Author: entelechyasia

Entelechy Asia is passionate about technology -- from the home to the enterprise, and telecommunications. We deliver news, views and reviews from Asia from the perspectives of practitioners and followers.

IBM in “game-changer” Red Hat acquisition

IBM has announced its US$34 billion acquisition of open source leader Red Hat.  The move has been dubbed a “game-changer” by Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, who added that it changes everything about the cloud market.

OnePlus deconflicts with Apple launch

UPDATE: Catch the launch live on Youtube at 11pm Singapore time.

OnePlus has brought forward its OnePlus 6T launch to October 29 to avoid a clash with Apple’s iPad Pro and Mac event the next day. The China smartphone maker had been first off the block with the October 30 date but Apple threw a curveball by announcing that its launch event will be on the same day in the same city.

Infineon gives startups a heads up with first Co-Innovation Space

Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry Dr Koh Poh Koon (centre) with the German Ambassador to Singapore Dr Ulrich Sante at the Co-Innovation Space.
Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry Dr Koh Poh Koon (front row, second from right) with the German Ambassador to Singapore Dr Ulrich Sante (front row, right) at the Co-Innovation Space.

Names such as Ampotech, Plunify, SHADO, and XNERGY may not ring a bell today but with a little help from Infineon, they may well become the successes of tomorrow.

Online marketplace Honestbee launches brick-and-mortar Habitat

It’s interesting how trends keep evolving. In the past decade or two, many supermarkets have opened up online stores to cater to changing consumer demands. On the other side, new companies set up online stores to challenge these traditional players. Yesterday, one of these, Honestbee, took the reverse route by setting up Habitat, its first brick-and-mortar outlet in Pasir Panjang, Singapore.

Huawei ups the ante on AI

Huawei has upped the ante with an ambitious US$140 million investment in developing one million artificial intelligence (AI) talents in three years. Under its AI Developer Enablement Programme, the China telecoms giant will work with universities and research institutions as well as partners and developers to build an ecosystem with AI resources, platforms, courses, and joint solutions to better support AI development.

Goodbye, Google Plus!

Google Plus aka Google+ will be no more — for consumers, at least. The search giant is shutting down its social media service after discovering security lapse that put the data of half a million users at risk.

Newstead goes into liquidation

Singapore IT retailer Newstead Technlogies has gone into liquidation. Established in 1998 with its first outlet at Funan DigitalLife Mall, it was supposed to be the anchor tenant when the redeveloped mall re-opens next year.

The stuff of spy movies

Supermicro has become infamous overnight following an expose by Bloomberg quoting unnamed sources. According to the report, “the attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 US companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain.”

No more paper arrival card filling for visitors to Singapore

Looking for a pen to fill in an arrival card while travelling to Singapore will be a thing of the past when the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) completes its three-month electronic arrival card for foreign visitors next year.

Qualcomm accuses Apple of IP theft

The legal tussle between Qualcomm and Apple has hit another level with the chipmaker accusing the smartphone giant of passing trade secrets to Intel. An earlier court battle, Qualcomm said that Apple breached an agreement for it to audit Apple’s use of Qualcomm’s source code.

Googles turns 20

By Edward Lim

It may have seemed like forever but Google just celebrated its 20th anniversary today. It’s not even an adult yet by human age but the search giant has grown massively over the past two decades.

Singapore launches unified payment QR code

The number of QR codes for payment is akin to the number of credit card offerings in the market — it keeps growing, making it more of a hassle than convenience for merchants and consumers. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has stepped in to solve this problem with the launch of the Singapore Quick Response (SGQR) Code.

The Weather Channel showcases realistic weather simulation

The weather wreaked havoc across the world last week with a number of hurricanes and typhoons. The Weather Channel leveraged the same technology used for computer games to create simulations that brought the impact of such weather into homes.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma walks the talk

By Edward Lim

It’s hard to let go when you’re one of the richest man in the world and leading one, if not the biggest, e-commerce company in the world. But, Jack Ma is a man of his word. A man who knows his time and a man who has shown what resilience is all about.

