Google’s cloud services are to be used to test blockchain technologies for banks, an area where IBM Corp, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc have been courting clients for the past year.
Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC has employed Google servers in a trial of a new blockchain application for clearing and settlement, consulting firm GFT Group said in a statement yesterday.
The company’s cloud services are also to be used by other bank clients of the firm, Stuttgart, Germany-based GFT said.
GFT is a member of Google Cloud Platform’s Partner Program.
Until now, IBM and Microsoft have been most active in rolling out special developer tools and inviting banks and start-ups to test the new database technology in their massive data centers. Amazon, a leader in cloud service, has also been working with blockchain start-ups.
The blockchain is a distributed ledger where multiple companies — such as banks — can record transactions securely.
The database’s strength lies in its trustworthiness: the difficulty of reversing or changing any transactions that have been recorded.
By facilitating trust and collaboration, the technology promises to make many industries more efficient and reduce costs on everything from international money transfers to paying a supplier.
As companies in the financial, supply-chain, healthcare and other industries rush to try out blockchain, they are opening up a potential new growth area for cloud-services players, like Alphabet Inc’s Google. Testing in the cloud is often easier and can be done faster than tests on a bank’s own computers.
If the tests are successful, cloud services could potentially play a role in blockchain deployments, since a database shared by multiple companies is more easily managed in the cloud.
Worldwide, the public cloud services market should reach US$204 billion this year, up from US$175 billion last year, researcher Gartner Inc said.
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