They said the landmark cooperation :is aimed at simplifying the lives of the university students, lecturers and personnel with the use of digital technology for a better quality of life”.

The CU NEX application connects student IDs to a database for the management of courses, activities inside the campus and non-academic lifestyles.

The programme also “promotes a cashless environment in the campus and surrounding communities”, they said.

The trade relations between India and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) comprising of Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar and Vietnam have seen an upsurge since the last decade.

India and Asean are in the process of negotiating agreements on trade and services and to improve cooperation. Both sides are working towards decreasing the import duty on their products to increase trade. India signed a free trade agreement in goods in 2009 which was implemented in 2010 and FTA in services and investments in 2014 with Asean. And in 2015, India established a separate Mission to Asean and the EAS in Jakarta with a dedicated Ambassador to strengthen engagement with Asean and Asean centric processes.

Investment flows are also substantial both ways. In the years 2016-2017, India’s share of total exports and imports was around 11.2 per cent and 10.56 per cent, respectively. India also has a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement with various countries of the Asean region which has resulted in rise in investments; around 10 per cent of the total FDI equity inflows to India come from the Asean region.

Indonesia has emerged as the largest trading partner of India in the Asean region. India imports mainly coal, palm oil, copper ores and a few other products from Indonesia. Indonesia on the other hand imports machineries, accessories of motor vehicles, telecommunication equipments, animal feed, corn and wheat.

Singapore and Vietnam are the main markets for India which recorded exports trade worth US$ 9,564.48m and 6,786.56m respectively in the year 2016-2017. Exports from Malaysia were worth US$ 5,244.86m and imports at US$8933.59m in the year 2016-2017. India’s export basket to Malaysia is diverse with meat, sugar, rice, wheat , vegetables, fruits, cotton yarn and electronic goods.

Trade between India and Thailand also increased with reduced tariffs and new initiatives by both the countries. India exported goods worth US$ 3133.44 m and imported goods worth US$5415.40m respectively in the year 2016-2017.

Top products that India exports to Asean countries are petroleum, beef, and crustaceans, flat rolled products of iron, alloyed steel and diamonds. Beef is the most demanded product in Asean nations and India is the largest beef exporter in the world. India imports palm oil, coal, electronic gadgets, and automatic data processing machines from the Asean countries.

India is keen to strengthen its ties with Asean countries and it was in this context that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently invited the leaders of all ten Asean nations to join him in country’s Republic Day celebrations.

“The realization, however, may take place over several years,” said BPKM head Thomas  Lembong during a press conference in Jakarta on Tuesday as reported by kontan.co.id.

The figure indicates an annual growth of 30 to 50 percent in start-up firms, he added.

He said start-ups had become the target of foreign investment.

Thomas further said total foreign investment reached Rp 692.8 trillion ($51.75 billion), last year, higher than the target of Rp 678.8 trillion stated in the 2017 state budget.

He said the figure excluded investment in the digital economy as the BKPM had yet to determine the types of businesses that could be included in the digital economy category.

“Is Go-Jek a portal or transportation firm? We will work on this over the next three years,” he added.  “Maybe only 10 percent of [the investment in the digital economy] is included in the total foreign investment.” (bbn)

The firm said the funding and a strategic partnership with oBike place SpherePay well to be among the top three payment platforms in Southeast Asia.

It currently serves five million users and has 10,000 merchants in the region.

SpherePay will integrate oBike’s operating system into its app so it can support all services available on oBike’s app, including its geofencing feature and crowdsourcing delivery service, oBike Flash.

“Since our inception last year, we have been making good progress to ensure that SpherePay will be one of the most highly utilised mobile payment apps in the region,” said chief executive Joseph Chen.

“The recent fundraising and partnership with oBike are testament to the commitment and rapid development of SpherePay. This partnership with oBike saw an immediate acquisition of over five million users in Southeast Asia and we are putting together new features that will bring even greater benefits to all our users.”

With the integration to be completed by March, users of oBike and SpherePay will be able to access both services on their preferred app.

Upcoming enhancements of SpherePay will include merchant-deals listings supported by LBS (location-based services). This means users will be notified of a deal available nearby and will also enable merchants to list their products and promotions on the SpherePay app at their convenience. Payment capabilities such as booking of events, courses and classes, paying for bills such as telco and utility bills and booking tickets such as cinema screenings, flights and hotels will be enabled later.

SpherePay announced in December plans to expand into Indonesia and Thailand.

It has now confirmed plans to rapidly expand throughout Southeast Asia, covering those countries and Singapore as well as Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia, by the second quarter of the year.

Blockchain, a new technology to help explore the various forms of crypto-currencies, could open up new attractive environment for all businesses and investors, said Nguyen Duc Cuong, head of consultancy division at Vietstock – a local financial-business media.

Cuong made the statement at the first summit in Vietnam on blockchain technology and digital money, called Vietstock Blockchain Summit. The event was held in HCM City on Sunday by Vietstock and FundYourselfNow – a Singaporean organisation that helps startup businesses to raise funds for their initial coin offering (ICO).

Vietnamese investors have caught up with the world trend and turned blockchain and crytocurrencies into a “hot” investment trend. For example, bitcoin and other cryptocurrency-related key words were among the top search targets on Google in Vietnam last year.

This means that local businesses and investors have a great demand to learn and access the new technology and cryptocurrencies.

