By Edward Lim
In the early 2000s, I visited Beijing for the first time and was amazed to see a taxi using a global positioning system (GPS) to get me to my destination. To put things in perspective, this was before the arrival of smartphones and GPS wasn’t even used in Singapore. Continue reading “China: Quick adopter, widespread use of technology”
A new player has entered the machine learning arena. While big players such as Google, Intel and NVIDIA have been slugging it out, Amazon has thrown its hat into the ring with its newly-launched Inferentia chip.
Continue reading “Amazon takes on big guns in machine learning”
Singapore headquartered Arcadier, has launched Token Generation Event (TGE) Presale to raise US$25 million by Q3 next year for its Project ArcadierX blockchain-enhanced marketplace platform. A private sale has yielded US$1 million in investment. Continue reading “Arcadier to raise US$25m for blockchain e-commerce marketplaces”
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.
Continue reading “Online marketplace Honestbee launches brick-and-mortar Habitat”
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.
Continue reading “Singapore launches unified payment QR code”
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.
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.
Continue reading “Outage and strike do not faze Amazon on Prime Day”
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.
Continue reading “Suning Tesco opens first UAV logistics route in Wuhan”
China e-commerce giant JD.com has received a US$550 million investment from Google as part of a strategic partnership.
Continue reading “JD.com gets US$550m cash injection from Google”
Information and communications technology (ICT) spending in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) will hit US$1.5 trillion in 2021, according to IDC.
Continue reading “ICT spending in APAC (sans Japan) to hit US$1.5t in 2021”
Google has ousted Amazon from the perch of the global smart speaker market. According to Canalys, Google shipped 3.2 million units with its Google Home and Google Home mini series , surpassing the 2.5 million units of the Amazon Echo series for the first time in Q1.
Continue reading “Google moves to top of smart speaker market in Q1”
Singapore-headquartered Carry is teaming up with Spoqa of South Korea to bring cryptocurrency payment and blockchain-enhanced loyalty points to brick-and-mortar retailers.
Singapore-based Carousell has secured US$85 million in Series C funding to grow and expand its e-commerce business across the region.
Alibaba Group has acquired Daraz, its second purchase for a Rocket Internet company following the earlier deal for Lazada in Southeast Asia.
Continue reading “Alibaba acquires Daraz to extend South Asia reach”
Singtel and Razer have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to connect their respective e-payment systems into an interoperable network to reach out to up to 50 million users in Southeast Asia.
Continue reading “Singtel and Razer to unite e-payment network”
The number is staggering even if the company is Amazon. Jeff Bezos has announced that Amazon Prime has more than 100 million members globally.
Continue reading “Amazon has more than 100m Prime subscribers”
Virtual reality (VR) has been tipped to be the next innovative technology to improve and impact retail and marketing.
More than 1,000 participants attending the NVIDIA AI Conference in Singapore next week are in for a treat as the organisers are bringing in a tantalising line-up of speakers.
The two keynote speakers are Dr David B Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow and inventor of more than 60 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design; and Dr Wanli Min, AI scientist of Alibaba Cloud, who will touch on A Revolutionary Road to Data Intelligence.
Besides these two, there are special guest-of-honour Chng Kai Fong, Managing Director of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and a panel discussion on AI for the Future of Singapore Economy.
Continue reading “Tantalising line-up of speakers at NVIDIA AI Conference”
Greater internet and mobile device accessibility are driving e-commerce growth in Southeast Asia.
According to ABI Research, Smart Retail has gone through revolutionary changes in the past 10 years and will exponentially continue to do so going forward. Brick and mortar stores are no longer the only option for consumers across the globe to make their everyday purchases, due to significant advancements in technology, both in-store and online.
Key players include Senion, who implements some of the world’s largest Indoor Positioning System (IPS) solutions to enhance in-store experiences, and AisleLabs who provides shopper traffic behavior analytics to help retailers optimise store layouts. Leading POS software vendors, Shopkeep and Square are allowing retailers to sell across multi-channels from a single platform. These and other key vendors are paving paths to making the offline and online worlds seamless experiences.
