Khazanah’s funding from US$1.3bil Dana Impak to spur competitiveness
Aims to serve 2.5mil gig workers & 300k SMEs within the next five years
Southeast Asian focused insurance tech startup, PolicyStreet Sdn Bhd, headquartered in Malaysia, has closed a US$15.3 million (RM67 million) Series B fundraising with Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional Bhd…Continue Reading
Apple recently unveiled its Vision Pro headset at the Worldwide Developers Conference in California. With it, Apple is venturing into a market of head-mounted devices (HMDs) – which are usually just displays, but in this case is more of a complete computer attached to your head – as well as the worlds of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR).
The new Apple product will fuel the hopes of many working on these technologies that they will some day be routinely used by the public, just as the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch helped bring smartphones, tablets and wearable tech into mainstream use.
But what does the Vision Pro actually do, and how much mass appeal will it have?
VR immerses users in an entirely computer-generated world, isolating them to a large degree from their physical surroundings. AR superimposes computer-generated elements onto the real world while the latter remains visible, with the purpose of enhancing the context of our physical surroundings.
A term often used interchangeably with AR is mixed reality, referring to a set of immersive technologies including AR, that provide different “blends” of physical and virtual worlds. These three technologies are often collectively referred to as XR.
The blending of VR and AR seems to be a key part of Apple’s thinking, with the Vision Pro allowing users to adjust their level of immersion by deciding how much of the real world they can see. This transitioning between the two experiences will probably be a trend for future HMDs.
The physical world is “seen” through an array of 12 cameras located behind a ski-goggle-like glass fascia, acting as a lens. When the Vision Pro is in VR mode, people approaching you in the real world are automatically detected and displayed as they get close.
A feature called EyeSight also displays the wearer’s eyes through the glass lens when needed, to enable more natural interaction with people around them – a challenge for many HMDs.
In terms of technical specifications, the Vision Pro is impressive. It uses a combination of the M2 microchip and a new chip called the R1. M2 is running visionOS, which Apple calls its first spatial operating system, along with computer vision algorithms and computer graphics generation.
R1 processes information from the cameras, an array of microphones and a LiDAR scanner – which uses a laser to measure distances to different objects – in order to make the headset aware of its surroundings.
More importantly, the Vision Pro boasts an impressive display system with “more pixels than a 4K TV to each eye.” Its ability to track where the wearer’s eyes are looking allows users to interact with graphical elements just by looking at them.
The headset can receive gesture and voice commands and features a form of 360-degree sound called spatial audio. The quoted unplugged operating time is two hours.
Packed, in typical Apple fashion, in curved aluminum and glass, the headset has an eye-watering price of US$3,499 and represents a collection of many premium features. But Apple has a history of developing products with increasingly versatile capabilities to sense what’s going on in their real-world surroundings.
Apple also focuses on making its devices interoperable – meaning they work easily with other Apple devices – forming a wearable “ecosystem.” This is what really promises to be disruptive about the Vision Pro. It is also akin to what had been promised and hoped for by pioneers in the idea of wearable computing back in the 1990s.
Combining the headset with the iPhone, which still forms the backbone of Apple’s ecosystem, and the Apple Watch could help create new uses for augmented reality. Likewise, linking the headset to many programming tools demonstrates the company’s desire to tap into an existing community of developers of augmented reality applications.
Many questions remain, however. For example, will it be able to access mixed reality applications via a web browser? What will it be like to use from an ergonomic point of view?
It’s also unclear when the Vision Pro be available outside the US or whether there will be a non-Pro version – as the “Pro” part of the title implies a more “expert”, or developer market.
The Vision Pro is a gamble, as XR is often seen as something that promises but rarely delivers. Yet, companies such as Apple and those that are probably its primary competitors in the XR domain, Meta and Microsoft, have the clout to make XR popular for the general public.
More importantly, devices such as the Vision Pro and its ecosystem, as well as its competitors could provide the foundation for developing the metaverse. This is an immersive world, facilitated by headsets, that aims for social interaction that’s more natural than with previous products.
Sceptics will say that Vision Pro and EyeSight make you appear like a scuba diver in your living room. But this could finally be the time to dive into the deep waters of XR.