The digital ledger, in which transactions made in various types of cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly, can open up new trends in the different fields of finance, banking, retail and telecommunications, Cuong said.

He added that being considered as the foundation of the industrial revolution 4.0, which was spreading around the world, this was the time for blockchain technology and digital money to provide additional cryptocurrency products.

The prospects of blockchain technology and technology-based digital money had become brighter as the technology could help firms replace traditional legal documents, which were handwritten and compiled on computers, with encryption.

Therefore, blockchain technology could minimise the chance of identity theft and strengthen personal data security. Recently, government agencies in Singapore, Canada, Switzerland and Estonia had started developing national identification systems using blockchain technology.

According to Kennett Tan, chief technology officer of FundYourselfNow, blockchain can remove the need for a centralised server to verify ownership and deals. He said the technology could help financial and banking businesses process their transactions faster without asking for assistance from any intermediary units. This would save time and costs.

In addition, blockchain technology could help businesses retain intellectual property rights and registrations, Tan said.

Liu Yusho, CEO of Vinaex.com, a bitcoin wallet service that assists customers to buy, sell and secure bitcoin, said that the total capitalisation of the cryptocurrency market was only US$2 billion a few years ago with bitcoin accounting for 90 per cent of the market value.

The numbers had increased to $550-600 billion with nearly 1,500 types of crytocurrency. Bitcoin now only dominated 35 per cent of the market value, he said.

Liu said that there were risks for investors when they purchased digital money or assets and they should take careful look at potential risks.

Investors needed to know that as the crytpocurrency market was booming, there would be projects, websites and companies trying to defraud them, he said.

The event was carried out to help investors, businesses and the public understand the nature of blockchain technology, its applications, how cryptocurrencies are managed and the nature of the world’s quickly rising cryptocurrency market.

Google’s website http://www.blog.google confirmed the investment, saying that the investment allows the global firm to partner with a great local startup and deepens its commitment to Indonesia’s digital economy.

“By investing in local companies, building locally relevant products and training local talent, we hope to see more amazing local champions like GO-JEK emerge in Indonesia,” Google said.

Indonesia is estimated to have more than 133 million internet users, the fifth largest population of internet users in the world.

Google said it has already trained nearly 60,000 Indonesians on mobile app development, toward its goal of training 100,000 developers by 2020. Through its Gapura Digital initiative, the company has also trained more than 40,000 small business owners in 10 cities.

GO-JEK is a rival of two other major ride-hailing services, namely Uber and Grab.

The report, which lists Norway as the world’s most inclusive economy, was released just a day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the plenary session of the WEF in Davos on Tuesday and said he was rolling out the red carpet for global investors.

Modi got a standing ovation at the session where international and corporate leaders have gathered for the WEF’s 48th annual meet.

The shocker is India’s ranking below its neighbours with Sri Lanka at 40, Bangladesh, 34, Nepal, 22 and Pakistan, 47. In Asia, apart from China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia are all ahead of India.

Of the three pillars that make up the index, India ranks 72nd for inclusion, 66th for growth and development and 44th for inter-generational equity. The index takes into account the “living standards, environmental sustainability and protection of future generations from further indebtedness”, the WEF said.

Last year. India ranked 60th among 79 developing economies, as against China’s 15th and Pakistan’s 52nd position.

The good news is that despite India’s overall low score, it has been listed among the ten emerging economies. The top-five most inclusive emerging economies are Lithuania, Hungary, Azerbaijan, Latvia and Poland.

Among advanced economies, Norway is followed by Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Denmark in the top five.

Of the G7 economies, Germany (12) ranks the highest. It is followed by Canada (17), France (18), the UK (21), the US (23), Japan (24) and Italy (27).

WEF urged the leaders to urgently move to a new model of inclusive growth and development, saying reliance on GDP as a measure of economic achievement is fuelling short-termism and inequality.

Though China ranks first among emerging economies in GDP per capita growth (6.8 per cent) and labour productivity growth (6.7 per cent) since 2012, its overall score is brought down by lacklustre performance on inclusion, the WEF said.

The advent of these edge-dependent data centres is one of the trends identified by a global panel of experts from Vertiv, formerly Emerson Network Power.

“Digital transformation has driven tremendous growth in colo (colocation) facilities as companies in Asia migrated critical applications to the cloud over the last few years. This, coupled with the explosion in connected devices and requirements for low latency and seamless customer experience, has led to the need for re-architecting data centres in the middle and at the edge,” said Anand Sanghi, president of Vertiv, Asia.

“From Australia to Singapore to Korea, in 2017 we now have over 50 use-cases for our converged/edge SmartSolutions, enabling enterprises to harmoniously integrate the cloud to the edge and architect their infrastructure to be agile, efficient, always-on, and visible on a single pane.”

Previous Vertiv forecasts identified trends tied to the cloud, integrated systems, infrastructure security and more.

The panels also predicts advances in colocation efficiency and scalability, and an emergence of high-density systems.

Thirapong Khumruangrit, senior executive vice president of Millcon Steel, said the company had signed business partnerships agreement with Artha Graha Group, a leading industrial conglomerate based in Indonesia, for a joint-venture project in which each holds a 50 per cent stake.

The two companies have committed to start trading activity first in order to study the market.

Indonesia is fast growing and it is the largest market in Southeast Asia due to its large population base. Millcon has specialised in steel production and distribution so that the joint venture is expected to contribute to future success of the company’s business operations, said Thirapong.