The year in 2022: Q422 - October to December 2022

Q4 technology milestones for 2022 include:

October 2022

- Dell announces Project Frontier, which will deliver an edge operations software platform to securely manage edge applications and infrastructure at global scale.

- Google announces that its first data centre in Japan will be in Chiba, to go live in 2023. 

- Huawei Cloud is enhanced with cloud-native acceleration through CCE Turbo, UCS for the consistent management of cloud-native applications, and a re-architected GaussDB for improved scalability. 

- Musk acquires Twitter.

November 2022

- Air Asia is in the news for an alleged ransomware attack, with information from 5 million passengers on sale. The company downplays the incident, stating: "The Company wishes to clarify that the cyber attack was on redundant systems and did not affect our critical systems. The Company had taken all measures to immediately resolve this data incident and prevent such future incidents."

In 2022, more corporations than homes have become ransomware victims, because it is more lucrative, said Righard Zwienenberg, Senior Research Fellow at ESET, sharing that ransomware attempts have been made on Thales, NVIDIA, and Bank Indonesia among others. Zwienenberg observed that ransomware is now evolving into extortionware. Ransomware used to involve encrypting data and asking for a ransom to decrypt it. If the ransom is not paid, that data remains encrypted, but nothing else happens to it. With extortionware, on the other hand, the data is encrypted and not paying can lead to that data being made public, which could have repercussions for corporate reputations and risk regulatory penalties. 

"We don’t see people at home attacked that much any more," he said.

- Alibaba stops sharing sales numbers for 11.11. It said gross merchandise value (GMV) for 2022 was in line with 2021 GMV of RMB540.3 billion.

- Amazon is the world's first public company to lose a trillion dollars in market value, though the valuation is now post-trillion again. The company also announced that it had run cloud services on a satellite, a world first.

- Crypto exchange FTX crashes, jolting the cryptocurrency world yet again.

Source: WOLOT Foundation.
Chan.

"This year has seen the greatest number of industry black swan events, amid a regular bear market cycle and made worse with the fast-rising US dollar strength, pushing the crypto market into deep-bear territory," observed Ben Chan, Chairman, WOLOT Foundation.

"With this downturn, many of the pitfalls with centralised finance (CeFi) were exposed, as we have seen with the collapses of Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi, 3AC and recently FTX. CeFi is controlled by humans, operating in a black box with ineffective regulations. This is the perfect breeding ground for corruption and illegal activities. More effective regulations and oversights are needed, but will this ever be enough?

"On the other hand, Web 3 promises decentralisation as a solution to all these problems. Decentralised finance (DeFi) weathered the downturn storm very well this year, proving that trusting in open source and audited code is better for the end users than trusting in CeFi. Perhaps it is time the world wakes up to Web 3?"  

- The Hong Kong government issues the Policy Statement on development of Virtual Assets in Hong Kong at Fintech Week, which aims to create a more open and fair licensing system for virtual assets, more comprehensive licensing of virtual asset investments, more diversified investment categories, and introduce an official stable currency – the e-HKD – for payments.

- New application, analytics, and developer services are released for HPE GreenLake.

Source: IBM. From left: Dr Darío Gil, Senior VP, IBM and Director of Research, Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and VP of IBM Quantum, and Jerry Chow, Manager of the Experimental Quantum Computing group at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center. Gambetta is holding the new 433-qubit ‘IBM Osprey’ processor.

- IBM introduces a 433-qubit processor. 'Osprey' has the largest qubit count of any IBM quantum processor. 

- Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) collaborates with Microsoft to address climate-related issues and improve sustainability outcomes for digital technologies.

- Lenovo celebrates 10 years of Neptune liquid cooling technology. An expanded water-cooled portfolio is introduced, including the fifth generation of Lenovo Neptune Direct Water-Cooling technology for ThinkSystem servers.

- Meta makes the first major job cut in its 18-year history.

- NVIDIA teams up with Microsoft to build one of the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world. The supercomputer will be powered by Microsoft Azure’s supercomputing infrastructure and NVIDIA GPUs, networking and full stack of AI software.

- Open AI introduces ChatGPT to the world, sparking a viral movement to converse with the artificial intelligence (AI).

- PayPal’s Singapore Development Centre (SDC) celebrates 15 years of powering global payments.

- Singtel and SK Telecom (SKT), South Korea’s largest telecom operator, signed an MoU to jointly grow the metaverse in the Asia-Pacific region. Under the MoU, Singtel will share its 5G and other technology expertise across the region, while SKT will provide insights from the operation of its metaverse platform, ifland, in Korea, as well as metaverse-related technologies. This follows SKT's recent announcement to expand ifland to 49 countries in partnership with four global telecom operators, including Singtel as its key partner for Asia-Pacific.

Source: Singtel. Anna Yip, CEO, Consumer Singapore, Singtel (left) and Ha Min-Yong, Chief Development Officer, SK Telecom (right), formalising the partnership for both telcos to jointly grow the metaverse business in Asia Pacific.

- Twitter begins halving its workforce.

- The Wi-Fi Alliance announces that Wi-Fi 6E is seeing strong product, deployment, and regulatory momentum worldwide.

“Aruba is seeing continued, strong demand for our Wi-Fi 6E solutions across all sectors of our customer base and tremendous progress on regulatory fronts internationally...The first live demonstration of an end-to-end Automatic Frequency Coordination system, in which we participated with the Communications and Information Technology Commission of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Federated Wireless, bodes well for the future of standard power operation in the 6 GHz band,” said Stuart Strickland, Wireless CTO and Fellow at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, as part of the Wi-Fi Alliance announcement.

December 2022

- The news leaks that executives at FTX competitor Binance may also be charged for irregularities. By mid-December there is a run on Binance assets.

Nigel Green, CEO and founder of deVere Group said: “Crypto is under a harsh spotlight like never before.

“From the collapse of the FTX empire to charges of insider trading at another crypto firm, now to these reports about there being divisions between US government prosecutors about delaying the conclusion of a criminal investigation into a major crypto exchange, amongst other incidents, it’s been quite a year for the market.

“Of course, all this serious drama creates huge uncertainty which translates into more market volatility.”

The deVere CEO continued: “I think we can assume that after the catalogue of bad governance and possibly illegal activity from some industry participants that have come to light in recent months, there’s now a level of deep scrutiny that is taking place by various authorities of the wider sector.

“Whilst this will continue to trigger volatility and price dips, the scrutiny will act as a shake-out of bad actors which are, sadly, present in all markets and industries.

“Ultimately, what’s happened this year, I believe, will push fit and proper industry leaders and financial watchdogs to seize this moment as a point of inflection and to work together in order to further shore up the sector and instill trust and transparency by means of sensible, workable regulation.” 

Chan also agreed that things must get worse before they get better. "The downturn and the bear market naturally flushed out the weak hands and the scammers. It is needed for the industry to return to a healthy growth, especially for real projects that can change the world of tomorrow," he said.

- ESET launches a test developed with The Myers-Briggs company to determine to help test-takers understand their approach to innovation.

- Meta announces that the global metaverse could account for more than US$3 trillion by 2031 according to early estimates. The company also releases a discussion paper detailing the policies needed to ensure that Web 3.0 is a success.

- OPPO rolls out the first product under its OHealth brand, the OHealth H1 family health monitor, together with its second self-developed chip, the MariSilicon Y Bluetooth audio system-on-a-chip (SoC). 

- Singtel enters the data centre market in Indonesia. 

- Sony announces it is the first to launch live-streamed 3D audio. 

- Xiaomi launches the Xiaomi 13 Series, its 2nd series developed in collaboration with Leica.

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