Online platform helps owners find their missing pets
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 04, 2023
A new online platform is using data analytics to help owners locate their missing pets.
The “i Found Pet” platform, which is available on Line application, was launched in June 2022 by a cat lover who goes by the name “Visanu”. Currently, ‘“i Found Pet” has 2,651 members who have registered 2,021 pets.
Registrants of “i Found Pet” can post an alert if their pet goes missing by providing information on the animal and where it was last seen. The platform will check its database of registered pets for matching description in case the missing pet has been adopted by another member.
If the pet is not in the database, the platform will send an alert to members in nearby areas, to increase the chance of the lost pet being found.
Visanu revealed that so far the platform has received 1,676 cases of missing pets and has successfully found and returned 357 pets to their worried owners.
He added that members can also get a QR code to be attached to their pet’s collar, so that finders can scan and the platform can notify that this animal belongs to someone who has reported a missing pet, or that it’s just out on a stroll. The owner will also receive a notification of location every time the QR code is scanned.
The platform also has several useful features, including a message board for pet owners where they can share photos of their beloved babies, and a calendar that alerts them when it is time to take their pet to the vet.
Visanu said he was targeting at least 100,000 members to maximise the coverage and increase the chances of missing pets being found before something bad happens.
For more information and registration, head to ifoundpet.com
LG unveils vision for more personalized, smarter TV ahead of CES 2023
TUESDAY, JANUARY 03, 2023
LG Electronics Inc. unveiled a vision for its TV business on Monday ahead of the opening of CES 2023, emphasizing connectivity and customization.
The consumer electronics giant will dedicate itself to fulfilling the vision of Sync to You, Open to All, it said, based on its advanced organic light-emitting diode display technologies and webOS, its own smart TV operating system.
At the world’s most influential tech trade show, set to open on Thursday, LG will unveil the new OLED evo TV that boosts brightness by around 70 % compared with existing OLED TVs and reduces the reflection of light on the screen.
OLED evo is the major TV maker’s second-generation OLED panel, with more light per pixel than before and improved brightness and better colour accuracy. Blacks are deeper and darker, and other colours are richer and creamier on LG OLED evo TVs, according to the company.
The new TV also became smarter with an improved artificial intelligence processor, which enables it to analyze even a show producer’s intention of making a certain scene and automatically adjust the brightness and other effects.
When turned on, the webOS home screen will appear on the latest OLED evo TV, the company said, just like a smartphone, allowing users to pick whatever applications they wish to watch.
LG said its smart TV platform now offers more than 2,500 applications and is fitted with a more advanced recommendation algorithm tailored to individual tastes and needs.
The South Korean tech firm is counting on success in the high-margin, premium TV segment to keep its competitive edge over rivals.
The tech firm’s TV business logged an operating loss of 55.4 billion won ($43.5 million) during the July-September period, due to bigger marketing expenses amid intensified market competition and high logistics costs.
Pandemic-driven pent-up demand for home appliances, including TVs, has lost steam, and aggressive rate hikes in major economies to bring inflation under control have significantly weakened consumer spending power.
According to research firm TrendForce, global TV shipments in the second half are forecast to undergo a 2.7 % on-year decline to reach 109 million units.
TV shipments in the fourth quarter are expected to grow by 10.8 % on-quarter to 56.96 million units but down 3.5 % from a year ago, it said, adding that the annual shipment for 2022 is expected to reach a decade low of 202 million units.
During an earnings call in late October, LG said it planned “to ease cost burden by raising the sale prices of our premium lineup,” of which demand is still robust among deep-pocket consumers.
VTubers emerge as new medium to connect with young generation
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2022
Jarupong Krisanaraj
Virtual YouTubers (VTubers) are playing an important role in boosting the growth of the digital content industry worldwide, including in Thailand.
Different from YouTubers, VTubers use animated characters as avatars to interact with audiences online, such as video game streaming, playing a joke or presenting video content.
The streamers’ avatars can move or express their feelings with applications called Motion Capture and Live2D.
The VTuber idea started to trend in 2016, inspired by a Japanese VTuber named “Kizuna Ai“. She is described as the “world’s first VTuber”.
Ai achieved enormous success, attracting some 2 million subscribers on YouTube by 2018, thanks to her friendly demeanour in line with her slogan: “I want to connect with everyone”.
Thanks to her popularity, Ai became a Japanese tourism ambassador under the campaign “Come to Japan” in 2018. The campaign was launched as a cooperation between Japan National Tourism Organisation and its New York Office.
