It looks like Xiaomi is likely going to have a break when it comes to their impending U.S. ban. In a court ruling released on the 13th of March, a judge in the District of Columbia, Rudolph Contreras, found that the classification of Xiaomi as a “Chinese Communist military company” was “arbitrary and capricious” and granted the company a preliminary injunction against the restrictions that were due to take effect. In addition to issuing the preliminary injunction, the judge stated that filing of the claim from the Department of Defense lacked “a satisfactory explanation” and lacked a rational connection between the facts and the conclusion made. The preliminary injunction bodes well for Xiaomi as the company looks to reverse the classification all together.
Xiaomi found itself in the middle of a legal battle towards the end of Trump’s administration. The Department of Defense, under Trump, declared Xiaomi a threat to national security citing ties to the Chinese government. However, Xiaomi has since denied the claim. In their court filing, the company cited that the classification would cause irreparable damage and losses. Keep in mind, the ban that Xiaomi was facing is not the same as the one Huawei is facing. Xiaomi was facing a ban on investments from the U.S. If the injunction was denied, any individual or company linked to the United States would have had to divest their shares in the company by November. This was clarified by Xiaomi when it announced that Google Play Services would remain on its international phones.
Xiaomi has since issued a public statement regarding the matter.
Microsoft has finally rolled out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) feature to Microsoft Teams after a long wait. This feature is available for commercial or paid subscriber, and it only applies to one-to-one unscheduled meetings. Although, Microsoft mentioned that this feature will be applied in other types of meeting in the future.
This security feature has provided users a better platform to discuss sensitive and confidential matters or topics. Microsoft’s implementation not only encrypts the conversation during the meeting but also enhances cryptographic keys held on users’ devices. In other words, no third party gets access to the meeting or trace the conversations, including Microsoft. The latest security upgrade is supposed to reduce privacy concerns.
On the other hand, PowerPoint Live is one of the new features in Microsoft Teams, it allows users to remotely control the slides, while the viewers or other presenters can privately skip ahead to the content they want without disrupting the presentation. Presenters can review comments, content, notes, and meeting participants on a single screen, which is convenient.
Moreover, Microsoft Teams is offering 3 presenter modes for customized presentations. The 3 modes are ‘Standout’, ‘Reporter’, and ‘Side-by-side’.Only Standout mode will be released within this month (March 2021), Reporter and Side-by-Side mode will be released soon as per Microsoft. Standout mode places the presenter’s video feed front and center. Side-by-side places the video feed right beside the presenter’s slides. Reporter mode is pretty self-explanatory.
Of course, users can leave it in Dynamic Mode to keep things simple. Dynamic View personalizes and automatically manages the frame to the speaker window as people speak up or turn on their cameras. Users can decide to place the participant gallery at the top of their window, closer to your webcam’s placement. This layout arrangement helps maintain a sort of natural eye gaze. Dynamic View will also be coming later this month.
Shopee, one of Malaysia’s largest e-commerce platforms, is bringing next day delivery to its users. The platform will be offering next day deliveries for Peninsular Malaysia excluding Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan and Terrengganu through its Shopee Xpress service. The offer kicked off on 18 February 2021 as the platform geared up for its upcoming 3.3 sale.
The next-day delivery offer applies to purchases on Shopee Mart with the “Next-Day Delivery” tag. Keep in mind that your order will also need to be placed before 12PM daily to make use of the service. Orders placed after 12PM will be considered orders for the next day and will be delivered the day after. So, if you order at 1 PM on Monday, you’ll be receiving your order on Wednesday. If eligible orders do not make it to their destination by the next day, users will receive a free shipping voucher for their next Shopee Mart purchase.
The new service comes in response to the data reported by iPrice and Parcelhub which showed that Malaysians experienced a 119% increase in delivery times in 2020’s movement control order (MCO). This made Malaysia the country with the longest delivery time for online purchases in the region.
Shopee’s next-day delivery offer is only the tip of the iceberg as the company has been working with partners to facilitate a faster, more convenient delivery process. They have since increased the number of Shopee Xpress drop-off points to more than 300 nationwide with partners such as Parcelhub and Mailboxes Etc (MBE). These new drop-off points are expected to help reduce turnover times. To date, Shopee has successfully reduced delivery times to East Malaysia (Sabah & Sarawak) from 10 days to 4 days.
During their 3.3 sale, customers can get free shipping with a minimum spend of MYR10. Shopee is also offering daily 50% off deals and bargains from as low as MYR0.33. They will also be working with TV3 for a 3.3 Supermarket Show which will air at 9PM on 3rd March 2021.
