SAP has expanded its presence in Asia-Pacific (APAC) with the opening of a new data centre in Singapore to support SAP Commerce Cloud deployment.
Slack releases new app for Salesforce
Slack has strengthened its partnership with Salesforce with the release of a new Salesforce for Slack app that provides a significant update to Sales Cloud integration and integration with Service Cloud.
Singapore eyes up to 4 5G networks
5G is about to become a reality for the masses in Singapore. With 20 times faster surfing speed than 4G, the next generation mobile technology is expected to drive the nation’s digital economy.
TerraMaster releases entry-level NAS for SOHO and home users
TerraMaster has unveiled the F2-210 , an entry level network attached storage (NAS) solution for home and small office home office users.
Google Pixel 4 loses key edge
By Edward Lim
The much awaited Google Pixel 4 and Google Pixel 4 XL smartphones were announced at Google 19 yesterday. Interestingly, Google chose to talk more about the software capabilities rather than the hardware specifications, avoiding direct comparison with other flagship smartphones.
Qualcomm announces IP e-learning platform for India startups and MSMEs
Help is at hand for India startups and micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to get quickly from mind to market, following the launch of the L2Pro India IP e-learning Platform.
Samsung, China Mobile and Alibaba among world’s top 10 tech companies
Samsung, China Mobile and Alibaba have made it to the top 10 of Forbes 2019 top 100 digital companies. The Korea giant came in third behind Apple and Microsoft, but edged out Google and Intel.
Dyson switches from electric car to battery
High-end vacuum maker Dyson has shelved plans to build an electric car. Instead, the British technology company will concentrate on making a revolutionary battery.
India’s Stellapps Technologies wins Rabobank’s SustainableAg Asia Challenge
Umesh Parjapat of Stellapps Technologies (second from left) with (from left) Albert Boogard of Rabo Foundation, Diane Boogard of Rabobank Asia and Harjan Kuiper of Rabobank Singapore.Stellapps Technologies put on a stellar presentation to win over the judges and take home the top prize of US$10,000 at Rabobank’s SustainableAg Asia Challenge. Fending off 13 other shortlisted competitors from China, India, Indonesia, and Singapore in a field of 138, it impressed with its SmartMoo internet of things (IoT) platform, which improves yield per animal, traceability and quality of milk in emerging countries.
Zendesk launches Gather and Sunshine Conversations
Zendesk has launched Gather, which lets companies provide trusted and transparent support to customers through online community forums. They can engage with each other and company experts to offer guidance and insight beyond what a single customer support agent might be able to handle.
Maxis goes with Huawei for 5G
Malaysia’s second largest mobile network operator Maxis has inked a deal with Huawei to roll out 5G in Malaysia next year.
Avast survey: 1 in 5 smartphone photo is terrible or a duplicate
The average person stores 952 photos on their smartphone, of which 22 percent are of bad quality, blurred, dark, or duplicates, according to an Avast survey.
NVIDIA RTX takes live TV up another notch
While ray tracing has been adopted to make gaming more real, the technology took live broadcasting to another level at the opening of The League of Legends Pro League regional finals in Shanghai. The live show host interacted with an augmented reality gaming character in a real-time mixed reality broadcast.
Singapore: Most ready for AI
As a city, Singapore is the world’s most ready for the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, according to research firm Oliver Wyman Forum. London, New York, San Francisco, and Paris made up the rest of the top five with Sydney slotting in at 10th.
AWS avails NVIDIA T4-powered Amazon EC2 G4 instances
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced general availability of G4 instances, a new NVIDIA T4 GPU-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance designed to help accelerate machine learning inference and graphics-intensive workloads.
India server market dips in Q2
The server market in India dropped one percent year on year, driven primarily by a dip in x86 server sales.
Rabobank shortlists 15 startups for SustainableAg Asia Challenge
India and China startups and innovators dominate the list of 15 shortlisted finalists for Rabobank’s SustainableAg Asia Challenge. The other challengers come from Indonesia and Singapore.
Watch your bin — the rubbish version!
Your rubbish bin could be a treasure trove for thieves. What you deem as garbage may contain a repository of sensitive information that could come back to haunt you.
IBM keeps betting on mainframes with z15 launch
The mainframe computer is not quite going the way of the dinosaur. Even in today’s age of Intel-based servers, there’s still room and relevance for the mainframe. This explains why IBM has launched the z15, its 15th generation of the mainframe.
Qualcomm and Ericsson ready for next phase 5G commercialisation
Qualcomm Technologies and Ericsson have completed a 5G New Radio (NR) data connection compliant with global 3GPP 5G NR Release 15 specifications in Standalone (SA) mode of operation.
