Gait recognition is a technique that integrates computer vision, pattern recognition and video processing to identify people by analyzing their body shape and walking posture.

The fresh round of financing is led by Shenzhen Hang Bong Investment and Development Co Ltd and Hua He Capital.

Huang Yongzhen, founder and CEO of Watrix AI, said that the fundraising will be mainly used for the research and development of product and technology, marketing as well as attracting talent.

“We will spare no effort to explore more advanced technologies to step up the application of gait recognition technology. We aim to gain a lead in industrial visual sector,” he said.

Watrix AI, founded in 2016, was incubated by the Institute of Automation of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The startup, focused on gait recognition, can provide solutions for sectors including security, transportation and manufacturing.

According to the company, it is the only company in the world that can achieve cross-view gait recognition with an accuracy rate of 94 percent.

Shopee has beat Lazada to become the top e-commerce platform by traffic in the third quarter of this year, according to the Map of E-commerce in Vietnam recently published by Iprice Insight.

Statistics showed that Shopee had a monthly average traffic of 34.5 million in the quarter.

It was closely followed by Lazada with a monthly average traffic of 30.2 million.

This is the first time Lazada has lost the top position since the second quarter of 2017.

Other players in the top five included Tiki with 29.4 million traffic per month, Sendo with 20.7 million and Adayroi with 5.3 million.

The top four, including Shopee, Lazada, Tiki and Sendo all received foreign funding.

The competition was growing fierce in Vietnam’s e-commerce market, which is anticipated to reach US$10 billion by 2022.

The ranking was forecast to see significant changes in the last quarter of this year when e-commerce platforms would offer more promotion and discount programmes to stimulate shopping as the year-end approaches.

Iprice Insight is run by iPrime Group, a price comparison platform in seven markets, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Microsoft Corp unveiled its most powerful Surface personal computing product series in China on Monday with a tailor-made new colour option for local customers, as the US tech giant seeks to increase its popularity among female users.

Panos Panay, chief product officer at Microsoft, said China is now the second-largest market for Surface after the United States, with “super strong double digit growth” seen here last year.

“China should become the top market for Surface, with local consumers having a unique desire for luxury, or products that contain meaning and depth,” Panay said in an interview in Beijing.

The company unveiled the “Blush”, or greyish pink option, for its new Surface Laptop 2 exclusive to the China market. The move is partly designed to attract more female users, as a significant proportion of consumers buying the Surface are male.

“We are betting on China, which is a very thought-leading market,” Panay said.

His comments come as the Chinese personal computing market is rebounding to growth after declining for a number of quarters.

According to data from market research company Gartner Inc, shipments of PCs to China grew 0.8 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of this year, faster than the global average of 0.1 percent, indicating a gradual shift back to expansion.

Though demand for traditional PCs remains weak, the desire for light gadgets that can help people manage work is rising, said Xiang Ligang, CEO of telecoms industry website Cctime and an expert in consumer electronics.

Priced from 9,988 yuan ($1,442) in China, the new Surface Laptop 2 has up to 14.5 hours of battery life. It is part of the company’s broader effort to offer convenient hardware that can perform major computing tasks.

Other products released on Monday include the Surface Pro portable laptop, the Surface Pro 6, and the Surface Studio 2 desktop computer.

Microsoft’s fiscal quarterly and yearly financial results showed revenue from the Surface line grew by 25 percent, while sales were up 16 percent year-on-year during the quarter which ended in June. Additionally, a report from Gartner showed that for the first time, Microsoft had joined the top five PC vendors in the US, thanks to its Surface computers.

As we continue to undergo digital disruption, the reality of what we will see today and tomorrow is that a lot of new jobs will be created and a lot of current jobs will be transformed.

The challenge will be in the synchronisation of job destruction and job creation. And that underlines the importance of reskilling and upskilling, which allows people to get that new kind of job or to acquire the skills needed to continue in their current job as it is transformed, says Alain Dehaze, chief executive of Adecco Group.

By 2030, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation”, as many as 375 million workers – or roughly 14 per cent of the global workforce – may need to switch occupational categories as digitisation, automation and advances in artificial intelligence disrupt the world of work.

These 375 million people will have to be reskilled and upskilled by 2030, says Dehaze

He says the report finds that many kinds of jobs will be disrupted, including jobs eliminated through technology being used in highly repetitive processes. On the other hand, technology will create a lot of new jobs, as entire industries emerge and companies are formed. And that offers many opportunities.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will have a major impact on everybody’s life, as it either replaces some work now done by people or amplifies the work done by people. “AI is like electricity – when electricity was invented its first application was light. People can create ways to apply electricity,” Dehaze says.

“From just that one invention, you can see all the new products that have been developed. With AI, it is exactly the same. We are at the beginning of AI. We started with chatbots, and as this continues the applications grow, creating more and more new products. So AI is like a kind of electricity.”

He says companies need to anticipate their futures, so that on the one hand they can reskill their people to ensure the company’s production remains efficient and on the leading edge. On the other hand, the companies must innovate.

