The ship’s steel cutting ceremony took place in Wismar, Germany last week, marking the start of the production.

Dream Cruises President Thatcher Brown said during Genting Cruise Lines Travel Partner Tribute Award Ceremony that the new AI technology would include facial and voice recognition and a self-guided mobile assistance, designed to provide better services for guests.

Meanwhile, Genting Hong Kong chairman and CEO Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay said in a statement: “The Global Class ship mirrors the widespread use of technology and artificial intelligence by our Asians guests in their daily lives, with facial and voice recognition for most services onboard, eliminating most queues; contextual marketing to even out demand on ship facilities; automated robots to perform mundane tasks — allowing the hardworking staff to focus on service delivery — along with other artificial intelligent and digital systems. Internet, an essential service for guests to connect on social media, will be free.”

The Global Class ship is said to be the largest cruise ship managed by Dream Cruises as it can accomodate up to 9,500 passengers.

It’s planned to be completed in 2020 and set to deploy from Shanghai all the way down to Australia.

The company, based in Kuala Lumpur, said users will be able to view the game in VR through their phones so they don’t have to invest heavily in hardware and only needed a headset to mount the phone.

“Whatever game your PC is capable of running, Clovr is able to turn into VR,” it posted on the site.

There will be no wires as the stereoscopic image will be transmitted to the phone via WiFi.

It also utilises the smartphone’s built-in gyroscope for head tracking and 3DOF (three degrees of freedom), allowing users to perform three types of rotations – pitch, yaw & roll.

“VR gaming is all about experiencing the game in a lifelike manner, and a bunch of cables would only get in the way. Using WiFi, Clovr transmits VR content to your phone, allowing you to freely roam while gaming in VR,” it posted.

While it would work with any PC game, the team found that it worked best for first-person shooters and role-playing games.

Clovr said it has tested the app with a number of popular games, including Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, DOTA 2, Dying Light, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, Half Life 1 and 2, Borderlands 2, and Portal 2.

“Most games should be able to run on Clovr. However, if you have a game you would like us to test out and optimise, just send us a message and we’ll help you figure it out,” it posted.

The company aimed to raise S$5,000 to put the finishing touches on the user interface and design. Additional funds would go towards app optimisation and new features.

Basic rewards started from S$2 to show support or S$3 for a three month subscription, plus Kickstarter exclusives like a lifetime subscription and beta access for S$50.

The deadline for the Kickstarter campaign is May 5, while the beta access will be available by June and standard access by July.

The team behind Clovr are its founder and chief technology officer Gan Chee Yong; co-founder and lead developer Lee Yew Chun; co-founder and tech consultant Albert Quek; business development team members Jan Wong and Daryll Tan; and digital marketing strategists Zewin Leung and Jeremy Ng.

Clovr admitted there were risks and challenges, including potential bugs and compatibility issues in the early stages, a need to develop an iOS version, and widening game compatibility.

“Our dream is for everyone to enjoy their favourite games on VR with Clovr. Users may run into hiccups when it comes to running certain games.

This is why in addition to continually testing new games on Clovr, our team is committed to troubleshoot and help you optimise your favourite games if you face any problems,” it said.

The startup’s Kickstarter page is at kck.st/2tr3IL1.

The state government has launched a pilot project to survey these areas with the help of camera-fitted drones, a revenue department official said.

Mapping was earlier carried out manually, but the drone technology is now changing the way this massive exercise is undertaken. Once extended to other areas and completed, the process is also expected to boost revenue collection for the government.

The project was launched in Sonori village in Purandar tehsil of Pune district.

“There are 43,000 gaothans (old settlements) in the state, where exact information about government-owned land, open areas and private properties is not available,” he said. “It has caused inordinate delay in charing property tax, drafting village or town-centric policy and implementing changes made in land utilisation reservation.”

“To date, the state machinery used to do such surveys manually, which used to be full of errors and time consuming,” the officer said.

However, deploying drones will drastically cut down on time and also bring more clarity in the exercise.

“Drones will capture the entire area in a few minutes and it can be downloaded on state provided software. It will help the revenue officials identify the open spaces, government and private land and quickly match them with the available records.

“This procedure can complete the mapping of a town in 2-3 days which otherwise would have taken months,” the revenue official said.

S Tripathi, an officer of the Survey of India, Deharadun, came to Pune last week and held a meeting with District Collector Sourabh Rao and other officials for starting the pilot project.

Under the project, which commenced on March 5, a couple of villages has already been mapped, the official said. The Survey of India works under the Union Ministry of Science and Technology.

The biggest benefit of the survey is going to be in revenue collection.

The existing database is not accurate, hence there are several properties where no revenue tax is collected. Once such properties are identified, the local government or the revenue department can start collecting tax, he said.

“We have not estimated how much tax collection will go up but it will be significant for sure. Every year, the revenue department comes up with special drives to find out non-tax paying properties and some amount is recovered.

“With modern and updated maps, no one can evade revenue tax,” the official said.

