Forming the foundation for the company’s growing financial solutions will be Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat Satellite, which help to provide a consistent, open standards-based platform to better enable the rapid delivery of application services across the countries served by Ascend Money, Red Hat said in a press statement.

Ascend Money’s TrueMoney payment platform serves more than 30 million people through its e-wallet app and 50,000 agent networks. TrueMoney supports bill payments, mobile top-ups, money transfers, and online and offline payments. As its user base expanded, Ascend Money faced challenges integrating its systems and scaling across new and growing markets. With customer service a key factor in the payment platform’s success, Ascend Money began to search for a more flexible and scalable open source platform that could support its current and future business goals, including bringing the app to unbanked and underbanked users in more countries and expanded functionality.

As the company rolls out its new application foundation, Ascend Money plans to use Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to more rapidly create, host, and scale applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Built on open innovation and industry standards, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps Ascend Money unite its developers and IT operations teams on a single platform for modern and traditional applications with shorter development cycles and increased efficiencies.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform unites developers and IT operations on a single platform to build, deploy, and manage applications consistently across hybrid cloud infrastructures. This helps businesses achieve greater value by delivering modern and traditional applications with shorter development cycles and increased efficiencies. The platform is built on open source innovation and industry standards, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kubernetes, and is trusted by many companies around the world.

Ascend Money has also selected Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat Satellite to provide effective management and automated provisioning of infrastructure across all environments.

Beam is based on Nutanix’s recently-acquired Minjar Botmetric service, which is already used to manage more than $1B of cloud spend across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, Nutanix said in a press statement.

According to Gartner, “Governance becomes incrementally more challenging as organizations deploy multicloud strategies, because they must govern not only the consumption of cloud by provider, but also consumption across cloud providers. The cloud providers offer on-demand, self-service resources with endless capacity, making it difficult for organizations to gain visibility into what is being consumed. Without visibility into consumption, it is impossible to govern and manage your environment.”[1] For businesses adopting hybrid cloud architectures, this creates an unenviable scenario, managing IT costs and security across third-party cloud deployments.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software helps companies reduce complexity of their multi-cloud architectures by melding private, public and distributed clouds into a common IT operating model for their end-to-end infrastructure. Beam, the first SaaS offering from Nutanix, further reduces complexity by providing customers with deep visibility and rich analytics detailing how they are using the public cloud. It also provides one-click recommendations based on machine intelligence so IT teams can immediately optimize their cloud spend and enhance their security posture for improved compliance across clouds. IT organizations get a clear view into the entirety of their public cloud deployments so unexpected costs and potential security gaps can be addressed before they turn into business challenges.Beam helps organizations make better decisions when operating multi-cloud architectures.

“For us, integrity, security and compliance are of the utmost importance, especially across our multi-client, multi-technology environment with a large application landscape. It was becoming a nightmare to keep track of everything. That’s when we came across Nutanix Beam,” said Rustum Virani, Cloud Solution Architect Manager, ZS Associates. “Beam is an excellent tool that provides a single pane of glass to see the state of our infrastructure, automate tasks, provide cost-saving recommendations and generate billing reports.”

Nutanix Beam customers better manage their multi-cloud deployments with:

●    Cost Optimization and Cloud Visibility — IT teams get full visibility into their overall cloud costs. They can then optimize their spending by quickly identifying unused and underutilized resources, and select more size and cost appropriate cloud resources for each application

●     Centralized Financial Governance — businesses get streamlined visibility into the entire cloud footprint so IT departments can track the consumption of cloud resources by department and group, make data-driven decisions balancing IT needs and cost constraints, and enforce policies based on allocated budgets

●     Continuous Cloud Security and Regulatory Compliance —customers can define custom health check policies for compliance audits, and proactively analyze cloud security operations, while real-time scans for cloud compliance identify risks and violations

“In the multi-cloud era, IT organizations need a unified, real-time view to all of their private, public and distributed clouds,” said Vijay Rayapati, GM, Engineering, Nutanix. “Beam services help our customers optimize their cloud spend and manage compliance, putting them back in control of their IT assets. We’re so pleased to be a part of the Nutanix family and bring our Botmetric technology to Nutanix customers as Nutanix Beam.”

