Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING APRIL 2018 42 INDUSTRY PROFILE it better or efficient. We actually took the process and turned it into a user interface for the device. The beauty of it was that after we developed it, the users didn’t need an instruction book. When they saw it they knew exactly what it was because we actually took what was conceptually in their head and put it into the interface. No manual. No training. Everybody could use it. And it works so well that it became the gold standard for Goldman Sachs. OG: Those were the years prior to the founding of Neomancer? HN: Yes. In 2001, 9/11 hit us really hard. We were in New York and we couldn’t get into our office for months. We were working for the banks and half the banks were destroyed. We even lost a friend in a tower. My partner decided to fold so I went back and did some work with Columbia University. OG: Where did the name Neomancer come from? HN: The reason I came up with Neomancer was that we had a lot of clients that would come to us and say “Wow! What you’re doing is magic,” so we thought, “Okay, we’re the new magician.” That’s what Neomancers do – it’s the Latin word for new magician. When we started Neomancer, we were kind of tired of working for companies, so we did an interesting thing – we said, “Look, we’re concierge technologists.” We work for high-net-worth individuals with few technologies. We have some celebrities as clients – directors, actors and producers, bankers – and we take care of their technology needs. We help them buy phones, manage their computers, privacy issues. We are a very small company but our clients trust us so much that we’re actually in some of their wills! Should they have an accident and die, we get their computers. We also have orders on how to purge their computers. We will get all their data, we will be told who gets to see what and then the computer is destroyed. It’s an interesting line of work. OG: How did Neomancer lead you to iGaming? HN: One of our clients wanted to get into iGaming. He wanted us to build a program for him to do box pools, an electronic version of it, which we developed. We even developed a specialized RNG to generate the numbers and we have a US patent on that, which my colleague owns. While we were doing that, they needed a place to host it, so they told us, “There is this place in Canada in Mohawk Territory called Mohawk Internet Technologies, why don’t you come up with us and check them out?” In other words, audit them and see if they’re good enough. We met with the owners and eventually we did something with them. The data center became Continent 8 Technologies, one of the biggest data center and infrastructure providers for iGaming in the world today. I was CIO for them for a while and then Director of Asia, so I brought them into Singapore. We got government permission to host gaming provided we don’t target Singaporeans. OG: And how does eSports fit into that? HN: We started doing fantasy sports about four or five years ago and a guy came to me with an idea for daily fantasy. This was before DraftKings and all those guys. This guy actually owns one of the patents “We work for high-net-worth individuals with few technologies. We have some celebrities as clients – directors, actors and producers, bankers – and we take care of their technology needs. We are a very small company but our clients trust us so much that we’re actually in some of their wills!” Hai (far right) moderating a panel on eSports betting at the recent iGaming Asia Congress in Macau.