Fitbit’s health-centric devices have been some of the best fitness devices on the market to date. The company has successfully developed sensors and an intuitive interface that allows users to not only collect data but view them in a way that is easy to understand. However, in 2019, Fitbit saw the opportunity to bring even more insights to their users at a premium.
Fitbit Premium has been up and running since late 2019. It provides deeper insights into the data that is already collected by your Fitbit device – some of which could even be used to detect COVID-19 without the PCR test. Just recently, the company extended the availability of a limited version of Fitbit Premium available to users of the Versa 3 and Inspire 2. Now, it seems like that may be more behind that.
Source: Fitbit
Fitbit has recently sent out a customer survey which asks users to consider an cheaper tier of their Fitbit Premium service. According to Android Central, the theoretical new tier would be priced at USD$2.99 (MYR12.09); less than half the price of the current plan at USD$9.99 (MYR40.38). However, it seems like the offerings would be significantly less than the current Premium plan which offers not only user data but also guided workouts and more. The new plan would allow users to “see your activity, sleep, stress, and health metrics for the last month, year, forever with unlimited historical data.”
It seems like this may be Google gauging users’ valuation of the data and insights they get from Fitbit devices. This comes as no surprise as the sale of Fitbit to Google essentially limited what Google could do with the data collected from Fitbit devices. Senior Vice President of Devices and Services, Rick Osterloh, mentions the issue of data privacy and Google’s acquisition of Fitbit stating that the acquisition was about hardware and never the data.
PR asset of Fitbit Premium on Android, showing Today screen with insights. For placement into renders or lifestyle imagery only.
This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we’ve been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users’ privacy. We worked with global regulators on an approach which safeguards consumers’ privacy expectations, including a series of binding commitments that confirm Fitbit users’ health and wellness data won’t be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data.
Rick Osterloh, Senior Vice President, Devices & Services at Google
However, Google being a data company understands that there is an inherent value to all the data being collected. Hence, this straw poll to see if users are willing to spend to get access to their data and insights is just an exercise of how much value users place in the data collected by their Fitbits.
That said, we have always been in the camp where users should be given access to their data regardless of a “Premium” fee – the other goodies in the premium subscription are definitely worth the investment, if you see the need or want to make better sense of the data that’s being collected.
As companies continue in their digitization journeys, they are seeing an increased need for solutions that are able to mitigate risk. However, with the many solutions in the market, it can be daunting for them to discern between them. Marsh, a global insurance broking and risk management firm, has come up with a program called Cyber Catalyst which recognises and certifies cybersecurity solutions for their effectiveness across a set of criteria including the effectiveness, efficiency and viability of the solution. For the second time, one of Aruba’s security offerings has been recognised for its efficacy as part of the Cyber Catalyst Program.
Aruba’s ClearPass Suite of identity-based access control solutions has been recognised in the Cyber Catalyst program. The ClearPass suite encompasses an array of individual, AI-driven services which allow organisations to have better visibility of their network activity. It allows businesses to scale – even with the rigours of remote work – effectively without compromising network and data security through the implementation of automated device compliance policies and even through BYOD provisioning. Aruba’s ClearPass covers everything from onboarding, policy control, remote management and even guest access security.
Aruba’s ClearPass joins its Policy Enforcement Firewall (PEF) which received the same recognition in 2019. As two of their services have now been recognised, the company now boasts an integrated identity-based network access control solution. Aruba’s offerings are now a comprehensive approach to Zero Trust and Security Access Service Edge (SASE) frameworks.
Twitter seems to be on a diversifying binge with the acquisition of podcasting platform, Breaker, earlier this year and now the acquisition of Dutch newsletter startup, Revue. The company looked to the acquisition of Breaker as a strategic move to help develop their Twitter Spaces feature. With their acquisition of Revue, they are looking to make the platform more interactive and profitable for content publishers.
The acquisition of Revue doesn’t change anything when it comes to the platform. It will continue to function as an independent service and app under Twitter. However, the company will be leveraging on the know-how and experience of the Revue team to develop and enhance their social media platform when it comes to discoverability and content. To this end, Twitter has decided to expand the team further, hiring for key roles such as engineering, design, data science, and others to produce more features. The move to acquire Revue comes as a boon to Twitter as it acquires crucial insights and talent when it comes to empowering publishers on the social platform.
With this move, the company looks to increase the exposure of the content publishers to a more wide-reaching network and global audience. In addition, the Revue acquisition will allow Twitter to enable a more interactive relationship between publishers and their audiences. As Twitter grows into a channel for publishers to build their audiences, the company is also looking to provide users with more creative and meaningful content.
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down, particularly when it comes to businesses. It has accelerated the shift from analogue to digital more than three fold and has forced businesses to think outside the box. Honeywell has been one of the companies that has been adapting to change to help deliver meaningful services to their customers. Over the past year, the company has developed services that allow their clients to address the ever changing landscape.
