Alex Jenson  00:08

You’re listening to Korea podcast with the KBLA. I’m your host Alex Jensen on this Thursday, March 31. Now first I just want to thank for making today’s episode possible Innovation Center Denmark Seoul, which seeks to create innovation and business opportunities and build up relations between Korean and Danish r&d intensive companies, research institutes and universities. But speaking of innovation, we’ve heard about some great tech over the last few months on this podcast, some of which has opened up completely new ground, some of which has enhanced aspects of life. We’ve all grown up with some broad in application some really specific well, when table tennis became popular as an upper class, after dinner, a bit of fun in Victorian England, something of a diversion. It’s hard to imagine anyone envisaging that it would one day become a major global sport, and perhaps even harder to imagine, then artificial intelligence one day helping to progress the game further, but that’s at the heart of Fast Pong, whose CTO, Kie Brooks and co founder, by the way joins us now thank you for taking the time.

Kie Brooks  01:18

Great to be here. Alex.

Alex Jenson  01:19

Unlike me, you’re from the UK originally the home of table tennis, I was kind of surprised by that. By the way, I was just doing some very basic research before this insert interview, looking at the origins of table tennis, I thought I was gonna find it in Asia because of the popularity of the sport in China particularly. But the way that it’s grown throughout the world, but yeah, the idea of after dinner activity in Victorian England, push aside the plates and put up a little net. It’s, it’s quite a journey. The sports gone on, isn’t it?

Kie Brooks  01:49

Yes, I think it was originally called with laugh. And I think Boris Johnson may be referred to it in a speech one time, but but yes. England is no longer dominating the sport anymore. It’s China now.

Alex Jenson  02:05

Yes, indeed. And I did come across that with worth, I was even going to add it to my introduction, but I thought I just not sure about saying that. But we’ve already done it now. So Kie, FastPong, plays on another one of the titles of the sport ping pong. So what exactly is this company that you’re involved in?

Kie Brooks  02:27

So I’m going to start by giving you a bit of the background of the CEO, which will explain the origins of the company.

Alex Jenson  02:38

And that’s Amir Kamandi, your fellow co founder.

Kie Brooks  02:42

Yes. So he was a national table tennis player. And then he studied Sports Science at Seoul National University. And his goal was to see how he could improve training for players how he could make it more efficient, essentially, having visual dynamic targets was tried, and it was found to be extremely effective. And basically, the the fast pump system is based on that idea of having visual dynamic targets. And over several years of research and r&d, we’ve managed to improve on that, to the point now we’ve actually launched the product. So Amir originally began the company. And then after about a year and a half ago, I joined. And we’ve continued to do a lot of developments, to the point that actually we now have a complete product, which is being manufactured. And we’ve Well, we did a soft launch and now our hard launch is coincident with world table tennis day.

Alex Jenson  03:58

What what is that? Exactly? I’m sure most of us are not aware of world table tennis day.

Kie Brooks  04:03

I think it’s just a day where people in the table tennis industry will go yay. And and people make announcements and have events. We’re going to be having some promotions and marketing around the world and also having some events here in Seoul. Actually, we’re going to have an event with Decathlon and we’ve got other partners who are going to be having events in in various countries around the world where they they use the system and encourage people to play table tennis.

Alex Jenson  04:34

Yeah, it’s one of those sports that I’m sure most of us feel confident enough to pick up a little racket and have a go but to play at a professional level. It really starts to get impossibly fast, impossibly technical. Is your product more aimed at those at the highest level at the moment.

Kie Brooks  04:54

We have people like Samsung and Masahwoi here in Korea, which have You know, professional table tennis teams. And they are using our product to great effect, because it allows them to practice different strategies and get real time feedback and see, as well as having their metrics, they can see that progression over time. But the versatility of the system means that even if an amateur like yourself or me, or a club player can still use it in a way that’s both going to be enjoyable and still useful, because we have these visual dynamic targets. It allows us to work on our accuracy, and our decision making, because when, when we get stimulated by Oh, another visual dynamic target, then it’s very helpful for our training in our decision making. And there’s also as well as the training aspects of it, there’s also the entertainment aspects. So there are things like games that are also included,

Alex Jenson  06:02

Because presumably, for this model, this business to really take off, it requires that mass market and I’m thinking of, for example, as a comparison, those indoor golf simulations that you see gyms across the country and some other venues as well, if it was to take off in that way, then FastPong could really become huge.