Continue reading “E-commerce to account for a quarter of retail sales by 2025”
The online grocery market in Singapore has just gotten hotter with Amazon’s launch of its Prime Now service. It is the e-commerce giant’s first stop in the region.
Prime Now offers tens of thousands of products, such as groceries, chilled beer, ice-cream, household, and home essentials, baby, beauty, electronics, and toys.
Mastercard has unveiled a new brand identity and logo to be aligned with its position as a forward-thinking, human-centred technology company.
“To thrive in this new digital world where business moves faster than ever, we want to modernise and elevate the brand in a design that is simple and elegant, yet unquestionably Mastercard. We’ve been on a fantastic trajectory, with digital technology being an increasingly important part of our business. Now it’s time for our brand to embody the company we’ve become,” said Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Mastercard.
Designing a brand mark to work seamlessly across all digital platforms, retail channels and connected-devices, while preserving its heritage was key to the overall effort, which also includes the most comprehensive brand design system ever introduced globally within Mastercard. The evolved brand identity will be rolled out across Mastercard beginning in Fall.
Leading e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced that it would pay US$1 billion for a controlling stake in Singapore startup Lazada, which has e-commerce operations across Southeast Asia.
Established by Rocket Internet in 2011, Lazada is a popular e-commerce platform for a wide range of consumer products.
“With the investment in Lazada, Alibaba gains access to a platform with a large and growing consumer base outside China, a proven management team and a solid foundation for future growth in one of the most promising regions for e-commerce globally,” said Michael Evans, President of Alibaba.
GSMA has launched GSMA Marketplace, an e-commerce platform dedicated to the mobile industry.
GSMA Marketplace leverages the associations’s reputation as a trusted intermediary in the telecoms industry to bring together buyers and sellers to do business more easily with each other.
“Whether you are a buyer looking for greater innovation or better prices in your procurement of products or services, or a seller seeking to win new business and enter new markets, GSMA Marketplace will let you browse, contact and connect with companies who can help you achieve your objectives,” said John Hoffman, CEO of GSMA.
Continue reading “GSMA launches e-commerce platform for telecoms industry”
November 11 is Singles’ Day in China and the singular thing retailers are aiming for today is record sales. China e-commerce giant Alibaba has set US$8.18 billion (RMB50 billion) as its 2014 target of single-day transaction value for the November 11 online shopping festival, according to IDC.
The research firm believes Alibaba is very likely to achieve five percent more. “11.11” is not only a festival for Alibaba, online shoppers, and online retailers; it also changes consumers’ buying behaviour and impacts the evolution of the China e-commerce ecosystem.
“11.11” has become a special day for many Chinese consumers ever since Alibaba created this single-day online shopping festival in 2009. The total transaction value during last year’s “11.11” reached US$5.73 billion (RMB35 billion), which shocked Alibaba’s e-commerce competitors all around the world as well as the entire retail industry.
Continue reading “Alibaba sets US$8b target for November 11 sales”
Red Bull has implemented a new global B2B order management portal based on the hybris B2B Commerce solution. Known as the SOET 2.0 Solution, the portal provides a highly flexible solution for quick and easy order entry for global retailers and distributors placing orders with the beverage brand across multiple channels.
Launched in March, the global roll-out was completed in June and 79 countries are now using Red Bull’s order management portal utilizing hybris’ B2B Commerce solution.
Founded by Dietrich Mateschitz in the mid-1980s and inspired by functional drinks from the Far East, Red Bull is currently available in more than 165 countries.
Continue reading “Red Bull builds global B2B portal with hybris”
hybris has announced the coming availability of hybris B2C Commerce Accelerator for China. As businesses move from a single channel, such as print catalogues, to multiple channels — including online, mobile, print and call centers, complexity increases.
