Magazine BEAST #16 2019
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74<br />
#Technology | Startup<br />
KA: You mentioned «Stage». What is it exactly?<br />
AG: Well, I forgot to mention that when we started our<br />
journey, we launched over 5 celebrity apps back in South-<br />
East Asia garnering over 7 million downloads. Quickly, we<br />
realized that the model was not evolving and that it would<br />
eventually die due to longer sales cycles. We therefore<br />
scrapped the beta version to now launch Stage, a platform<br />
for creators to monetize content and commerce. You will<br />
see it soon in Luxembourg: we have some exciting worldcreators<br />
signed up along with Hollywood biggies. We will<br />
be launching a survey in the UK and Europe with over<br />
25,000 creators.<br />
KA: This sounds exciting and looks global…<br />
AG: Yes, indeed, we are very excited. Media-Tech is<br />
something which runs in our DNA as a company, and<br />
personally, I am very passionate about it. With Stage, we<br />
think we can solve a real world challenge of empowering<br />
the next generation digital influencers globally and also do<br />
it better than the competition by leveraging the power of<br />
machine learning and betting on automation.<br />
The team is working on it non-stop in the UK, Luxembourg<br />
and India to get it up and ready. It is going to be a great<br />
product built out of love, collaboration and partnerships.<br />
KA: Is «Stage» going to be the focus for 2020?<br />
AG: Definitely. It already takes about 50% of my time.<br />
Imagine an artist selling his/her content, commerce<br />
(ticketing, merchandise) and having his/her own digital<br />
identity online. There is not a single platform in the world<br />
today which allows an artist to decide how he/she should<br />
price his/her content/commerce. Social platforms can give<br />
you a million followers, yet, most of the time, you are<br />
unable to monetize this popularity. We want to pioneer<br />
the Direct to Consumer model by giving creators more<br />
control and therefore a global reach on how their content<br />
is distributed. The first version of web, mobile and TV apps<br />
looks very exciting and we are already running betas in<br />
small pockets with our users. It’s still 6 months away for<br />
the consumers though… Stay tuned!<br />
KA: One last question… when are you bringing<br />
robots to Luxembourg?<br />
AG: How do you even know about this? Well, we are<br />
extremely excited to work on a robotics project for a<br />
South East Asian company. It opens a whole new world of<br />
possibilities of deep learning for us, as we are collaborating<br />
with the world’s best technological minds. We have been<br />
working on it for more than two years, with many setbacks,<br />
but we are finally getting there. There are still miles to<br />
go, but we are very confident when it comes to the<br />
future success of this amazing project. Moreover, we are<br />
contributing to the creation of its Autonomous Navigation<br />
and object detection system. You have to interact with it<br />
– which is really cool – and it actually speaks like a Human<br />
being. We are training it to be adaptive for use cases for<br />
the hospitality, defense and healthcare sector, among<br />
others. Hopefully, it will be ready for ICT Spring 2020!<br />
<strong>BEAST</strong> MAGAZINE <strong>#16</strong>