-click tests and diagnostics, real-time monitoring of bandwidth and data use, and centralized notifications, billing and support. 
  • See immediately if there are any known outages affecting their service.

In addition to simplifying and shortening the ordering process, Carbon also provides users with a bevy of features for managing existing services, as well as handling billing and troubleshooting issues without the need to call customer support. Users can apply their preferred custom configurations to business telco services, which is especially useful for enterprise customers looking to build and manage their own networks and cloud platforms.

Aussie Broadband engineered Carbon to tackle some of the biggest pain points experienced by business and enterprise customers, and the company believes they are the first telco in Australia to offer account features and self-service at this level.

Carbon is not the only tool that Aussie Broadband offers to customers to enhance the customer experience. The MyAussie App offers a range of innovative features for customers that had never been seen before from a major player in the Australian telco industry. Among many other features, MyAussie offers customers the ability to “kick” their internet connection all the way back to the network, which would have required assistance from a technical support staff previously.

Another tool developed by Aussie Broadband is The Proactive Fault Detector, an in-house designed and developed software that automatically detects faults and proactively resolves them before a customer contacts Aussie's support team. They found that more than 50% of dropout and speed faults were identifiable before the customer contacted support. One of the main benefits is that it significantly reduces both the duration and volume of calls, giving their support staff more time to focus on better customer experience. If a fault is detected with a customer’s connection, the system begins running troubleshooting tests and attempts to restore services immediately. The automated fault identification system is currently identifying and triaging over 200 faults per day. 

Since winning their Stevie Award, Aussie Broadband has completed the acquisition of Brisbane Telecommunications and IT solutions provider Over the Wire (ASX:OTW) for $344 million dollars. In addition, they have signed a 3-year deal with Mitsubishi Motors Australia to provide Enterprise NBN and on-net services to its corporate and regional locations across the country.

Aussie Broadband won the Gold Stevie Award for the Innovative Use of Technology in Customer Service - Telecommunications Industries in the 2022 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards.

Interested in entering the 2023 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards?

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Topics: Asia-Pacific Business Awards, Asia-Pacific Market, Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, AsiaPacificStevieAwards

Schedule Revised for 2022 Asia-Pacific Stevie® Awards

Posted by Clara Im on Thu, Mar 03, 2022 @ 12:06 AM

Entry deadline extended to April 1

 

The Stevie® Awards, organizer of the world's premier business awards programs, announced that they are revising the entire schedule for the 2022 (ninth annual) Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

 

APSA22_EXTFDL010422_600x300_English

 

They have extended the final entry deadline for the awards to April 1. No additional late fees will be charged for entries submitted through April 1, and the entries will not be penalized in any way in the judging process. The judging process will extend through April 11. The Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners will be announced on April 19. As the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Asia-Pacific region discourages the staging of an awards banquet this year, a virtual ceremony will be staged instead, on Wednesday, June 29.

 

The Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards is the only business awards program to recognize innovation throughout the entire Asia-Pacific region. The competition is open to all organizations across 29 nations of the Asia-Pacific region: large and small, for-profit and non-profit, public and private.

 

The awards focus on recognizing innovation in all its forms, wherever it is achieved in the workplace. Entries are accepted in eight languages - Chinese, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Thai and Vietnamese - in the following category groups:

New categories for 2022 will recognize Social Media innovations, in content creation and moderation, management, and marketing since July 1 2019.

Scores of professionals from throughout the region will participate in the judging process to determine the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie winners.

The Stevie Award trophy is among the world's most coveted prizes. The name Stevie is taken from the name Stephen, which is derived from the Greek for "crowned".

 

Interested in entering the 2022 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards?

Request the entry kit

Topics: business awards, Asia Awards, Asia-Pacific, The Stevie Awards, Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, AsiaPacificStevieAwards

How a Stevie Award Winner Is Helping to Clean Up Emissions in Asia

Posted by Maggie Gallagher on Thu, Jul 02, 2015 @ 01:06 PM
The Chief Representative for Clean Air Task Force in China, Dr. S. Ming Sung won the Bronze Stevie® Award for Executive of the Year - Non-Profit or Government in the management awards categories of the 2015 Asia-Pacific Stevie® Awards.  The edition of the 2016 Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, which are open to all organizations operating in the 22 nations of the Asia-Pacific region, will open for entries in October 2015. Find out how to get more information here.

Dr. S. Ming SungClean Air Task Force (CATF), a nonprofit environmental organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, believes that partnerships between companies in China and the West are crucial to accelerating the commercialization of low-carbon, coal-based energy generation. To that end, CATF is working in China and elsewhere in Asia to facilitate the development of joint business ventures between innovative energy companies and research institutions.

CATF is represented in China by Dr. S. Ming Sung, its Beijing-based Chief Representative for Asia-Pacific. CATF and Sung’s efforts in China focus on developing partnerships and knowledge-sharing that build on the country's current leadership in low-carbon coal technologies essential to addressing climate change and energy security.

