PETALING JAYA: Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd has partnered with tourism technologies expert Creative Advances Technology (Cat) to develop and commercialise tourism-focused technologies.
They will collaborate on the Cat-Cradle Sota Technopreneur Programme, which will help technopreneurs come up with better ideas to suit the tourism sector, based on Cat’s Standard Online Tourism Architecture Platform (Sota).
According to the Malaysia Tourism report, about 22 million tourists arrived in the country last year and contributed about RM48bil to the local economy.
The Sota platform covers technology components for travel packages, hotel and flight bookings, as well as other technologies integral to the entire supply chain of the tourism industry.
Rohizam Mohd Yusoff, Cat chief executive officer, said the programme is aimed at increasing the number of tourism-focused applications built by Malaysian technopreneurs.
“We’ve used Sota to build applications and solutions for the tourism industry but I believe the industry will benefit from the development of even newer, more focused applications,” he said at a press conference after launching the programme here.
Sota, he said, is being used by about 750 major players in the tourism industry, such as airlines, travel agents, hotel chains, and state tourism authorities.
“Technopreneurs in this programme can be assured that there are ready customers for their products,” Rohizam said.
He said it will also present technopreneurs with a chance to tap into a lucrative market, estimated to be worth about US$200bil (RM720bil).
Know the needs
Cradle CEO Nazrin Hassan said about 4% of the ideas submitted to the pre-seed funding organisation are tourism focused.
Also, he said, “many technopreneurs fail because they don’t know enough about a particular industry’s needs.
“By encouraging them to work with domain experts, we believe we can help them mitigate the risk of such failures.”
Technopreneurs, Nazrin said, can always benefit from the ideas and feedback submitted by domain experts such as Cat.
In essence, domain experts can be mentors to those technopreneurs with industry-specific ideas, he said.
Cat will provide the budding technopreneurs with a platform on which to build their applications while Cradle will vet through and fund the viable ideas.
For more information on the programme and the Cradle innovation fund, head to
www.cradle.com.my.
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