HTC Corp (宏達電), the world’s No. 5 smartphone brand, yesterday said it has appointed Shashi Fernando as chief content officer, saying this showed its commitment to boosting its presence in the mobile application space.
Fernando was previously CEO at Saffron Digital, a London-based company he founded in 2006 to provide mobile platform solutions to third-party developers.
HTC also recently bought a US$40 million stake in OnLive Inc, a US-based on-demand games company, by purchasing 5.3 million Onlive shares at US$7.50 each.
Fernando will report directly to CEO Peter Chou (周永明) and be based at HTC’s headquarters in Taoyuan.
Chou said in the statement: “Content will continue to be a crucial part of our overall proposition and future success.”
The appointment reflects HTC’s commitment to developing content as a pivotal component in the devices, the statement said, adding that Fernando’s main tasks will be to lead HTC’s global content strategy as well as the company’s business and regional deployment.
Fernando was included in Mobile Entertainment magazine’s annual list of Top 50 executives in both 2009 and last year.
Saffron Digital is currently listed as a Deloitte Fast 50 Technology company and is also on the Media Momentum Top 100 list of digital media companies.
David McDonald, Saffron Digital’s chief operating officer, will now become CEO at Saffron and work directly with HTC as a strategic partner.
Meanwhile, HTC said on Monday that it was selling the industry’s first smartphone running on the fourth-generation LTE network via the US carrier Verizon.
Running Froyo on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, the Thunderbolt has an 8 megapixel camera on the back, 1.3 megapixels up front and 32GB of storage.
Shares of HTC closed flat yesterday at NT$1,040 (US$35.2) on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained