Tech Roundup March 2019

Tech Roundup March 2019

ASIA PACIFIC/MIDDLE EAST (APME) NEWS

March 16 - First iF Gold Service Design win in China comes from WeChat

Source: WeChat/PRNewswire. WeChat Scan & Go wins iF Gold Award, a first for China in the Service Design category. 

March 21 - Tmall Global unveils plans to boost the entry of international brands into China.

March 21 - Huawei releases white paper about cloud VR with China's Video Experience Alliance

March 25 - Singtel adds 12 months of Amazon Prime membership free for new and recontracting customers

March 25 - Singtel's GOMO mobile plan is targeted at Millennials

March 29 - Huawei releases an upbeat 2018 Annual Report which alluded to challenges and pointing out that their 5G platform offers users an edge over competitors.

March 29 - Lazada sees engagement increase with shoppertainment, introduced to celebrate its 7th birthday

March 30 - Batelco launches 5G in Bahrain with Ericsson
 

APME RESEARCH

March 4 - SAS and the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) announced Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Banking and Risk Management: Keeping Pace and Reaping Benefits in a New Age of Analytics which found that 81% of risk professionals in the financial services industry have already seen benefits from AI technologies, such as improved process automation (52%), credit scoring (45%), and data preparation (43%). Of those who have yet to embark on their AI journey, 84% plan to use machine learning and natural language processing in the next three years.

The markets surveyed included Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China, and India. Highlights for Singapore and Hong Kong include:

- The majority of firms in Singapore (89%) and Hong Kong (78%) say that they are already seeing benefits from AI technologies. Out of these benefits, A reduction in manual tasks with the use of AI technologies was seen by 77% globally, 82% in Singapore and 61% in Hong Kong.

- The ability to attract new, skilled talent by using AI was seen by 56% globally, 66% in Singapore and 41% in Hong Kong. The ability to inspire more creativity and experimentation through the use of AI was seen by 59% globally, 69% in Singapore and 41% in Hong Kong.

- Four in 10 (44.4%) financial service professionals in Singapore are concerned about the transparency and interpretability of their firm’s AI models – higher than the global average of 34.9%.

- Being able to recruit the right talent to support AI was the top concern globally (22.3%) – this statistic doubled in Hong Kong (42.4%).

Singapore firms differed from the global average, expressing concerns about misguided decision-making though bias or inaccuracies (46.3%) and the increase of regulatory and/or reputational risks (45.5%).

Download the report

March 14 - A10 Networks has a DDoS study that identifies IoT devices as a vulnerability with China, Korea and India hosting some of the highest numbers of DDoS weapons. DDoS stands for distributed denial of service, a type of cyber attack.

March 28 - Asia Pacific and Japan organisations have new challenges around managing data, Dell EMC says.

Source: Dell EMC infographic. Organisations are thinking about monetising and protecting data.

APME EVENTS

March 21 - A slew of awards were handed out at the GATES Consumer Channel Summit.    

Source: GATES. Ben Tan, CEO at Courts Singapore, speaks at the GATES Summit.

March 29 - Huawei unveils AI and 5G solutions for ISPs at its Huawei ISP Summit Asia Pacific 2019.

GLOBAL NEWS

March 6 - Qualtrics develops new data privacy and governance capabilities and introduces brand tracking

March 13 - Dell EMC, NVIDIA offer DGX reference architecture

March 14 - Juniper Networks now supports SONiC

March 17 - SAS announces US$1 billion investment in AI.

March 18 - Plantronics is now Poly

March 26 - Huawei launches the P30 smartphone on France. The phone launched in Singapore and sold out before noon on April 6.

GLOBAL RESEARCH

March 21 - LPWAN is a US$65 billion market by 2025

March 22 - Digital Realty organises a groundbreaking ceremony for its 3rd data centre in Singapore. On March 4, the company announced it had achieved "five nines" of uptime for the 12th consecutive year, exceeding 99.999% availability throughout 2018.

March 26 - ACI Worldwide sees real-time payments and open banking as good for the banking industry

INTERNATIONAL EVENTS

NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on deep learning and AI was held in the US from March 23-26. Significant GTC announcements included:

- NVIDIA's new RTX servers will turbocharge entertainment

- NVIDIA brings data science to the desktop

- NVIDIA Jetson and AWS IoT Greengrass to work together, expanding IoT possibilities

- NVIDIA enables autonomous vehicles to be trained more quickly with simulation technology

- A new NVIDIA CUDA-X AI software development kit makes data science easier

NVIDIA's partners also made a number of announcements at the event, including SAS, which announced a partnership around AI deployment for businesses with NVIDIA and Pure Storage's new AI solutions.

Dotscience placed AI governance solution on NVIDIA NGC. NGC is the NVIDIA hub of GPU-optimised software for deep learning and machine learning software.

There were several autonomous vehicle wins for NVIDIA, including WeRide which plans to use autonomous vehicle technology from NVIDIA, and Toyota - the Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development is to use NVIDIA autonomous vehicle technology end to end.

Hashtag: #GTC19, #MWC19

*Dates reflect the timezone the news was announced in.

**Huawei sponsored transport and accommodation at the Huawei ISP Summit. NVIDIA sponsored transport and accommodation at GTC.