Kie Brooks  06:21

Yes, absolutely. And in South Korea, Golf Zone was the first to bring sort of sports into the digital arena, which is then followed by baseball with strike zone. And we would really like to see table tennis follow. But until now, there hasn’t been any sort of way to digitize the process. And we believe that with the introduction of the FastPong system, that will be possible. And we would really like to see fast pond follow in their footsteps. The thing is, table tennis is extremely popular, not only in Southeast Asia, I mean, all over the world. But for example, in Korea, there are more people that are members of table tennis clubs that are members of baseball. So we see the market here as being really huge. But it’s some of the difficulties that we face is that it’s a new system. So we need to sort of get the word out there. And a couple of the changes that have happened in table tennis, and when traditionally, table tennis is an industry that’s not very accepting of changes. So one of the first big changes was to change from a court ball to a celluloid ball, then adding adding rubber to the bat was the next big change. And then the ball shooter came in the 1980s. And since then, there haven’t really been any changes. So even the ball shooter took about 10 years to get established. So we’re hoping that we can bring in the fast punk system, but it’s not going to take us 10 years.

Alex Jenson  08:01

The thing about baseball and golf as comparisons is that while golf is very easy to visualize, you tee up your ball and you strike it or you strike it from a flat surface. And that pretty much simulates what happens in the real thing, except you’ve got this digital image in front of you. With baseball, likewise, you’re only ever going to be hitting one ball at a time. And then setting yourself up for the next swing. With ping pong, or table tennis with waffle, whatever you want to call it, it can be very fast moving, and it’s built on these exciting rallies and having a lot of physical movement. How do you simulate that in a satisfying way?

Kie Brooks  08:40

We use a ball shooter and and ball shooters have come a long way from how they were in the beginning. You can with a modern ball shooter, it can control where it places it on the table, and what kind of sequence with what kind of spin so for example, professional players will really like and no spinball is very important. Sometimes you can simulate your opponent. But if you don’t have any particular target to hit it to when you don’t sort of have any feedback about your metrics, then it becomes less interesting. And that’s where FastPong steps in, to give you these dynamic targets and these dynamic goals, so you can make your training more involved and more interesting. One of the benefits obviously, having a bullshitter is that even if you’re by yourself, you can train actually, you can also use the FastPong system for training two people at a time. If you if you sort of play doubles.

Alex Jenson  09:42

It sounds a lot more effective than just lifting the other half of the table up and doing what I used to do as a child.

Kie Brooks  09:47

For surefor sure, which is I mean, how it used to be. And also before FastPong what people used to do is add tape a square to the table and say okay, that’s my target. But then again, it’s not really are very satisfying.

Alex Jenson  10:02

The fact is that you and me, neither of you are from Korea originally. But I’ve decided to make career the base for FastPong. And I think you’ve hinted already at some of the wild popularity of this game, the sport in this country at various different levels as being a good reason for that. Is there any other reason why you both got this off the ground here in this country,

Kie Brooks  10:22

We both happen to be in Korea. And we I think we both love it here. But also, Korea is actually very supportive for startup businesses. And there’s a there are lots of funds that are potentially available that you can apply for. And normally, it’s quite competitive in that many companies apply for the funds. But for the ones that make the strongest business case, they’re normally the ones that are the most successful. So that’s been very helpful. And we’ve taken the difficult route of launching a hardware product. And we can talk about that a bit more. But that is really cost intensive, and has and brings a whole bunch of other headaches. But yeah, Korea is really a great place for for startup businesses. And I think one of the the most supportive places there is, although that does involve a lot of paperwork, but nothing, nothing’s for free.

Alex Jenson  11:23

Well, at least of all production. I guess that’s one of the things you’re driving out when it comes to the hardware. Can you talk us a bit more through those difficulties?

Kie Brooks  11:31

Yes. So on the face of it, it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be difficult to produce hardware, okay, just find a manufacturer and he’ll make things for you based on your design. But actually, when we compare it with, say, doing a software product, every time we make a change, that is that there are many steps in the process. So we involve the product designer, then the manufacturer, he will then need to speak with his suppliers. In addition to that, because we have a product that has electronics in it. And we’re also using Bluetooth so that the system communicates with your phone, which is where it keeps the data and on the clouds, we have to have various certifications in order to be able to sell it and to export it. So things like CE, FCC, KC for Korea, and we have about five other certifications as well. Okay, Mark, there’s Teluk, SRC. So for Japan, China, actually, even the UK that they’re using CEE at the moment, but from next year, there’s going to be another Mark just for the UK as well. So every time you want to do these certifications, it’s not automatic that you’ll get it, there’s a whole bunch of tests that need that you need to go through. And then if you change your product, because you found a problem during the iteration or during the testing, then you have to more or less not start from the ground up. But you have to go through product design, getting your PCBs putting the things together with the manufacturer, it can be really painful. And hardware production, you have minimum order quantities. So you can’t just say okay, I’d like five of these. But if you’re going to order you say okay, maybe the minimum order quantity for my PCBs, that’s the printed circuit boards that go inside the product, the minimum order quantity might be 500, or 1000s. And if your costs for the system is $500, and that’s half a million dollars, just for the supply, so hardware is hard.

