TECHNOLOGY
Apple gears up for iPad 3
Apple plans to begin trial production of a next generation iPad in October with an eye to a launch early next year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The newspaper, citing “people familiar with the situation,” said Apple is working with component suppliers and its assembler in Asia on the iPad 3 and has ordered key components such as display panels and chips. It said the next generation iPad is expected to feature a high resolution 2048-by-1536 pixel display, compared with the 1024-by-768 display on the iPad 2. The Journal quoted one unidentified component supplier as saying that the company had placed parts orders for about 1.5 million iPad 3s in the fourth quarter. Apple sold 9.25 million iPads last quarter.
INDIA
Target of 9% growth agreed
The nation aims to accelerate the pace of economic growth to 9 percent in the five years beginning in April next year to help cut poverty, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said. The government had asked the Planning Commission to consider a goal of 9.5 percent, Singh said in New Delhi in an address to Cabinet colleagues and members of the government agency that sets five-year investment targets. The Reserve Bank of India is concerned that growth in excess of 8 percent could fan inflation, underscoring the dilemma policymakers face in raising living standards in Asia’s third-biggest economy, where the World Bank estimates 76 percent of its 1.2 billion people live on less than US$2 a day.
CANADA
No more stimulus spending
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Friday that the government would stick to its plan to reduce the deficit by 2015 and not spend more money to stimulate the economy, but signaled that could change if the global economy deteriorated dramatically. Flaherty told an emergency meeting of parliament’s finance committee that more government spending is precisely the wrong thing to do. He pointed to Europe where he said too much government spending is the problem. Flaherty also said most economists do not believe there will be another global recession, but said there are certainly risks. Central bank governor Mark Carney said the US and Europe were expected to grow more slowly than thought earlier this year, but said he did not expect the US to slip back into recession.
HACKING
Epson Korea breached
Epson Korea Co said yesterday that hackers breached the personal data of its 350,000 registered customers last week, the latest in a series of cyber attacks involving a huge number of victims in the country. An official at the South Korean affiliate of Seiko Epson Corp said the company had reported the case to the communications regulator. It said personal information, including telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, names and coded data from customers registered on its Web site had been compromised. South Korea has recently drawn up an intensive cyber security master plan after a wave of hacking attacks against government agencies, companies and financial firms exposed the vulnerabilities of networks in the world’s most wired country. Late last month, hackers attacked the Nate Internet portal and the Cyworld blogging site, both run by SK Comms, accessing the personal information of up to 35 million users in the country’s biggest cyber attack so far.
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
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts