Alibaba Cloud invests $283 million to accelerate global partner innovations
Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced that it will invest RMB2 billion (US$283 million) during this fiscal year to empower global partners and accelerate joint innovations in the post-pandemic era. The investment aims to bring its partners up to speed with digitalization capabilities and create joint products and solutions to benefit even more customers across all sectors......»»
Alibaba debuts Cloud Computer, Delivery Robots
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technologies and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, unveiled a series of innovative products at its 12th annual Apsara Conference, highlighting the technology pioneer’s commitment in helping people adapt to the more digitized world and accelerate customers’ digital transformation during and after the pandemic......»»
Alibaba Cloud invests $283 million to accelerate global partner innovations
Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced that it will invest RMB2 billion (US$283 million) during this fiscal year to empower global partners and accelerate joint innovations in the post-pandemic era. The investment aims to bring its partners up to speed with digitalization capabilities and create joint products and solutions to benefit even more customers across all sectors......»»
Jollibee invests $28 million in beverage tech firm
Filipino-owned Asian food conglomerate Jollibee Foods Corp. is investing $28 million for a 10 percent stake in beverage technology company Botrista Inc. to support the growth of its coffee and tea business......»»
Global Dominion spreads love, appreciation to its partner car dealers
To celebrate the occasion of Valentine's Day last month, the division organized a memorable celebration to express their gratitude towards their partner dealers......»»
Xinhua world economic news summary at 0900 GMT, March 18
BEIJING -- Global new energy passenger car sales are predicted to exceed 39 million units by 2030, said a report obtained during the China EV100 Forum 2024 concluded Sunday in Beijing. That will mark a penetration rate of almost 50 percent, rising from the nearly 20 percent in 2023 with the sales of over 13 million units, according to the report issued by China EV100, a new energy vehicle (NEV) industry think ta.....»»
Alibaba announces surprise departure of ex-CEO
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced the surprise departure of former CEO Daniel Zhang, who had been set Monday to take charge of a key subsidiary as the firm undergoes a major restructuring. Hangzhou-based Alibaba is one of China's most prominent technology firms, with business operations spanning cloud computing, e-commerce, logistics, media and entertainment, and artificial intelligence. After years of turbulence in the Chinese tech sector, Alibaba in March announced the biggest restructuring in its history, dividing itself into six entities, with the goal of listing them on the stock exchange separately. CEO Daniel Zhang was due to take charge of the firm's new cloud computing branch, now a separate entity, on Monday. But two months after announcing his appointment, Alibaba said its ex-boss was no longer with the company. "The board of our Company expresses its deepest appreciation to Mr. Zhang for his contributions to Alibaba Group over the past 16 years," the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, where it is listed, late on Sunday. It gave no reason for his departure. Plans for a spin-off cloud computing firm would go ahead, Alibaba said, "under a separate management team to be appointed". The company announced in June that Zhang would be replaced by Joseph Tsai as chairman and Eddie Wu as CEO. The executive played a vital role in the company's success in the past decade, spearheading the now hugely popular Singles' Day shopping festival since its first edition in 2009. Shares in the firm sank nearly 3.5 percent Monday -- the first working day of its new reorganization into six distinct branches. In addition to e-commerce and cloud computing, Alibaba's reach stretches into everything from logistics to media, entertainment and artificial intelligence. But its vast size brought it into the crosshairs of Chinese regulators as Beijing sought to crack down on the tech sector. In 2020, Alibaba became the country's first tech giant to bear the brunt of increased oversight, when authorities called off what would have become one of the most valuable public listings in history -- valued at $34 billion -- for its former subsidiary Ant Group. Ant Group is the owner of Alipay, a mobile payment application widely used in China. One month after officials hit the brakes on its IPO, Alibaba was investigated for alleged anti-competitive practices, then issued a $2.8 billion fine. And in July authorities fined Ant Group nearly $1 billion for breaching banking regulations. The post Alibaba announces surprise departure of ex-CEO appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Alibaba unveils own large language scale models