The news marked the latest in a series of privacy embarrassments for the world’s biggest social network, which has faced a firestorm over the hijacking of personal data on tens of millions of users and more recently for disclosures on data-sharing deals with smartphone makers.

Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said in a statement that the company recently “found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts.”

Facebook said this affected users posting between May 18 and May 27 as it was implementing a new way to share some items such as photos.

That left the default or suggested method of sharing as public instead of only for specific users or friends.

Facebook said it corrected the problem on May 22 but was unable to change all the posts, so is now notifying affected users.

“Starting today we are letting everyone affected know and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” Egan said.

“To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before — and they could still choose their audience just as they always have. We’d like to apologize for this mistake.”

Facebook confirmed earlier this week that China-based Huawei — which has been banned by the US military and is a lightning rod for cyberespionage concerns — was among device makers authorized to see user data in agreements that had been in place for years.

Facebook has claimed the agreements with some 60 device makers dating from a decade ago were designed to help the social media giant get more services into the mobile ecosystem.

Nonetheless, lawmakers expressed outrage that Chinese firms were given access to user data at a time when officials were trying to block their access to the US market over national security concerns.

The revelations come weeks after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in Congress about the hijacking of personal data on some 87 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy working on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

These marquee technology companies – CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP, and SUSE – have committed to extending additional rights to cure open source license noncompliance. This will lead to greater cooperation with distributors of open source software to correct errors and increased participation in open source software development, Red Hat said in a press statement.

The GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) are among the most widely used open source software licenses covering many important software projects, including the Linux kernel. GPL version 3 (GPLv3) introduced an approach to termination that offers distributors of the code an opportunity to correct errors and mistakes in license compliance. This approach allows for enforcement of license compliance consistent with a community in which heavy-handed approaches to enforcement, including for financial gain, are out of place, the statement added.

In Nov. 2017, Red Hat, Facebook, Google, and IBM each committed to extending the GPLv3 approach for license compliance errors to the software code each has contributed under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 and v2. With today’s announcement, there are now 10 companies that have publicly committed to providing greater predictability to open source users. The large ecosystems of projects using the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x licenses will benefit from adoption of this more balanced approach to termination derived from GPLv3.

The drone-powered sunshade — being developed by Asahi Power Service — should be released next year, and will initially target those in need of a hands-free head covering wider than your average hat, like golfers.

The potential headaches posed by crashes, and regulations governing autonomous aircraft, mean the company expects the product will initially be used in closed private spaces, like golf courses.

“I decided to develop it as I don’t like to hold an umbrella,” company president Kenji Suzuki told AFP.

At 150 centimetres (60 inches) wide, the parasol prototype weighs five kilos (11 pounds), and so far can only fly for five minutes on one charge.

Asahi Power Service is hoping to quickly extend flying time to at least 20 minutes, partly by making the device lighter, Suzuki said.

“The first prototype we made was just a drone attached to a regular umbrella,” he said.

“We are now testing the third-generation prototype and trying to overcome (the technological challenges of) hovering in a stable manner above the head of the user and then chasing the user.”

The drones are fitted with cameras that help the parasols track their owners and stay over the correct head.

The company expects the device to have a price tag of about 30,000 yen ($275), a hefty investment for a parasol that isn’t yet able to protect its users from the rain.

For now, the devices are not waterproof.

“Eventually, we aim to develop it into an umbrella,” Suzuki said.

The announcement by Apple comes amid a growing focus on protecting privacy following a Facebook data scandal and new rules being enforced by the European Union for online services.

Apple, kicking off its annual developers conference, appeared to be setting itself apart from Facebook, which has drawn the ire of privacy activists, and even showed how its software could prevent the social network from tracking users on Apple devices.

The upcoming versions of software powering iPhone and Mac computers will block the use of so-called “cookies” from Facebook “like” buttons that can follow people from one website to another, Apple said.

“Turns out ‘like’ buttons and ‘comment’ fields can be used to track you, so this year we are shutting that down,” Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi told a standing-room crowd of some 6,000 developers at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in the heart of Silicon Valley.

