Twitter Inc’s manager for greater China, whose appointment just eight months ago sparked controversy, has announced her resignation, but welcomed the growing number of Chinese advertisers even though the service is blocked by Beijing.
Kathy Chen (陳葵), appointed in April last year as general manager for the greater China region comprising Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Macau, made the announcement on Saturday evening on Twitter.
“Now that the Twitter APAC team [Asia-Pacific team in Singapore] is working directly with Chinese advertisers, this is the right time for me to leave the company,” she said.
Like other Western platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, Twitter is inaccessible in China, blocked by the Chinese government’s vast system of Internet censorship.
Unable to reach local users, Twitter has tried to persuade Chinese companies and media to open accounts to reach a global audience. Large groups such as the telecoms giant Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and state media have made their appearance on the platform.
Chen said that in the past two years, Twitter’s advertising base in the greater China region had grown almost 400 percent.
Human rights activists and non-governmental organizations had taken issue with Chen’s resume when she was appointed. In the 1980s and 1990s she worked as a computer engineer for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
Critics were also dismayed by Chen’s call on her appointment for “closer partnership” with Chinese Communist Party-backed state media.
Twitter is home to a very active community of Chinese intellectuals and dissidents posting from abroad and also from within the country through the use of virtual private networks.
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