This year’s theme of the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference starting Tuesday in Vancouver is “Age of Amazement,” but with a keen eye on unintended consequences.

The gathering comes amid growing fears about a loss of privacy in the digital world, and a race to artificial intelligence and robotics which could spin out of control.

“The future is amazing, but there is good amazing and there is amazing terrifying,” TED curator Chris Anderson told AFP.

“There is going to be an intense debate on what we think of the future. We are embracing those fears that the world may have gone mad in one way, but we are also embracing innovations, science and technology.”

The TED community includes scientists, artists, activists, politicians and superstar entrepreneurs such as founders of Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Netflix.

This year’s speakers include Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and star Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, whose winning investments include early bets on Amazon and Google.

Former US vice president Al Gore, a longtime member of the TED community, will host a discussion on climate change at the conference

Anderson expected heated debate on the potential dangers as well as the benefits of new technologies.

“Is the world making progress or, despite our best efforts, are we making things worse?” he asked rhetorically.

“I think people are astonished and disturbed by a lot of the technology we have built.”

Podcasts popping

While internet-age news cycles have attention shifting from one headline to another, TED is intended as an oasis where ideas and developments are thoughtfully explored.

“So many people don’t want to hear about progress at the moment; they are not seeing it,” Anderson said.

“They are feeling stress and anger. You could argue a collective talking ourselves into gloom and doom.”

Since starting as an intimate gathering on the California coast 34 years ago, TED has grown into a global media platform with a stated devotion to “ideas worth spreading.”

TED has a massive following for its trademark presentations in which speakers strive to give “the talk of their lives” in 18 minutes.

The standard cost of attending the main TED conference, now in Vancouver, has climbed to $10,000.

Money brought in by the nonprofit Sapling Foundation behind TED is used to make talks available free in apps, podcasts and videos at online venues including YouTube and ted.com.

TED has had a hit with a new live-audience television series in India hosted by Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan.

Podcasts and a TED Radio hour have proven natural fits for the conference’s spoken-word style presentations.

TED is poised to launch a native Spanish language podcast in a partnership with Univision as it expands its lineup with offerings such as podcast devoted to the genius of everyday objects and do-it-yourself neuroscience.

“The platform has seen spectacular growth despite all the competition from politics,” Anderson said.

It has also started creating short-form video presentations, as smartphone lifestyles have people accustomed to snippets much shorter than 18 minutes.

“In the early days of TED, when we you told lecturers, professors and academics they had to deliver a talk in under 20 minutes they looked at you like you were crazy,” said TED head of media Colin Helms.

“In internet time, when people are used to content as short as 15 seconds, it seems a much meatier format.”

Turning talk to action

Anderson has gracefully but firmly encouraged TED’s influential community to act on big ideas that win their hearts or minds.

An annual TED prize launched in 2005 that came with cash and support from the conference community to fulfill potentially world-changing wishes will be transformed this year into an “Audacious Project” funding ideas with “the potential to create massive, global change.”

More than $250 million has already been committed to the “collaborative philanthropy” model, according to TED.

Each year, the project will identify up to five ideas that stand out as thrillingly bold and have a credible path to execution.

“The notion of turning ideas into action will be a real sub-theme,” he said of this year’s gathering.

The news comes after Facebook was forced to admit that it secretly deleted messages sent by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company executives.

The sent messages were deleted from inboxes without the knowledge of recipients, a tactic that the firm admitted it had been using since 2014.

Following the admission, Facebook has now said that the featured used to delete Zuckerberg;’s messages will be rolled out to all users in “several months” time, according to a report by TechCrunch.

In a statement issued to Business Insider, Facebook said:

“We have discussed this feature several times. And people using our secret message feature in the encrypted version of Messenger have the ability to set a timer — and have their messages automatically deleted.

“We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages. We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not.”

However, the revelation that Facebook had been secretly deleting the messages has sparked uproar among users, many of whom are still reeling following the privacy scandal involving British firm Cambridge Analytica.

The practice of Facebook secretly deleting messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg and other senior members of staff was revealed in a report by TechCrunch late Thursday.

Had the report not been published, it remains to be seen if Facebook would have revealed the practice and agreed to make the feature of being able to delete sent messages available to all users.

The 33-year-old chief executive is expected to face a grilling before a Senate panel Tuesday, and follow up with an appearance in the House of Representatives the following day.

His appearance comes amid a raft of inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic following disclosures that data on 87 million users was hijacked and improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Lawmakers have signaled they intend to get tough on Facebook and other online services over privacy.

“A day of reckoning is coming for websites like @facebook,” Democratic Senator Ed Markey wrote on Twitter Friday.

“We need a privacy bill of rights that all Americans can rely upon.”

Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, agreed that legislation is needed “to protect Americans’ dignity and privacy from bad faith actors like Cambridge Analytica, who use social media data to manipulate people.”

Khanna tweeted that “self-regulation will not work. Congress must act in the public interest to protect consumers and citizens.”

Several lawmakers and activists believe the United States should follow the lead of Europe’s data protection law set to be implemented in May, which has strict terms for notification and sharing of personal data online.

Zuckerberg told reporters Facebook would follow the European rules worldwide, although cautioned that its implementation may not be “exactly the same format” for various countries and regions.

– Shift on political ads –

Facebook meanwhile announced Friday it will require political ads on its platform to state who is paying for the message and would verify the identity of the payer, in a bid to curb outside election interference.

The change is meant to avoid a repeat of the manipulation efforts by Russian-sponsored entities which sought to foment discord in 2016, and also responds to criticism about anonymous messages based on Facebook profile data.

Zuckerberg said the change will mean “we will hire thousands of more people” to get the new system in place ahead of US midterm elections in November.

“We’re starting this in the US and expanding to the rest of the world in the coming months,” Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page.

“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads.”

Zuckerberg said Facebook is now endorsing the “Honest Ads Act,” a bill that would require disclosure of the sources of online political ads.

“Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act,” he said. “This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online.”

Some activists say Facebook needs to do more to guard against manipulation and deception on the platform.

Facebook “should really be turning their attention not only to election ads but to all ads,” said Harlan Yu of the technology and social justice nonprofit group Upturn.

“They should disclose to the public a detailed accounting of all the bad ads they’re taking down,” Yu told a forum Thursday at the New American Foundation.

Facebook is also likely to face questions on whether it violated a 2011 agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission. Activists have alleged the social network failed to live up to promises to protect privacy.

– ‘Serial offender’ –

David Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor who headed the FTC’s enforcement division when the Facebook deal was negotiated, called the latest incident a “major breach” of the court-supervised settlement.

“Facebook is now a serial offender,” Vladeck said in a Harvard Law Review blog post.

But Vladeck noted that a major problem with Facebook’s privacy woes comes from its failure to get written contracts and guarantees with third parties such as app developers.

“It seems that Facebook made no effort to establish the (credential) of developers, much less verify or audit what user data app developers actually harvested and shared,” Vladeck said.

Some analysts fear that Zuckerberg’s appearance on Capitol Hill will be little more than a public relations exercise.

“Zuckerberg’s dance before Congress will be delicate, and I’ll bet that even a brainiac like him will have a damp shirt under his very nice suit coat not long into it,” said Roger Kay, an analyst and consultant with Endpoint Technologies Associates.

“But in the end, he’ll agree to some meaningless adjustments to how Facebook operates just to get out of there in one piece.”

Six Thai start-ups have graduated from the eFounders Fellowship Programme while gaining first-hand insights after participating in field visits and attending lectures to understand the digital transformation that has swept China over the past 20 years.

The joint initiative by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and Alibaba Business School aims to equip young entrepreneurs to unlock their full potential and to bridge the digital divide.

Six Thai start-ups were among the 37 Asian entrepreneurs to spend 11 days at Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, China. They are: 1×1 Wall, provider of creative space for up-and-coming artists; Karma X, operator of a merchandising platform for creators seeking to support social causes; Tourkrub, provider of an online travel platform connecting tour package providers to travellers; Flow Account, developer of an easy-to-use cloud accounting solution for small businesses; GNG Tech, operator of Khonde.com, a logistics platform connecting truck and lorry providers to factories or other businesses; Weshopchina, a shopping enabling platform to help Thai customers to shop on Taobao and Tmall; and TakeMeTour, developer of the largest marketplace for local tours and activities in Thailand, with more than 20,000 local experts from 55 cities.

Amornched Jinda-apiraksa, CEO and co-founder of TakeMeTour, was one of 200 applicants from Souteast Asia to seek the eFounders Fellowship and was interviewed via video conferencing

“We leant a lot of things including the business and the marketplace ecosystem developed in China that can be applied to Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asian region. Importantly, we experienced the working culture at Alibaba and learnt their approach to problem-solving that can be applied to our work here,” said Amornched.

Last but not least, he said, the programme gave him a chance to make more friends, and meet the co-founders and CEOs from other start-ups in Southeast Asia to build connections and find partners for future collaboration.

“We will recommend our Thai start-up friends apply to join this programme to get first-hand experience themselves. As for me, I will share the knowledge we got from this programme with my start-up friends here.”

Kridsada Chutinaton, co-founder of Flow Account, said the programme gave him valuable experience from learning about Alibaba’s e-commerce ecosystem development and how the company helped Chinese and other people. “For almost the entire trip, we did not use cash, just digital money, especially in Hangzhou. When we gave merchants or service providers cash, they would not accept it at all. It is very interesting for a technology company like ours,” said Kridsada.

