The new system also has the advantage of being able to handle trains with different door placements.

Safety barriers to prevent people from falling onto the tracks are being installed on station platforms ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. The Tokyo metropolitan government launched a practical demonstration of the new system on the municipal Toei Subway lines last month.

When a train pulls into the Toei Asakusa Line’s Daimon Station in Minato Ward, doors open in a safety barrier that has been temporarily constructed on the platform. Affixed to each train door window is a QR code sticker measuring about 15 centimeters by 15 centimeters.

“Cameras installed on the platform read the codes, and the barrier doors located in front of the train doors open and close in unison,” an official of the metropolitan government’s Bureau of Transportation said proudly.

The stickers display a geometric pattern similar to the QR codes that mobile phone users read with their device’s camera to connect to a dedicated website.

The metropolitan government worked with Denso Wave Inc., an Aichi Prefecture-based company that creates QR codes, to develop the world’s first method for operating safety barrier doors that uses QR codes. Trials of the new system began on Nov. 24.

Huge savings likely

One issue that has made installing safety barriers difficult is that trains in the Tokyo metropolitan area run through an increasing number of directly connected lines operated by different companies.

These operators run trains with differing numbers of cars and doors, so precisely opening and closing the correct safety barrier doors requires the installation of expensive communication devices in train cars.

Installation of safety barrier doors has not been completed on the Asakusa Line, which operates through services on four private railway lines operated by Keikyu Corp., Keisei Electric Railway Co., Hokuso-Railway Co. and Shibayama Railway Co.

Some trains on these lines have six cars, and others have eight. Some cars have two doors on each side, and others have three. With such a variety of train cars running on these lines, installing communication equipment needed the understanding of each rail operator — and for them to bear the financial burden.

To resolve this problem, the metropolitan government approached Denso Wave in 2015. The QR codes contain information including the number of cars in each train and the number of doors on each car.

Scanner cameras mounted on the platform ceiling read the QR codes, and this newly developed technology opens and closes the safety barrier doors located in front of the train car doors.

The cost of installing communication equipment, which according to a bureau official could amount to “tens of millions of yen for each train car formation,” can now be replaced by the cost of affixing stickers on each train car.

Platform safety barriers featuring this new technology will be installed in four of the Asakusa Line’s busiest stations — Shinbashi, Daimon, Mita and Sengakuji — before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. They likely will be installed in the line’s 16 other stations after the Games.

Other types being tried

The central government and railway operators aim to install platform safety barrier doors at 882 stations across Japan by fiscal 2020, when the Tokyo Olympics will be held. As of the end of March this year, they had been installed at 686 stations. However, at the 260 stations used by 100,000 or more people daily, only 84 had barriers.

Installing the barriers can often involve extending and strengthening the platforms. Rail operators are making various efforts to overcome these problems.

In 2016, East Japan Railway Co. started an experiment involving a new type of door at Machida Station on the Yokohama Line. The doors have a frame made from metal pipes that reduce the overall weight by about 30 percent. This will reportedly eliminate the need for major strengthening work on some platforms.

Keikyu trialed a new type of platform barrier at Miurakaigan Station in Miura, Kanagawa Prefecture, until September. Trains with differing numbers of doors use this station. The new platform barrier can adjust the position of its doors so they line up with the train doors.

“The test revealed problems such as the sensor reaction speed and the length of time needed to open and close the doors,” a Keikyu public relations official said. “We’ll continue to consider how we can put the new system into practical use.”

They go to the shopping mall and they get a push message saying, “You’re close to our shop and we have a special, exclusive discount for you. Come visit us.” That makes them feel very special. It’s almost like being famous. It’s not perceived as “creepy.”

I think this is going to change, though. There’s a new story about identity theft or “phishing” every second day in the news. People are starting to hear more often about getting scammed or robbed online. They start to realise that their information is out there for anyone to see.

Certainly, at some point, the awareness levels will increase. A quick look at Pantip or blognone, reveals that they now have pop-ups asking for consent to use your data. That didn’t exist last year.

If you’re ready to improve the safety of your data, know that there are two sides to data privacy: the side you control and the side you don’t control. It’s up to you whether you want to check into every single venue you visit and share every dish you eat, or even your photos of the toilets when they’re particularly fancy. You can control that.

Then there’s the personal data that you’ve handed over to companies because you needed to use their services. For example, your bank or mobile service provider has your ID number, address, and phone number. Your bank would also know all your transactions, while your mobile service provider would know who you’ve called and which websites you’ve visited.

