GAMING
Electronic Arts names CEO
Video game giant Electronic Arts on Tuesday named Andrew Wilson as its new chief executive. Wilson, who had been heading the company’s sports unit and online portal for digital games, joined the California group in 2000 and worked in Asia and as head of the FIFA game titles. Executive chairman Larry Probst said the company had conducted a “rigorous search,” both inside and outside the company. Electronic Arts is known for its Sims titles, and the Battlefield and Need for Speed series.
ENERGY
Alaska wants LNG plant
Alaska wants ConocoPhillips to reopen its mothballed Kenai Peninsula liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant to provide an incentive for petroleum companies to explore and invest in Cook Inlet. In a Sept. 5 letter to ConocoPhillips president Trond-Erik Johansen, acting Natural Resources commissioner Joe Balash requested that the company apply for a three-year federal LNG export license for the plant at Nikiski, about 110km southwest of Anchorage. ConocoPhillips in March announced it would not extend its natural gas export license beyond March 31, but said it would consider a new license if the needs of local gas markets were met and sufficient natural gas was on hand to export.
PHARMACEUTICALS
Epanova decision in May
US regulators have accepted an experimental fish oil-based heart drug from AstraZeneca for review and will make a decision on whether to approve it by May next year. Epanova, for treating people with very high levels of fatty triglycerides in their blood, was developed by Omthera Pharmaceuticals, which AstraZeneca acquired earlier this year. AstraZeneca yesterday said that the US Food and Drug Administration had set a date of May 5 to act on the Epanova submission. Cardiovascular medicine is a key area for AstraZeneca, whose top-selling drug is the cholesterol fighter Crestor. The UK-based group is working on a fixed-dose combination of Crestor and Epanova that, if successful, would extend the Crestor franchise beyond 2016, when the drug’s US patent ends.
FINANCE
Trader says he is scapegoat
A former JPMorgan Chase trader said on Tuesday that the government was making him a scapegoat for the “London whale” trades while letting off his boss. Lawyers for Julien Grout, who was indicted by a grand jury on Monday for fraud and false securities filings in the case, said that he acted under orders from his managers in masking the massive derivatives losses that rocked the bank last year. Grout, who worked under senior trader Bruno Iksil in JPMorgan’s London office, “has been unjustly used as a pawn in the government’s attempt to settle its highly politicized case against JPMorgan Chase,” said Edward Little, an attorney for Grout.
INTERNET
3D search-printer developed
Yahoo Japan Corp has developed a voice-activated Internet search that links to a 3D printer, letting users look online for blueprints to deliver solid objects in a few minutes, the company said. The search engine scours the Internet for information that it can use to print palm-sized renderings of items as diverse as hippopotamuses or fighter jets. The devices use slices of information about a 3D object and gradually deposits fine layers of material — such as plastic, carbon or metal — to build a copy. Yahoo Japan has no firm plans on commercializing the technology.
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],”
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
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