Panagiotis Ritsos, Senior Lecturer in Visualisation, Bangor University and Peter Butcher, Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction, Bangor University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Ideal solutions that are more accessible, affordable, convenient
Boost’s cross-border payment ecosystem brings together the underserved
Access to financial services is a fundamental component of economic growth and social development. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the global population, particularly in emerging markets, remain underserved or excluded from formal financial services. This could…Continue Reading
International investors are likely to increase their exposure to Japanese equities or, indeed, consider including them in their portfolios for the first time this year and beyond.
The reason is that the world’s third-largest economy is experiencing inflation that reached a four-decade high in February and continues to run hot.
Sharp price gains are rarely desirable, but Japan is an exception after bouts of deflation since the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Japan has been grappling with a persistent problem of low inflation and deflation for several decades for four main reasons.
First, it has an aging population and a declining birth rate, which has led to a shrinking workforce and reduced consumer spending. With fewer people entering the workforce and spending less, there is lower demand for goods and services, resulting in stagnant prices.
Second, Japan has experienced prolonged periods of economic stagnation, characterized by sluggish growth and weak consumer and business spending. This has limited the potential for inflationary pressures to build up.
Third, the country has one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios among developed countries. To manage this debt burden, the government has implemented accommodative monetary policies, including low interest rates and quantitative easing. While these policies aimed to stimulate economic growth, they have not translated into significant inflationary pressures.
And fourth, Japan has faced structural challenges in its economy, such as excess capacity in certain industries, weak productivity growth, and limited wage increases. These factors have contributed to a lack of upward pressure on prices.
However, in more recent times, as the economic recovery continued amid supportive monetary and fiscal policies and a surge in tourism, inflation has surged.
For this reason, cash is no longer king as the rising prices are eroding Japanese investors’ purchasing power.
As such, they’re increasingly looking for alternatives, and we expect Japanese equities are going to be the go-to as a way to preserve or even increase the real value of their investments.
Equities are often seen as a potential hedge against inflation. When prices rise, the value of a company’s revenue and earnings may increase, leading to higher stock prices.
Should Japanese investors pile into the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges, equity values will naturally increase, and this will pique the interest of international investors looking to further diversify their portfolios to seize opportunities and mitigate risk.
Japan experienced a prolonged period of economic stagnation in the 1990s and 2000s, often referred to as the Lost Decades. This era was characterized by low economic growth, deflation, and a weak stock market. The negative perception of Japan’s economy during this time seriously deterred international investors from considering Japanese equities.
In addition, historically, Japan’s corporate governance practices and transparency standards were considered relatively weak compared with other developed economies. This lack of transparency and shareholder-friendly practices made some would-be overseas investors cautious about investing in Japanese companies.
Plus, of course, equities in Japan have not consistently outperformed other global equity markets in recent years.
But as values are likely to rise as investors shed cash and fixed-income investments because of rising inflation, this trend for overlooking Japanese stocks will be reversed.
Nigel Green is founder and CEO of deVere Group. Follow him on Twitter @nigeljgreen.
The launch of a new RISC-V software association makes open-standard integrated circuit design and open-source software even more of a challenge for the US government’s efforts to stop the development of Chinese high-tech and bend Europe to its geopolitical will.
On May 31, Linux Foundation Europe announced the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE), which it described as,
a new collaborative effort that brings together global industry leaders committed to accelerating the availability of software for high-performance and power-efficient RISC-V cores [processing units] running high-level operating systems for a variety of market segments.
Those market segments include cloud computing, data centers, automobiles, mobile phones and other consumer electronics. Hosted by Linux Foundation Europe, RISE supports the global open standard activities of RISC-V International.
Gabriele Columbro, General Manager of Linux Foundation Europe, notes that,
The RISE Project is dedicated to enabling RISC-V in open-source tools and libraries (LLVM and GCC, etc) to speed implementation and time to market. RISC-V is a cornerstone of the European technology and industrial landscape so we’re honored to provide a neutral, trusted home for the RISE Project under Linux Foundation Europe.
Thirteen companies from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China form the RISE Governing Board: NVIDIA, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Intel, Samsung, Google, Andes, Red Hat, Imagination Technologies, Rivos, SiFive, Ventana and T-Head.