New MacOS Mojave and iOS 12 software to be released later this year will also make it harder to use trackers to create “unique fingerprints” by gleaning data about devices being used, according to Federighi.

“It will become dramatically more difficult for data companies to identify your device and track you,” Federighi said.

Enhanced privacy was part of a slew of improvements touted by Apple to developers, whose creations are key to the popularity of iPhones, iPads and Mac computers.

The conference kickoff came the same day the New York Times reported Facebook gave special access to device makers, including Apple, to personal data on social network users and their friends.

Facebook said it “disagreed” with the report and that the agreements with device makers were far different from those with third-party developers including one which shared data with the political firm Cambridge Analytica.

Acknowledging smartphone ‘addiction’

Apple’s software upgrades also include features that help users understand how much time they are spending on their devices, amid concerns of growing smartphone “addiction.”

Features being added to “limit distraction” from iPhones included being able to turn-off lock screen notifications at bedtimes to avoid “getting spun up” by prompts when perhaps one just wants to check the time.

“I think we are all going to be using Do-Not-Disturb a whole lot more,” Federighi said.

Along with ways to limit distracting notifications from iPhones, a new Screen Time feature allows people to more tightly control and monitor time spent in applications.

“We know there are people who would like extra help,” Federighi said of curbing app time.

Parents will be able to set limits for time their children set in apps, and get detailed reports regarding which apps are used.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook meanwhile told developers the “app ecosystem” developed by the iPhone maker will soon have delivered more than $100 billion to partners.

“This is beyond remarkable,” Cook said, noting that the online App Store will be 10 years old in July.

“The App Store has fundamental changed the way we live.”

The array of features being added to software powering Apple devices included being able to make group FaceTime video calls; letting third-party applications work on Apple Watch, expanding the abilities of Siri digital assistant and delivering a platform for augmented reality applications.

Some analysts remained unimpressed, saying Apple is lagging rivals in key areas like artificial intelligence as the smartphone market matures.

“I am concerned… that Apple is falling further behind Google and Amazon in AI (artificial intelligence),” said GlobalData research director Avi Greengart in a tweet.

“If Apple has major improvements to Siri in its labs, it did not show them off today.”

Tech start-ups should gear themselves to advanced and deep tech if they want to have a long-term social impact, according to industry watchers.

Thailand’s start-up ecosystem has the right momentum to continue to grow, including healthy support from large corporates, and the country is in the spotlight of global investors. However, aspiring tech entrepreneurs need to be aware of the lack of tech talent and regulators, as well as the risk and uncertainty from the political situation.

Thailand’s tech start-up ecosystem has been developing well and is quite mature. For example, total start-up fundraising in Thailand in 2017, excluding initial coin offerings (ICO), was worth around US$105.55 million (Bt3.37 billion), with the largest deal being aCommerce’s Series-B fundraising of $65 million. Of 30 deals, from seed to series-B, 29 involved traditional venture capital while only one drew from the new ICO approach.

This new source of fundraising first emerged in Thailand last year, when OmiseGo raised $25 million in start-up funds in 2017.

There has been a major increase in the number of large corporates investing in or otherwise encouraging start-ups, through their own initiatives or through collaborations, said Oranuch Lerdsuwankij, chief executive officer and co-founder of Southeast Asia’s largest tech conference, Techsauce Global Summit.

While telecom companies and banks were the first two sectors to gear up for involvement in start-ups, other corporates have been rolling out innovative start-up projects, including SCG, PTT and Mitrphol among others.

These large corporates recognise the importance of innovation for their new S curves, and so are building projects that support start-ups. The shift was one of the key factors driving the start-up ecosystem in Thailand since last year, said Oranuch.

These trends have led to creation of new niche start-ups in agriculture, healthcare, and food. That’s a good sign for the overall development of the country, since it creates social impacts and can address the problems experienced by the nation’s core industries, Oranuch said. These recent innovations go beyond creating yet another mobile app.

