A month after it emerged that protesters in China were using the AirDrop function on iPhones to digitally share anti-government flyers with strangers without their consent, Apple began limiting file-sharing for Chinese iPhone users last week.

In what is apparently the latest in a string of incidents, Apple appears to be conceding to Chinese demands to block the spread of content deemed inflammatory to the government — but can it also be construed as Apple doubling down on its privacy and security pledges, and preventing misuse of its Airdrop universal share option to all Apple devices within a certain range?

APPLE RETAKES TOP SPOT IN CHINA SMARTPHONE MARKET

Aaron Raj | 28 January, 2022

Under the update to the AirDrop function last week, users of smartphones sold by Apple in China can only opt in to receive files from non-contacts during a 10-minute window, before it automatically shuts off. The feature did not previously have a time limit in China, or anywhere else.

The update was rolled out in the iOS operating system practically overnight, and makes it next-to-impossible to receive unrequested files from strangers. The change follows widespread reports of people using AirDrop to spread leaflets critical of the Chinese Communist Party in crowded public spaces — a digital version of a protest that was partly inspired by an incident in Beijing in which a man hung banners calling for the removal of President Xi Jinping.

As per their usual practice, Chinese censors quickly scrubbed online videos and posts appearing on the mainland that made reference to the protest, while hundreds of users on the popular payment and chat app WeChat had their accounts blocked after speaking about the rare act of rebellion. Apple declined AFP‘s request for comment on the record but the company is now understood to be planning a roll out of the Airdrop feature update across the globe.

Apple phones sold outside mainland China did not appear to be affected by the update last week, while iPhones sold in China displayed the limit regardless of which country the user’s App Store account was based in. The description for users said the update “includes bug fixes and security updates”.

Customers queue to get newly-launched iPhone 14 mobile phones at an Apple store in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province. (Photo by AFP) / China OUT

Airdrop update highlights the cost of doing business in China

The world’s most valuable company based out of  Cupertino, California, touts security and privacy protections as key features of its device ecosystem, but has previously faced criticism for alleged concessions to Beijing.

Following widescale Western sanctions and a stifling zero-Covid policy that have derailed its international technological cooperation and thrown manufacturing supply chains into disarray, including for locally made iPhones, China is seen by observers as becoming increasingly repressive as President Xi Jinping embarks on his third term as the country’s most powerful figure.

“This is one small sample of a type of China cost…that’s making China much less appealing as a investment and manufacturing destination for many global multinationals many global companies,” Isaac Stone Fish, CEO of Strategy Risks, told AFP. “Apple has to understand the very real risks of being overly exposed to China in 2022.”

Other apparent concessions included opening a data center in China, as well as removing an app in 2019 that allowed Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters to keep track of police. It has also faced boycott threats in China as it stands in the crossfire of US-China tensions, with Beijing warning in 2020 that it could turn its citizens against Apple if Washington blocked Chinese apps.

Some Chinese social media users last week hailed the iPhone update as a positive step in preventing unsolicited messages from strangers. One Weibo user said the change would “greatly reduce the probability of iPhone users being harassed”.

A handful questioned why the function was only being rolled out on Chinese iPhones, with one Weibo commenter joking about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s friendliness with Beijing: “So is Tim Cook a Party member or not?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

With reporting by Jing Xuan TENG © Agence France-Presse

The post Apple limiting Airdrop file-sharing in China – kowtow or privacy champion? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Japan was once one of the most prolific tech manufacturers in the world, but as China rose as a hardware-making powerhouse and various smaller economies began leveraging digital technologies to accelerate their development, the island nation has fallen off the pace as a leader in technological advancement in recent years.

Even as the global demand for semiconductors has been surpassing the supply capability of the industry, Japan has attempted several initiatives to solidify its position as a major tech player. As chip shortages have wreaked havoc on global electronic supply chains of which Japan is a key link, the country has looked to strengthen tech collaboration with its ally the US, aiming to establish a new joint research center for 2-nm chips by end-2022.

The two out of the three largest economies in the world also agreed to work together to shore up supply chain resilience, counter economic coercion, secure critical technologies and infrastructure, and pursue “peace and prosperity” by aligning on a shared belief in similar principles and rule of law. Alongside that, major links in Japan tech supply chains such as second-biggest auto-parts maker globally, Denso, are considering diversifying their product offerings to focus more closely on key business such as the manufacture of semiconductors.