It’s significant that T-Head is included. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alibaba, a fabless semiconductor design company that develops application-specific ICs for artificial intelligence, cloud computing, industrial, financial, consumer electronics and other applications. In effect, it is the Alibaba group’s semiconductor division.
According to T-Head Vice President Jianyi Meng,
T-Head has been contributing to the software ecosystem through initiatives such as putting various operating systems onto RISC-V and contributing an integrated development environment to the RISC-V community. Together with other global business leaders for the RISE Project and our partners across sectors, we can further drive the growth of the open-source software ecosystem.
Speaking at a conference in Shanghai at the beginning of March, Meng said,
The development of RISC-V requires global innovation collaboration, from chips to software, applications and terminals. T-Head is pulling together the major ecosystems so that global developers and partners can better use and develop RISC-V technologies.
At that time, T-Head and Alipay also announced plans to enable secure payments on wearable devices using embedded RISC-V processors.
The rise of RISC-V, particularly in China, is likely to be negative for Arm and its Japanese owner Softbank, which plans to take Arm public later this year. Proprietary instruction-set architectures from Arm are seen as high-risk by the Chinese due to potential US influence on their owner.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture based on reduced instruction set computer design principles. It was conceived at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010.
The RISC-V Foundation was established in Delaware in 2015 to support and manage open-source technology, with the Institute of Computing Technologies of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as one of the founders.
Other founding members include Google, Qualcomm, Western Digital, Hitachi and Samsung. Other Chinese members include Huawei, ZTE, Tencent and Alibaba Cloud. Altogether, the association has more than 300 corporate, academic and other institutional members around the world
In 2020, the Foundation was incorporated in Switzerland as the RISC-V International Association, moving out of the United States to avoid potential disruption caused by then-president Donald Trump’s anti-China trade policy. For more information about this, see Open-source IC architecture taking off in China.
The GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) mentioned by Gabriele Columbro is part of the GNU Project, a collaborative effort for the development of free software founded in 1978 by Richard Stallman at MIT.
Linux, the open software kernel created by the Swedish-Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s, is normally used with the GNU operating system.
GCC consists of free software programs from the GNU Project and other parties, created in an open environment in order to “attract a larger team of developers, to ensure that GCC and the GNU system work on multiple architectures and diverse environments.” GCC is one of the world’s largest free software programs.
GNU defines itself as “an operating system that is free software – that is, it respects users’ freedom.” Its “four essential freedoms” are,
Freedom to distribute “means you are free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere.”
The explanation goes on to note that:
Sometimes government export control regulations and trade sanctions can constrain your freedom to distribute copies of programs internationally. Software developers do not have the power to eliminate or override these restrictions, but what they can and must do is refuse to impose them as conditions of use of the program. In this way, the restrictions will not affect activities and people outside the jurisdictions of these governments. Thus, free software licenses must not require obedience to any nontrivial export regulations as a condition of exercising any of the essential freedoms.
According to the Linux Foundation, open-source technologies that are published and made publicly available are not subject to the Export Administration Regulations of the Bureau of Industry and Security of the US Department of Commerce.
China has involved itself in RISC-V from the beginning and that – particularly in view of the Biden administration’s liberal and expanding use of sanctions – has turned out to be a very good idea.
Follow this writer on Twitter: @ScottFo83517667
WASHINGTON: Thailand is in a “delicate phase” after the May 14 election and the goal of the United States is to support an “effective, stable, democratic government” there, a top US official for the Indo-Pacific region said on Tuesday.
“We’ve watched carefully the election,” White House Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell told the Hudson Institute think tank. “This is a delicate phase in terms of the formation of a government.”
The opposition Move Forward and Pheu Thai parties dominated in last month’s election in Thailand, dealing a resounding defeat of conservative parties backed by a military that has controlled government since Thailand’s last coup on May 22, 2014, which ousted the Pheu Thai-led administration.
They have been seeking to form a coalition government with six other parties. However, Move Forward leader and prime ministerial front-runner Pita Limjaroenrat faces an uphill battle to woo members of an unelected, conservative-leaning Senate to back him in a legislative vote on a prime minister expected by August.
