Dragon Creative Primed for Growth and Innovation with IBM Cloud
Dragon Creative Enterprise Solution Limited (DCES), a local pioneer in augmented reality (AR) applications, has successfully migrated its software development and delivery operations to the IBM Cloud in order to improve time to market, access cognitive APIs and leverage IBM’s extensive go-to-market support.
A home-grown startup with a successful track record in public crowdfunding, DCES was established in 2013 to tap emerging opportunities in commercial applications of augmented reality, leveraging its award-winning MAD Gaze family of “smart glass” devices. Launched by DCES in December 2015, MAD Gaze is a smart glasses brand targeted at both business and consumer markets, delivering a superior user experience based on augmented reality.
While its initial mode of operations was to run an on-premises software development system and host applications on an alternative cloud platform, it soon started coming up against limitations.
“We found that a lack of open standard support in our previous cloud platform made integration harder than it should be, slowing our development efforts and hindering partner collaboration,” said Jordan Cheng, Founder & CEO of DCES. “By contrast the IBM Cloud has end-to-end support for open standards with IBM Bluemix, IBM’s cloud development platform, enabling us to tap into an incredible range of built-in functionality so we don’t need to build it ourselves.”
“This includes the Watson Developer Cloud which provides cognitive capabilities that will be critical as both a driver and catalyst for the augmented reality solutions market. Solutions that integrate cognitive capabilities and augment reality help businesses where digitalisation, voice command and data collection are needed.”
Since moving to the IBM Cloud, DCES has been able to speed up its project development times by at least 70 percent, according to Cheng. It now has several cognitive AR solutions under development in areas including traveling assistance, logistics and inventory and customer services, with one application already rolled out in the field.
The Vocational Training Council in Hong Kong is currently testing the DCES-developed training simulation to help teach automobile mechanics. By leveraging application programming interfaces from the Watson Developer Cloud, including IBM Watson Speech to Text, Visual Recognition and Dialog APIs, DCES’ MAD Gaze glasses can see and identify vehicles parts, vocalizing the part names and helping students find where they need to be fitted (as shown in the video).
“We share a vision with Dragon Creative of cognitive computing becoming ubiquitous in our everyday lives and fundamentally changing how we perform our jobs, engage and interact with others, learn and make decisions,” said Gordon Sit, Executive, IBM Cloud, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “Combined cognitive and smart glass applications have huge potential to enhance efficiency and improve workflow across a broad range of industries. We’re therefore pleased to be working with Dragon Creative to target opportunities in the B2B market.”
“Through this fruitful collaboration we hope to contribute to the further development of the Internet of Things and encourage widespread adoption of cognitive AR applications among businesses in Hong Kong,” concluded Sit.
Gordon Sit, Executive, IBM Cloud, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited (right) and Jordan Cheng, Founder and CEO of Dragon Creative Enterprise Solution.
As well as providing the ability to deliver apps in almost any geography thanks to IBM’s global network of 47 cloud data centers, IBM helps to support DCES’s go-to-market efforts through the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program. This gives it access to an extensive roster of corporate clients, a network of 600 business and technical mentors and up to $120,000 USD a year in IBM Cloud resources.
Thus far IBM has engaged with more than 8,000 startups worldwide through the Global Entrepreneur Program, granting them over $250 million USD in cloud resources to help them develop, test and deploy solutions on IBM Cloud. As well as DCES, local beneficiaries of the program include Ambi Climate, winner of the PITCH competition at RISE Conference 2015 in Hong Kong, and Insight Robotics, a winner at IBM SmartCamp 2014.
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