That is a lot of data for them to hold and with it comes a great responsibility. And it begs the question: what is being done with that data? Are you confident it is safeguarded carefully? Is everything being done to protect it? Or are they just ticking off the boxes to meet bare legal requirements?

If you’re counting on your data being |protected by legal requirements, know that the only requirement is “consent”. That form you signed ages ago, or those boxes you ticked on a website – that’s all the law requires.

Everything else depends on the commitment of individual organisations. I’ve worked in a number of them and I can tell you I’d say the average local company gets a two out of five rating on privacy, even the very big ones. The ones with a global footprint usually do better, even if their presence here is small. Size isn’t what matters.

At DTAC, privacy is not just a principle and a policy posted on our corporate website. It goes beyond that. You have to look at the users, the people at the operations level. They are the most risk exposed. For the month of November, we trained 700 people across eight 2.5-hour sessions. And we’re continuously producing internal campaigns online, on our in-house radio and on billboards.

Training is key because of the ambiguities surrounding privacy. If you just look at the code of conduct, well, how do you interpret it? The code of conduct says that our employees should not reveal, disclose, sell or distribute company secrets in any form. So if I go into a company’s records and look at my girlfriend’s file, I’m not revealing, disclosing or selling any information, am I? And yet, it’s clearly not okay. These are the kind of scenarios we have to cover in training. I use real-world examples to show the risks that can come with consulting information other than for work-related reasons. And I remind our teams that there are better avenues to do this without infringing on privacy. Want to consult your elderly grandparents’ phone bill? Ask them for their password and use the DTAC website. Don’t do it using your employee privileges.

But training without a control system is not enough. Every access to information at DTAC has to be reconciled with a customer’s request for that information. If we spot any unreconciled access, our managers will investigate it, and I randomly investigate the managers, too.

Finally, full data protection is actually a combination of data privacy plus data security. We’ve made big changes on who can access what. A single password won’t get you access to everything anymore. And it’s impossible to download staff records in bulk, which is what happened in a hacking attack on a competitor last year. You’d have access to one or two records at most.

I really hope consumers will demand more regarding their data protection. If someone steals your identity and commits a crime, you could get in serious trouble. There is no 100-per-cent protection, but do ask yourself: Is your data held by a company that is watching, a company that cares, and a company with systems in place to spot anomalies?

Montri Stapornkul is an assistant |vice president, policy governance culture department, DTAC.

Life was good for Sri until she fell ill for a few days. After recovering, Sri found herself short of the cash needed to reopen the shop. Due to a lack of credit and only needing a small sum, Sri couldn’t go to a bank, and so turned to a loan shark. What happened next was the kind of story we all know but, perhaps, never really care enough about – high interest rate and debt collection methods that border violations of human rights.

Fintech refers to tech companies that use new technologies to offer new and more user-friendly forms of financial services. The Millennial Disruption Index – a survey done by Viacom Media Network in 2013 – showed that more than 70 per cent of the millennials believed financial innovation would come from outside the industry, and were more excited about new financial service offerings from Google, Amazon, or Paypal than from the banks. The index showed that Fintech was popular among the younger generations back when it was started.

However, there have been rapid shifts in the domination of financial technology by the tech companies in recent years. Most commercial banks, including those in Thailand, now have a division focusing on fintech and financial innovation to come up with new financial products and services that leverage the same cutting-edge technologies, such as mobile computing, machine learning and blockchain, to compete with the tech competitors. Some banks went so far as to create new organisations, outside of the parent organisations, that think and work like a tech company. In doing so, they transformed their situation from being disrupted to becoming a disrupter. A good example of this is Kasikornbank’s KBTG.

Aside from offering new innovative financial services to their existing customers, the use of Fintech also allows banks to serve potential |customers – those considered “underbanked” and “unbanked” – who in the past did not have access to financial services due to costs, lack of credit or access. The ability for the banks to serve everyone is known as “financial inclusion.” According to the World Bank, around 2 billion people don’t use |formal financial services and over 50 per cent of adults in the poorest households are unbanked.

Financial inclusion is a key enabler to reducing poverty and boosting prosperity. The president of the World Bank Group has called for universal financial access, where everyone can have access to financial services, by 2020. A report from Thailand’s Ministry of Finance in 2016 shows that 56 per cent of Thais received micro finance from special financial institutions and less than 9 per cent from commercial banks. Clearly, most Thais often turn to non-bank providers for small sums of money.

