INTERNET
Netflix hit by outage
Families across the US will have to rely on other sources of entertainment after Netflix’s video streaming service was hit by a Christmas Eve outage. The company based in Los Gatos, California, apologized in a company tweet for the outage on Monday night. The company says on its Twitter page that the outage was caused by “some of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.” Netflix says it was working with Amazon engineers to restore the outage, which a company spokesman told the Wall Street Journal stretched “across the Americas.” Attempts to reach Netflix by The Associated Press were unsuccessful.
SHIPBUILDING
Daewoo wins Norway order
South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering yesterday said it had secured a 1.9 trillion won (US$1.8 billion) order to build a fixed platform for Norway’s Statoil ASA. Daewoo said it would complete the 31,000-tonne offshore platform for the production of oil or gas by the end of 2016. The platform capable of producing 80,000 barrels of crude a day would be installed on the continental shelf in the British sector of the North Sea, it said. The shipbuilder said it had won a total of US$12.7 billion in orders so far this year, including the platform.
ENERGY
Mozambique picks CC JV
A joint venture consisting of US company CB&I and Japan’s Chiyoda Corp has been picked to participate in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Mozambique, CB&I said on Monday. “CC JV, a joint venture comprising of CB&I and Chiyoda Corp, has been awarded a contract for the Front End Engineering and Design for the onshore natural gas liquefaction facility project in an LNG park in the Cabo Delgado Province of ... the Republic of Mozambique,” it said in a statement. Texas-based Anadarko said on Friday it had reached an agreement with Italy’s ENI to jointly plan and construct the LNG plant, which the CB&I release said was the first of its kind in Mozambique. The first LNG cargo is planned for 2018.
SOFTWARE
Microsoft’s Mundie retiring
Microsoft announced on Monday that company veteran Craig Mundie has stepped down from his post as chief of research and will retire in 2014. Mundie, who was one of two executives who assumed responsibilities left behind by Bill Gates when the Microsoft co-founder retired in 2008, will now serve as an adviser to chief executive Steve Ballmer. “In this role, he works on key strategic projects within the company, as well as with government and business leaders around the world on technology policy, regulation and standards,” Microsoft said on its Web site.
UNITED STATES
El-Erian to advise president
US President Barack Obama will appoint Pacific Investment Management Co (Pimco) CEO Mohamed El-Erian to head the US global development council. El-Erian, who shares the title of co-chief investment officer of Newport Beach, California-based Pimco with Bill Gross, will be chairman of Obama’s global development council, which was created earlier this year to advise the president on ways to promote economic development and good governance in countries all over the world, according to a statement from the White House on Friday. El-Erian, 54, will head the council as a member of the private sector and his role at Pimco won’t change.
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