18 months ago, Touch n’ Go Sdn. Bhd. started something quite radical for the transportation industry in Malaysia. It is not what you would call unthinkable or unheard of. It has been done before, albeit outside of Malaysia. The new application within Malaysian road have been also widely know to be used in plenty of applications with unmatched reliability and accuracy; baggage sorting and handling in the airports for example.
If you were thinking of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification); yes we are talking about RFID. The title should have given it away anyway. Touch n’ Go Sdn. Bhd., in collaboration with Touch n’ Go Digital, launched the RFID pilot program. According to Touch n’ Go, the program gave out about million RFID tags to residents of Klang Valley. The program also extends its acceptance across Klang Valley’s 22 highways through its 18 months Pilot program. Late last year, extending into this year, the RFID acceptance extends to selected toll gates across the North-South Expressway.
In short, the program was a successful one. That is the test covered; so what is next? A full rollout of course.
That also means that RFID tags are now available for purchase via installation centres across the nation. You no longer have to make extensive applications through the website and wait for approval from Touch n’ Go to install the RFID tags to your cars, for a price. Not expensive though at MYR 35. Compare that to a new Smart TAG device at MYR 150 each. To use the devices you also have to get a new Touch n’ Go card for MYR 10.
The RFID tag works with an eWallet – the Touch n’ Go eWallet. You do not need a Touch n’ Go card anymore with the RFID tags. Well, you might still want to keep one as a back up; just in case. All you have to do is to ensure you have enough credits in the Touch n’ Go eWallet, pass through an RFID lane, and you’re through. Keep a good distance with the car in front of you though, and a reasonable speed (30 km/h) and below.
Of course RFID will not just stop at the 22 toll gates in Klang Valley. They are rolling out to even more toll gates across the nation through 2020 and beyond. Touch n’ Go is also looking to use RFID beyond the public roads. They are looking at installing it and using it for parking, paying for petrol, and more.
RFID is more than just what you see on the surface though. Touch n’ Go Sdn. Bhd. can now do real-time traffic analysis and tracking. These data can be shared across multiple platforms or even the authorities for traffic planning and tracking. It is all a part of a smarter and more digital Malaysia.
Touch n’ Go’s RFID tags will be available for purchase at MYR 35/tag from 15th February onward. You do have to ensure that you have the Touch n’ Go eWallet app on your smartphones first though; the RFID tags are tied to your eWallet. From the 15th February 2020 to 15 April 2020 40 lucky winners will walk away with MYR 2,500 worth of Toll Pass credited in their eWallet.
The Touch n’ Go eWallet app is available for free on Android and iOS via Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store respectively. For more information on the Touch n’ Go RFID program you can head over to their website.
Any
drivers knows the pain of driving. Traffic jam? No, not really. There
is one very big inconvenience whenever you take out your car.
Put
it this way; your car needs energy to run. For electric cars, you need a
battery pack to store energy for the car. While you can do that at
home, you need to get your car plugged in still. It will take forever to charge too.
While electric cars may not be too clever of an investment in Malaysia at this time, the traditional internal combustion
engines with traditional fossil fuels are the way to go. The
inconvenience is that you have to keep your tank topped up when it runs
out, a 5 minute ordeal at times.
Most of the time though its just 5 minutes that you spend in the fueling station. You tend to spend more than 15 minutes in the fueling station. At times you have to wait for a pump to free up when there is too many people at the station. Once that’s done, you have to queue up to pay for your fuel at the kiosk. To skip that, you can use your debit/credit card at the pump. If you use a debit card though, the vendor first takes MYR200 from your account before you even start doing anything.
What if there is a better solution. Since every other person in Malaysia has been going on and on about eWallet, why not use these apps to pay for fuel, from inside the car; ‘Setel’ it there and then.
Welcome to the world of Setel, an eWallet app that is specialised in handling all your fuelling needs. With Setel, it really is just 5 minutes in the fuelling station, not 15 minutes.
The moment you get to the fueling station, all you need to do is to pull up to an available pump, whip out the smartphone, open Setel app, choose the pump you are at, enter the amount that you would like to fuel, and voila, your pump is ready. Of course you need to make sure you still have credits in the app wallet. For that, you can use your credit/debit card with no fuss. If you need to find a petrol station near you, the app will help you find it too.
