Asia overview India’s Minister of Railways, Telecommunications, Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnau has vowed to prevent Google from removing Indian apps from the Play Store.
Google recently removed apps it claimed were not compliant with payment regulations.
In an interview with the Press Trust of India, Vaishnau argued that the app should be restored and vowed to protect Indian startups.
“I have already called Google and I have already called the delisted app developer. We will meet next week,” the minister told Press Trust.
The minister added: “This cannot be tolerated. This type of delisting cannot be tolerated.”
– Simon Sherwood
APNIC Secretary General resigns
Paul Wilson, executive director of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), has announced his intention to step down from his position at the Internet Registry after 26 years.
Wilson’s departure was announced last Friday.
“After long consideration, Mr. Paul has decided to pursue other personal interests, explaining that those interests are incompatible with the demanding job of leading APNIC,” APNIC Chair Kenny Huang said. wrote.
Wilson’s term ends June 30, 2024, and he has indicated his intention to remain in the position until the end of the year if necessary.
Huang thanked Wilson for his “significant contributions to the RIR system, the management of the APNIC registry, and advancing the vision of an open, global, stable, and secure Internet.”
“His unwavering support and commitment to Internet development in the Asia-Pacific region will leave a lasting legacy,” Huang declared.
Wilson’s resignation was announced at APNIC’s annual general meeting in Bangkok, where he also oversaw the registry elections. Candidates Sumon Ahmad Sabir, Vincent “Achy” Atienza and Kam Se-young were all re-elected.
Mr. Kenny Hwang remained chairman, Mr. Yoshinobu Matsuzaki was reappointed as treasurer, and Mr. Rupinder Singh Perhar was appointed secretary.
– Simon Sherwood
Indian Railways launches large-scale facial recognition bidding
Indian Railways, the statutory body that operates India’s national railway system, floated a tender last week to install facial recognition cameras at the entrances and exits of 44,000 passenger coaches.
Local media outlet Media Nama reported that the camera is expected to include a facial image cropping tool to capture the faces of both adults and children, raising privacy concerns.
To help authorities apprehend criminals, the cropped image can be fed into a facial recognition system and matched against photos of the criminal in a database.
Indian Railways is also bidding for 300,000 GPS transceivers for vehicles.
Hong Kong technology investigation yields strange points
In its biennial survey of IT use by local businesses, the Hong Kong government found that it will direct IT budgets to cloud computing services initiatives next year, even though more than 96% of businesses surveyed use public services. It became clear that the plan was completely unfulfilled. cloud.
Only 1.6% say they use a hybrid cloud, and about 15% say they use a private cloud.
The main applications used by cloud computing services are most commonly email and other communications (98.1 percent), followed by data storage or backup (79.4 percent).
ByteDance is reportedly preparing an AI product
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is reportedly secretly developing its own AI products, including something called a “multimodal digital human.”
A secretive team has apparently been working on the product for months at CapCut, a subsidiary of ByteDance, but no official information has been released about what they’re building or when it will see the light of day.
- In this occasional new feature,register Stay tuned for new partnerships, sales and funding rounds across the region.
- South Korea’s SK Telecom has partnered with US AI startup Perplexity to offer its AI-based search engine product, Perplexity Pro, for free to its more than 32 million subscribers.
The startup, backed by Bezos and Nvidia, will also give SK Telecom access to the company’s technology to build its own personal AI assistant products. - Tencent cloud and high cloud The super app known as TribunX has announced a partnership with Indonesia-based news organization TribunNews.
“Leveraging Tencent Cloud’s advanced cloud technology, TribunX Super App aims to establish itself as the go-to platform for digital news consumption,” the press release states. - Japanese multinational company NEC has been selected by mobile operator NTT Docomo to provide 5G commercial network services using virtualized radio access network (vRAN).
Docomo believes this initiative will reduce total cost of ownership by up to 30 percent and power consumption by up to 50 percent. - AI chip startup Tenstorrent announced that it will provide its RISC-V and chiplet IP to Japan’s Advanced Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC) for edge 2nm AI accelerators.
“Tenstorrent and LSTC believe that the future of silicon will be driven by heterogeneous computing, a combination of RISC-V CPUs and AI cores designed to be used together to process any workload. We share the same vision,” the announcement details.
China’s rental friend app boom
China’s leading social media platforms Douyin and Xiaohongshu offer rental friend services.
An article published in Nikkei Asia last week details how the app’s hard-working users are renting out their free time for platonic relationships.
In other news
Other regional reports last week included India approving its first wafer fab, a joint venture between Tata and Taiwan’s PSMC.
News from China includes Baidu admitting it may never be allowed to buy cutting-edge GPUs again and losing senior self-driving car staff to Nvidia. We also investigated how his Middle Kingdom PC manufacturer, Acemagic, was injecting malware into its machines.
In Australia, the head of the country’s intelligence agency expressed concern about attacks on critical infrastructure, and Meta backed away from previous commitments to fund local news organizations.
We also discovered that Vietnam is considering banning cryptocurrencies and that the leader of Japan’s NTT West is taking early retirement to make amends for data breaches that began years before he took office. ®