On Tuesday, Mr Pita played down an effort to disqualify him over a stock ownership issue, insisting he violated no rules and that rivals were determined to keep him from the top job.
The US is seeking to boost ties with allies and partners throughout Asia at it pushes back against China’s expanding power, and Campbell said Washington wanted to sustain a strong bilateral relationship with Thailand, its oldest treaty ally in the region.
“Many companies are invested there; we have strong military programs and engagements with the Thai armed forces,” the US official said.
“I think it is undeniable that the politics of Thailand have been unstable and complicated,” he said, adding: “I think our goal would be to support an effective, stable, democratic government in Thailand and then work consequentially with it.”
In a LinkedIn December 2022 survey, 91 per cent of the respondents based in the US said that including salary ranges in a job post would impact their decision in applying for a role.
This finding was consistent across industries and seniority levels. Salary clarity allows applicants to tailor their search and form a good idea of their growth potential, while recruiters can focus on the most viable candidates.
Despite this, many companies are not adding pay ranges to job ads, stemming from fear that it may lead to discontent in their current workforce. It may also be due to a lack of confidence in their pay structures or in the maintenance of pay equity within the company.
There is no one answer to how pay transparency will affect the future of hiring, as the impact will vary depending on organisation and industry.
Pay transparency can be an effective tool in addressing challenges in talent attraction and retention, but it is not a comprehensive solution on its own. It is also important to remember that employees may decide to leave a company for non-quantifiable reasons, such as better career development and progression opportunities.
With increased competition for talent, business leaders must work together with HR to adopt and implement progressive policies to keep top talent with the organisation.
Aslam Sardar is Chief Executive Officer, Institute for Human Resource Professionals (IHRP). Dr Fermin Diez is an IHRP Master Professional and until recently the Deputy CEO and Group Director of Sector Capability and Transformation at the National Council of Social Service (NCSS). Carmen Wee is an IHRP Master Professional and Founder and CEO, Carmen Wee & Associates.
Silence may also be interpreted as encouragement. When a superior knows what his subordinates are up to and can stop them but does not do so, this may be taken as approval to carry on. It has happened in hierarchical organisations like the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) and the SingaporeContinue Reading
During her keynote address, Ms Fu said that Singapore is committed to meeting its national climate target to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
Citing a report that mentioned finance, technology and international cooperation as three critical enablers for accelerated climate action, Ms Fu elaborated on how Singapore could contribute in these aspects.
Singapore must accelerate the development of decarbonisation technologies to make them commercially viable in order to harness their potential for decarbonisation at scale, Ms Fu said.
She raised the example of low-carbon hydrogen as a potential alternative to fossil fuels in the maritime and aviation sectors. Hydrogen can potentially supply up to half of Singapore’s power needs by 2050, she said.
“More importantly, it has the potential to unlock global energy trade, through its carrier forms that can be stored and transported over long distances. This will connect regions with abundant low-cost renewable energy with those that have limited renewable energy potential.
“However, the technology and supply chains are still nascent, and large-scale deployment has not yet been demonstrated.”
Another problem was the shortfall in funds to finance net zero goals. The solution to address this, Ms Fu said, is the scaling of blended finance, which is public, multilateral, or philanthropic funding “coming in as catalytic capital, to improve the bankability of green projects and encourage private investments”.
The development of credible carbon markets is another breakthrough in finance, as carbon credits are key instruments that “channel financing to mitigation projects which would otherwise not be bankable nor implementable”, said Ms Fu.
“(Singapore) will allow companies to use high-quality international carbon credits to offset up to five per cent of their taxable emissions from next year onwards. This could spur local demand in carbon markets, hence supporting the growth of a vibrant international carbon market and channel financing to mitigation projects internationally,” she added.
Assessments of Southeast Asia’s economic outlook published by the Asian Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 2023 find reasons for optimism. “Developing” Asia, they conclude, will lead the world in economic growth over the next two years.
Southeast Asian economies weathered the pandemic relatively well, notwithstanding hardship due to lockdowns. The geopolitical challenges brought by increasingly antagonistic competition between the United States and China are a looming threat to the region’s prosperity, but so too are the perverse growth effects of protectionist policies.