AS JAPAN SCRAPS TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS, TECH INVESTMENTS COME POURING IN

Aaron Raj | 12 October, 2022

Now, the government of the world’s third-largest economy has announced that it will will pour half a billion dollars into a ‘last-gasp’ project to develop and make next-generation microchips, even as the global shortage of semiconductors continues to spark economic security concerns. Eight major Japanese companies including Sony, SoftBank, Toyota and telecoms giant NTT will work together on the venture, the industry ministry said, to bolster the country’s own production pipeline and to provide Japan a measure of tech independence from other countries.

The pandemic has fuelled a global shortage of semiconductors, an essential component of nearly all modern electronics, from smartphones to kitchen appliances to cars. This has forced businesses to slow manufacturing activity, and has prompted calls for governments and firms to secure chip supplies as geopolitics become increasingly volatile — especially concerning Taiwan, which has the biggest chip-producing capacity globally.

Japan’s industry ministry said each company has invested around one billion yen (US$7 million) in Rapidus, with MUFG Bank investing 300 million yen. On top of this, the government has said it will grant 70 billion yen to the project. Named Rapidus, the new company intends to mass-produce next-generation semiconductors by 2027.

At an unveiling of the new venture, Rapidus president Atsuyoshi Koike said economic security issues were “very problematic considering the global supply chain”, with many chipmakers based in China and Taiwan. “It seems that everyone has come to understand the importance of semiconductors in recent years,” Koike told reporters, adding that “there has also been growing concern about the decline of the Japanese semiconductor industry”.

US officials have posited that the world is closer than ever to seeing a conflict over Taiwan — which China considers its own territory — could result in the territory being taken one day, by force if necessary. Given Taiwan is the top player in the semiconductor world, any move to invade would wreak havoc with global supply chains.

Washington recently introduced new measures to limit China’s access to high-end semiconductors with military uses, a move that has wiped billions from the valuations of chip companies worldwide.

The German economy ministry also has recommended that the sale of a chip factory to a Chinese-owned firm should be blocked as it poses a security threat, government sources said last week. In 2021, Taiwanese chip giant TSMC and Sony said they would tie up on a new US$7 billion plant in Japan.

 

 

 

With reporting © Agence France-Presse

The post Japan teams with its ‘Big Tech’ to develop next-gen chips appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Along with “an advanced IT infrastructure, strong government support and IP protection laws,” KPMG reports that Singapore has traditionally been considered to be home to “a deep pool of talent.” But that status might now be in doubt as the global shortage of skilled IT workers becomes more pronounced in the island state.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, SUSTAINABILITY THE DRIVING (SALES)FORCE FOR SINGAPORE

Joe Devanesan | 22 September, 2022

The 2022 Global Tech Trends survey from digital infrastructure company Equinix found that digital leaders in Singapore have serious reservations about staff retention and recruitment. Well over half (64%) of business technology decision-makers here state a shortage of workers with IT skills to be one of the biggest risks facing their industry.

One of the key barriers is the speed at which the technology scene is evolving, developing faster than organizations can source and retain talent with the right skill sets needed not just for today’s innovations, but equipped with the abilities to adapt to future requirements. Companies, Equinix among them, are looking to bring in more diverse talent “through alternative recruitment drives”.

This presents a unique opportunity for IT workers who have witnessed mass layoffs or voluntary separation schemes decimating the tech industry, to step into those gaps and be retrained with additional skills and development opportunities, with the potential to fast-forward their career advancement. By the same token, tech firms offering these personal development opportunities will likewise be in a better position to attract top-tier tech talent.

To that end, the vast majority (87%) of Singapore businesses surveyed in the 2022 Global Tech Trends Survey are reskilling IT workers to plug those needs.

Office workers walk out for a lunch break at Raffles Place financial business district in Singapore. (Photo by Roslan RAHMAN / AFP)

The findings come on the heels of Slack releasing its newest Leadership and the War for Talent research, which found that one in two Singaporean workers reported feeling burnt out in the past 12 months due to the uncertain macroeconomic climate, poor or uninspired leadership, and the emergence of the ‘quiet quitting’ phenomenon at work.