“It is important to survive and to embrace the future to create new products, new services. Because if you do not do it, others will do it for you. So if you want to stay competitive, you need to innovate,” said Dehaze.

There are two aspects to this, he says. One is to reskill and upskill people, because to find a data scientist,

for example, is not easy. For many companies, it is easier to retrain or reskill their internal people to a level of basic competency. Employees who have been taught new data science skills, for example, will do a great job because they know the company and the

sector.

New or upgraded skills are needed in many key areas of work, especially those developing digital capabilities, the use of data and the science of data, to amplify people’s work or to work in different ways. Workers need to acquire knowledge about how to leverage data.

“It does not mean you have to become a data scientist or a data engineer, but you need to understand how you can apply AI in the work you do today – this is very important,” says Dehaze.

The second challenge of innovation is to upgrade the education system itself to provide the required workforce skills. The system must be able to develop these capabilities in the workforce of today and tomorrow and meet the needs of business.

“It is the big challenge,” says Dehaze. “Because the world is moving very fast, we do not know what the new jobs will be. Six people out of 10 in the ecosystem will do a job that does not exist today. That means that it is difficult for a high school or university to know which capabilities they have to teach. That is why life-long learning is very important.”

The way that education and work has functioned in the past is almost finished. In the past, people learned for 15 to 20 years, and then worked for 40 to 45 years. Now, people study three years, work for three years or work in parallel [with learning], because people lose 30 per cent of their competency every four years. People need to permanently adapt themselves.”

In the past, the education system provided knowledge. Today people can acquire knowledge via the Internet. Schools and universities have to become places where people learn how to learn, learn to apply their knowledge, says Dehaze.

“Ideally, the curriculum of education should be strongly influenced by the businesses or by [society’s] needs. Absolutely, I recommend this and we can help design the curriculum,” he says.

Moreover, the education system needs to understand the new generations, the millennials and Gen Z, who are purpose-driven. They all want to have an impact in the world, especially a social impact and want to improve the world. A company must have a strong purpose if they wish to attract skilled employees from these generations, he says.

They also want flexibility, a better balance between private life and professional life. It is important to recognise these needs so that the company can fulfil them. These generations also want to learn, says Dehaze. The company needs to fit their needs by giving these people a project with new challenges. It is the responsibility of the company to attract and retain younger generations to join its workforce.

Freelancing trend grows 

Another global working trend is towards freelancing. Today in the US, 30 per cent of the labour force is freelancing and this will grow to 50 per cent by 2025. Also, 47 per cent of the new graduates entering the labour market are freelancing. This trend is spreading, including within Thailand, where about 4 million people are freelancers.

“A lot of people in the younger generations want to be freelance, to have flexibility between their private and professional lives. They want much more project driven [work], and they want more freedom,” says Dehaze. “They are also interested in seeking out work, discovering ways to work on their own independently. On the other side, the companies that want to hire these freelancers, need to discover how to find them.”

This led Adecco to create a digital platform, YOS, which allows companies to outline the work they need done and for freelancers to come to the platform and match their supply with the labour market’s demands.

“We co-created, with Microsoft, to develop YOS – your own boss – your one-stop shopping, the digital platform for freelancers,” says Dehaze.

The platform is able to develop new services and products in the huge freelance market, which is three-times larger than the traditional staffing market.

“Adecco every year does a lot to help millions of unemployed people to get a job. We know what kinds of needs the companies have, and know what kinds of skills the candidates have or do not have. If they have skills we place them in companies, but if they do not have the skills we can train them in a lot of competencies and make them employable. It is important and it is how we can get millions of people to find a job, to get the income they need, to get the future, to be able to live on their own,” says Dehaze.

He says Adecco always does three things – adding more digital aspects into its processes such as chatbots at work; co-creating digital trends for existing activities by, for example creating a digital platform called Adia; and investing in innovation by, for example, acquiring a company doing fully automated ways of permanent recruitment.

“We have launched Adia in four countries, but not yet in Thailand.” says Dehaze. Adia is aimed at revolutionising the industry by matching talent supply and demand more effectively and managing that talent more efficiently. “Targeting candidates and clients across multiple industry segments such as hospitality, events, logistics and many more, Adia makes it possible for employers to find temporary staff for short-term assignments and provides a brand new experience to both clients and candidates,” he says.

The platform’s algorithm matches jobs to workers based on skills, level of experience, and proximity to the place of work as well as the job seeker’s real-time availability. The user can hire new staff, plan shifts, issue contracts and approve timesheets from this platform, all in real-time.

Other investors for the round include lead investor Gobi Partners, Vickers Venture Partners and Partech Partners.

Ariya Banomyong, managing director of Line Thailand says that Fastwork will join the Line Scale-up Programme, which will provide the start-up a free access to Line users through the official account and Line API.

“I am excited about this first investment of Line Ventures in Thailand,” said Ariya. “We are here to support the Thai start-up ecosystem. Previously, we launched the Line Scale-up programme for Thai start-ups to gain access to Line API. Going forward, working with Line Ventures, you will see more investments from Line from seed to Series A, and upward.”