Southeast Asia has benefited from limited decoupling between the Chinese and US economies, as manufacturers move some production processes out of China to avoid tariffs and blacklists. Although some relocations have taken the form of “re-shoring”, more investment has moved to other Southeast Asian countries.
Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia registered relatively strong inflows of FDI in the last two years. Competition among external powers has also provided Southeast Asian elites with bargaining leverage in infrastructure projects and access to finance.
But beneath these recent developments, there is a deeper structure that will shape the Southeast Asian experience of increased geopolitical tension.
First, there is the basic openness of economic development in Southeast Asia. The region’s growth and industrialization depends on external markets and foreign investment. High growth has mostly occurred when “internationalist” coalitions advanced their core interests and create access to international markets and investment.
Southeast Asian countries also showcase a tremendous variety of domestic institutions — the structures and embedded rules that guide action and make it more or less possible to carry out different development tasks.
Specifically, state and private sector institutions shape the ability of individuals and companies to overcome problems of coordination, commitment and collective action. Countries that fail to overcome such problems typically fail to provide sustainable economic development.
Given Southeast Asia’s institutional variety, we can expect continued unevenness in how countries in the region will respond to current geopolitical challenges and opportunities.
Some are better equipped than others to benefit from supply chain restructuring and investment shifts motivated by the desire to secure supplies or protect against geopolitical risk.
Mineral endowments coupled with nationalist policies have motivated recent investments in Indonesia, while Thailand’s established capabilities in the automotive sector make it an appealing investment site for Chinese and other investors seeking to diversify.
Southeast Asian responses to geopolitical change will also be mediated by political pressures within each country. In addition to the persistent risk of institutional corrosion due to rent-seeking elites, governments face the challenge of integrating broader political movements.
Challenges “from below” include calls for greater redistribution of wealth, for the abandonment of export-driven political economies in favor of greater domestic consumption and for more attention to poverty alleviation. The environmental limits to extractive growth strategies — along with the effects of climate change — also create challenges.
Elite responses to these challenges vary enormously, from attempts at greater inclusivity to the mobilization of vertical allegiances that seek to displace material grievances through the politicization of race, religion or royalty.
Finally, it matters that the region is grappling with more than a transitory escalation in competition between great powers. Southeast Asia faces the challenge of weathering the power transition in East Asia.
For the past 30 years, the region has prospered through increased integration into a Chinese-centric regional economy, while the United States’ security role limited concerns over asymmetric interdependence.
But this strategy is not sustainable. The gravitational force of the Chinese economy – along with the political appeal of the Chinese development model – remains significant.
In contrast, the US security role is under pressure. Even prior to the rise in US-China tension from 2017, domestic political and economic constraints within the United States have made it less willing and able to prolong the status quo. Increases in Chinese military and technological capacity add to this structural shift.
A general conclusion is that the region’s development strategies and growth trajectories are subject to both internal and external pressures.
Currently, a degree of “friend-shoring” in supply chains and increased US-China competition have benefited some parts of Southeast Asia. But the positive spillovers stemming from geopolitical tension create increased points of potential entanglement and vulnerability.
While some firms may be forced to choose which side of any “economic iron curtain” they will stand on, others have invested in dual supply chains to serve decoupled technology spheres. In doing so, they take a bet on the continued willingness of both the United States and China to tolerate this duality.
Southeast Asian countries – enmeshed in cross-border investment and trade relationships that cut across geopolitical rifts – have effectively made the same bet.
Samsung’s extensive investments in Vietnam, for example, are reinforced by a coalition of supporting interests that depend on Samsung’s status within the United States’ sphere of non-suspect entities. At the same time, the Vietnamese economy relies substantially on supply chain linkages to China.
This structure of connection will expose countries in the region if the security concerns of external powers escalate further. Beyond strictly business ties, potential reprisals, blacklists and sanctions could also threaten cross-border collaborations involving firms, research institutes, universities and government agencies.
These connections mean that there is ample and increasing scope for US-China conflict to play out in Southeast Asian local economies.
Natasha Hamilton-Hart is Professor in the Department of Management and International Business at the University of Auckland and Director of the New Zealand Asia Institute.
This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.