TechTouch Asia

by Andy Watson, SAP Concur’s SVP & GM for Asia Pacific Japan and Greater China Source: SAP Concur. View from a plane window. Owners of untidy homes and weary business travellers may not realise that they have much in common until Japanese decluttering expert Marie Kondo came along. She made the connection clear. Just like it’s possible − with the right method − to transform your chaotic home into a neat abode that sparks joy, it’s possible to turn business travel from pain to pleasure with some technological ingenuity. Traditionally, business travellers need to: - Manually conduct multiple searches for desired flights and hotels. - Bookings are done separately, with the need to repeatedly key in personal and booking information. - Consolidate multiple bookings in one place, often in a paper-based fashion with no capability for changes or real-time prompts and updates. - Go through a tedious submission process for internal approval of the trip. - Safekeep pa...

VIP guests are invited to place their hands on the logos to trigger the launch mechanism for ConnecTechAsia . ConnecTechAsia , comprising BroadcastAsia, CommunicAsia and NXTAsia has opened in Singapore. Held from 18-20 June 2019, the event showcases technologies and trends that are shaping Asia’s digital future. Harriet Green, CEO and Chairman, IBM Asia Pacific, kicked off the event with a keynote on the shift from digital experimentation to large scale adoption of new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT). She spoke about how technology impacts the reinvention of business ecosystems and is reshaping business architectures of entire industries. Green said companies already benefiting from emerging technologies include: - Standard Chartered, which pioneered an AI engine with IBM to enhance trade document processing, a traditionally-manual activity. The bank handles over 36 million pages of trade documents ...

Source: Sony. The new SRG-X400 and SRG-X120 cameras. Sony has introduced two new cameras to its IP-based pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera family. The SRG-X400 and SRG-X120 join the BRC-X400, announced in April. The new models offer a 4K upgrade option – a first for Sony’s PTZ cameras to ensure today’s HD usage and protect the investment for tomorrow. The SRG-X400 and SRG-X120 are designed for a variety of corporate, education, healthcare, houses of worship and government applications. On the other hand, 4K resolution comes standard on the BRC-X400, which is ideally suited for broadcast studio and reality TV production as well as live event capture. These cameras incorporate Sony’s newly-developed 4K Exmor RTM CMOS image sensor that ensures superb image quality. The sensor achieves natural colour reproduction with minimal noise. A built-in, high-resolution 4K lens accommodates wide-angle shots up to 70 degrees, and for added flexibility, the cameras can be ceiling-mounted. They boa...

Source: Microsoft. Dr Giri. A professor and her students are using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict how airborne diseases can propagate based on climate conditions, air quality, and population density. “If we can employ AI algorithms to predict the spread of disease and understand how environmental changes, including climatic conditions and external factors like pollution impact the ecology and epidemiology of disease, we can initiate precision public health at a granular level,” explains Dr Nupur Giri, Professor, and Head of Department of Computer Engineering at Vivekanand Education Society’s Institute of Technology (VESIT), Mumbai, India. In 2018, the team began with looking for correlations to predict how tuberculosis (TB) would spread. The disease affected an estimated 2.74 million people in India in 2017. India is one of the countries with the most multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) patients in the world. To study the impact of environmental conditions, such as clim...

Dropbox , the global collaboration platform, has unveiled a new integrated workspace. With updates to the Dropbox desktop experience, dropbox.com , and the mobile app, users get a single workspace designed to bring files, fragmented work tools, and teams together. The update includes early access to a new desktop app designed to provide a convenient new access point to the workspace. "Work has become scattered—files are spread across devices, in the cloud, and on our hard drives. We're working across multiple apps that don't talk to each other, and teams are struggling to keep up,” said Drew Houston, CEO, Dropbox. "We're focused on removing the friction from that experience, pulling everything together in a way that nobody has done before. The new Dropbox helps you quiet the noise and find focus at work.” The new Dropbox brings web-based files into the Dropbox file system to provide one central location for all content, including: Cloud-based content like...

Lazada, a top e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, has been able to progress towards its goal of serving 300 million customers by 2030 through introducing innovations that are driven by Alibaba Cloud infrastructure. Lazada has been operating on Alibaba's infrastructure and Alibaba Cloud middleware since 2017, shared Raymond Yang, Chief Product Officer of the Lazada Group, at the recent Alibaba Cloud APAC Summit in Singapore. Some of the new features on the Lazada platform have included live streaming, launched in Thailand in 2018, as well as personalised recommendations. "We don't want users to just come and purchase. We want them to spend time with us, enjoy the moment, really try to experience and explore and watch our new user/customer engagement experiences," Yang explained. Today, key opinion leaders (KOLs) and sellers host 3,000 live streams in Thailand alone, while Alibaba Cloud's ApsaraVideo Live live streaming platform and content delivery netw...

Huawei continues to focus on providing users with a smooth experience with upgrades of its smartphone operating system despite US companies being banned from working with it later this year. The company is making its EMUI 9 release available for older smartphone models such as the HUAWEI Mate9 and P10, which were released near end-2016. EMUI 9 marks the second major version upgrade for the older models. The upgrade will bring consistent user interface (UI) design, a natural and immersive user experience (UX) design including one-handed operation capabilities, full-screen gesture navigation, and a smoother experience overall. The EMUI 9 upgrade benefits over 80 million users globally. According to data collected on June 3, 2019, the number of users who have upgraded from EMUI 8.X to EMUI 9 has exceeded 80 million globally and continues to grow. It is estimated that this figure will reach 100 million by the end of June. Details: EMUI 9 is available for the Mate10 series, which launc...