“Start-up founders are not new faces without business experience,” she said, “but have their own domain expertise, experience, and know-how. They see real problems and they come to develop innovative technology to address the problems. Meanwhile, the large corporates in the core sectors move to support these start-ups, and that helps to create yet more new start-ups that come with domain expertise rather than having to come up with the ideas.

“This momentum will create sustainable social impacts in the long term, though it might not see results in the short term. It takes some time,” she said.

“Meanwhile, more start-ups in Thailand have started to use advanced technologies to help solve social problem such as big data, artificial intelligence [AI], machine learning, and deep tech,” she added. “It needs collaboration from academics, like at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.”

One result is a trend toward start-ups in Thailand working on B2B2C (business to business to consumer) solutions, he said, though B2C start-ups also continue to grow, but the number of B2B start-ups is rapidly increasing. The participation of large corporates should lead to the creation of many more B2B2C start-ups.

Meanwhile, Krating Poonpol, fund manager of 500 TukTuk, the well-known source of venture capital for Thailand’s start-ups, said that the industry could expect double the start-up growth compared to last year in Thailand. That growth will be spread across the major business sectors including travel, finance, insurance, healthcare, education and agriculture.

However, a big challenge lies ahead due to the lack of available tech talent at exactly the time when a spurt in start-up growth is expected. That could prove a major threat for Thai start-ups in 2019.

“Investors are now looking at and comparing Thailand and Vietnam, and if we are not ready in terms of tech talents and local regulations in time, it might lead to a discounting of Thailand’s score,” said Krating.

He said Thailand has the potential to be seen as the proxy wall for tech giants like Line, Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent, with the impact of this becoming apparent by 2019.

The government needs to consider regulations that facilitate and encourage Thai start-ups to be able to compete against the giants. Meanwhile, Thai start-ups themselves need to be aware and adjust themselves in order to co-exist and grow along with these giants. “The coming of giant players will change the game in the consumer market, thus start-ups need to adjust themselves to deal with this situation,” said Krating.

Venture company 500 TukTuk has invested in start-ups for almost three years now, putting money into 50 start-ups, of which around half of them later received high funding for a combined investment of Bt400 million. “We have some money for

follow-on investments and we are now ready to continue with those investments,” said Krating.

Need more females

There is a need for more female leaders in tech, said Oranuch, who wants to see a better gender balance.

She said there is a growing requirement for more females to move up the ladder in the tech industry in Southeast Asia since there is nowhere near enough diversity when it comes to the number of men and women becoming CEOs, CFOs and company presidents.

“Diversity is necessary for any industry, but particularly the tech industry,” Oranuch said. “Women are strong when it comes to project management and negotiation, both of which are very important in tech. I know it’s not easy but I would like to call on more females across Southeast Asia to get involved in what is a rapidly evolving industry with plenty of opportunity. Women wanting to progress in a career in tech need to believe in themselves more and realise they can do just as good a job, if not better, than men particularly when it comes to becoming leaders of tech companies and organisations,” she said.

According to a recent report, “The Future Tech Workforce: Breaking Gender Barriers” by global technology association ISACA, the top five barriers currently faced by women in the tech industry are lack of mentors, lack of female role models in the field,

gender bias in the workplace, unequal growth opportunities compared to men and unequal pay for the same skills.

Innovation Week

Thailand’s first-ever destination conference on global innovation will feature four major events for Innovation Week from June 16 to 26.

The conference kicks off with Thailand Start-up Week, running June 16 to 20, featuring 60 meet-up events for the start-up community at co-working spaces throughout the country. Next up will be Corporate Innovation Day on June 20, which is co-hosted by Techsauce, Hubba, and Techstars.

The largest component event will be Techsauce Global Summit 2018, running June 22 and 23, which is expected to have 10,000 participants, up from 6,000 people in last year, along with 500 venture capital firms and over 1,000 start-ups.

“Now Techsauce Global Summit is among the top three tech events in Asia,” said Oranuch Lerdsuwankij, chief executive officer and co-founder of Southeast Asia’s largest tech conference, Techsauce Global Summit “The ‘Start-up Pitch’ is one of the highlights. This year is the first time we did a roadshow in Europe to invite start-ups from all around the world to do their pitching here. As of now, we have 22 start-up teams and they continue coming in.”