While the app has existed for about a year now, the app was only readily useable in the Klang Valley region and was in Beta mode. Now though, the app is fully launched as a full running app. The app will not just stop at the pumps though. They are working closely with PETRONA Malaysia to release more features within their petrol pumping stations like purchasing items in PETRONAS Mesra shops or partnering vendors, with collection at the station.
Speaking of Mesra, you can connect you Mesra card to the app and collect points automatically as you use the app. While in Beta you could not redeem the points in your Mesra card through the app now though, you can. The Setel app is the one stop shop for all fueling needs in PETRONAS.
The Setel app is now available for free on Google’s Play Store for Android and Apple App Store of iOS devices. You can use Setel app in over 700 PETRONAS fuelling stations across the nation. For now, there is no other vendors that accepts payment via the Setel
app. There is also currently an MYR 200 cap within the app. No matter
though, you can now tell your friends that you are actually ‘setel-ing’ some business as your late excuse. More information on the Setel app on their website.
Yes, we are riding the waves of the top news today too. If you go on Twitter, there are two quite a number of things that are trending in Malaysia. As of this writing, the top trending topic in Malaysia has nothing to do with the subject. Look further down though and there it is. #Wuhan is number three in Malaysia’s trending topics. Following that is #2019nCoV. Both of these refers to the subject that is also commonly known as the Wuhan virus.
Due to the virus, plenty of life in Asia has grounded to a halt. The official death toll in China has climbed over 400 and will continue to do so. Beyond that, China has also confirmed more than 20,000 cases within their borders. There are reports coming out of the country itself that China has quarantined more than 30 million people and suspects that the confirmed case numbers are closer to 10 million.
In Malaysia itself, there are already 8 reported cases. All of them are now in quarantine though. Still, #Wuhan is the trending topic, not only on twitter but everywhere else too. Air travels has been suspended and trips cancelled left and right. Not to mention, you might not be able to obtain anymore hand sanitisers and face mask now.
The virus though, does not hinder the progress of humanity. Wait, no that is not right. The virus will not hinder Samsung’s progress in their digital conquest. That sounds about right.
Source: Business Korea
You would expect plenty of construction work, or any sort of work in China itself to slowdown. That is not the case with Samsung’s Xi’an plant though. The plant, that is to be operational in the mid of 2020 will be Samsung’s second manufacturing plant in Xi’an and will be focusing on making memory chips.
While that construction is going smoothly and on track, Samsung has not stopped their progress as the world’s most advanced memory chip maker too. They have just announced and introduced their brand new third generation HBM2E fondly named ‘Flashbolt’. HBM stands for ‘High Bandwidth Memory’.
Source: Samsung
The new Flashbolt chip has a capacity of 16GB that is combined through stacking eight 10nm 16Gb DRAM (that is Gigabit for you) dies on top of a buffer chip. A little technical? Quite a lot actually. While half of us may not understand that process, it is important to note that the HBM2E has an average transfer speed of 3.2Gbps. In some cases, the Flashbolt can hit 4.2 Gbps in transfer speeds.
The current high performance memory module, the Aquabolt has a bandwidth of 307 GBps. With the new Flashbolt, that number goes up to 410 GBps per stack or up to 538GBps, if you might. Technically this does not mean that much to us as consumers.
Thing is, research labs all over the world needs all these stuff in their super computers. Plenty of these highly advanced labs uses Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) or Machine Learning (M.L.). Those applications eventually reach us, the users. With the advanced of a high speed and bandwidth chip like this, A.I. and M.L. algorithms and application can be more powerful than ever before. In that sense, no one will argue for a more powerful Google Assistant or Siri then.
Late yesterday Alphabet, which is what Google has become since their 2015 restructuring made their 2019 revenue reports available to the public. Of course Wall Street was the first to pick up the reports and ate their way through it to see if it matches all expectations. It did not; shareholders were not happy.
Source: Alphabet
Alphabet announced a total revenue of US$ 46 billion for 2019. That is a fair 17% increase from 2018. Sounds healthy, right? Wall street and shareholders though are expecting nearly a billion more in revenue though. Google missed the mark by about US$ 800 million.