Under the campaign, Ai was responsible for promoting foods, tourist attractions and culture to attract American tourists to visit Japan.
The idea of VTubers caught on rapidly in many countries worldwide, thanks to their potential to become influencers for agencies to penetrate the digital content market.
Meanwhile, products related to VTuber avatars can generate large sums in revenue for agencies.
There are many Thai VTubers nowadays, such as Aisha and Zona from virtual idol creator Polygon Official. As of Friday, Aisha and Zona have more than 500,000 and 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, respectively.
Meanwhile, Farmhouse, a brand under Thai bakery distributor President Bakery, launched a VTuber named “Fumi Hausu” on January 10 this year with the aim of promoting its products and drawing more engagement on social media.
A VTuber goes further in the development of a streamer and content creator, so private agencies are creating VTubers to boost their image, the Digital Economy Promotion Agency said.
“Meanwhile, government agencies can use a VTuber as an influencer to create awareness on culture and entertain the audience,” it said.
The agency added that a VTuber is considered a new pathway to connect government agencies and the young generation.
Seven key trends expected to influence financial services in 2023
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2022
Nongluck Ajanapanya
Cloud, real-time payments, and embedded finance are among seven key financial trends predicted for 2023, Mambu, a cloud banking platform, has revealed.
The prediction by the world’s leading financial services firms is included in Mambu’s annual “Partner Predictions” report, which highlights the top financial trends expected to influence the industry in 2023 as businesses try to survive and thrive in a volatile macroeconomic environment.
The report features insightful commentary from industry leaders from the fintech and financial services sectors, including executives from AWS, Backbase, Deloitte, Google Cloud, and others.
The participants share their perspectives on key issues that will shape the financial services sector in the coming year.
Mambu pointed out that banks’ focus on the payments theme will shift next year, with a greater emphasis on developing their own interface.
Rather than integrating their products into external platforms, this type of payment makes users more engaging, relevant, and interesting in order to increase brand loyalty.
Four other trends and issues expected to have a significant impact on the Asia Pacific financial services industry include the low code/no code approach, big tech in banking, environment, social, governance (ESG) and ethical impact finance, and the growth of data unlocking.
According to Mambu’s report, the low code/no code approach will empower digital banking teams to quickly protoype and launch without the need for complex development processes and specialised coding skill sets.
Many major Asian technology companies, such as Grab, Aeon, and the SEA Group, are now part of conglomerates with digital banking licences. This move by big tech will put pressure on banks to accelerate digital transformation.
“Customers now have higher expectations for their digital experiences,” according to the report, so traditional banks must collaborate with technology providers to provide more competitive banking services.
Meanwhile, a shift towards ESG across Asia Pacific will push traditional banks to offer more inclusive and customisable financial products and services, while also keeping sustainability in mind for the benefit of their customers, the report said.
In terms of data unlocking growth, Google Cloud predicts that by the end of 2025, more than 90% of all data generated by banks will be actionable in real time using machine learning.
“Financial institutions will reimagine themselves as “data companies with a banking licence in order to access previously locked innovation opportunities, such as one-hour home loans, green lending products, frictionless onboarding, and ultra-flexible, customer-centric products,” according to Google Cloud.
Pham Quang Minh, general manager of Mambu Thailand, said at the report’s release on Tuesday that some of these trends will gain traction, while others will be legally permitted to operate fully.
“2023 will certainly be a promising year for Thailand’s financial landscape. The spotlight will be on digital banks, which are expected to be fully licensed and start operating throughout 2023. We are looking forward to seeing how innovation can make financial services simpler, more inclusive and accessible for everyone,” he said.
According to Dan Jones, partner at Oliver Wyman Digital, digital banking in Southeast Asia is already more common than physical card payments and is on track to dominate point of sale (POS) overall.
“Some 72% of countries now have their own real-time payments (RTP) schemes, which I expect to extend across borders by 2023,” he said.
He explained that real-time cross-border payments are now uncommon, with only a few bilateral links between Singapore’s PayNow and Thailand, Malaysia, India, and the Philippines. However, multilateral agreements are on the way.
The governors of Asean central banks have signed an agreement for a true cross-border system based on QR codes.
Super-app ecosystems often include their own e-wallet offerings, such as WeChat and AliPay in China or Grab and GoTo in Southeast Asia, he pointed out.