ICO Start-up: Six Network 

Six Network originated from Ookbee U and Korean Yello Digital Marketing Global Pte Ltd. It uses blockchain technology to

reinvent the digital and creative economy by building a better infrastructure. The Six Network token sale successfully ended on May 31, after a pre-sale began on April 3, with around 520 million circulating six tokens (from the 1 billion total tokens) sold out. Each token was valued at 10 US cents.

Thousands of investors from over 61 countries contributed to the token sale, including more than 1,000 Korean investors, over 700 Thai investors, and investors from all over the world including the UK, Russia, India, Indonesia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Vietnam, Belarus, Ireland, Israel and more.

According to the official blog of Six Network, it had joined with 10 meet-ups and had several community sharing sessions in Thailand, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia, bringing out over 3000 participants in total for the events. Meanwhile, over 30,000 people showed interest across social media, such as Facebook and Telegram, with most coming from Korea, Thailand and China.

Natavudh Pungcharoenpong, co-founder and co-CEO of Six Network, said that after the ICO sold out, it would next distribute a Six coin beginning June 6 and then launch a coin exchange later on.

Six Network aims to create and operate Six as a utility token for use by participants in the emerging innovative and digital sectors of the new industrial landscape – not only in Thailand, but also throughout Asia and, ultimately, across the world.

Grab, Omise and Zanroo were among leading Southeast Asian “grown-up” tech companies to recently share the strategies they followed in entering new markets and the challenges they faced.

The discussion was one of the “Spend the Night With” series of talks, and titled “Going regional on a budget”. It was organised by The Great Room, Bangkok Entrepreneurs and Gaysorn Urban Retreat.

Social media listening platform Zanroo’s managing director for Thailand and CLMV Pornpat Wattananiyomkajohn joined with other participants in underlining the importance of understanding the local market and culture.

Zanroo was founded in 2013 as a two-person company. After four years it is now active in 15 countries, has more than 150 employees and is implementing an ambitious plan to be present in 40 markets worldwide by 2019.

Vee Charununsri, Grab’s head of business development and public affairs for Thailand, recalled being on a shoestring budget when the taxi-hailing app was first launched in 2012.

“We spend a lot of time researching and analysing the local market before entering,” said Vee.

The company spent wisely and used intellectual rigour when scaling the business. It was only in 2014 that Grab received its first funding. Today, what was originally a social enterprise has risen to become one of Asia’s unicorns.

Pornpat said that Zanroo carefully selected local partners in the countries they expanded into because locals knew their market best. He cited the example of a dairy that launched a new fruit-flavoured milk product based on conversations they followed on social media as they sought to understand what the consumers in that market wanted.

Meanwhile, Visit Yindisiriwong, country manager for Thailand for leading online payment technology service provider Omise, said the company focused on how to make the purchase journey of users faster and more convenient in each market they enter.

“Omise recruits the most talented team working globally from Silicon Valley to Bangkok, from Asia to Europe. This is why we benefit a lot, in terms of cost savings, from remote offices and co-working spaces, allowing us to fully control the business’ fluidity and scalability,” he said.

“My advice to companies looking at growing regionally is to remember that failure is not getting knocked down, it [failure] is not getting up again, so do not be afraid of failure. At some point, everyone is going to screw up, but what matters the most is that you learn from mistakes. Then you can get back up stronger. Action and velocity are the keys.”

Staying consistent with the company’s vision and mission is another key to success, added Vee.

“It helps if your vision, mission and your statements are consistent. For Grab, it was about security, convenience and improving the lives of people. We use that mantra everywhere we go and every business that we look into. We believe that if we don’t have that mantra, it’s going to be so hard to succeed. So we always try to keep that in mind. We have that same vision throughout in order to grow effectively.”

Visit said a key future trend is “cash is less” as people move to online payment. This is in line with Omise’s mission, which is “online payments for everyone”. The mission at Zanroo, Pornpat said, is to connect with consumers more effectively, and continually evolve the way marketing is done. While other companies provide news that has taken place, Zanroo listens to conversations that could shape the future of the brands, he said.