Facebook to build S$1.4b data centre in Singapore

Hot on the heels of Google’s announcement last month that it will build its third data centre in Singapore is Facebook, which declared today that it will be establishing its first Asia data centre in the country.

China wins battle for AI investments

A battle of sorts is taking place in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). It has been widely reported that China is ramping up its focus on the technology that is expected to transform businesses and industries. Numbers from ABI Research point to a swing in favour of China.

Google Pixel 3 coming on October 9

The Google Pixel 2 is expected to welcome its new sibling soon.

The rumour mills are spinning at top speed as smartphone launch season gets ready to kick off. With Samsung having announced the Note 9, and Apple expected to respond with a new iPhone next month, Google looks to be getting into the act too with the Pixel 3 slated for an October 9 introduction, according to Bloomberg.

NVIDIA AI Conference keynotes: Transforming industries, creating AI infrastructure

The first NVIDIA AI Conference in Sydney on September 4 will kick off with two keynote addresses. Marc Hamilton, Vice President of Solutions Architecture and Engineering, NVIDIA, will talk about Transforming Industries With AI. Jason Humphrey (right), Head of Retail Risk, ANZ Bank, will then share on Creating the Infrastructure to Undertake Deep Learning.

NVIDIA CEO teases at GeForce RTX announcement

It has been two years since NVIDIA’s last major announcement at the gaming front. And NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang decided that the thousands of audience at the auditorium in Cologne and nearly a quarter million who were catching the keynote presentation on Twitch could wait a little longer.

Apple pulls out 25,000 apps from China app store

The ongoing spat between China and the US seem to have claimed another victim. Apple has removed 25,000  gaming-related apps from its China app store. This move follows hard on the heels of the US ban on Huawei and ZTE technology from being used by the US government and government contractors yesterday.

NVIDIA and RED Digital Cinema ease 8K bottleneck

8K is the new benchmark for professional videos captured by state-of-the-art cameras but delivering that standard for editing was not quite possible until NVIDIA’s announcement this week at SIGGRAPH of the Turing architecture and the new Quadro RTX GPUs.

NVIDIA unveils Turing architecture and new Quadro products

To the uninitiated, images just look look sharper and more detailed because of improved resolution. But, there’s much more to that, one of which is ray tracing, a rendering technique used to generate an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.

StatX takes on Telegram with messaging and information app

Blockchain startup StatX has launched a mobile app that combines information-sharing and messaging features the crypto and blockchain community. While traditional messaging apps such as Telegram is more conversation centric than information-centric.

TSMC hit by computer virus

No major impact to iPhone production.
No major impact to iPhone production.

Chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) was affected by a computer virus attack over the weekend. However, the manufacturing of new Apple iPhones is not expected to be impacted.

NetApp rolls out NVIDIA-powered NetApp ONTAP AI architecture

NetApp has introduced NetApp ONTAP AI proven architecture to simplify, accelerate and scale the data pipeline across edge, core and cloud for deep learning deployments and to help customers achieve real business impact with AI.

Google Calendar: Yes, no, maybe, or reschedule

When a user gets a meeting invitation, the options are “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe”. Google has gone one up by adding “Propose a new time”, which lets users reschedule a meeting on Google Calendar.

Making autonomous vehicles more perceptive

Training neural networks to read human behaviour for safe self-driving.
Training neural networks to read human behaviour for safe self-driving.

Perceptive Automata, a startup which had its beginnings in Harvard University, is leveraging deep intelligence to give human intuition into autonomous vehicles. The technology will be able to observe body language of pedestrians and react accordingly to enable safer self-driving.

VLC blacklists recent Huawei smartphones

On the list: The Huawei P10.

VLC has taken the drastic measure of blacklisting recent Huawei smartphones, specifically the Huawei P8, P10, and P20, from installing its media player app. The move is in response to negative customer reviews for VLC as a result of Huawei blocking the installation of the media player.

Chrome marks http as “not secure”

The “Secure” will be removed from September 2018.

HTTP has been synonymous with an entire generation of Internet users but what many are unaware is that the protocol is not secured. Anyone with the right skills can change the contents of the site before it reaches the person browsing. To combat this, Google is marking all HTTPsites as “not secure” from today so users are more aware of the sites’ security status.