Datacenters.com launches Colocation Marketplace
Datacenters.com has launched Colocation Marketplace, claimed to be the “first platform to offer transparent co-location pricing from numerous providers to all visitors in an e-commerce platform”.
China and Brazil buck trend as smartphone sales slump in Q2
The signs are not good for smartphone sales as Gartner reports a 1.7 percent decline in Q2. Bucking the trend among the top five markets are China and Brazil. China clocked up 101 million smartphone sales, up 0.5 percent year on year in Q2, to maintain its top position.
VMware makes double acquisition
Ahead of the VMWorld in San Francisco next week, VMware has announced two major acquisitions — Pivotal for US$2.7 billion and Carbon Black for US$1.9 billion.
New Ambi Climate feature balances multiple users’ needs to keep everyone cool and cosy
Keeping cool in an air-conditioned room can raise the temperature if multiple users cannot agree on the correct setting. Hong Kong-based IoT startup Ambi Labs has come up with a new feature for its Ambi Climate controller that aims to keep everyone cool and cosy.
Microsoft buys jClarity to improve Azure
Microsoft has acquired AdoptOpenJDK project contributor jClarity to drive increased performance for Java workloads on Azure.
Samsung Galaxy Note comes of age
By Edward Lim
When it was first introduced in 2011, the Samsung Galaxy Note received brickbats for its 5.3-inch screen size with critics wondering if this was a wrong move for the Korean smartphone maker. History has proven that Samsung had made the right bet as others followed suit with larger screen sizes as well.
Salesforce bags ClickSoftware
Just two months after it’s acquisition of data visualisation firm Tableau, Salesforce has gone shopping again. This time, it has bagged ClickSoftware for US$1.35 billion.
Japan to lead APAC in smartphone decline in 2019
It’s not going to be a good year for smartphones. The global market is expected to dip 2.5 percent year on year, with Japan leading with a 6.5 percent drop.
Qualcomm and Tencent Games ink MOU
Qualcomm and Tencent Games have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MoU) for a strategic cooperation on digital entertainment. This includes joint efforts to optimise future projects such as Qualcomm Snapdragon-based mobile gaming devices, game content and performance optimisations, Snapdragon Elite Gaming enhancements, cloud gaming, AR/VR, 5G gaming use case developments and additional relevant technologies.
APAC GPUaaS market poised for 40 CAGR by 2025
The global GPU as a Service (GPUaaS) market is expected to jump tenfold from around US$700 million in 2018 to US$7 billion by 2025, according to Global Market Insights. The Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is expected to lead this charge with a compounded annual growth rate of more than 40 percent between 2019 and 2025.
IBM seals Red Hat deal
IBM has acquired Red Hat for US$34 billion, one of the biggest technology deals of all time — bettered only by Dell’s purchase of EMC for US$65 billion and Avago’s buyout of Broadcom for US$37 billion, both in 2015.
Private equity firm acquires Corel
Hands up if you’ve not heard of Corel before. Does the company sound vaguely familiar? Founded in the 1980s, this is a company that is well past its glory days. Corel used to be a well-known brand in the PC era with products such as Corel Draw and WinZip.
The future of database is in the cloud
Unsurprisingly, a Gartner report is predicting that three quarters of all databases will reside in the cloud by 2022. Only five percent of migration will remain on premises.
Robots to replace 20m jobs by 2030
Nearly one in 10 jobs will be replaced by robots by 2030, according to a paper released by Oxford Economics. Entitled How Robots Change the World, it highlights that up to 8.5% of the global manufacturing workforce could be displaced by industrial robots just 11 years down the road.
Explosion-proof VoIP phone, anyone?
An explosion can cause injuries to people and damage to the surroundings. Getting help is critical but what if the telecommunications equipment is also destroyed?
Malaysian teams top first Infineon-LG Hackathon
Malaysia scored big at the first Infineon LG </> Make Hackathon on breakthrough Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in Singapore on June 17.
NVIDIA empowers Arm with AI and HPC software
Giving customers choices and enabling innovation in the high performance computing (HPC) space are the key reasons why NVIDIA is providing support for Arm CPUs.
Goodbye and good riddance, iTunes!
By Edward Lim
Apple’s announcement that it is killing of iTunes is music to my ears. It’s about time!
Infineon to acquire Cypress for €9b
Semiconductor giant Infineon Technologies will be acquiring embedded solutions provider Cypress for €9.0 billion.
Taiwan’s fastest supercomputer goes online
Taiwan’s new and fastest supercomputer, Taiwania 2 is also the world’s 20th fastest and 10th most energy efficient. Made in Taiwan, it will be used by the academic and research communities at the Taiwan Computing Cloud.