The K Plus Shop is an example of fintech for financial inclusion from KBank. It is a mobile application designed to be a one-stop solution for micro businesses such as small shops and street vendors. The app is a point of sale, sales tracking, sales reports and PR tool combined into one app that anyone can download and use free of charge on any smartphone – iOS or Android. With K Plus Shop, the vendor can receive QR payment from any customer using K Plus, other mobile banking or e-Wallet applications via the standard QR for PromptPay, as well as from WeChat Pay and Alipay. The vendor can also use the app to create and send out promotions to nearby customers in real time at no cost. The real beauty of K Plus Shop in terms of financial inclusion comes with the use of machine learning to create behaviour-based credit models based on sell information. A variety of new financial services using the app can be offered to the vendors over a period of time. For example, Sri can choose to borrow Bt2,000 and return it in seven days from the app with instant approval. As a lifelong practitioner in |information technology, I have never been so |excited by the potential of technology as a means to make a difference. The fact that we now have super computers that are always connected to the Internet in everyone’s hand allows business and technologies to really make profound impacts on people’s lives. The poorest households are more likely to have access to mobile phones than to toilets or clean water, the World Bank has said. This underlines the significance of mobile technology and its potential in making the world a better place for everyone. We can all make good apps to make the rich richer. But what about making apps that can make life better for those who have always been underserved? Banks are not for charity, you might say. A study done by Accenture and CARE (care.org) found that serving the unbanked is a US$380 billion (nearly Bt12.5 trillion) market opportunity worldwide.

Apirut Vancha-Am is the principal visionary |architect, Kasikorn Business-Technology Group.

THE NATIONAL Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) will focus its attention on five areas to support Thailand 4.0 scheme.

Sarun Sumriddetchkajorn, director of Nectec said that the agency next year will focus on five areas: agriculture, smart manufacturing and services industries, health and medicine, energy and environment, and education, including lifelong education and learning.

For agriculture, the agency has developed a Food and Agriculture Revolution model, a “smart farm” solution to support the country’s farmers. The smart farm will focus on technology, management and application to increase on-farm production and help to reduce costs, while also upgrading agricultural standards to fit the digital economy.

In the area of smart manufacturing and services industries, the agency will utilise innovation and technology to support machine monitoring systems, and production-line health monitoring systems, in order to maintain performance and support efficiency.

It can closely monitor data indicating the state and performance of the machines, and so help to reduce machinery maintenance costs. The monitoring could also improve energy management for different sections of the production line, thus contributing to high productivity in the manufacturing sector.

The agency works with the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board and the Digital Economy and Society Ministry to develop data integration of poverty analytics. The resulting data about basic social welfare needs is integrated with other relevant data and processed through big data analytics, data integration, global positioning and network and graph analysis to help find optimal policies to improve the quality of life for the nation’s people.

For health and medicine, the agency will focus on developing a personal health record system, an information technology system able to enhance the efficiency of provincial health services. The system will also facilitate management of health data interfaces with immediate interchangeable standards in a precise and quick manner. It would allow users to access the system via tablets and smart devices, and for doctors to send feedback to the clinic.

The agency also developed an e-referral system in Bangkok and metropolitan areas in order to transfer patient treatment data between community medical clinics and the main hospitals, so that doctors could carry on treatment for patients who are moving between facilities.

Meanwhile in the area of energy and the environment, the agency has partnered to develop energy analytics systems to monitor electricity demand, and to analyse and design energy management ranging from the energy consumed by individuals to the use of renewable energy, including energy preservation and enhancement of energy usage. The agency will also develop and set up EV charging stations in order to increase public confidence in the use of these vehicles.

Addressing the area of lifetime edu-cation and learning, the agency is developing massive open online courses and open education resources to support and improve the education sector. It will provide KidBright, a board developed to stimulate the potential of systematic and creative thinking among children through a learn-and-play method. The board is equipped with a display and simple sensors that operate in compliance with the function commands. The learners can design and create the block-structured programming commands via an application on their smartphones.

Nectec’s Sarun noted the agency’s researcher teams would work together with partners under the concept of “practical research, springboard innovation.” The concept will guide them as they utilise research findings, technology, knowledge and digital innovation to produce new services and products to support and promote business growth, create added value, and bring in new income.

The result, said Sarun, would be sustainable social and economic development within the country. In doing so, it will also conduct research that will help make choices that become a significant springboard to uplifting the country into a Thailand 4.0 future.