Fernando Zandona, chief technology and product officer of Mambu, said that banks have to reinvent themselves and the end customers will decide which players will win.
Embracing technology will be one of the top approaches that financial services will need to survive and thrive, he said.
Tech Review: The iPhone 14 Plus shines with its excellent display and cameras
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2022
With its excellent large display and powerful processor, the iPhone 14 Plus allows users to better enjoy multimedia files while on the go.
Its 6.7-inch display is stunning. Apple’s custom-designed OLED high-resolution panel has a very high level of brightness (800 nits) and a high resolution: 2778 by 1284 pixel resolution at 458 pixels per inch depth.
Apple calls this the Super Retina XDR display.
This large display is very handy if you have reached the age where you need to hold the phone away from your face to read text – like me. The larger display means larger fonts for easily reading web pages, emails, and messages.
The display also features a very high contrast of 2,000,000: 1 ratio for a true black display and HDR experience, allowing you to enjoy viewing photos and videos in more realistic colours. When you view HDR photos and videos, the iPhone 14 Puls display can push the brightness up to 1200 nits for a true-to-life viewing experience.
You don’t have to worry that the large display and high brightness will quickly drain its battery. Apple says the iPhone 14 Plus has the best battery life ever for an iPhone.
During the test, I found that its battery comfortably lasted more than a day. By Apple’s own rating, the battery can play 26 hours of video, 100 hours of audio playback, or 20 hours of streaming video from Apple TV, YouTube, or other online services.
The battery also charges fast. It can be charged up to 50% in 35 minutes using an optional 20W adapter.
During the test, I found the iPhone 14 Plus has impressive performance. Video playbacks played smoothly. Photo displaying and web renditions were fast. Photo-taking and editing also had an impressive performance.
The impressive performance is credited to Apple’s A15 Bionic chip with a six-core CPU, five-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine processor.
The six-core CPU is made of two performance cores and four efficiency cores that work together to handle everyday tasks and demand workloads.
The five-core GPU delivers 18% faster performance for graphic-intensive gameplay and high-performance games, compared to a previous model.
The 16-core Neural Engine is capable of 15.8 trillion operations per second to provide fast machine learning, such as advanced text-to-speech on Siri and on-device processing of directions in maps as well as scene recognition in photo taking.
I found during the test that iPhone 14 Plus captured beautiful photos with its dual-camera system at the back and took beautiful selfies with its front TrueDepth camera. The machine-learning capability of the chip allows iPhone 14 Plus to properly select scene modes for photos.
The back dual-camera system has a 12MP main camera with a 26mm-equivalent focal length and a 12MP ultra-wide camera with a 13mm-equivalent focal length. The main camera comes with a bright f/1.5 aperture seven-element lens with sensor-shift optical image stabilisation while the ultra-wide camera uses an f/2.4 aperture with a 120-degree field of view, and a five-element lens with 2x optical zoom.
When you use the camera system of the iPhone 14 Plus for the first time, it will ask you to select one of five styles – standard, rich contrast, vibrant, warm, and cool. You can change the style whenever you want to try new ones.
I tried taking scenery photos with a rich contrast style and found that the camera captured them with a high dynamic range and good details in both dark and bright regions.
The main camera has better low-light performance thanks to its larger sensor, larger 1.9micrometer pixels, a faster f/1.5 aperture, which has 49% improvement in low light, and sensor-shift OIS.
The iPhone 14 Plus also uses Photonic Engine to process photos for optimised quality. The Photonic Engine dramatically improves photos taken in mid to low-light scenes, like indoors or right before the sun sets. Photonic Engine builds on the powerful computational photography capabilities of iPhone. It enhances the image pipeline by applying Deep Fusion, which is Apple’s image processing system, earlier in the process. Deep Fusion uses a powerful Neural Engine to take the best parts of multiple images on a pixel-by-pixel basis and combine them into an image that increases dynamic range and brings out extraordinary detail in low light, for example. Photonic Engine provides up to 2.5x better low-light performance for photos on the new Main camera and up to 1.8x better low-light performance on the new front camera.
The iPhone 14 Plus supports 5G and comes with Smart Data mode, which will switch to LTE (4G) and save your battery life automatically when you don’t need 5G speeds. The new smartphone also supports eSIM so you don’t have to deal with a physical SIM card anymore.
The iPhone 14 Plus also comes with safety features that hopefully you do not have to use – Crash Detection and Emergency SOS via satellite.