Meanwhile, 42% of Singapore IT decision-makers are complementing their workforce with recruits from unrelated sectors, but more (62%) are reskilling workers from similar industries. The biggest talent pools for reskilled staff are coming from administrative and business support (40%), manufacturing (23%), finance and insurance (22%), as well as those returning to the workforce after a prolonged absence (21%).

The biggest tech skills gaps for knowledgeable professionals in Singapore are in cloud computing (39%), data analysis (31%), AI/machine learning (26%) and data protection (26%), according to Equinix. Hence reskilled talent might be of direct benefit here, as workers repurposed for digital skills often end up with positions as IT technicians (46%), or cloud computing (45%) and data analysis (30%) roles.

80 of the top 100 global technology companies have a presence in Singapore, including Alibaba, Google, Grab, PayPal, and Zoom, with the city-state serving as a modern, well-equipped gateway to  Asia’s broader $26 trillion market and 2.2 billion middle-class consumers. The Singaporean tech scene is possibly the most important innovation ecosystem in the region, and so the challenges facing it are among the most critical. The issues facing it, according to IT leaders, include retaining current talent, adapting to workers’ shifting expectations around acceptable working conditions, and of course – the pay and compensation packages to remunerate employees.

Industries are moving to forward-looking alternatives to recruitment, such as working directly with higher education and apprenticeship programs. Companies mainly explore collaborative training programs with higher education institutes (46%) and offer student internships (37%), but many also take part in university career fairs (32%) and partner on degree apprenticeships (32%) these days.

Companies like Equinix are increasingly investing in upskilling initiatives like its career transition programs, designed to grow talent pools by drawing candidates from adjoining career paths with the necessary crossover skills. Equinix also partnered with the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore Management University (SMU) to offer sustainability scholarships to students, incentivizing them with internship and employment opportunities.

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Once a celebration of online shopping excess as digital consumerism took off across the Asia Pacific region (and sparking numerous imitator events such as the monthly one-off sales days in Southeast Asia, similarly labelled 9.9, 10.10 and so on) and led by Alibaba’s effervescent founder Jack Ma, Singles Day has been more muted in recent years as Beijing cracks down on online platforms and state media publicity has dropped off.

SINGLES’ DAY: ASIA’S GREATEST E-COMMERCE OPPORTUNITY

Soumik Roy | 5 November, 2018

Nonetheless, the combined gross value of products sold since late October “may surpass a trillion yuan” for the first time, Xiaofeng Wang, principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said earlier in a note. Sales revenues across platforms operated by tech giants such as Alibaba and JD.com hit around 262 billion yuan (US$36.7 billion) between Thursday evening and Friday afternoon, according to an estimate by research firm Syntun.

Nowadays dubbed the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, this year’s Singles Day featured over 290,000 brands from over 90 countries and regions across 7,000 product categories. On Alibaba’s Tmall Global platform, over a thousand international brands more than doubled the gross merchandise volume (GMV) they moved  last year.

Social commerce livestreams were also a big winner, with over 300 million watching livestreaming sessions hosted on Taobao Live since the start of the presale period. Over the entire sales period, 62 influencer and merchant-run livestreaming channels surpassed 100 million yuan (US$14.1 million) in GMV, and 632 influencer and merchant-run livestreaming channels surpassed 10 million (US$1.4 million) in GMV. And on Singles Day itself, rural livestreamers on Taobao Live hosted in excess of 100,000 livestreaming sessions featuring local products.

Despite some record profitability and sustainability wins, Singles Day 2022 had some notable losses as well. Analysts said demand was more muted than in previous years, while consumers told AFP that a lack of spending power and an economy groaning under a hardline zero-Covid policy had dampened desire to spend.

Businesses and consumers alike have been laid low by China’s Covid prevention policies, which see officials wield snap lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines in response to a handful of cases. Beijing resident Li Xiaofeng told AFP that the “state of the whole economy” was likely putting platforms and merchants under more pressure, “so they are offering fewer discounts”.

Source: Alibaba

China is the last major economy wedded to a zero-Covid strategy, with officials insisting they will stick “unswervingly” to the policy. But Beijing announced the relaxation of some of its harsher curbs on November 11, cutting quarantine for overseas arrivals and scrapping COVID-related flight bans.