Working Together

Beyond simply importing Western technologies, Chinese firms are working side-by-side with U.S. companies to learn how to adapt technologies to their needs and train new workforces. “The United States is more innovative,” said Sung. “But China tends to execute projects faster and cheaper than anyone else. So, if we can get the United States and China working together, everyone will benefit, and those concerns will also make a lot of money.”

Sung is profoundly aware of the importance of his work. As he put it: “CATF has a unique role to play in protecting the environment and addressing global climate change by catalyzing these business-to-business collaborations between the U.S. and Asia.”

Averting the Worst Consequences of Climate Change

Reliance on coal creates many challenges—along with some critically important opportunities. Energy companies in North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia have enormous experience and expertise working with coal, and are similarly motivated to develop technologies and techniques that will preserve a role for cleaner coal in a carbon-constrained world economy.

Business-to-business collaborations hold the potential to:

- Mitigate the cost of developing highly advanced clean energy technologies;

- Shorten the deployment time of clean energy systems;

- Decrease the world's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

The environmental and economic benefits of transitioning to clean energy will be smaller and slower to materialize if western and Asian companies do not work together. Investments by both countries will reduce the cost of that technology worldwide, increasing the likelihood that low-carbon technologies such as carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) will be widely deployed in time to help avert the worst consequences of climate change.

Developing Partnerships in China

Together, the U.S. and China account for about 40% of the world's CO2 releases. Both countries are heavily reliant on fossil fuels, so the challenges they face are the same: How to cut CO2 emissions without harming economic growth and national security. CATF therefore believes that in developing climate change solutions, the U.S. and China are natural partners, not rivals.

Dr. Sung has helped CATF to facilitate several joint ventures between U.S. and Chinese technology companies to get low or zero carbon coal deployed quickly. (Find out more about these projects on the CATF website.)

Dr. Sung has worked with Chinese energy industry leaders to draft energy proposals. He serves as the Senior Economic Advisor to the Chinese city of DaQing, and has been a keynote speaker/moderator at many international conferences.

China’s giant state-owned companies are taking the lead on these projects, and many also involve major international partners. “If CCUS is to succeed, the U.S. and China must share more technical information on clean-coal technology,” says Sung.

A Thirst for Cleaner Energy

China's thirst for cleaner energy and the targets established in its 12th 5-year plan are pressuring the major companies operating in China to ramp up their efforts to explore for natural gas in shale formations and rapidly scale up production. But haste may risk environmental degradation and adverse human health impacts as reported in the press (e.g. The New York Times article "China Takes On Big Risks in Its Push for Shale Gas" from April 11, 2014).

CATF's vision is that by learning from the experiences of modern shale developers, China can leapfrog to more advanced, cleaner, safer practices proven in the U.S.

Moving Forward on Solar, Nuclear and Renewable Energy

Taking the "all of the above" approach to clean energy, CATF has also worked on helping China’s industry develop nuclear and solar capabilities. For example:

  • As part of U.S.-China collaboration on nuclear energy development, CATF is helping Chinese nuclear operators receive training in U.S. facilities run by Duke Energy and Southern Companies. Trainees shadow U.S. nuclear operators for a 3-6 months program;
  • Working with Duke Energy, Huaneng Group, and others, CATF is evaluating and validating the technical and economic feasibility of advanced small modular nuclear reactors for the global market, including China;
  • CATF recently held a solar thermal technical conference in China for potential Chinese market development, and facilitated a meeting between Huaneng Group and a major solar thermal plant operator in Nevada;
  • This past year, CATF helped General Compression, an energy storage company based in Massachusetts, to partner with Huaneng CERI to develop a commercial demonstration facility in China.

About Dr. S. Ming Sung:

Dr. S. Ming Sung joined the Clean Air Task Force as its Chief Representative for Asia-Pacific shortly after the 2008 ACEII Roundtable event in Beiijng. An American citizen, Dr. Sung was born in Shanghai and is fluent in all three major Chinese dialects. He is well connected with China energy companies and relevant public officials, and has deep ties to the global coal gasification and large chemical/energy project development communities. Dr. Sung's experience and connections have proven a perfect fit with CATF and he has immeasurably expanded ACEII's ability to achieve its objectives.

Dr. Sung's professional experience extends over 40 years in the energy and IT industries. He has worked for a handful of the world's leading companies and institutions, including Shell (where he spent 25 years), AspenTech, BASF, Monsanto, US DOE, and XinAo Group (a division of China's ENN Group). His experience covers management, engineering, operations, and marketing in coal, oil, chemicals and related areas.

Dr. Sung earned his BS and MS in Chemical and Petroleum Refining Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His Ph.D. research was in asphalt rheology at the University of Florida.

About Clean Air Task Force:

Clean Air Task Force is a nonprofit environmental organization with offices across the U.S. and in China. CATF works to help safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research and analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector. For more information, please visit www.catf.us.

Topics: Asia Awards, Asia-Pacific Business Awards, Asia-Pacific Market, Asia-Pacific, Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, AsiaPacificStevieAwards