US$ 800 million is quite small compared to the US$ 46 billion that they have made. Or, so you thought. Apparently it is quite a big deal in the market since every other competitor is reporting a huge surge in their own ad game. People like Amazon, for example reported a large jump on their ad revenue in 2019.
Still, Google also made sure that their shareholders are happy by also announcing that out of the US$ 46 billion of revenue, US$ 10.6 billion of those are profits. That number is bigger than estimated by Wall Street too. At least that is that.
They broke down where their money was made too within the Alphabet empire. Google cloud business, that is their Drive, Docs, Sheets and what not, makes up US$ 8.91 billion in total. YouTube, our beloved red play button on our smartphones makes up US$ 15.5 billion in revenue for 2019. That is just from Ads.
Source: YouTube
One of the bigger contributing factors of Alphabet disclosing YouTube’s earnings this year, as suggested via experts, is that the organisation as a whole failed to meet revenue expectations. The numbers, as per presented by Alphabet, indeed are quite staggering and mind boggling. The disparity could be due to a number of reasons; we cannot know for sure until Alphabet says something. The earnings number alone though tells us that the tech giants are still here to stay and they are still quite untouchable for now.
Still, the fact that YouTube, a platform that we all use for free makes US$ 15.5 billion is quite mind boggling. That is six times more than Twitch and one sixth of Facebook’s ad platform. Yes, we apparently still spend more time on the blue ‘f’ logo app than the social video platform. Then again, Facebook’s platform is plenty more versatile.
The ad revenues are not about to dwindle down anytime soon though. We cannot get enough of YouTube, you have to admit that. Annoying ads will not stop us from watching our favourite videos. But there is a bigger picture in play here though.
YouTube as a platform, thanks to the now disclosed US$ 15.5 billion in ad revenue, will grow even bigger. There will be more people that could potentially see more money in YouTube. While that means that there will be even more content for us to enjoy, that could also spell more ads being shoved in your faces. It is quite inevitable though; the more you consume, the more of a target you become.
Smart Bands and Smartwatches are becoming some of the most essential fitness accessories nowadays. However, they always need manual input of meals, caloric intake and hydration. That’s where the HEALBE GoBe3 sets itself apart from the competition. The new smart band from HEALBE is touting the first ever commercially available smartband which tracks caloric intake automatically.
The HEALBE GoBe3 is a smartband which comes with sensors designed to monitor nine key vitals. This is done non-invasively through the surface of the skin and, according to its manufacturer, with real time accuracy. The vitals tracked include sleep, stress, energy balance, heart rate, and steps taken. It does all this tracking through the hypo allergenic titanium sensor contacts on the back of the device.
Monitoring Calories Through Your Own Electrical Impulses
The new HEALBE GoBe3 uses the company’s proprietary HEALBE Flow technology to monitor caloric intake. It does this by monitoring the bio-electrical impedance of skin cells. This method of monitoring caloric intake is backed by an understanding of the human digestive system and nutrient absorption.
Our body digests different foods at different intervals after we consume it. When the nutrients are absorbed, cells create a differential gradient to assist. Essentially, the cell pump water out to allow nutrients in. HEALBE Flow uses this movement to detect the caloric value and nutrient breakdown of foods. In essence, it monitors the differences in bio-electric charges in skin cells to derive the caloric value of foods. The impedance is then used to calculate the caloric value of foods and their nutrient content.
This method was recently verified by researchers at the University of California Davis. Their research found that the technology that HEALBE uses in the GoBe3 is as accurate as manually tracking caloric input. This research is supported by another piece of independent research by the Red Cross Hospital in Guangzhou, China. Both pieces of research found the HEALBE Flow to have 89% accuracy in its reporting.
Taking On the competition with Cutting Edge Technology
Aside from the groundbreaking HEALBE Flow technology, the GoBe3 is equipped with an always-on MIP display. The display is touted to be glare free. The GoBe 3 is also lighter and sleeker than its predecessor. In addition, the smart band has interchangeable straps which come in many colours and designs. The new design is also touted to increase the accuracy of tracking. This paired with a new optical pulse sensor allows more accurate and more frequent data collection. The GoBe3 also has WiFi capabilities which speeds up data processing.