Even event pioneer Alibaba has had to pull back in the face of a challenging macroeconomic climate and what appears to be lackluster support from the government. In April 2021, regulators fined Alibaba US$2.8 billion for anti-competitive practices, and Ma’s public presence has been noticeably diminished over the past two years.

Alibaba’s 2021 Singles Day sales hit 540.3 billion yuan (US$76.1 billion), but this year, the e-commerce bigwig has not released full sales figures for  the first time ever. “In terms of communications from the platform companies around the festival, there’s been a shift away from celebrating excessive consumption and emphasizing gross merchandise value (GMV),” said Jacob Cooke, the CEO of e-commerce consultancy WPIC Marketing + Technologies.

“The shift has been going on for a few years now, and that’s related to common prosperity, the anti-monopoly drive,” he added, referring to President Xi Jinping’s ongoing drive to curb the influence of big tech.

But nonetheless, there was still silver linings to this cloud — or rather, cloud computing itself was the silver lining. In its second year running wholly on the cloud, the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival saw improved high-performance computing efficiency, more efficient energy consumption and use of more innovative technology on these platforms to offer more immersive shopping experience.

Besides supporting extended reality using Alibaba’s 3D modelling proprietary technology and delivering nearly 2 million packages by Xiaomanlv vehicles, Alibaba’s last-mile logistics unit, Alibaba Cloud’s five hyper-scale data centers across China also doubled the amount of clean energy used to support this year’s 11.11 compared to last year.

With reporting © Agence France-Presse

The post China’s Singles Day 2022 winners and losers appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Quiet quitting emerged as a hot-button talking point on TikTok in mid-2022, and very quickly resonated with young people who have become accustomed to a demanding working culture in a prolonged period of economic uncertainty and a global pandemic.

INNOVATIVE WORK ENVIRONMENTS NOT ENOUGH TO DEAL WITH BURNOUT

Aaron Raj | 10 November, 2022

Even in Asian economic hotspots like Singapore and Hong Kong, long used to a culture of overwork such as working longer hours and doing extra tasks without expectation of overtime or extra compensation, expectations of remote working and more flexible working hours are increasingly in-demand especially amongst the younger working set – failing which, employees are more likely to consider quiet quitting.

Many workers are still planning to resign for greater job satisfaction and better compensation over the next year, but quiet quitting actually involves employees staying with their firm – but doing the bare minimum expected at work, as opposed to trying to please the management by doing as much as possible.

The Exhausted by Work – The Employer Opportunity report by Cigna International pointed out that while hybrid and flexible work is highly sought after by younger workers, a worrying 97% of 18-34-year-olds surveyed in countries like Australia, Mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and Singapore report being burned out.

Over 70% of both 25–34-year-old Millennials (73%) and 18–24-year-old Gen Zs (71%) are spending more time reconsidering their life priorities and nearly half (48%) are looking for new jobs despite the fragile economic climate. This demonstrates how overwhelmed the younger working generations are now, and for those who resigning is not an immediate option, quiet quitting is fast catching fire as an alternative.

Managers in fast-moving working cultures like Singapore’s, in fact, are lamenting this change in employee mindset. “But quiet quitting is not about avoiding work, it is about not avoiding a meaningful life outside of work,” according to Nilufar Ahmed, senior lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of Bristol.

For Singaporean workers, Indeed Singapore’s survey research found that while nearly half (45%) of workers on the island-state report financial compensation as the main reason they want to ‘quiet quit’, Gen Zs were the age group least interested in money as the reason. Exactly half say salary is the most critical reason, compared to 61% of Millennials and 70% of Gen Xers.

“Our survey identifies how workers in Singapore want to limit the pressure from work in their lives,” said Nishita Lalvani, Marketing Director for Indeed in India and Southeast Asia. “But it is important to note that they are not saying they don’t want to work hard. They are just stressing the limits and the desire to have a better life-work balance.”

“Quiet quitting aims to restore balance where work has crept into your personal time”, wrote Ahmed, and can help to separate an individual’s self-worth from their work identity. In work-first work environments like Singapore’s, this can include distancing perceived work failures – like not getting recognition for work achievements or not getting a deserved raise or promotion – from being internalised as personal failures, causing performance anxieties, and leading to a damaging cycle of low self-esteem and working even harder to compensate – inevitably, leading to burnout.