The smartphone has a new dual-core accelerometer that is able to detect the high g-forces typically experienced in severe crashes. When a crash is detected, it can automatically dial emergency services and play a voice loop notifying of the crash and providing a location.
With the Emergency SOS via satellite, the iPhone 14 can use custom antennas to directly connect to a satellite when you don’t have access to a cellular or wi-fi connection so you can seek help. It can also update your location in the Find My app, using the satellite connection.
The iPhone Plus 14 doesn’t have a 3.5mm conventional port for connecting wired headphones so you need to use Bluetooth headphones, like AirPods Pro. The smartphone played high-quality music via the AirPods Pro wireless earphones, I found.
During the test, I upgraded iPhone 14 Plus’ operating system to iOS 16.2 with a lot of new and improved features, including a new app called Freeform and Apple Music Sing feature.
Freeform is a new app for working with friends or colleagues on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It provides a flexible canvas that let us add file images and provides drawing tools that let you sketch anywhere on the canvas.
Apple Music Sing lets you adjust vocals in millions of songs available in Apple Music streamed music service so that you can sing along and it also provides beat-by-beat lyrics.
Apple iPhone 14 Plus with 128GB storage retails for 37,900 baht, 256 GB for 41,900 baht, and 512 GB for 50,900 baht.
Key specs:
OS: iOS 16.2
Chip: A15 Bionic chip with 6‑core CPU with 2 performance and 4 efficiency cores, 5‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
Capacity: 128GB/ 256GB/ 512GB
Display: 6.7-inch Super Retina XDR display (2778 x 1284 pixels)
Back cameras: 12MP main: 26mm, f/1.5 aperture; and 12MP ultra-wide: 13mm, f/2.4 aperture, 120-degree field of view
Front camera: 12MP TrueDepth Camera with f/1.9 aperture lens
Battery: Video playback: up to 26 hours, audio playback: up to 100 hours,
Kaspersky: what cyber confrontation looked like in 2022
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2022
2022 was marked by a 20th-century-style military conflict – that definitely brought uncertainty and some serious risks of spreading over the continent. While the broader geopolitical analysis of the conflict in Ukraine and its consequences are best left to experts, a number of cyber-events took place during the conflict that turned out to be very significant.
The story of the year, prepared by Kaspersky researchers within annual Kaspersky Security Bulletin, tracks every stage of the armed conflict in Ukraine, the events that have taken place in cyberspace and how they correlated with on-the-ground operations.
Significant signs and spikes in cyberwarfare in the days and weeks pre-dating military conflict were seen. February 24, 2022 saw a massive wave of pseudo-ransomware and wiper attacks indiscriminately affecting Ukrainian entities. Some were highly sophisticated, but the volume of wiper and ransomware attacks quickly subsided after the initial wave, with a limited number of notable incidents subsequently reported. Ideologically-motivated groups that presented themselves in the original wave of attacks appear to be inactive now.
On February 24, Europeans relying on the ViaSat-owned satellite faced major internet access disruptions. This “cyber-event” started around 4h UTC, less than two hours after the Russian Federation publicly announced the beginning of a “special military operation” in Ukraine. The ViaSat sabotage once again demonstrates cyberattacks are a basic building block for modern armed conflicts and may directly support key milestones in military operations.
As the conflict has evolved, there is no evidence that the cyberattacks were part of coordinated military actions on either side. However, there are some main characteristics that defined the 2022 cyber confrontation:
• Hacktivists and DDoS attacks. The conflict in Ukraine has created a breeding ground for new cyberwarfare activity from various groups including cybercriminals and hacktivists, rushing to support their favourite side. Some groups such as the IT Army of Ukraine or Killnet have been officially supported by governments and their Telegram channels include hundreds of thousands of subscribers. While the attacks performed by hacktivists had relatively low complexity, the experts witnessed a spike in DDoS activity during the summer period – both in a number of attacks and their duration: in 2022, an average DDoS attack lasted 18.5 hours – almost 40 times longer compared to 2021 (approx. 28 minutes).
Total duration of DDoS attacks detected by Kaspersky DDoS Protection in seconds, by week, 2021 vs 2022
• Hack and leak. The more sophisticated attacks attempted to hijack media attention with hack-and-leak operations, and have been on the rise since the beginning of the conflict. Such attacks involve breaching an organization and publishing its internal data online, often via a dedicated website. This is significantly more difficult than a simple defacing operation since not all machines contain internal data worth releasing.