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has open sourced two new AI models, Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat. The models are large vision language models (LVLMs) that can comprehend images, texts, and bounding boxes in prompts and facilitate multi-round question answering in both English and Chinese. Qwen-VL is the multimodal version of Qwen-7B, Alibaba Cloud’s 7-billion-parameter model of its large language model Tongyi Qianwen (also available on ModelScope as open source). Capable of understanding both image inputs and text prompts in English and Chinese, Qwen-VL can perform various tasks, such as responding to open-ended queries related to different images and generating image captions. Qwen-VL-Chat caters to more complex interactions, such as comparing multiple image inputs and engaging in multi-round question answering. Leveraging alignment techniques, this AI assistant exhibits a range of creative capabilities, which include writing poetry and stories based on input images, summarizing the content of multiple pictures, and solving mathematical questions displayed in images. The introduction of these models, with their ability to extract meaning and information from images, holds the potential to revolutionize the interaction with visual content. For instance, leveraging their image comprehension and question-answering capabilities, the models could provide information assistance to visually impaired individuals during online shopping in the future. The Qwen-VL model was pre-trained on image and text datasets. Compared to other open-source large vision language models that can process and understand images in 224,224 resolution, Qwen-VL can handle image input at a resolution of 448,448, resulting in better image recognition and comprehension. Based on various benchmarks, Qwen-VL recorded outstanding performances on several visual language tasks, including zero-shot captioning, general visual question answering, text-oriented visual question answering, and object detection. Qwen-VL-Chat has also achieved leading results in both Chinese and English for text-image dialogue and alignment levels with humans, according to the benchmark test of Alibaba Cloud. This test involved over 300 images, 800 questions, and 27 categories. The two models have been made available to the open-source community via Alibaba’s AI model community ModelScope and the collaborative AI platform Hugging Face. For commercial uses, companies with over 100 million monthly active users can request a license from Alibaba Cloud. The post Alibaba unveils own large language scale models appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
AI powers use of public cloud in Asia Pacific
The public cloud market in the Asia Pacific region expanded by a fourth to almost $33 billion in 2022, as countries began to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence in daily transactions......»»
NEDA: El Niño price impact seen minimal
The National Economic and Development Authority on Saturday said it expects a minimal impact of El Niño on food prices as government agencies streamline efforts to address the looming drought. In a forum on Saturday, NEDA Undersecretary Rosemarie Edillon emphasized that farmers, especially of rice, have been accustomed to the effects of El Niño and have been using technologies and agricultural practices to cope. “Currently, we do not see a huge impact of El Niño on the country’s inflation or economy. El Niño is a usual occurrence, happening three years in and three years out. Filipinos and the government agencies already know what to do to soften its impact.” The Department of Agriculture, for example, has said officials plan to allocate funds for cloud seeding to induce rain and to distribute pumps to small-scale farmers. They will also promote alternative farming methods and crop diversification. The department is also mapping out the areas to be most hit by drought, which is expected to start this month and last until early next year. Only slight drought Officials said farmers in western Luzon can still plant crops as the southwest monsoon or habagat is seen to still bring rain to this area. The Task Force on El Niño has been formed to include the Department of Health, Department of Science and Technology, Department of Trade and Industry, National Water Resources Board and National Irrigation Administration, among others. Sally Duquesa, general manager of Pindangan Primary Multi-Purpose Cooperative in Tarlac, told Daily Tribune farmers in the province have been planting less due to insufficient irrigation, aside from the higher prices of farming inputs. She said they were now only producing 180 bags of rice compared to 200 bags in the past harvesting seasons, which usually occur in April and October. Jun Neri, chief economist at the Bank of the Philippine Islands, said the government must accelerate efforts to address El Niño to ensure enough supply of agricultural products to prevent a heavier reliance on imports which could push up food prices. “The most significant risk is food security, especially given the looming El Niño. Importing food from abroad might become less effective in addressing supply problems since El Niño is expected to affect other parts of the world,” he said. The post NEDA: El Niño price impact seen minimal appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Private partnership to upskill Phl education