“Burnout is difficult and costly for individuals and employers. Many people with burnout end up taking time off work, or at least working at less than full capacity,” explained the University of Bristol’s Ahmed. “Quiet quitting can create a better balance of work and personal life and so could protect against burnout before it happens.”

Flexible work and digital-led innovations have stretched out worker resilience in post-pandemic Singapore, but many companies are still not offering flexible work arrangements as a long-term fixture. Only slightly more than half (52%) of Singaporeans surveyed by HR specialist Randstad claimed that their employers provided remote working options.

But the same survey found that around two in five Singapore workers will no longer accept jobs that do not offer work-from-home or flexible work-hour arrangements. This is indicative of a shifting mindset in traditionally employer-friendly Singapore, where trends like quiet quitting have made employees more conscious of being happier in their jobs, seeking fulfilment as much as (if not more) than seeking higher salaries and recognition.

52% in the Randstad study say they would resign from their jobs if it restricted their outside-of-work lifestyles, a sea change in Singaporean employee thinking, particularly among the Gen Zs and Millennials (more than half would leave their present positions if it did not allow them to enjoy life, at 56% and 57%, respectively).

Perhaps most tellingly in this ‘new normal’, 41% of Singaporean respondents would rather be unemployed than unfulfilled in their employment. This is well above the global average of 33%, as per Randstad, and a whopping 94% of respondents say that work-life balance is as critical as ever.

While employees, especially the younger generations, are in agreement with the importance of work-life balance, will these flexibility demands impair productivity? As studies have shown time and time again, the vast majority actually report productivity increases after implementing work-life balance programs along with flexible jobs and workdays.

The post ‘Quiet quitting’ a tradeoff between productivity & work-life balance? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Data breaches are becoming increasingly common, and it seems like hardly a week goes by without another high-profile one hitting the headlines. The latest victim is the Malaysian Election Commission (EC) MySPR system database.

The data of more than 800,000 users, including pictures of selfies and the MyKad national ID, which was part of the system’s Electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) implementation, was found in a much-pulicized online marketplace for databases.

INCREASED ALLOCATIONS FOR CYBERSECURITY AND CONNECTIVITY IN MALAYSIA’S BUDGET 2023, BUT IS IT ENOUGH?

Aaron Raj | 10 October, 2022

The database, which also contains information on the entire electoral roll with details of 22 million voters, is being sold for around RM9,401 (US$2,000). However, the seller specifically requested for payment to be made via cryptocurrency.

This and other recent Malaysian data breaches raise serious concerns about the safety and security of the country’s information and data. It also raises questions about the country’s readiness to face future elections, when crucial personal data from official government sources can seemingly be found online easily — and for a paltry sum for such sensitive data, no less.

What is the MySPR system database?

The Malaysian Election Commission (EC) originally implemented the MySPR system to streamline and centralize the registration of voters in the country. The MySPR system is an online database that contains the personal information of all registered voters in Malaysia. 

The personal information of registered voters includes their name, IC number, date of birth, address, and contact information. The MySPR system is accessible to all citizens of Malaysia who are aged 18 and above. 

MySPR Daftar can be deemed obsolete with the implementation of automatic voter registration earlier this year, but this does not mean that EC has abandoned the system.

Malaysian citizens outside the country and eligible members of security forces and related frontline agencies that must be on duty during election day also need to use the system to apply for a postal vote. The MySPR system was created to improve the efficiency of the voter registration process in Malaysia. 

A volunteer for the opposition Malaysian Pan-Islamic Party (PAS) checks registration details at a voter’s list confirmation booth in the 2008 general elections. (Photo by TENGKU BAHAR / AFP)

Malaysia is trying to strengthen cybersecurity

The recent MySPR database leakage incident raised questions on whether the data protection laws in Malaysia are adequate. This news surprises many, as the Malaysian government has been relatively vocal about its efforts to protect the personal data of its citizens. 

In fact, it was shared during Budget 2023 that a total of RM73 million (US$5.83 million) will be allocated to strengthen cybersecurity in Malaysia, specifically in threat monitoring, detection, and reporting, and to develop the nation’s cyber forensic capabilities.

As part of the drive to combat cybercrime and scams, a National Scam Response Centre will also be set up involving the police, the central Bank Negara Malaysia, the National Anti-Financial Crime Centre, and financial institutions operating locally.