• Poisoned open source repositories, weaponizing open source software. As the conflict drags on, popular open-source packages can be used as a protest or attack platform by developers or hackers alike. The impact of such attacks can extend wider than the open-source software itself, propagating in other packages that automatically rely on the trojanized code.
• Fragmentation. Following the start of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, many western companies are exiting the Russian market and leaving their users in a delicate position when it comes to receiving security updates or support – and the security updates are probably the top issue when vendors end support for products or leave the market.
“From February 24 onwards, we’ve been puzzled with a question, if cyberspace is a true reflection of the conflict in Ukraine, it represents the pinnacle of a real, modern “cyberwar”. By going through all the events that followed military operations in cyberspace, we witnessed an absence of coordination between cyber and kinetic means, and in many ways downgraded cyber-offence to a subordinate role. Ransomware attacks observed in the first weeks of the conflict qualify as distractions at best. Kinetic attacks using missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles have once again proven to be a more effective method of targeting infrastructure than cyberattacks. Nevertheless, collateral damage and cyber risks have grown for organizations in nearby countries due to the conflict, requiring advanced defensive measures more than ever,” comments Costin Raiu, Director of the Global Research & Analysis Team at Kaspersky.
As 2022 draws to a close, it’s time to look ahead to what’s next for the IT monitoring industry. Here are some key forecasts from Paessler, the monitoring experts for IT infrastructures and networks, for the IT landscape in 2023:
Digitalization will continue to create new responsibilities for IT
Whether it is in factory floors, hospitals, energy sources or data centres, previously analogue devices and systems that were isolated from the IT world are now generating data compatible with digital systems, expanding the limits to which we can analyze and interpret data.
While industries are clamouring to address all the challenges that have come up with the rising convergence of IT and OT (operational technology), it is also equally important to consider the monitoring of the ecosystem. A major challenge here is to bring these multiple metrics and their different monitoring systems into a single view. There will be an increased focus on IT monitoring tools that will enable organizations to keep track of the changes in the ecosystem and provide a consolidated view of the data collected, simplifying the data analysis and decision-making process. As we stretch the limits of IT/OT convergence, we will need solutions that can monitor these devices and infrastructures.
Monitoring solutions will keep playing a vital role in the data centre sector
As multinationals continue to relocate their data centres to Southeast Asia (SEA), there is little doubt that the region has become a hotspot for data centre investment. In the second half of this year, Singapore’s government lifted its moratorium on data centre construction. With the Satu Data Indonesia (SDI) 2022-2024 action plan, the Indonesian government is also focusing on expanding the implementation of data structures such as data centres. While the Thailand data centre market is expected to reach US$1.03 billion by 2027.
With data centres – and the subsequent infrastructure and devices that are often spread over multiple geographic locations – comes the challenge of monitoring them. Because data centres have become an essential infrastructure for organizations across various industries, their failure means that businesses are often left inoperable. In order to ensure efficient operation, it has become paramount to keep a constant eye on the various technical equipment, operational facilities, and security, which will minimize data centre downtime. As the data centre sector continues to play a major role in multiple industries and across the SEA region, so will the monitoring solutions.
Remote monitoring from the cloud will be on the rise – but need differentiation
Today, organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud with 76% of Asia Pacific businesses planning to increase their cloud services in the next 12 months. An important aspect of cloud migration is strengthening cloud-first strategies by ensuring that various applications and IT processes can be incorporated into a cloud computing environment.
Additionally, monitoring services being offered from the cloud are increasing. And this is applicable to monitoring cloud-based components such as websites, cloud services, and cloud-based applications. When it comes to on-premises monitoring, the monitoring solutions from the cloud may face some issues as they are depending on a superfast and reliable internet connection to avoid false monitoring results due to time lags in data transmission. It’s important to take this into account and organizations will need to go with the right mix of cloud-based and on-prem monitoring tools.
A renewed focus on improving security in the IoT environment
Given the significant rise in data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cyber-attacks on various industries across the world, it really is no surprise that businesses across the globe are turning their attention to further strengthening their cybersecurity initiatives and strategies. However, one noticeable gap in all of this is the Internet of things (IoT) security gap.