The report by Korea Small Business Institute said blockchain can open new horizons for how small and medium-sized enterprises conduct business with their larger contractors.

Blockchain, often associated with cryptography and virtual currency, is considered an incorruptible digital ledger that can document all kinds of transactions and data. The system is designed for a wide range of data sharing among a vast number of computers that are all linked together in a “chain” that theoretically cannot be tampered with.

Park Jae-sung, a research fellow at KOSBI, claimed that a contract distributed through the blockchain system will make delayed payment and unilateral changing of a deal a thing of the past.

He added that because smart contracts that are linked to virtual currency can be set in advance so immediate payments are made when contractual conditions are met, there is no way for a big company to withhold or delay payment. “To create such an environment, it is imperative that a kind of public blockchain be developed and set up so it can be used by companies,” the research fellow said.

He said that the first smart contract should be reached between SMEs and the government and state-run corporations so their feasibility and utility can be checked.

“Successful use of such deals will lead to this kind of arrangement becoming more widely adopted,” Kim said.

In addition, the researcher stressed that blockchain is widely hailed as a next generation technology that can bring about considerable innovation.

But crypto enthusiasts in the Kingdom say that’s easier said than done. Cryptocurrency exists in a legal “grey area”, according to several entrepreneurs pursuing crypto projects in the Kingdom, with the government rejecting the currencies themselves while embracing their underlying technology.

In Mean is the lead developer of the Khmer Crypto Foundation, and has also created his own cryptocurrency called KHCoin. While Mean admitted to feeling on-edge about operating in an atmosphere of regulatory uncertainty, he said he understood the hesitation on the part of the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) to engage with cryptocurrency. The new technology is often plagued by scams, wild fluctuations in value and under-regulation.

When Mean created KHCoin, he originally offered it for free to stay on the right side of the law. Then, when he tried to monetise it, he got slapped down by regulators.

“I wanted to bring value to my coin, but when I started my payment system, the national bank said, ‘Any crypto transaction is illegal’,” Mean said, referring to an announcement from the NBC in December banning “all banks and microfinance institutions from trading, buying, selling and advertising cryptocurrencies”.

That announcement led some banks to prevent customers from using their own personal bank accounts to buy or sell cryptocurrency, which made it difficult to trade in cryptocurrencies without specifically outlawing people from owning them.

But prior to its December announcement, the NBC had launched its own initiative to explore the use of the underlying technology that cryptocurrency relies on, a concept known as blockchains. The NBC signed an agreement with a Japanese firm in April to develop a blockchain-based project for its own internal use, which would track interbank lending and transactions.

Blockchain was developed in 2009 to operate as a public ledger for the original cryptocurrency, bitcoin. The technology operates by recording a series of new transactions, called “blocks”, that reference previous blocks, forming a cryptographically secure list of recorded transactions that are linked together.

“At its core, the blockchain is just a database. We’ve discovered a way for the public to change this database without corrupting any of the previous entries within it, so it’s impossible to fake a transaction,” explained Steve Miller, founder of Cambodia-based blockchain group CryptoAsia.

According to Miller, a “private blockchain” project like the one at the NBC is just a database lacking a verification process. And that verification process – the backbone of any blockchain project – is where cryptocurrencies become necessary, according to Miller.

With concerns over an oversupply in the second half of this year waning, more market trackers have revised up their growth projections for the world chip market this year, putting shares of chipmakers on an upward curve.

According to the sources, a recent report from the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) has forecast global chip sales to rise 9.5 per cent on-year to US$451 billion this year.

The projection is higher than the 7 per cent forecast presented by the WSTS in November last year.

In a report released a week ago, the US Semiconductor Industry Association said global semiconductors sales spiked 22.7 per cent from a year ago to US$37.6 billion in January, maintaining the on-year gaining streak for 18 months on end.

Early this month, global investment bank Goldman Sachs said in a report to investors that the price of 32-gigabyte server modules had risen as high as 5 per cent in just one month amid a global undersupply of DRAMs. The report sent shares of US-based chipmaker Micron Technology Inc soaring more than 10 per cent in just three sessions.

Citing industry sources, Taiwan’s IT daily DigiTimes reported that global DRAM sales will spike more than 30 per cent on-year to US$96 billion this year, backed by increased demand for chips for data centres and smartphones.

The daily said DRAM prices will likely increase 5 to 10 per cent in the first half of this year from a year earlier, with no price falls in the cards for the time being.

A South Korean industry source echoed the view.

“Demand for DRAMs used in servers and mobile devices will continue its upward momentum in the second half of the year,” the source said.

“In particular, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will enjoy robust performances for the time being, given their dominant positions in the 3D NAND and DRAM technologies.”

Another market watcher said global chip sales are likely to go up this year thanks to the growing size of the overall market, despite a possible drop in memory chip prices in the latter half of this year.

Yet, some sceptics said the world semiconductor market remains dogged by possible downside risks, such as China’s massive spending on chip production and an excessive industry wide competition to cut prices.