Sunmi lets consumers pay with their face
Think using the smartphone is a cool way of paying? Well, that’s neat but China-based Sunmi aims to take digital payment a step further with its face-recognition payment solution.
India PC market slides in Q1
Weak consumer demand, high inventory from previous quarters, and supply issues for Intel chips are among the reasons why the India PC market slipped in Q1. According to IDC, the segment dropped 8.3 percent to 2.15 million units that quarter.
NVIDIA strikes back at Intel
Take that, Intel! GPU giant NVIDIA has fired back at Intel, which reported that its Xeon Scalable processors outperforms NVIDIA GPU on ResNet-50 deep learning Inference.
Google fires first salvo at Huawei
By Edward Lim
It was only a matter of time before the spat between the US and China went up another level. And this week, Google joined in the fight by pulling out support for China’s world number 2 phone maker Huawei.
HP Enterprise buys Cray for US$1.3b
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is on the acquisition trail again with the purchase of supercomputing pioneer Cray for US$1.3 billion.
Cray to build world’s fastest supercomputer for US government
The race to have the world’s fastest supercomputer has taken on a new spin with the US Department of Energy commissioning Cray to build the most powerful yet by 2021. Called Frontier, the new 1.5-exaflop supercomputer will be built on built on Cray’s Shasta supercomputing platform using AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs.
Singapore aims for 5G in 2020
Singapore aims to roll out at least two 5G networks by 2020. With its greater reliability, lower latency and ability to connect more devices, the next generation network will enable applications such as augmented reality/virtual reality content and live streaming of 4K/8K videos.
Huawei bucks the trend as global smartphone shipment shrinks in Q1
While its competitors struggled, Huawei strode ahead and emerged the winner in the worldwide smartphone market in Q1. Though it’s still behind market leader Samsung, the China-based smartphone giant narrowed the gap with an astounding 50 percent growth in the quarter, according to IDC.
Facebook plays matchmaker
Singapore has joined 18 other countries, including Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam, that can access Facebook Dating, the social media platform’s dating feature.
China Unicom ready for 5G rollout
China Unicom is readying to roll out 5G in China with the support of Qualcomm and in collaboration with device partners nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.
OnePlus 7 coming on May 14?
Leaks of the launch of the OnePlus 7 keep coming and CEO Pete Lau seemed to be fanning the flame.
Fujitsu HK appoints Tang as new GM of sales
Fujitsu Hong Kong has appointed Freddie Tang as General Manager of Sales. In his new role, Tang will oversee Fujitsu’s sales and go-to-market strategy in Hong Kong and Macau, including building relationships with strategic and enterprise customers, growing the customer base, developing new vertical markets, and optimising sales functions to achieve cost effectiveness and sales efficiency.
AMD CEO to deliver Computex 2019 keynote
This year’s Computex in Taipei will kick off with a keynote address by AMD President and CEO Lisa Su at the Computex International Press Conference on May 27 at 10am.
Worldwide cloud services to grow exponentially through 2022
Cloud services are really hot with projected growth of 17.5 percent to US$214.3 billion in 2019, according to Gartner. The momentum is expected to continue through to 2022 with the research firm projecting the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three time the growth of overall IT services.NVIDIA unveils US$99 Jetson Nano
NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a slew of announcements during his near three-hour keynote address at the GPU Technology Conference last week. But among the date centre and server offerings, partnerships with leading brands and a new development in autonomous driving, one that doesn’t seem as loud and prominent could prove to be the spark to trigger a robotics tsunami.
Hope for lost photos
Have you ever accidentally deleted a photo on your mobile phone and felt really lousy afterwards? A new photo recovery tool can help ease your frustration. The newly-launched Recoverit lets you find lost photos on Android-based mobile devices.
NVIDIA to acquire Mellanox
NVIDIA has reached a US$6.9 billion agreement to acquire Mellanox, a supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and smart interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage.
NTU and Volvo launch world’s first full size, autonomous electric bus
Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Volvo Buses have launched the world’s first full size, autonomous electric bus. The single-deck 12-metre long Volvo electric bus has a capacity of 80 passengers.Technology to shift occupational categories for 375m by 2030
The constant evolution of technology is reshaping jobs and by 2030, up to 375 million people or 14 percent of the global workforce will need to switch occupational categories.
eSIM Alliance launched
Hong Kong-based eSIM solutions provider 10T Tech has announced the launch of the eSIM Alliance, the world’s first global alliance of mobile operators (MNOs) and virtual mobile operators (MVNOs).
Entelechy Asia 