The rapid growth of adoption and capabilities of IoT technology has skyrocketed over the past few years. By 2025, IoT spending in the Asia Pacific is predicted to reach US$437 billion. Any device that is connected to the internet is susceptible to some form of cyberattack. Apart from the fact that IoT devices inherently have very little built-in security, and that patch management can be difficult because of their physical nature, the interconnectedness of these devices, and the subsequent complex environments, pose grave security threats across the network.
Monitoring is a vital part of every security strategy, ensuring that all classic security tools like firewalls, unusual detection systems or privileged access management (PAM)-tools work flawlessly. But especially in the IoT world, monitoring has another important task. Suitable monitoring solutions can ensure physical security by integrating door-locking systems, security cameras, smoke detectors or temperature sensors into central monitoring. And businesses will look at taking these facets into consideration, going forward.
Distributed Architecture will continue to become the new normal
With concepts of hybrid working, remote offices and working from home becoming common, organizations are storing data in the cloud instead of having centralized data infrastructures, thereby moving toward networks using Software as A Service (SAAS) and Software-Defined WAN (SDWAN). With distributed architectures gaining prominence, it is critical to have the right distributed monitoring strategy in place that can be effective. Given this scenario, there will be a high demand for solutions which will provide organizations with a unified monitoring overview of multiple IT infrastructures providing benefits such as an end-user view of network performance, troubleshooting, simplifying transition to the cloud and reducing bandwidth requirements.
NTT Data offers firms blockchain-based system to develop loyalty program
MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2022
NTT Data (Thailand) Co Ltd, a subsidiary of NTT Data Corporation and a global digital business and IT service leader, is suggesting the use of blockchain technology to tide over the problem of many organisations stumbling in developing a loyalty program.
The company said the use of blockchain technology would streamline the complex work process, reduce operating costs and securely link data. It would provide prompt solutions to customers, and create a seamless experience with the use of smart contract on a blockchain ecosystem to establish a centralised platform. Such a platform would help connect allies and partners directly in one ecosystem without going through a medium, and it would provide a seamless key touchpoint communication system to maintain a sustainable customer base.
Hironari Tomioka, President and Chief Executive Officer of NTT DATA (Thailand) Co., Ltd. reveals that the loyalty program will maintain good relations between the brand and customers in the long run and become part of the brand’s main strategy to create good customer relations that will lead to brand loyalty and new marketing opportunities by providing a seamless, convenient, and real-time experience as much as possible through a Blockchain ecosystem to connect various allies and rapidly exchange data via a highly secured platform with high flexibility to meet various customer demands.
The Global Loyalty Programs Market Intelligence Report 2022 of the first quarter indicates that the loyalty program market is expected to grow 12.6% with 142,636.8 million U.S. dollar value by the end of 2022, and the global market is expected to grow 12.2% during 2022-2026 with 225,907.9 billion U.S. dollar in 2026.
NTT DATA have has been developing Blockchain ecosystems widely to combine business, technology, and security together including loyalty programs that integrate back-end systems from allies in various industries such as finance, banking, insurance, and retail through Blockchain API (Application Program Interface) to allow users to access the loyalty programs on their registered platform.
They may also collect and use points earned from the allies on one platform where the system automatically calculates the points of the allies. The data on the platform may also be applied to ongoing business developments, services, and customer relations.
Loyalty Program with Blockchain-based ensures good customer relations that will lead to sustainable brand loyalty through the Key Touchpoint consumer communication platform. Allies and partners under the same ecosystem may analyze and understand customer needs, develop demanded products/services, and enhance the experience overall.
“Recently, NTT DATA provides a loyalty program with Blockchain-based to a major Australian ticket booking company. The program is integrated with a digital wallet platform to enhance the user experience by counting the points automatically when a user pays with a credit card and coupons on the platform in real time. It combines the payment experience, point collection, and discount claims offered by many providers on one platform that leads to repurchases, new product offers, and better image”. Hironari concluded.
Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023
MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2022
Gartner, Inc. announced its list of 10 top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2023.
“To enhance their organization’s financial position during times of economic turbulence, CIOs and IT executives must look beyond cost savings to new forms of operational excellence while continuing to accelerate digital transformation,” said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “The Gartner strategic technology trends for 2023 are built around three themes — optimize, scale and pioneer — where technologies can help organizations optimize resilience, operations or trust, scale vertical solutions and product delivery, and pioneer with new forms of engagement accelerated responses or opportunity.”