Last year, the agency enjoyed success in developing new innovation and technology in five main areas: big data and analytics, image processing and optical imaging, machine learning, CT scans and X-rays, as well as reluctance motors and switches. It developed over 286 prototypes and provided 398 papers.

“Science, technology, research and innovation can be important tools to develop the country in various dimensions,” said Sarun. “It would improve the quality of life for Thai people as a whole and drive the country’s Thailand 4.0 scheme.”

Yet there have been no virtual assistants to help us at work … until now.

Cisco Partner Summit announced on Friday the Cisco Spark™ Assistant, which it says is the world’s first enterprise-ready voice assistant for meetings.

It will be available first on the Cisco Spark Room Series portfolio, including the new flagship Cisco Spark Room 70, which was also announced at the same time.

Cisco Spark Assistant is the latest innovation on the Cisco Spark platform. Unlike all-purpose voice assistants, Cisco Spark Assistant has one goal: to help you have great meetings that run more smoothly.

“During the next few years, AI meeting bots will be joining our work teams. When they do, people will be able to ditch the drudgery of meeting set-up and other logistics to become more creative than ever,” said Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM, Applications Group, Cisco.

“The future of great meetings is Spark with AI and our partners have an incredible opportunity to help customers take advantage of this game-changing technology.”

Netflix members who have a supported device and a premium plan can now enjoy movies and shows in HDR.

That means more vibrant colours in “Chef’s Table”, more terrifying depths in the Upside Down in “Stranger Things 2”.

More than 200 hours of HDR entertainment is currently available and next year more HDR PCs will be on the market.

This feature is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with industry partners.

Intel CPUs of seventh generation and up provide the capability to play Netflix HDR10 encodes. Both Intel and Nvidia developed GPUs that use 10 bits per channel for each of the RGB colours, increasing the colour space that can be represented.

With the new hardware available on consumer PCs, Netflix and Microsoft partnered to put the software pieces in place.

Microsoft added the necessary operating system and browser changes in its Windows 10 Autumn Creators Update, and Netflix engineers integrated the APIs to complete the video-player work.

The admission played into concerns that Apple was stealthily nudging iPhone users to upgrade to newer models by letting them think it was the handsets that needed replacing and not just a matter of getting new batteries.

“Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices,” an Apple spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry.

“Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.”

Lithium-ion batteries are commonly used in mobile devices, and charging capacity naturally wanes with use and time.

Meanwhile, smartphone operating software is perpetually improved with updates that typically increase appetites for electricity.

Last year, Apple introduced a feature to “smooth out” spikes in demand for power to prevent iPhone 6 models from shutting down due to the cold or weak batteries, according to the California-based company.

The iPhone 6 made its debut in late 2014.

The feature, which slows performance to demand less power, has been extended to iPhone 7 handsets with the latest iOS operating software and will be added to other Apple products “in the future,” the spokesperson said.

Apple releases new iPhone models annually, and sales of the handsets power its money-making engine.

People worried about performance could replace batteries, which Apple does for free for iPhones covered by warranty or for $79 if that is not the case.

Apple design of handsets makes it borderline impossible for people to change batteries themselves.

Rumors have persisted for years at tech news websites devoted to Apple products and among fans of the company’s products that iPhone performance was being intentionally slowed, perhaps to push users to buy newer models.

The consumer electronics industry overall has routinely been accused of designing products that wear out sooner than necessary in a strategy referred to as “planned obsolescence.”

The FlashStation FS1018 is a powerful 12-bay, low-latency, all-SSD NAS powered by an Intel Pentium D1508 dual-core CPU.

It has eight gigabytes of DDR4 EEC RAM, expandable up to 32GB.

There are four plug-and-play Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports and selected network add-on cards can be installed with a PCIe 3×8 slot, providing more than 40K 4K Random Write IOPS.

The cutting-edge hardware delivers high performance and throughput even with multitasking and multiple virtual machines hosted.

The all-new Virtual Machine Manager enables the testing of software in sandboxes, isolating connected machines and increases server flexibility.

“Designing a form factor that satisfies the need for both performance and drive capacity was crucial,” said product manager Jason Fan.

The DiskStation DS218 is a two-bay NAS equipped with a 64-bit quad-core processor delivering sequential throughput at over 112 MB/s reading and 112 MB/s writing.

It comes with 2GB of DDR4 memory, four times the capacity of its predecessor.

