IBM Corp is investing US$3 billion to build an Internet of Things division aimed at harnessing the massive trove of data collected by smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances, and using it to help companies better manage their businesses.
IBM estimates that 90 percent of all data generated by mobile and smart devices is never analyzed. The Armonk, New York, company hopes to change this by teaming up with companies such as Twitter and the Weather Co, the owner of the Weather Channel, to develop cloud-based data services and tools for app developers.
IBM is training more than 2,000 consultants, researchers and developers to help businesses come up with new ways to use the vast amounts of data that are now available, said Glenn Finch, big data and analytics lead at IBM Global Business Services.
This could mean combining Twitter data with economic and weather data to predict what someone might be interested in buying.
The new business unit is part of IBM’s shift away from hardware to focus on analytics, cloud computing, mobile services and security.
IBM plans to launch an online service that helps insurance companies extract insight from connected vehicles, to create new pricing and services customized to individual drivers.
Meanwhile, Weather Co plans to shift and integrate its massive weather data operation into IBM Cloud, so that insurance providers can send policyholders text messages alerting them to impending hailstorms so vehicles could be moved before being damaged, for instance.
It could also help determine exactly how many people were hit by a natural disaster so insurers could respond to claims faster.
“Most people, most businesses, most governments wait for weather to happen to them and react to it, rather than anticipate what it will do to them,” Weather Co WSI division president Mark Gildersleeve said. “[The partnership] aims to help governments and businesses essentially serve their end users better by making decisions earlier.”
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
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