In the forefront of their service, the company has been focusing on empowering their customers digital transformation initiatives. With the growing need for tighter Cybersecurity measures and the increase of work from home arrangements, Honeywell is investing resources into its Honeywell Forge entreprise performance platform. The platform delivers actionable insights from real-time data that allow decisions to be made effectively.
Honeywell’s new offering is just the tip of the iceberg. The company’s rapid response to the changing needs driven by the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed them to create new products and offerings in a short period of time. The new innovations are focused on enabling companies in ASEAN maintain safety standards and compliance, create leaner operations, increase reliability of their critical assets while increasing productivity.
In addition to the Forge, Honeywell’s Remote Industrial Solutions has seen an uptick in adoption across ASEAN as businesses look to maintain business continuity. The remote solutions include Forge and Experion Remote operations. These programs allow the deployment of a remote workforce complete with cybersecurity solutions which ensure a secure connection between firewalls. It also allows IT departments to remotely deploy updates and patches to address any new or potential vulnerabilities.
The e-commerce industry is also being empowered by Honeywell in the ASEAN region. The region’s explosive growth in e-Commerce adoption has spurred the need for solutions that empower cold chain integrity for medical products. This also comes on top of solutions for Building Safety and Sanitization.
Hot off the finalisation of the sale of it’s Honor brand, rumours are surfacing that Huawei may be looking to do the same with their P and Mate smartphone line ups as well. News first surfaced when Reuters reported that it had obtained the information from sources close to the matter.
The report stated that Huawei was in talks with Shanghai government-backed investment firms to spin the brands off as independent companies like Honor. One of the sources claimed that the idea has been floated since late last year. Sources are claiming that Huawei hasn’t made a final decision just yet and the deal may not go thru as Huawei is still looking to manufacture its own HiSilicon Kirin chipsets.
Be that as it may, Huawei has issued a statement to Android Authority dismissing the “rumours”. That said, the company did the same when initial rumours of Honor’s sale surfaced. In its statement, Huawei states, “There is no merit to these rumours whatsoever. Huawei has no such plan. We remain fully committed to our smartphone business, and will continue to deliver world-leading products and experiences for consumers around the world.”.
The sale would effectively mean that Huawei would be withdrawing itself from the high-end smartphone market. On the other hand, Huawei has been touting its upcoming Harmony OS as an alternative to Google’s Android OS since the sanctions from the U.S. were enacted. However, things haven’t been easy for the company as sanctions have tightened leading to the company losing access to key partners such as ARM and TSMC.
The sale of Honor seems to have been a boon to the brand as the company has since inked deals to engage partners like AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, MediaTek and more. This enables them to produce their Honor MagicBooks and smartphones. However, unlike Honor, the sale of the P and Mate brands would only leave Huawei’s lower end Y and Nova series in their smartphone portfolio.
From shifting to work from home policies to customers’ increasing demand for better services and experience, organizations are finding that they need to transform faster to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We expect technology trends to only continue to evolve as reliance on technology becomes more critical in our current social and economic landscape. To ride out the wave rather than sink in it, forward-thinking organizations in Asia-Pacific (APAC) should rethink their digital transformation strategies based on these trends we expect to see in the coming year.
5G, IoT, Edge computing: The trio for intelligent connectivity
APAC will continue progressing on its 5G journey. While commercial 5G services are already available in nine markets in the region — including South Korea, Japan, and China — another 12 have officially announced similar plans. The increased availability of 5G will help drive the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing to deliver ultra-low latency, high bandwidth network, and effectively support large-scale distribution of endpoints. For example, 5G, IoT and edge computing can be applied to smart fleet management, wherein edge devices can monitor critical vehicle systems and access the 5G network to send alerts, track the flow of goods, plan routes, and facilitate communications between a vehicle and any IoT-enabled entity that may affect or be affected by the vehicle.
We foresee more APAC organizations and cities adopting 5G, IoT, and edge computing in 2021 to become more connected and efficient. Emerging use cases for the three technologies include analyzing sensor data for predictive maintenance and quality control, augmented reality systems for remote operations, and personalized ‘connected experiences’ for customer and supplier engagement.
Security is a growing priority for hybrid cloud
Customers and employees alike now expect business applications and services to be highly available, on-demand and secure. To achieve that, we recommend organizations to embrace hybrid cloud in order to run workloads across any environment (i.e., on-premises, private or public cloud) more easily and quickly. Red Hat’s 2021 Global Tech Outlook found that 77% of APAC organizations surveyed plan to use more than one cloud platform — be it private and public clouds — in the next 12 months, up from 53% in 2020. According to the survey results, the top three reasons for organizations to run their applications across hybrid cloud include improving data security, gaining IT agility, and addressing data privacy concerns.
