Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) showed interest in partnering with Sony Corp on movie franchises, including Ghostbusters, when billionaire Jack Ma (馬雲) met with Hollywood executives in October, e-mails revealed by hackers show.
Asia’s largest Internet company also considered investing in Pixels, a 3-D computer-animated comedy starring Adam Sandler, and intends to produce about 10 movies a year, according to messages to Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc chief executive officer Michael Lynton.
Sony was the only studio where Ma met executives in person during Alibaba’s whirlwind tour of Hollywood, with actor Jet Li (李連杰) and others in his team of advisers talking to production houses to learn about co-investment in movies, the e-mails show.
“Ali believes that they can enhance performance through marketing, crowd-funding, products on Taobao and the Ali ticketing platform,” Dede Nickerson, a Sony film executive in China, said in an Oct. 28 e-mail to executives, including Lynton.
Alibaba prefers to invest in specific films rather than in studios, a person familiar with the matter said last month.
The Hangzhou-based company wants to become a more significant distributor of content by using customer shopping and viewing data to forecast what productions will become hits, the person said.
“Securing licensing agreements to distribute content across the Alibaba ecosystem remains an important part of our long-term business strategy,” Alibaba spokesman Bob Christie said in an e-mailed statement, declining to comment further.
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],”
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
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