“However, in 2023, delivering technology will not be enough. These themes are impacted by environmental, social and governance (ESG) expectations and regulations, which translate into the shared responsibility to apply sustainable technologies. Every technology investment will need to be set off against its impact on the environment, keeping future generations in mind. ‘Sustainable by default’ as an objective requires sustainable technology,” said David Groombridge, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner.
The top strategic technology trends for 2023 are:
Sustainability
Sustainability traverses all of the strategic technology trends for 2023. In a recent Gartner survey, CEOs reported that environmental and social changes are now a top three priority for investors, after profit and revenue. This means that executives must invest more in innovative solutions that are designed to address ESG demand to meet sustainability goals. To do this, organizations need a new sustainable technology framework that increases the energy and material efficiency of IT services, enables enterprise sustainability through technologies like traceability, analytics, renewable energy and AI, and deploys IT solutions to help customers achieve their own sustainability goals.
Pioneer
Metaverse
Gartner defines a metaverse as a collective virtual 3D shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. A metaverse is persistent, providing enhanced immersive experiences. Gartner expects that a complete metaverse will be device-independent and won’t be owned by a single vendor. It will have a virtual economy of itself, enabled by digital currencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). By 2027, Gartner predicts that over 40% of large organizations worldwide will use a combination of Web3, AR cloud and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue.
Super apps
A super app combines the features of an app, a platform and an ecosystem in one application. It not only has its own set of functionalities, but it also provides a platform for third parties to develop and publish their own mini-apps on. By 2027, Gartner predicts that more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple super apps.
“Although most examples of super apps are mobile apps, the concept can also be applied to desktop client applications, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, with the key being that a super app can consolidate and replace multiple apps for customer or employee use,” said Karamouzis.
Adaptive AI
Adaptive AI systems aim to continuously retrain models and learn within runtime and development environments based on new data to adapt quickly to changes in real-world circumstances that were not foreseen or available during initial development. They use real-time feedback to change their learning dynamically and adjust goals. This makes them suitable for operations where rapid changes in the external environment or changing enterprise goals require an optimized response.
Optimize
Digital Immune System
76 % of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to deliver that high business value, along with mitigating risk and increasing customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.
Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems. Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80% – and that translates directly into higher revenue.
Applied Observability
Observable data reflects the digitized artefacts, such as logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers, that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action. Applied observability feeds these observable artefacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organizational decision-making.
“Applied observability enables organizations to exploit their data artefacts for competitive advantage,” said Karamouzis “It is powerful because it elevates the strategic importance of the right data at the right time for rapid action based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. When planned strategically and executed successfully, applied observability is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making.”
AI Trust, Risk and Security Management
Many organizations are not well prepared to manage AI risks. A Gartner survey in the US, UK and Germany found that 41% of organizations had experienced an AI privacy breach or security incident. However, that same survey found that organizations that actively managed AI risk, privacy and security achieved improved AI project results. More of their AI projects moved from proof-of-concept status into production and achieved more business value than did AI projects in organizations that did not actively manage these functions.
Organizations must implement new capabilities to ensure model reliability, trustworthiness, security and data protection. AI trust, risk and security management (TRiSM) requires participants from different business units to work together to implement new measures.
Scale
Industry Cloud Platforms
Industry cloud platforms offer a combination of SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providing industry-specific sets of modular capabilities to support specific industry business use cases. Enterprises can use the packaged capabilities of industry cloud platforms as building blocks to compose unique and differentiating digital business initiatives, providing agility, innovation and reduced time to market, while avoiding lock-in.
By 2027, Gartner predicts that more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives.
Platform Engineering
Platform engineering is the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms for software delivery and life cycle management. The goal of platform engineering is to optimize the developer experience and accelerate product teams’ delivery of customer value.
Gartner predicts that 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams by 2026 and that 75% of those will include developer self-service portals.
Wireless Value Realization
While no single technology will dominate, enterprises will use a spectrum of wireless solutions to cater for all environments, from Wi-Fi in the office, through services for mobile devices, to low-power services and even radio connectivity. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of enterprises will be using five or more wireless technologies simultaneously.
As networks move beyond pure connectivity, they will provide insight using built-in analysis and low-power systems will harvest energy directly from the network. This means the network will become a source of direct business value.
This year’s top strategic technology trends highlight those trends that will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next five to 10 years. Gartner clients can read more in the Gartner Special Report “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023.”