The DS218 is also optimised for 10-bit 4K H.265 video transcoding via Video Station.

Michael Wang, another product manager at Synology, noted that 4K video content is “becoming more and more common”.

“If your device isn’t capable of 4K video playback, the DS218 provides online 4K video transcoding to 1080p and below for a smoother experience.”

The FS1018 and DS218 run on DiskStation Manager, the intuitive operating system for Synology NAS devices, with various applications offered to enhance work productivity.

Synology has received several media accolades, topping the mid-range NAS category in TechTarget magazine’s storage-solution survey and winning PC Mag Readers’ Choice seven years in a row.

The newly emerging “Digital Mobility” trend offers a less-hassled lifestyle, because smartphone users can now manage a variety of matters via their phones with greater ease and convenience.

One of the major drivers of this lifestyle trend in Thailand is a government policy to promote e-payment services that cut cash management costs. That initiative has led to progress among many services. Examples include expanded use of chip-embedded debit cards (EDCs) and more EDC installations at card-accepting merchants, plus the introduction of the PromptPay service and QR code payments, which will surely change customer behaviour. Concurrently, more online services have been devised that allow users to make financial transactions via online platforms.

According to the Bank of Thailand, the number of mobile banking accounts had reached 26.3 million by the second-quarter of 2017, or 52.8 per cent year on year growth. As well, monetary transfers and payment transactions via mobile banking services had surged 99 per cent year on year.

Notably, inter-bank transfer transactions had increased nearly 131 per cent, due in large part to the launch of PromptPay service early in 2017, wherein over 90 per cent of PromptPay transfers were conducted on smartphones. Same bank transfers and payments via mobile banking services had risen 95 per cent and 87 per cent, respectively.

The volume of mobile banking transactions accounts for 61 per cent of all banking transactions, becoming larger than the combined volume of transactions via Internet banking and ATMs.

Mobile banking rolls out

Amid leapfrogging growth in mobile banking services, Kasikornbank has embarked upon strategies to meet this challenge. Being the No 1 Thai digital banking provider, KBank has enhanced their mobile banking capacity for broader service coverage to serve retail and SME customers, as well as e-commerce merchants, seeking fast and convenient trade transactions via three KBank applications.

They include K Plus, which is now Thailand’s single most popular mobile banking application. The number of K Plus users is expected to reach 8 million by the end of this year and 10.8 million in 2018. Most recently, KBank has been promoting QR code payments – an integral K Plus feature – across the country by making it easier for merchants to agree to QR code payment acceptance. Marketing campaigns have encouraged customers to use the QR code payment system. This is another real challenge of leveraging technology to drive change in consumer behaviour.

The goal of K Plus is to transform mobile banking into a lifestyle platform that could better meet all customer needs. In so doing, the lifestyle banking platform employs machine learning technology to analyse and develop guidelines in offering new services in line with customer behaviour. Among these services is marketing data targeting specific customers via the Mobile Life Plus menu on K Plus. In 2018, a cross-border money transfer menu will be added to K Plus – “low-value remittance” will be a new dimension in cross-border money transfer services for retail customers. With this service, customers in Thailand would for the first time be able to transfer money via K Pus to recipients in over 40 countries worldwide, including China, the US, Britain, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and the European Union.

K Plus Shop is the only application from any Thai bank designed for merchants to receive payments via QR code. To facilitate over 9 million Chinese tourists visiting Thailand each year, K Plus Shop also allows merchants to receive payments from Alipay and WeChatPay. KBank targets around 2.5 million transactions by Chinese tourists per year. Currently, over 450,000 merchants have downloaded the K Plus Shop application, and it is expected that one million merchants will use it in 2018.

K Plus SME, a mobile banking application for SMEs, gives customers access to information and helps them to conveniently and quickly manage their own business and finances. Entrepreneurs can easily check their account balances, regardless of whether the money comes from an electronic transfer or a cheque, and the app even shows their own returned cheques. The total number of K Plus SME users should reach 420,000 by the end of this year and 500,000 in 2018.

Commercial banks are facing increasing competition from business rivals. Financial institutions, fintech start-ups and other businesses are eyeing to expand into financial services. Banks have to elevate their service capabilities to meet that challenge and facilitate changing customer behaviour. K Bank believes the transformation of mobile banking into a lifestyle platform will be the key answer, responding to the digital mobility trend and new lifestyles around the world today and in the future.

Patchara Samalapa is senior executive vice |president, Kasikornbank.