Pricing & Availability
There’s no official price for the GoBe3 announced just yet. However, we expect that the smart band will continue to hover around the USD$169 of the GoBe2.
Keep an eye on healbe.com for the GoBe3’s availability.
5G is fast becoming the norm in the tech industry as more countries see the rollout of their own 5G networks. Back at AWS re:invent, Amazon Web Services made a significant announcement, in partnership with Verizon, which made it the first company to have 5G edge computing services. AWS Wavelength is a first of its kind service which brings AWS services closer to developers and, more importantly, end users.
AWS Wavelength will see an initial rollout to 69 sites in the United States. Verizon and AWS have already been hard at work developing and fine tuning the service in Chicago. There companies such as Bethesda Softworks and the National Football League have been developing on and utilising Wavelength to deliver new, enhanced experiences to their users. This includes interactive experiences which may be the next generation of gaming and sports.
AWS Wavelength essentially brings the company’s full suite of services to the 5G Edge. The technology allows telecommunications providers and AWS to deploy remote containers fitted with all of its services. This allows developers to develop with real time experience and with single digit millisecond latency. They will then be able deploy whole new experiences to end users.
The deployment of Wavelength marks a paradigm shift which empowers edge computing like never before. It allows real time compute with large data packets which will find its applications in things like autonomous vehicles and even Smart City management. The deployment of Amazon’s full suite of web services will allow developers to deploy unique experiences for end users which take advantage of the low latency and high data volume. This in addition to the exponential increase in the number of devices each base station is able to handle will enable IoT technologies as well. The availability of machine learning interfaces at the 5G edge enables developers to develop more complex applications with further ranging implications.
Source: AWS
Developers won’t need to familiarise themselves with a new interface; Wavelength comes with the same interface developers are used to in their AWS dashboard. In fact, they will simply need to activate instances of AWS services such as EC2, ECS and more which suit their needs at a Wavelength availability zone to use the service.
AWS Wavelength is available in an initial 69 availability zones in 25 AWS Regions. The initial rollout in the United States will be done in partnership with Verizon. However, the company has committed to new availability zone in South Korea (SK Telcom), Japan (KDDI) and Europe (Vodafone) in 2020.
Adobe Premiere Pro is quickly becoming one of the most popular video editing tools among professionals. If you stay for the credits in movies, you’ll realise that a growing number of them have Adobe’s logo in the credits. As such, the demands on Premiere Pro and its features are slowly evolving to adapt to an ever changing workplace with an increased amount of collaboration.
“Productions” was designed in collaboration with some of the largest producers and editors in Hollywood. The feature was tested on recent films such as “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Dolemite is My Name” with special builds being used in ongoing projects.
The new “Productions” feature in Adobe Premiere Pro allows users to arrange and organise large projects into smaller, bite sized chunks. With these chunks as guides, video editors and videographers are able to divide and upload footage and assets to Adobe Creative Cloud and Premiere Pro in a more organised way. They will be able to create folders within their project files which will sync seamlessly between team members and also allow team members to download updated assets and files to work offline. It will continue to sync once the person goes online.
The more flexible collaborative and management features on “Productions” allow assets and video footage for large productions to be segregated into smaller portions. It also allows larger episodic productions to be organised according to episodes or even more granular divisions. It also allows reused assets to be shared or duplicated across folders seamlessly. You can easily add to project workflows by adding projects to the “Productions” panel within Adobe Premiere Pro. This will then add the project to the larger workflow.
Project locking in “Productions” allows editors to lock their active project. This will prevent collaborators from overwriting or deleting work files or the project. However, it still allows collaborators to seamlessly copy and import assets from the active workflow to their own. Project settings are also synchronised between project files in “Productions”. This allows collaborators to previews rendered by a single editor can be made available to all the editors for smooth playback.
The feature is coming to Adobe Premiere Pro soonon both MacOS and Windows. However, Adobe has not provided an exact date just yet.
CISO stands for Chief Information Security Officer. From that description alone, we believe you would know what this report is about then. If you still do not; Cisco did a study for the cyber security field for 2019 by interviewing about 2,000 Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) or security professionals all over Asia Pacific. You would be glad to know also that about 10% of the participants in the study are Malaysian. While that does not change the nature of the study, the sample size should mean that there is some accuracy in the general scheme of things.