Founded on hybris Commerce Accelerator, hybris B2C Commerce Accelerator for China has been specially configured and equipped with functionalities specifically to address Chinese e-commerce needs.
Adapted expressly for the Chinese market, it comes with pre-configured page templates that are designed to suit the highly characteristic ‘click’ culture and specific shopping atmosphere enjoyed by Chinese consumers, providing big product images, larger merchandising bars and a very visual user experience.
Continue reading “hybris announces B2C Commerce Accelerator for China”
Alibaba Group handled a record-breaking surge in online shopping traffic on China Singles’ Day on November 11 , the busiest day of the year for Internet retailers in China.
China’s largest e-commerce company broke its one-day sales record by more than 80 percent. ZTE’s ZXONE 8700 optical transport network system carried 90 percent of Alibaba’s operating data traffic that day, as online shopping orders pushed Alibaba’s peak data traffic to almost 300 Gbits per second, sustained for a period of seven hours.
For the 24-hour duration of China Singles’ Day, ZTE’s OTN systems deployed by Alibaba delivered excellent network performance and fault-free reliability, with no malfunction warning reported.
Continue reading “Alibaba breezes through China Singles’ Day online traffic with ZTE technology”
Cloud computing adoption is growing and will form the bulk of new IT spend in 2016. According to Gartner, 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.
Gartner describes cloud computing as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered “as a service” using Internet technologies. It heralds an evolution of business in positive and negative ways. It has also become a hot industry term that has been used in many contradictory ways.
“Overall, there are very real trends toward cloud platforms, and also toward massively scalable processing. Virtualisation, service orientation and the Internet have converged to sponsor a phenomenon that enables individuals and businesses to choose how they’ll acquire or deliver IT services, with reduced emphasis on the constraints of traditional software and hardware licensing models,” said Chris Howard, Research Vice President of Gartner. “Services delivered through the cloud will foster an economy based on delivery and consumption of everything from storage to computation to video to finance deduction management.”
Continue reading “Cloud Computing to account for most of IT budget by 2016”
hybris has been named alongside IBM, Oracle Commerce and Intershop as leading B2B commerce vendors in Forrester Research’s latest Wave report.
Entitled “The Forrester Wave: B2B Commerce Suites, Q4 2013”, the report examined seven vendors based on 66 evaluation criteria across each vendor’s current offering, strategy, and market presence.
According to the report, customers are attracted to hybris for four key reasons: the modern Java-based architecture; the embedded enterprise product content management capabilities; the embedded and rapidly maturing order management capabilities; and the flexibility of the “Framework”.
“One of our key differentiators is that the hybris B2B Commerce suite provides a scalable and flexible solution with rapid time to innovation, this, along with hybris now being a part of SAP, means that we are positioned to help our customers gain the revenue growth and cost-saving benefits they seek. We are therefore proud to see that we have been recognised as a leader in Forrester’s latest B2B eCommerce market report,” said Ariel Lüdi, CEO of hybris.
hybris B2B Commerce is built on a single, modern technology stack, with embedded capabilities for product content management and order management which provides a best-in-class solution for scalability and performance for high-volume, high-transaction environments. Built on the highly flexible hybris platform that is architected to be the operating environment for modern, always-on Internet applications, hybris B2B Commerce also provides a standards-based development framework on which anyone can build custom applications or extensions to the platform or hybris applications.
Download the report from http://www.hybris.com/en/forrester-wave-q4-2013.
Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach US$3.8 trillion in 2014, a 3.6 percent increase from 2013, but it’s the opportunities of a digital world that have IT leaders excited, according to Gartner.
The beginning of the Digital Industrial Economy will make every budget an IT budget; every company a technology company; every business a digital leader, and every person a technology company.
“The Digital Industrial Economy will be built on the foundations of the Nexus of Forces (which includes a confluence and integration of cloud, social collaboration, mobile and information) and the Internet of Everything by combining the physical world and the virtual,” said Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President of Gartner and Global Head of Research.
Continue reading “Beginning of the Digital Industrial Economy”