Recent data breaches in Malaysia

This is not the first time a data breach has hit the Malaysian government, by a long shot. Among the recent ones is a data leak where the personal financial data of 22 million Malaysians from the National Registration Department were sold on the dark web.

CYBERSECURITY IS TOP CONCERN, AS ONLINE THREATS MOUNT IN MALAYSIA BY 82.5%

Joe Devanesan | 14 April, 2020

Nearly two million payslips and tax forms in PDF format, amounting to 188.75 gigabytes from the Penyata Gaji (ePaySlip) system, were extracted by a group of grey hat hackers. According to cybersecurity company Surfshark, Malaysia was the 11th most data-breached country in the second quarter of 2022, based on an analysis of millions of breached accounts from April to June. 

Meanwhile, Trend Micro Incorporated revealed that two-thirds (67%) of Malaysian organizations think they’ll be successfully attacked in the next 12 months, with 22% claiming this is “very likely” to happen. The report also shows that 87% of companies claimed to have suffered one or more successful cyberattacks in the past 12 months, while 26% had more than seven data breaches of information assets.

This is a worrying trend, as Malaysia does not seem adequately prepared to deal with such attacks. Data breaches can significantly impact individuals, businesses, and the economy.

They can lead to identity theft, financial loss, and damage to reputation. Although the Malaysian government is taking steps to address the issue, more needs to be done to protect the data of Malaysians.

The post ‘X’ marks the MySPR election database, found for sale online appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Part of a global boom of BNPL service providers who established themselves during the pandemic as instalment-based payment alternatives to traditional financing options, Atome has planted a firm foothold in the fast-growing Southeast Asian (SEA) region.

Despite a rapid growth rate, SEA has traditionally been slow to adapt to traditional financial institutions, with low penetration of credit and debit cards, or even possessing a bank account. The issue is compounded by increasing numbers of young millennials and Gen-Zs who are digitally savvy and are looking for affordable, digitally-enabled financial options to supplement their online and offline buying behaviors.

Atome is active in SEA territories like Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, as well as China and Taiwan. Airwallex, on the other hand, has gone global in recent years, expanding its cross-border payments reach beyond native markets in Australia and Hong Kong. Airwallex has a growing presence in SEA too, particularly in Singapore and Malaysia, as well as a growing cross-border footprint in the US, UK, and Europe.

As part of its global cross-border payments strategy, Airwallex presently offers a business account that features cards and international collection & transfer solutions in a range of currencies for small to medium-sized merchants, plus an API for larger enterprises that require embedded payments and other financial services.

Now for the first time, Airwallex merchants will be able to expand their range of international payment options with BNPL functionality, diversifying their partner portfolio with a flexible deferred payment methodology. The Atome collaboration will complement the multi-currency card-based payment facilities Airwallex offers with Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay, along with the more than 20 localized payment methods across Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

“We are pleased to be partnering with Atome as we continue to find ways to better support businesses across Southeast Asia and Hong Kong,” commented Arnold Chan, Airwallex General Manager for Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. “We want to give businesses access to all the benefits of BNPL, which will not only help them increase revenues, but also create a more seamless customer experience for the longer term that will enable them to unlock new market opportunities.”

Besides supplying future-ready cross-border payment solutions and revenue diversification possibilities for its merchants with this collaboration, Atome will enable Airwallex to provide BNPL as another payment alternative in Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand in the very near future.

Following Airwallex’s early-2022 entry into the Singapore and Malaysia markets and the subsequent offering of globalized payment methods, the cross-border transaction facilitator continues to scale globally, raising US$100 million in its recent Series E2 fundraising round after being backed by Tencent Holdings and Sequoia Capital China initially. Standard Chartered invested US$500 million in Atome in a 10-year partnership late last year.

The post Cross border BNPL in APAC with Airwallex x Atome union? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

At the Google AI event held at the company’s Pier 57 offices in New York City on November 2, the global technology titan highlighted areas of focus to include democratizing AI development pathways, “building for everyone” responsible, controlled models which can identify generative AI — unsupervised artificial intelligence learning algorithms that can create new digital audio, text, imagery, video, or code — along with advancing language translation, disaster management, and health AI.

