Hon Hai Group (鴻海集團) is poised to become a stakeholder in China’s first big data exchange operation, which is expected to be launched soon, Chinese media reports said.
Hon Hai is expected to hold a 21.5 percent stake in the Global Big Data Exchange (GBDEx), which will be established in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, with registered capital of 50 million yuan (US$8.05 million)
The exchange is to provide data cleaning, modeling, platform development and other services.
Trading of big data services on the exchange will be conducted electronically, matching clients’ requests with offers.
Other shareholders include a range of Chinese providers of big data and mobile financial services, the Guiyang City Government and technology firms, the reports said.
They also said that Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) is likely to attend Guiyang’s Big Data Expo late next month, an event that is expected to attract global giants such as Google Inc, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), Hewlett-Packard Co, Dell Inc and Intel Corp.
The Guiyang City Government has been ramping up its efforts to develop the city as a base for China’s big data industries, signing 138 development deals totaling 132.61 billion yuan last year, the reports said. An additional 61 investment deals valued at 50.64 billion yuan are set to be finalized before 2017, they said.
Hon Hai investments in Guiyang include joint construction of technology and science parks for cloud computing and semiconductor production, and research centers for nanotechnology.
A data center in Guizhou Province built by Hon Hai uses the region’s geological features to achieve energy-efficient cooling and is known as the green tunnel.
The company has also secured agreements with the local governments in Guizhou and Guiyang to develop new applications for cloud and mobile computation technologies across the province in collaboration with Alibaba and 21Vianet Group Inc (世紀互聯數據中心).
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],”
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
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