Security will remain a focus area as organizations progress in their hybrid cloud journey — nearly half of the organizations we surveyed globally cited cloud security as their top funding priority next year. The challenge when it comes to security is that it is made up of different elements such as endpoint, network and data security. One way of overcoming this is by adopting an open security automation framework that unifies the different security practices using a set of automated workflows. By doing so, organizations can gain greater visibility across the entire security function, enabling them to identify threats or remediate cyber attacks faster.
Cloud-native will drive container adoption
Cloud-native applications can respond quickly to change, adapting and evolving with new features and functionalities released incrementally more quickly, reliably and frequently with less risk. As more organizations adopt hybrid cloud to increase the scalability and availability of apps, those that also embrace cloud-native development are in a better position to build and run responsive, scalable, and fault-tolerant apps on any cloud.
Containers are a key technology for unlocking the benefits of cloud-native development. Containers enable applications to be packaged and isolated with their entire runtime environment, making it easier to move them between environments while retaining full functionality. With containers, developers can more easily release and update apps as a collection of loosely coupled services, like microservices, instead of having to wait for one large release. Recognizing that containers can help accelerate innovation, 45% of APAC respondents from the 2021 Global Tech Outlook expect more than half of their workloads to be containerized in the next 12 months.
Automation is on the rise
Customers are demanding more at a faster pace, while IT architectures are ever-changing and built on increasingly complicated technology stacks. Organizations also need to support a work-from-home productivity model during the COVID-19 pandemic. To address these requirements, APAC organizations are increasingly turning to automation to reduce complexity, improve productivity, and lower operating cost. However, they must have an enterprise-wide automation strategy instead of deploying automation in silos in order to fully benefit from the technology.
More organizations are increasingly using automation in conjunction with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create an additional layer of automated insight to optimize business processes. Some APAC banks are already using robotic process automation (RPA) to approve credit card applications, automate payments, and validate claims. Because RPA can augment and mimic human judgment and behavior to replicate rules-based human action, it reduces the time taken for those tasks.
Open culture needs to complement technology modernization
According to a November 2019 study sponsored by Red Hat, 80% of APAC business leaders surveyed rank cultural change and technology modernization of equal importance for digital transformation. Cultural characteristics key for transformation include adaptability, inclusivity, transparency, and collaboration – all of which are open source principles. Organizations that have supported their cultural change initiatives with efforts to modernize their infrastructure and application architecture have been able to quickly develop and deliver new applications, respond rapidly to customer demands, and control maintenance costs.
With APAC businesses recognizing that digital transformation is driven by a change in mindset, we foresee more organizations embracing open principles, processes, and culture next year. By doing so, organizations can nurture collaboration and empower employees to bring their best ideas and selves to work, which can help accelerate innovation and address changing customer and business requirements in an agile manner.
All in all, global events in 2020 have caused organizations to focus on near-term survival goals to support business continuity. As the business landscape continues to evolve, APAC organizations must prepare for the future by adopting flexible, agile and scalable technology solutions. Considering trends such as 5G and edge computing, hybrid cloud and automation can help organizations as they develop or update their digital transformation plans in 2021.
Maxis is one of the only telecommunications companies in Malaysia already embracing the cloud. The company embarked on its journey to become a one-stop provider for connectivity and infrastructure for Malaysia back in 2019 with an early partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services) who is currently the most prolific web service platform in the world. Today, they are announcing that they have successfully achieved new accreditation as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner; making them the only telecommunications company in Malaysia to have done so. This solidifies their claim to being one of the most equipped converged solutions providers in the country.
The new accreditation certifies that Maxis is equipped to provide its customers and partners with the technical support and know-how to migrate and sustain their businesses in the cloud. To achieve this, Maxis has to demonstrate a sustained competency in their workforce equipped and certified by AWS for the many services that their platform provides. This includes taking advantage of the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence components available on AWS.
In addition to this, Maxis is now also offering AWS Direct Connect. AWS Direct Connect allows customers to access AWS directly via a dedicated network connection with one of the many AWS Connect locations using industry-standard 802.1q VLANs. This also allows customers to partition the connection into multiple virtual interfaces easing access to object instances in the AWS public and private clouds while maintaining network separation.
The new accreditation comes on the heels of Maxis having announced key acquisitions that have bolstered the company’s position as one of the most equipped telecommunications companies in Malaysia able to empower businesses in their digitization journey. The company has also been certified in the AWS Public Sector Partner program with over 300 Maxis employees being accredited and undergone comprehensive training by AWS.