Google shared the first rendering of a video that shares both of the company’s complementary text-to-video research approaches — Imagen Video and Phenaki. Source: VentureBeat

The interest of global communities was piqued by the announcement that language abilities are being developed using AI for the world’s one thousand most spoken languages, showcasing another major area of artificial intelligence focus as tech giants compete to dominate the internet’s next battleground.

Just last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed plans for a universal translation tool that would speech-to-speech translate even languages that are mostly spoken, with Hokkien being the first unwritten dialect to be translated into English. Now Google Brain leader Zoubin Ghahramani says the search and advertising giant is building a universal speech model trained on over 400 languages, with the claim that it is the “largest language model coverage seen in a speech model today.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared in a video shown to guests, highlighting that the purpose of the event was to reimagine how technology might be beneficial in practical applications and enrich people’s lives. The company is dedicated, Pichai said, to making sure that like any revolutionary technology, its AI services are designed with the aim of helping people in mind. Language and other forms of data will play a key role in helping to teach the AI to improve.

ORACLE CLOUDWORLD 2022 UNLEASHES MAJOR CLOUD, AI EFFICIENCIES FOR ENTERPRISE

Joe Devanesan | 25 October, 2022

Data is crucial to advances in AI, and Google and its big tech rivals want to tap information to help make products perform better and be more available to the widest possible audience. “Imagine a new internet user in Africa speaking Wolof […] using their phone to ask where is the nearest pharmacy,” said Johan Schalkwyk, a researcher at Google.

Such situations “we take for granted,” Schalkwyk told reporters, adding that languages were “not available to everyone in the world.” According to Schalkwyk, there are more than 7,000 languages globally.

However, Google at present only offers its translations for a little more than 130 of them. The Alphabet company said it is aiming to widen this substantially and wants to mine data in new languages not only from texts available on the internet, but also from videos, images and speech.

The Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) office in Accra, Ghana is the first AI center established in Africa by Google. (Photo by CRISTINA ALDEHUELA / AFP)

Like Meta’s universal translator tool, the search engine is also looking to collect audio clips for languages for which there may not be much written material. As progress is made on the project, which is estimated to take several years, Google plans to integrate its advances into its products, including YouTube and Google Translate.

Facebook parent Meta earlier this year announced a similar plan called No Language Left Behind designed to create translation systems to cover hundreds of world languages.

With reporting © Agence France-Presse

The post Google backs democratizing AI language models in 1,000 dialects appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom that shopping enthusiasts would prefer the physical browsing experience, including trying out items in-store first and being helped by sales assistants.

E-COMMERCE CHECKOUT IN MALAYSIA IS FILLED WITH ERRORS

Aaron Raj | 27 October, 2022

Instead, the 15th Annual Global Shopper Study released by Zebra Technologies highlighted that despite favoring a return to in-store shopping, retail buyers in the APAC have become accustomed to self-serve shopping as they increasingly adopt the use of ‘do it yourself’ (DIY) and mobile retail technology to browse, compare prices and items, as well as make payment for items in stores.

Despite the waning of the pandemic and its heightened ‘need’ for contactless options, the survey of over 4,000 retail decision-makers, associates, and purchasers globally found that 68% in APAC regions said inflation and economic uncertainty had caused them to pull back from making immediate purchase decisions – but that they were still returning to stores.

68% of consumers in APAC want to minimize time spent in physical locations, and self-serve innovations are helping shoppers maintain their newly formed habits. Among APAC respondents, nearly half (47%) said they are using self-checkout options, and a similar quantity (46%) are opting for cashless payment means.

Half of those surveyed in APAC prefer paying with a smartphone or other mobile device. A growing number (48%) have become used to self-checkout, mirroring a similar decline in use of traditional checkout methods, down to 55% globally and 51% in the APAC territories surveyed.

That is a monumental change in traditionally physical-friendly APAC, where even adoption of other physical channels like credit and debit cards was most noticeable in matured markets like Singapore and Australia only. Despite the historical popularity of cash, retailers surveyed indicated a noticeable upsurge in automated technology usage, while physical counters manned by staff continue to decline in popularity.

A man scans food products at a self checkout in a Walmart store in Beijing. (Photo by GREG BAKER / AFP)

In fact, more than three-quarters (79%) of retailers in APAC viewed manned checkouts as less necessary these days. More than half surveyed had already converted existing retail space to self-serve areas (53%) and other contactless methods (52%) when the Zebra study was carried out between June and July 2022.