The programme experience has led Kridsada to enlarge his business vision beyond products and services to also think about platforms that benefit all stakeholders.

“This trip experience gave us inspiration to develop a long-term vision and to be patient until it succeeds, as long as it is beneficial for the people and the country.”

Yet, the Thai government actually has a very strong informal training network. The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, for example, has 2,000 training centres around the country. The Ministry of Education has another 6,000.

In the past, these centres would focus on what the trainers thought was important, instead of what the learner wanted. They would teach Word, Excel and Powerpoint, which are good if you’re looking for an office job in Bangkok but not so useful if you’re trying to sell coconuts from your Surat Thani farm.

What does a farmer want to know?

About 90 per cent of Thai Internet users actually access the Internet from a phone. So the topic most useful to them is how to use a phone rather than a desktop computer: how to use it to get email, how to use Facebook, how to set up a Facebook page, how to take good pictures of your products.

To develop such a curriculum, DTAC reached out to the Deputy Minister of Education, General Surachet Chaiwong, and the Office of Non-Formal and Informal Education under the Ministry of Education. We jointly created a curriculum of over 200 courses covering really basic things, like posting beautiful pictures of your products on a Facebook page to grow your direct sales.

The Ministry of Education has 1.2 million teachers in its informal education network (known as Kor Sor Nor in Thai). So how do you train that many people in a few years? We approached it like multi-tier marketing. First, we trained a head teacher in each of the 77 provinces. Then we trained them together with 10-20 trainers per province. Those trainers then went on to each train some 300-400 teachers in each district. By the time you get to the sub-district level, you’re reaching one million teachers. In fact, the programme reached that figure in one short year, well ahead of schedule.

The secret is to create incentives for the end user. If rural folk can see tangible results from their training, if they can leverage Facebook to make sales, then they will spread the word.

In the North, for example, we approached some rice farmers with the idea of going organic and connected them with the resources to make biofertilisers. Second, we helped them redesign their packaging. Finally, we helped with storytelling. Why is it organic? What are the benefits? It worked: they’ve increased their sales dramatically.

Beyond the curriculum, creating the right environment is also very important. Classes with rows of desktops are too intimidating. We’re now opting for learning environments with more of a start-up/coworking space atmosphere. We want people who have some time on their hands during the day, from motorcycle taxis to housewives, to feel comfortable enough to drop by, pick up extra skills and unlock a second source of income.

To grow our impact even further, the plan is to work with small businesses like cooperatives and local community enterprises in rural areas. This year, we want to bring 100,000 of them online. If they sell Bt1 million worth of products a year, that’s a contribution of Bt100 billion to the Thai economy. Along with DTAC, four ministries are on board: the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives and the Ministry of Commerce. They have over 20,000 training centres in total. If it is accompanied by a solid training programme, the government’s Thailand 4.0 policy can lift incomes even in the most remote and underdeveloped areas of the country. Training is how we can turn digital transformation from a threat to an opportunity for all.

Lertratana Ratananukul is senior vice president, head of government relations division, at DTAC.

True Move H is the first mobile operator to officially launch the Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular) in Thailand, at a cost of Bt15,500. It is expected that the other two operators, Advanced Info Services (AIS) and Total Access Communication (DTAC), will later catch up.

The Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular) will automatically switch to the most power-efficient wireless available.

It can connect to an iPhone when it’s nearby, a previously joined Wi-Fi network, or cellular. When the watch is connected to a cellular network, users can check the signal strength from the Control Centre or the Explorer watch-face.

True Move H is offering many package bundles with the Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular), including at Bt499 per month (200 minutes of voice calls and 4GB of data), Bt599 (250 minutes of voice calls and 6GB of data), Bt699 (300 minutes of voice calls and 8GB of data), Bt899 (400 minutes of voice calls and 15GB of data), and Bt1,099 (650 minutes of voice calls and unlimited of data).

There were 121.53 million mobile phone SIM cards used last year, of which 53.05 million numbers belonged to Advanced Info Service, 36.05 million to True Corp, 30 million to Total Access Communication, 2.32 million to CAT Telecom, and 0.11 million to TOT.

The huge jump was a result of the availability of more spectrum bandwidth to cellular operators, including the auction of 2.1GHz in 2012, and 1800MHz and 900MHz in 2015 to 2016, which enabled them to expand the wireless broadband service.

Samsung Electronics on Friday reported higher-than-projected earnings during the first quarter, with operating profit topping market expectations by around 1 trillion won on successful memory chip sales.