SingHealth patient database compromised in cyber attack

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was among 1.5 million patients who had their personal data stolen in the nation’s most severe cyber attack to date.  Also compromised were the outpatient prescriptions of 160,000 patients.

Samsung and Xiaomi neck-to-neck in India in Q2

The Redmi 5A was Xiaomi's bestselling phone in India in Q2.
The Redmi 5A was Xiaomi’s bestselling phone in India in Q2.

Xiaomi and Samsung shipped 9.9 million smartphones each to India in Q2. Together they account for 60 percent of the total shipment that quarter, according to Canalys.

Google Maps motorcycle mode now available in Singapore

Google Maps has enabled its motorcycle mode feature for Singapore and elsewhere in the region in due time. Originally launched in India in December 2017, the app will give motorcyclists routes that are more suitable for two-wheelers.

Consortium introduces standard to simplify VR headset connectivity

NVIDIA, Oculus, Valve, AMD, and Microsoft have come together to introduce VirtualLink, an open standard that simplifies next-generation virtual reality (VR) headset connectivity to PCs and other devices. Instead of a range of cords and connectors, the new standard adopts the single, high-bandwidth USB Type-C connector.

TechnologyOne secures 5-year deal with 3 NZ government agencies

Edward Chung: Delivered on time and on budget.
Edward Chung: Delivered on time and on budget.

TechnologyOne has inked a five-year contract with New Zealand’s Central Agency Shared Services, under which it will provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) to the Treasury, the State Services Commission and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Outage and strike do not faze Amazon on Prime Day

Amazon Prime Day is still going strong and racking up tons of sales despite an outage that prevented some customers in North America from accessing the website and the app, and a strike by workers in Spain.

Singapore launches SEA’s first geospatial centre

Singapore Land Authority (SLA) has launched GeoWorks, the first geospatial industry centre in Southeast Asia (SEA). The centre will kick off by housing 22 geospatial technology start-ups from across the region to network and interact with government agencies and the industry with the aim of developing geospatial solutions.

Google faces massive fine over Android

It happened to Microsoft in 2013 and it looks like history is repeating itself, albeit with Google being the one under the spotlight. The European Union (EU) is expected to decide on a record fine for forcing Android smartphone makers to pre-install its search and web browsing tools and use them by default unless they want to lose access to the Play Store.

PC market inches up 2.7% in Q2

HP maintained tops with the likes of the HP ProOne 600 G4  business PC.
HP maintained tops with the likes of the HP ProOne 600 G4 business PC.

Global traditional PC shipment posted the strongest growth in more than six years during the past quarter, according to IDC. Total shipment was 62.3 million units, which translates to a 2.7 percent year-on-year growth.

Broadcom to acquire CA for US$18.9b

Fresh from its failure to acquire Qualcomm in March, Broadcom has made a move for former software giant CA Technologies. The US$18.9b deal brings together two unlikely partners — one a chipmaker and the other a software company that had its glory days in the 1990s.

NVIDIA brings premier AI conference to Sydney

A global line-up of artificial intelligence (AI) experts will be heading to Sydney to speak at the NVIDIA AI Conference. Researchers and developers will also get training from the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) during the event.

100m smart speakers by end of 2018

The Amazon Echo Dot and its siblings account for more than half of installed smart speakers.
The Amazon Echo Dot and its siblings account for more than half of installed smart speakers.

Smart speakers are picking up steam with the installed base expected to hit 100 million by the end of this year, according to Canalys. That’s 2.5 times the size of end 2017.

Suning Tesco opens first UAV logistics route in Wuhan

China e-commerce firm Suning Tesco has opened the first pilot route for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) logistics and transportation in Wuhan, China. Its logistics arm Suning Logistics and Ewatt Aerospace jointly developed two UAVs for this purpose.

China tops IDC’s smart cities awards

China has emerged tops with five out of 19 winners in the 2018 IDC Smart City Asia Pacific Awards (SCAPA). Taiwan and Singapore were next with four and three awards respectively across 12 functional categories.