Source: Cisco
The Big Numbers
The big numbers for Malaysia are 44% of threat alerts are investigated, 46% of the recognised threats are neutralised, and 27% have faced downtime of longer than 24 hours due to a cyber security breach or threat. There are some good things about these numbers, and some bad things too. So it is not all roses and rainbows for Malaysia’s cyber security industry in 2019.
The first of the numbers are the investigated threats. This does not mean alerts. Receiving cyber threat alerts and investigating them are two different things. You can have threat alerts of more than 10,000 and still not investigate any of them for a number of reasons. Still, investigated threats are escalated from reported threats.
According to the Malaysian numbers, 44% of threats reported in Malaysia are investigated in 2019. That is 4% more than 2018, Malaysian CISOs are busier by 4% last year 2019 than in 2018 then. That could be due to the raised number of serious threats. It could also mean that awareness to cyber threats have increased in Malaysia. So while it does sound like Malaysia is being attacked more, it also means that Malaysians are now better prepared for cyber threats or breaches.
Out of all the verified threats, nearly half of them were remediated at 46%. That number is higher than plenty of Malaysia’s neighbours and the average in Asia Pacific at 43%. The other half? Maybe those cases could be a little tougher. Still, that also means that Malaysians are capable of handling cyber security issues. This number is also an increase from 2018.
The next big number is 27% of companies declared a downtime of more than 24 hours when they get attacked. This is a large increase from 2018’s 9%. While this may not seem like a good thing, there is a bigger story that than. For one, this also means that Malaysia is plenty more digital in 2019 than 2018. This increase could also be because of the increased threat detection in 2019. The result was also a higher resolution to each identified threat.
More Vendors, More Problems?
It seems only yesterday that having multiple layers of security is a good thing. Like plenty of things, throwing money at something should solve a problem. Those were the days.
There used to be a time when organisations like banks would recommend having about 10 security vendors to layer security in all parts of their organisation. In some sense, it works; but it is very expensive, and very inconvenient for users. That is not yet considering the fact that having multiple vendors and that many layers of security increases complexity in controlling and managing the solutions.
The new way to think about cyber security then is to keep the number of vendors down to as little as required. This reduces not just complexity of workflow and simplifies management, but also increases the efficiency of managing cyber threats.
From the Malaysian numbers though, this seems to be a slightly new concept with more than 35% of the responding organisations having more than 10 vendors. While this is slightly lower than 2018’s 39%, there is still a need to reduce that number even lower. Malaysians realise that too, with 90% of respondents finding it hard to manage that many vendors at the same time. Some experts suggests that having five to six vendors at a time is enough for a holistic cybersecurity system to be in place for any organisation.
The Problem With Cybersecurity Malaysia
There are still looming problems for a country that is going through a major digital transformation though. While the progress toward a digital Malaysia and Industry 4.0 has been a steady one in the region, there are still fundamental problems that might hinder progress or create holes in the cyber armours that the CISOs have put up or tried to put up. One of these enemies to cyber security is budget.
There are times where companies might have a large constraint over budget. For most SMEs and startups, it is quite understandable. They would probably need to pool their money in things that they might find more useful to them in the shorter run. That is not saying that it is not a problem for them or the general cyber security state in Malaysia. It is still a problem, but an inevitable one.
There are cases with large organisations that has restricted their budgets to cyber security because they do not yet see the value in cybersecurity. This becomes a major issue for CISOs. Despite the consensus that more money may not mean more protection, cyber security still needs a pool of money to work with. If not enough money is being poured into the department, not much can be done. With less protection, larger organisations are more vulnerable and thus, might lose even more money.
The biggest problem with cyber security, not just in Malaysia but most of the world, is always personnel; both the lack of skilled workers and awareness of the main issue. Thing is though, CISOs all over Malaysia are also making efforts to reduce this number down with plenty of awareness and skill training of personnel all over the company. The number of skilled personnel in terms of cyber security in Malaysia is also growing continuously, which also means that it is a problem that can be solved in time.
So What do We do in 2020?