Complementing the shift to self-serve is the continued reliance on mobile devices during shopping trips. More shoppers in APAC are checking for sales, discounted prices, or coupons online than ever before (48%). But what might be considered a very eastern habit has caught on globally thanks to creeping economic uncertainty, with over half (51%) checking their smartphones for better deals worldwide.

Post-pandemic, about eight out of 10 shoppers expect retailers to have the latest technology, demanding a seamless shopping experience that prioritizes convenience when it comes to having their items delivered to them. 73% in APAC prefer the comfort of doorstep delivery, and 64% would go contactless for in-store or curbside pickups of their orders, with APAC in tandem with the rest of the world in this regard.

While nearly half (49%) of retailers are modifying store space to accommodate pickups in accordance with changing buyer preferences, mobile retail ordering is showing the biggest exponential growth amongst certain age groups.

Not only are eight out of 10 shoppers turning to mobile retail channels, but an overwhelming majority (9 out of ten) of millennials name online shopping via their smartphones as the preferred means of purchasing.

“With the convergence of retail channels today, retailers need to step up to meet renewed shopper expectations and ensure a seamless experience across their offline and online platforms,” commented George Pepes, the APAC Vertical Solutions Lead for Retail and Healthcare, Zebra Technologies. “Furthermore, as the retail sector heads into the future of fulfilment, it is more important than ever for retailers to empower associates with the right technology to better perform their tasks.”

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At the same time, the company that made itself famous (and notorious) for its social media networks also introduced another AI-powered tool, a virtual assistant. Both of these intelligent applications were intended to have practical use cases in Zuckerberg’s metaverse, those were their intended uses but they will also have wider business applications that Meta is all too aware of.

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AI virtual assistants, of course, are already in wider use by organizations as chatbots to handle basic customer requests and interactions across a variety of digital services– including Meta’s own popular platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp Business. The other, less well-known AI use case(s) is the language and translation exercises that provide alternatives to relying on human translators to provide accurate, expert-quality translations in real-time.

Arriving at the 8th annual Breakthrough Prize awards ceremony at NASA Ames Research Center in 2019, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his AI business achieve a major speech translation milestone of its own. (Photo by JOSH EDELSON / AFP)

While one such Meta AI project is building a long-term language database that will eventually comprise a majority of the world’s languages – the other is the Universal Language Translator, an AI system that might be the first in the world to offer speech-to-speech translation – even for those languages that are mostly spoken, and do not have as much text data as other dialects.

That’s right, most AI translation models are trained on millions of text samples of a given language – these models are called speech-to-text or vice versa, owing to the fact the AI is either deciphering spoken words into text, or text is being processed and transcribed by the AI into a software-generated audio clip.

Hokkien, the 1^st language from unwritten speech-to-speech AI translation

When Facebook renamed itself as Meta a year ago, co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg said the company was focusing on a shift to online life playing out in virtual realms, a concept referred to as the metaverse.

But in a major breakthrough last week, Meta said it had built an artificial intelligence system that translates the Hokkien dialect into English even though the Taiwanese language lacks a standard written form.

The Silicon Valley tech titan billed the work at its Universal Speech Translator project as an effort to enable users from around the world to socialize regardless of the languages they speak. “Spoken communications can help break down barriers and bring people together wherever they are located — even in the metaverse,” Meta said in a blog post.

The fledgling system for translating Hokkien was billed by Meta as the first artificial intelligence-powered “speech-to-speech translation system developed for an unwritten language.”

Hokkien is widely spoken within the Chinese diaspora. It is used by 16 million people across Asia and is spoken by three-quarters of the population of Taiwan, according to the French National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations. But the language lacks a standard written form, making it a challenge to train AI models to interpret what is said, according to Meta.

“It’s a step toward a future where simultaneous translation between languages is possible,” Meta elaborated. “The techniques we pioneered with Hokkien can be extended to many other unwritten languages and eventually will work in real time.”

More than 40% of the world’s 7,000 existing languages are primarily spoken, without a standard or widely known written form, the tech firm went on.

“In the future, all languages, whether written or unwritten, may no longer be an obstacle to mutual understanding,” the emerging AI tech firm stated.

Featuring some content © Agence France-Presse

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