Alibaba Cloud of the Alibaba Group and the Asia Pacific College will launch a state-of-the-art innovation lab to train and strengthen the cloud computing competencies of teachers and students as part of its efforts on local digital talent empowerment in the Philippines. A joint development by Alibaba and APC, the innovation lab will serve as an incubator that will foster the development of creative industry solutions and promote collaboration among students, faculty, and industry professionals. “Creating a digital future means being proactive and assisting people and institutions that will drive the future of digitalization. This also means investing in students and teachers. We admire APC’s initiative and commitment to its learners, educators, and IT team to provide them with the tools and skills they will need not just to survive but also to thrive in the digital future. We believe that by equipping them with relevant skills and knowledge, more opportunities will come their way,” shared Allen Guo, country manager for the Philippines, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. The partnership with Alibaba Cloud will enable APC educators, learners, and even its IT team to enhance their cloud knowledge through various cutting-edge technology workshops, online and offline training and certification courses. Alibaba Cloud Academic Empowerment Program will also open opportunities for students to get invited to local community events to meet and learn from professionals and industry leaders. To equip teachers to lead training and workshop sessions in the future, Alibaba Cloud also includes a dedicated knowledge transfer session and hands-on laboratory classes for educators. Through AAEP, students will get local and global internship and competition opportunities as well as invites to campus events through Alibaba Cloud’s well-connected global network, enabling them to learn from world-class professionals. The exposure and experience will help students and teachers develop a digital-forward mindset that can then guide them in pursuing a career or higher education in the future. Alibaba Cloud will also strengthen APC’s cloud infrastructure with the company’s cloud solutions for data backup, students’ management system, and online teaching platform. These will ensure the efficiency and security of the school’s remote access and overall online system. The post Private partnership to upskill Phl education appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Local fintechs to benefit from digital firm s mentorship program
MANILA - Local financial technology (fintech) firms are set to benefit from a mentorship program that aims to help start-up companies in their digitalization bid to expand their operations.In a virtual briefing on Tuesday, Alibaba Cloud country manager for the Philippines Al.....»»
Alibaba Cloud boosts online education platform
An online education platform of Dito CME Holdings Inc., the communications, media, and entertainment arm of Dennis Uy’s Udenna Group, and CloudSwyft is set to get a boost with the help of Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group......»»
Cisco helps customers be Cloud Smart to deliver exceptional digital cxperiences
Cisco announced new ways it is helping customers accelerate digital transformations as they move more resources to the cloud. .....»»
Alibaba to build first data center in PH
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced plans to build its first data center in the Philippines by the end of 2021, forming part of the $1-billion expansion of the tech giant to Southeast Asia in the next three years......»»
Alibaba to put up data center in Manila
Alibaba Cloud of Chinese tech tycoon Jack Ma will put up its first data center in Manila to capture the growing demand for e-commerce and position itself as one of the leading digital firms in the Philippines......»»
UnionBank shifting to cloud as digital payments accelerate
Aboitiz-led Union Bank of the Philippines is ramping up the migration of its information technology (IT) system to the cloud as digital payments continued to soar in the country amid the mobility restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic......»»
Digital piracy must be stopped
Since the computer chip was invented, the pace of digital innovation has continued to accelerate. As access to fast broadband has become indispensable, the main source of information and entertainment has shifted from traditional media to the internet, from reading publications, listening to the radio and watching free television broadcasts, to subscription-based cloud services and virtually unlimited digitalized content......»»
Alibaba Cloud strengthens security for card-based transactions
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced it has secured the globally recognized Payment Card Industry Three-Domain Secure (PCI 3DS) compliance for all of its seven availability zones in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The PCI 3DS standard was established by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council – a global forum that brings together payments industry stakeholders to develop and drive adoption of data security standards and resources for safe payments worldwide. This latest attestation further strengthens Alibaba Cloud’s support for the burgeoning fintech industry in Southeast Asia......»»
Demand for cloud services seen rising in 2021
As the pandemic continues to accelerate digital transformation among businesses, Amazon Web Services is seeing robust growth in new customers and partner signups for cloud services through its Amazon Partner Network......»»
Philippine businesses increasingly rely on cloud-based IT solutions
A majority (94%) of Philippine businesses view cloud-based IT solutions as an important factor in mitigating the impact of the pandemic, according to a survey entitled “The Role of Cloud in Asia and Confidence in Asian Innovation”, commissioned by Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group......»»