2020 is meant to be the year of progress, of near complete digital revolution. It is the year of 5G and WiFi 6, the year where data is meant to be all covering and seamless. That potentially means more cyber security risks with bigger data bandwidth and less latency. It gives software less time to react. Which means that a DDoS attack could be a big thing in 2020.
Still, awareness is key to combating cyber attacks. With the availability of data in today’s world, having a VPN no longer cuts it. The only benefit of VPN these days is to ensure that whatever that you have accessed is not tracked by your data or service provider. You are still at risk of a cyber attack even via VPN.
The fact that you have multiple devices that are connected to the internet and each other is already a threat on their own. At every point and turn, you really have to be aware of what you are accessing on the internet and what you are vulnerable to. That allows you to be more alert on things like phishing attacks, malicious links, email scams and what not. That should be enough as the first layer of defense against common cyber attacks, maybe even big ones like ransomware and what not.
If you are planning on getting an Anti-Virus software protection on your PC, consider spending a little more than what you would pay for a generic Anti-Virus program. You might want to look into find an Anti-Virus program that covers the whole lot from spyware, adware, to even malware. That way, you are ensured of a holistic protection, at least on your own end.
Maxis and Astro have been offering a combo package for internet, IPTV and Astro’s satellite TV since last year. This year, the companies are upping the ante with even faster packages to cater to a more digital audience.
The packages offered by the partnership are essentially an combination of the preexisting offerings already available from the companies. However, Astro is offering a limited 2-year rebate for those subscribing to their higher packages. This rebate is in addition to the MYR5 rebate for those using the auto-debit service. Subscribers will get either an MYR15 or MYR25 monthly rebate for 24 months depending on their subscription.
The breakdown of the costings are summarised in the table we created below. Do note that the prices for Astro are their minimum at each level, there are packages that are more expensive that are not reflected in the table. Prices are also not inclusive of the 6% SST.
Users who are interested in subscribing to the new packages can visit the official Astro broadband website. The offer is not limited to new subscribers, preexisting Astro subscribers can opt to add on the Maxis internet packages to their subscription. Do note that on higher speeds, Maxis is offering free Mesh routers for new sign ups only. Users who add-on the internet package will not be eligible for the mesh router.
However, Astro is offering a free upgrade to their new Ultra box which features Cloud Recording and a new interface for all subscribers. For more details, visit https://product.astro.com.my/broadband/offers.
Malaysia has been discussing and researching 5G for a while now. In fact, the initial rollout of 5G commercially will begin in Q3 2020. With that in mind, HUAWEI was also present at the recent 5G Malaysia International Conference in Langkawi. The company was showing off their Mate 30 Pro 5G in Malaysia’s 5G test bed. HUAWEI has announced today, that the smartphone will be available officially in Malaysia starting on 7 February 2020.
The Mate30 Pro 5G initially leaked earlier this year when screen caps of its certification in SIRIM surfaced. Now, it looks like Malaysia will join China for its commercial rollout. The new Mate30 Pro 5G is the first 5G capable smartphone top be made commercially available in Malaysia. The smartphone will be available via HUAWEI stores and telco partners such as Maxis, U mobile and Celcom.
Powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G, the Mate30 Pro is a step above its Mate30 Pro brother. The new 5G capable chipset supports 2G, 3G, and 4G in addition to the upcoming 5G. The new entry supports standalone and non-standalone 5G networks. HUAWEI touts low latency connectivity with the 5G capable smartphone, however, keep in mind that this is only applicable with a 5G network.
Aside from this, the smartphone shares the same design, software and camera setup found on the Mate30 Pro. This means that one of the most praised smartphone cameras is available on the smartphone; DxO mark gave the camera setup a 123. This paired with the 40 SuperCharge feature on the smartphone makes it a compelling offering from HUAWEI.
Pricing and Availability
The HUAWEI Mate30 Pro 5G will be available starting from February 7, 2020. The smartphone will initially be available from HUAWEI stores and also from Maxis, Celcom and U Mobile. It is also slated to be available through DiGi.
It will be retailing for MYR4,199 off contract. Purchases of the HUAWEI Mate30 Pro 5G will be entitled to freebies from HUAWEI worth MYR537 including an extended year of warranty and an in-car wireless charger.