Alex Jenson  13:44

Understood. Also, the idea itself, how do you protect that, whether that may be here in Korea, for instance, to stop another company coming along and creating something very similar and introducing it to the market, maybe with bigger local connections or stronger local connections? And then going abroad, it’s something we touched on on the legal front already this week. If a company in China, for instance, or several companies in China wanted to roll it out in the huge market for ping pong there, how would you protect FastPong?

Kie Brooks  14:14

So you’re correct, this is definitely a concern we have and and we’ve done everything that we can to ensure that that doesn’t happen or doesn’t happen too quickly, at any rate, so you can have patents for your ideas, which we have. And then you can have these can be done locally, or they can be done worldwide. And then you can also have copyright. So we’ve also got sort of our our code, which is copyrighted. So we’ve got the firmware, which is the software inside the electronics. And then we have the software that’s written for the mobile application. And then we have trademarks. So people can’t just use the FastPong name and say, Yeah, this is the fast pond system. But we have also registered trademarks. so that if somebody does launch another product that doesn’t infringe on our patents or our copyright, then they can’t call it FastPong, they need to call it, I don’t know, you know, Bob’s training tip table tennis training system. So those are the legal protections that we have. And then on top of that, we have some technical protections. So we sort of have various locking mechanisms, so that it’s not that easy for people to just make a copy of the code that we have inside the microchips. But that won’t stop a really determined person. But if somebody does it anyway, and then just copies the system, we hope that all of the time and effort and the quality of our system will, and also the contacts that we have established in the market with distributors and players, there are people will still say our, you know, fast Pong system is the gold standard. And I don’t want to get another, another system that’s not going to provide, you know, the same quality and have all the great application software that they have. And also, there’s of course, the law courts for people that are infringing. Also, in the beginning, that there aren’t mass sales yet. So it seems unlikely and nobody would be copying it yet, because of the expense of the mass manufacture. But as we start to grow a lot, then inevitably, people are going to try and join the market.

Alex Jenson  16:34

And here in Korea, this word, infringing, I’m curious how much resonance it has in a sport, considering here that the sport is known as Takgu. My pronunciation is quite right there. But anyway, you get the idea.

Kie Brooks  16:50

I think your pronunciation is perfect, but I’m, I’m not a native speaker. And in Cantonese, it would be called beanbag ball, which sounds a little bit like ping pong. I’m not too worried. If about the name being similar to ping pong. I think we have a huge mountain to climb, which is telling everybody about the product, and showing them how useful and and effective it is in their training. Compared to what they’re doing right now. Just brand recognition is just going to be part of our marketing program. And also, I think most Korean people have heard of ping pong. So but anyway, we will see see how it plays out. Hopefully, it’s a well chosen name.

Alex Jenson  17:38

You’ve already got these professional table tennis institutions in Korea interested, though? So you’ve done something, right. Perhaps for people who aren’t even in the gaming or gamification of sport areas, someone who’s just beginning on their business journey, is there any advice that you might have for making even the types of inroads that you’ve made so far?

Kie Brooks  18:00

LFR is brutal. I’d say if you’re thinking about starting as a startup doing hardware, don’t do it, because it’s going to cost much more than you think and be much harder than you think. But obviously, it’s something that we’ve done, if you’re really determined, go for it. But costs are much greater than you would expect for hardware, and timelines as well. So if you’re starting a new hardware project, that’s, let’s say, of moderate difficulty, not really ambitious, but moderately difficult, then you should be looking at a minimum of a two year timeline plus paying your engineers and then you’re going to have all of your sales and marketing on top of that. But there’s definitely funds and help out there. And not just funds, but also consulting services. And if you’re doing it in Korea, there’s there’s a lot available. And there’s a lot of support because of all of the startup community here. It’s it’s a very nice place to be. So I mean, you’ll learn a lot about doing business and, and, and startups and your your pitching will definitely improve. So I would encourage people but not necessarily hardware, because it’s hard.

Alex Jenson  19:24

Thank you very much Kie it’s been a really interesting story to hear. And I wish you all the best because it feels like the story is really about to enter its its most dramatic chapters and hopefully most successful chapters as well. Wish you and Amir all the best.

Kie Brooks  19:39

Thank you very much. And I hope that we can have another interview when when we’re as big as GolfZone.

Alex Jenson  19:47

well, I hope so as well. And in the meantime, we’ll celebrate World table tennis day with you on April 6. Perhaps. In the meantime, we’ll just have to lift up the other half of the table though, and just imagine FastPong in action. clipartix really wish you all the best as I said,

Kie Brooks  20:03

Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Alex Jenson  20:05

And thank you also to Innovation Center, Denmark Seoul for making today’s episode possible. Join us again with another one tomorrow.