Operating profit in the January-March period likely jumped 57.58 percent on-year to 15.6 trillion won ($14.6 billion), while revenue was estimated to have increased by 18.69 percent on-year to 60 trillion won, the South Korean tech giant said in an earnings guidance report.

Samsung did not release performance and net profit estimate reports for each business division. It plans to disclose detailed earnings later this month.

The tech giant’s earnings guidance tops projections by FnGuide, a Seoul-based financial market provider, that Samsung would log an operating profit of 14.56 trillion won and revenue of 61.58 trillion won.

Market analysts had predicted that despite a strong performance by its main semiconductors business, the gains would be offset by losses linked to a downturn of the display business led by sluggish sales of Apple’s iPhone X made with Samsung-made OLED displays.

However, Samsung’s first-quarter earnings guidance has eased such concerns, as demand for Samsung-made memory chips appears to have been strong enough to set the Korean electronics maker on track for another profitable year.

Memory chips are expected to have accounted for about 70 percent of Samsung’s operating profit, as strong demand for DRAM chips used in computer servers offsets falling prices of NAND flash memory chips, according to market projections.

Samsung’s IT mobile communications business — pulled along by the early release of premium Galaxy S9 and healthy sales of older models — appears to have contributed to the first-quarter earnings as well, overcoming a slowdown in global smartphone sales, analysts said.

The Galaxy S9, which began selling in most markets from mid-March, was launched around one month than its predecessor S8 which begun sales from mid-April back in 2017.

According to market tracker IDC, worldwide smartphone shipments shrank for the first time in 2017, as customers were less likely to purchase the latest high-end devices due to the high price tags and slowing innovation.

Vietnam is among top 10 countries in which information of Facebook users may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, according to Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer.

Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based data collection and analysis company, was reported on March 19 to have wrongly collected information and data from about 50 million Facebook users around the world.

Mike confirmed in his Wednesday post on Facebook Newsroom the total number of Facebook users affected by the case has reached 87 million. The case has stunned the world in general and damaged Facebook in particular in regards of its share price and reputation in recent weeks.

In Mike’s post, Vietnam ranks ninth of the 10 countries in the list with more than 427,000 Facebook users that have unwillingly shared their personal data and information with Cambridge Analytica.

The top country is the US with more than 70.6 million users, followed by the Philippines (nearly 1.2 million), Indonesia and the UK (nearly 1.1 million each). Australia is the bottom one with around 311,000 users.

To improve the situation, Mike said Facebook will remove the authorisation of API apps, a software intermediary that lets two applications connect, from getting access to users’ personal data and information public in groups, pages, events, and call and text history.

In addition, Facebook on April 9 will “show people a link at the top of their news feed so they can see what apps they use – and the information they have shared with those apps,” Mike said.

“People will also be able to remove apps that they no longer want. As part of this process, we will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied claims alluding to his potential resignation as the head of Facebook amid the Cambridge Analytica case, but said that he takes full responsibility.

Yasmin binti Jaidin joined 20 other participants from Japan and Asean member countries to attend the week-long intensive workshop, which followed the theme of art, biotechnology, and culture.

Participants came from diverse backgrounds of expertise, ranging from aspiring artists that explore science and technology, engineering, biotechnology and nature/art conservationist.

According to Yasmin, the workshop encouraged extensive exchange and dialogue between participants. The workshop also gave them the opportunity to share their understanding of current issues, while searching for organic biotechnology design methods that can facilitate new ways of living.

“We were expected to work together by discussing concepts and themes, and presenting our views on these issues. The ambiguity of the theme of the workshop was intentional as participants were expected to come in with a completely fresh perspective,” she explained.

The participants learned of the philosophy behind the Japanese Garden by academic researcher and garderner Tomoki Yamauchi.

They also visited Shinjuku Gyoen National Park to get a better understanding on the conservation of endangered plant life, as well as the planning and research that goes into the annual Chrysanthemum Festival.

One of the highlights of Yasmin’s visit was the ‘MetaPhorest’ laboratory of the Centre for Advanced Medical Sciences, Waseda University – a practical platform for artists working on biological/bio media art and bio aesthetics.

“The artists (involved) made me think of what the conventions of fine art should or could be, where technology and science is already a huge part of our lives.Artists approach contemporary issues, break the rules and are in constant search for new ideas.

“It made me realise that we should not be afraid to experiment with the boundaries of technology in our practice,” she said.

American artist and scientist Joe Davis, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) made a statement that resonated with Yasmin, “The key to innovation is that the answer is always in front of you”, and described it as the epitome of the workshop.

“We progress as far as we allow ourselves to. As an artist working and living in Brunei, it has changed my perspective on how far innovation can take you.

“It is up to the individual to challenge their critical thinking regarding available resources – to see what we have in different perspectives to get to where we strive to be.”