Youders’ Story – Mr. Ken Law 羅健麟先生
Recipient of Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowships in 2002/03
尤德爵士紀念基金研究生獎學金2002/03年得獎者
Despite being known as Asia’s financial centre, Hong Kong is often perceived to be lagging in its innovation and technological development. As one of the pioneers in Hong Kong’s technology industry, the recipient of Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowships in 2002/03, co-founder of Motherapp and PowerArena, Mr. Ken Law believes that Hong Kong needs to restructure its strategy towards attracting the best talents in order to catch-up with other leading cities in the world.
Under his father’s influence, Mr. Law has developed a strong interest in computers since childhood. Consequently, he chose to pursue a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology after graduating from secondary school. After that, he studied his master’s degree in computer science at Stanford University, which is popularly regarded as the cradle of Silicon Valley, and joined Google as one of its early Chinese employees. During his time at Google, one of his development projects was to design an algorithm for related webpages according to users’ search patterns to facilitate their access towards more relevant information.
Several years later, Mr. Law returned to Hong Kong. Despite originally planning to study a PhD at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, he changed his plans after witnessing the growth of smartphone adoption and the mobile application market in the subsequent year. Instead, he decided to quit his PhD research to co-found Motherapp, which turned out to be a great success. Starting from a team of 3, the start-up swiftly grew to more than 70 people, and served large clients such as Ocean Park and OpenRice.
With the advent of Industry 4.0 in Germany, Mr. Law found out that the factories owned by his friends were lagging behind in their digitalization. Leveraging the maturation of Deep Learning, Mr. Law has delegated Motherapp to his team and founded another company called PowerArena to discover pain points in production lines using Artificial Intelligence to boost their productivity. Through installing cameras to monitor different procedures in production lines, Mr. Law’s solution calculates the average time needed for each procedure through real-time data analytics. Anomaly detection is also utilized to flag any procedures using more time than expected, allowing industrial engineers to diagnose the underlying causes through video analysis to further optimize resource allocation and workflow design.
Mr. Law has set revenue targets of 2x-3x for PowerArena, with plans being developed to deepen applications of Artificial Intelligence and broaden the company’s clientele. Additionally, Mr. Law has joined FoundersHK to connect with investors for pre-series A fundraising. Considering the potential of industry 4.0, Mr. Law has a long-term vision of pursuing an Initial Public Offering for PowerArena.
Regarding Hong Kong’s innovation and technology development, Mr. Law believes that Hong Kong currently suffers from a lack of talent due to the lack of opportunities and brain drain. Despite being home to some of the top universities in Asia, many talents in the technology industry have either prioritised pursuing employment in large foreign technology companies after graduation, or decided to seek for opportunities in mainland China, leaving few talents behind in Hong Kong. Ultimately, Hong Kong’s technology industry has long been overlooked, leading to its overtaking by other regions focused on high-technology development, driven by the rise to prominence of many world-leading technology companies in the past 10 years. Should the government provide more opportunities for technology researchers to transfer their research into viable businesses, these talents would be more incentivized to stay in Hong Kong.
Mr. Law received the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowships when studying his PhD at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The scholarship was meaningful to Mr. Law, as it contributed to part of his start-up capital for Motherapp. Although he hasn’t finished his PhD, he is grateful for the recognition from the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fund.