Founded in 2015 by a group of engineers and entrepreneurs from New York, Fastwork is one of the largest professional freelancing platforms in Southeast Asia, as judged by the number of users and projects completed.

The company’s revenues have grown 1,100 per cent since December 2017, and it currently employs more than 50 people in Indonesia and Thailand.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Line, and excited to widen our ambitions as we launch new products, enter new markets, and build an end-to-end experience for the 80 million businesses in Southeast Asia,” said Vasa S Iamsuri, Fastwork’s founder and CEO.

The company recently launched “Fastwork Pro” and “Fastwork Enterprise”, both premium services where the top 1 per cent of their best performing freelancers and agencies are selected to offer high quality services and work on large-scale projects to users who are in the growth stage of their businesses.

The platform, in addition to providing a secure payment system, uses a proprietary algorithm called Fastwork Score to screen and rank freelancers on both their quantitative and qualitative data, significantly reducing time for users to find the right match.

In Young Chung, director of Line Ventures, said that e-commerce is at the cusp of rapid long-term growth in the region, underpinned by social commerce platforms. As social commerce creates significant outsourcing demands for SMEs, leading freelancing platforms like Fastwork will enjoy robust growth by providing end-to-end outsourcing solutions for SMEs, he said.

It is the country’s first competition in which both general and vocational students (Pratomsuksa 4 to Mathayomsuksa 6) are challenged to come up with creative ideas to facilitate and enhance daily life, and to develop these ideas into tangible projects using BBC’s micro:bit code.

The competition reflects Microsoft’s mission to nurture young talent through technology-driven skills training that focuses on computational thinking and coding, said Microsoft Thailand’s managing director.

Dhanawat Suthumpun says it is crucial for Thailand to develop strong human capital and promote digital literacy to support the Thailand 4.0 strategy. He says coding is the backbone of digital workforce development as it enhances systems thinking and problem-solving skills, thus developing people’s ability to understand the issues they face and overcome them.

“At Microsoft Thailand, we want future generations to create technologies rather than make use of the technologies,” said Dhanawat.

The initiative aims to support Thai youth by opening the door to limitless learning opportunities through STEM education and careers. That would, in the long run, help them achieve their goals and overcome digital limitations in the digital economy.

The competition is held in partnership with SiriVentures, a capital venture between Thai real estate developer Sansiri and Siam Commercial Bank focusing on full-scale research and development to innovate new property technologies. The partnership’s objective is to give children opportunities to learn digital skills with advanced technologies and to encourage creativity.

Jirapat Janjerdsak, chief technology officer, SiriVentures, said that the mission is bringing technology to develop the well-being of Thai people. It hopes that the Smart Living competition will spark genuine interest and show Thai youth the significant role digital skills play when it comes to enhancing personal well-being, family life and communities.

The winning team of Smart Living with Micro:bit will receive a Bt30,000 prize, while two runner-up teams will get Bt15,000 each.

The competition is open for students from Pratomsuksa 4 to Mathayomsuksa 6 or vocational institutions until October 30. In November, 10 teams will be selected for the semi-final round, and each team will receive a sensor valued at Bt5,000 from SiriVentures to further develop their projects. The 10 selected teams will present their projects from the sensor kit on “Mini Demo Day”, including consultations with specialists, to be ready for final round competition.

By December, 10 teams will present their projects as part of the “Coding Thailand Tournament” competition held by the CodingThailand community with support from Digital Economy Promotion Agency (DEPA).

The partnership was officially announced at Digital Thailand Big Bang 2018, an international digital technology event held by the DEPA.

Previous pilot projects developed by children using coding on micro:bit devices include a statistic collector enabled by a light sensor which can be used for school activities such as library attendance records and student council elections. The project was developed by a group of students from Ban Khlong Sawang Arom School in Nakhon Pathom.

Another pilot project highlight – an automatic toothpaste dispenser powered by a distance sensor – aims to facilitate people’s daily lives. It was developed by a group of students from Debsirin Nonthaburi School.

The investment was led by Japan’s largest private venture capital fund, Global Brain, with participation from 31VENTURES, the CVC arm of Mitsui Fudosan, one of the largest real-estate developers in the country, and returning Indonesian venture capital fund SMDV.

Global expansion is a key growth driver for businesses around the world, yet financial transactions are being processed by legacy platforms built on infrastructures that are not geared to support global commerce needs.  As global commerce and population movement grows, the ability to conduct payments anytime and anywhere becomes a necessity.

To provide payments in an  increasingly borderless world, a financial infrastructure that can be accessed globally is needed.

This undisclosed funding brings in additional financial support, notes a press release from the firm. More importantly, it notes, the funding develops connections with strategic partners to strengthen the reach of the financial infrastructure currently in the development phase by entities under Omise Holdings, Omise payments, OmiseGO and GO.Exchange.

“We are excited our investors have affirmed their continued support for Omise with their contribution to this latest funding,” said Jun Hasegawa, CEO and founder of Omise. “Today’s announcement with industry leaders like Global Brain, 31VENTURES and SMDV is another solid step further on our path of developing a new payments infrastructure. We look forward to engaging in broader partnerships and opportunities to tap into Japan’s evolving market.”