The cyberattacks occurring last year are a sharp escalation to the disruptive threats facing businesses. In 2022, cybercriminals targeted critical infrastructure with ransomware attacks, and continued to find ways to exploit the cryptocurrency boom, hybrid working, and unsecured APIs.
As per Palo Alto Networks’ ‘What’s Next in Cyber Survey,’ almost all respondents admitted their organization experienced cybersecurity incidents and data breaches in the past year. However, a cause of concern is that only 2 in 5 say their board’s recognition of cyber risk has increased significantly alongside accelerated digitalization strategies.
Palo Alto Networks’ 2023 APAC cybersecurity predictions feature the top 5 insights to help organisations pursue a more secure future. In cybersecurity, predictions are highly relevant because, apart from the attacker’s behaviours, they consider a broad view- from technology to workplace trends and evolving laws and regulations.
Ian Lim, Field chief security officer of Palo Alto Networks, said, “The fluidity of today’s cyberattacks will require business leaders to reimagine their cybersecurity approach constantly. Leaders must consider innovative solutions, technologies, and approaches that outperform traditional mechanisms. Organizations have much to consider in 2023, but remaining vigilant and aware will empower them to defend against the evolving threats.”
“From prevention-first Al to adopting Zero Trust strategy and architecture, it will be imperative to adopt the broadest and deepest cyber expertise and threat intelligence into their defences to stay ahead of the curve. But, more importantly, they must build resiliency to respond and recover from those that inevitably get through,” he added.
Palo Alto Networks has identified five key cybersecurity trends to watch out for in 2023:
PREDICTION 1
Accelerated 5G adoption will deepen vulnerabilities
5G connections in the Asia Pacific (APAC) are expected to reach 430 million in 2025, up from 200 million at the end of end-2021, according to a recent report by the industry association GSMA. In Singapore, Singtel has reached 95% of 5G coverage nationwide, ahead of the regulatory target of 2025, with plans to expand standalone 5G coverage to its seaport by 2025. While cloud provides greater agility, scalability, and performance, it also exposes the 5G core to cloud security vulnerabilities. Large-scale attacks could come from anywhere, even from within the operator’s network
PREDICTION 2
Securing connected medical devices will be critical
Digitisation enables new healthcare capabilities, e.g., virtual healthcare and remote diagnosis. The prevalence of legacy systems and sensitive data attractive to cyber criminals makes healthcare a soft target, and cyber threat actors will focus on it. The closer a device is to a patient, the more likely it is to impact patient safety, and the more likely a threat actor will weaponise it. Ensuring the cybersecurity of medical IoT will be important as ever for patient safety.
PREDICTION 3
Cloud supply chain attacks will disrupt businesses.
Companies adopting cloud-native architectures are also consuming third-party code in their critical applications. Log4J recently demonstrated how many organisations can be immediately vulnerable due to a piece of dependent code tucked deep into the software packaging process. We have also seen attackers targeting the volunteers who maintain these open-source code constructs to infiltrate organisations through the package update processes. This issue falls under the cloud supply chain, and we will see more disruptions due to cloud adoption trends in the coming year(s). Hence, in our latest research, [1]37% of organisations expect software supply chain attacks to increase most in 2023.
PREDICTION 4
The debate on data sovereignty will intensify
As the world becomes more reliant on data and digital information, the volume of regulations and legislation emanating from a desire to control and protect citizens and ensure the continued availability of critical services will increase. As a result, the conversations around data localisation and data sovereignty will likely intensify in 2023.
PREDICTION 5
Metaverse to be the new playground for cybercriminals
With an estimated $54 billion spent on virtual goods every year, metaverse could open up a new playground for cybercriminals. The immersive nature of the metaverse will unlock new opportunities for businesses and consumers alike, as it allows buyers and sellers to connect in a new way. Companies will take advantage of mixed reality experiences to diversify their offerings and cater to the needs of consumers in the metaverse.
The six-core CPU is made of two performance cores and four efficiency cores that work together to handle everyday tasks and demand workloads.
I found during the test that iPhone 14 Plus captured beautiful photos with its dual-camera system at the back and took beautiful selfies with its front TrueDepth camera. The machine-learning capability of the chip allows iPhone 14 Plus to properly select scene modes for photos.
The iPhone 14 Plus supports 5G and comes with Smart Data mode, which will switch to LTE (4G) and save your battery life automatically when you don’t need 5G speeds. The new smartphone also supports eSIM so you don’t have to deal with a physical SIM card anymore.
SootinClaimon.Com 