Pandemic boosts Alibaba Cloud s Philippine ambitions
As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is grabbing on a business opportunity that the health crisis had brought: offering to help in the digital transformation of Filipino businesses......»»
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......»»
Beauty World’s latest
One of the main skin issues that Filipinos worry about is having sensitive skin. Living with it can be incredibly challenging to manage with the occasional irritation, flare-ups, itching, dryness, burning and redness. The effects of having sensitive skin can manifest physically, emotionally and psychologically — which is why it is best to invest in a routine that is efficient, simple and yet powerful enough to manage one’s sensitive skin. Two-step solution Aveeno Skin Relief Body Wash and Lotion, Aveeno’s two-step solution, is powered with oats to effectively manage sensitive skin. Both are formulated with Triple Oat Complex that will help you soothe dry, itchy andsensitive skin. [caption id="attachment_190019" align="aligncenter" width="1487"] Bodyography.[/caption] Included in the two-step regimen, the Triple Oat Complex is composed of Oat Oil that boosts ceramide production for a stronger skin barrier, Oat Extract that contains avenanthramides with potent antioxidants and Oat Flour that moisturizes the skin. Combining both the Skin Relief Body Wash and the Moisturizing Lotion to your sensitive skin routine poses many benefits, such as relief and comfort to one’s skin. Apart from your skin feeling extra moisturized and smooth upon using, the skin barrier is strengthened, protected, more nourished and more soothed with the help of Aveeno’s Triple Oat Complex formula — therefore providing an easy, more efficient way to manage sensitive skin. [caption id="attachment_190020" align="aligncenter" width="1124"] Aveeno Skin Relief Body Wash and Lotion.[/caption] Clean beauty finds Unicorn Glow understands how unique everyone is and provides a fun, whimsical range of products, from eyeshadow sticks to lip tints, foundation, and hair masks. Another rising brand in the K-beauty industry worth stocking up on is L.O.C.K. Fun and fearless, L.O.C.K.’s elevated range helps beginners apply makeup like a pro, providing easy-to-follow tutorials with its seamless products. Sky Bottle delivers luxurious, perfectly perfumed skincare, like body lotions, mists, creams, and body washes that make one feel soft and light as a cloud. Conscious beauty brand Last Object is disrupting the single-use industry and revolutionizing beauty by providing reusable options that are a minimum of 10 times better than single-use. Dr. Pawpaw has released a skincare line that makes it a vegan beauty must-have, now with cleansing balms, serums, day creams, night creams, and sheet masks. Hailing from London, the Urban Apothecary delights patrons with its elevated body and home fragrances, delivering alluring scents that set the mood and soothe the mind. A beauty brand to truly count on, Bodyography products are infused with beneficial ingredients, such as antioxidants, anti-aging superfoods and minerals that leave your skin looking and feeling its best. Its mostly vegan products are free from parabens and gluten, and the brand is also certified by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) as cruelty-free. [caption id="attachment_190021" align="aligncenter" width="1080"] PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HELLO GLOWCollagen Serum Soothing Gel.[/caption] Skin-loving ingredients Hello Glow’s new soothing gels are made with skin-loving ingredients suited for different skin types. The Collagen Serum Soothing Gel is perfect for those who are looking for anti-aging products as it is infused with Bakuchiol, a potent antioxidant that helps fight signs of aging such as fine lines and sagging skin. Bakuchiol becomes even more effective when paired with hydrating ingredients like Hyaluronic Acid. The Collagen Serum Soothing Gel is also packed with Collagen to give skin a plump and youthful look. Meanwhile, the Tea Tree Serum Soothing Gel is the answer for those with acne problems. Infused with Tea Tree extract, this serum soothing gel variant has anti-bacterial properties used to treat acne skin while keeping it supple. It’s also mixed with other extracts like aloe vera which treats sunburn and soothes irritated skin and other skin problems; and Camellia Japonica which has skin-enhancing benefits such as antioxidant protection and moisturizing properties. The post Beauty World’s latest appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Amazon steps up AI race with $4-B Anthropic investment
Amazon said on Monday it would invest up to $4 billion in AI firm Anthropic, as the online retail giant steps into an AI race dominated by Microsoft, Google and OpenAI. The success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot released last year that is able to generate poems, essays and other works with just a short prompt, has led to billions being invested in the field. Amazon had already announced it aimed to soup up its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI, which the firm said would allow users to have smoother conversations. San Francisco-based Anthropic is seen as a leader in the field and has its own chatbot, Claude, a competitor to ChatGPT. "We have tremendous respect for Anthropic's team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration," said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. The giant firms and wealthy investors of Silicon Valley have poured money into artificial intelligence as they seek to find a killer application to justify the interest. ChatGPT's instant success threw much of the focus onto chatbots and sparked imitators and rivals, not least from Google with its Bard chatbot. Chinese titans Tencent and Baidu have also launched bots they claim can rival ChatGPT. 'Transformation' promise But Monday's deal between Anthropic and Amazon is potentially less significant in the chatbot world and more important in the race to develop chips to power AI. Anthropic agreed to use Amazon's chips to develop its next models and the two firms said they would collaborate on developing the next set of chips. All firms in the space are looking to wean themselves off the chips made by market leader NVIDIA, said Nick Patience, lead AI research analyst at S&P Global Market. "It'll be difficult for anyone to make a dent in the next 12 to 18 months," he told AFP, but tie-ups like Monday's Amazon deal could help change the picture over five years. Anthropic also agreed to use Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure -- the data centers that store and process data on a vast scale -- for "mission critical workloads". Amazon said it would take a "minority ownership position" in the AI firm, which has already raised more than $1 billion since it was set up in 2021. The statement promises that "Claude", which is the name of Anthropic's chatbot and its model, will help AWS customers "of all sizes to develop new generative AI-powered applications to transform their organisations". The deal intensifies competition between Amazon and Google, which had earlier opened its cloud services to Anthropic and invested $300 million to acquire 10 percent of the company. AI models require huge computing power so AI firms rely on data centers provided by the likes of AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. As tech giants push their own AI ambitions, they have been increasingly looking at tie-ins with smaller AI firms -- Microsoft leading the way with a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI. The post Amazon steps up AI race with $4-B Anthropic investment appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
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......»»
Esquire adopts Oradian cloud core banking platform to scale business 10x in 5 years
Esquire Financing Inc., has adopted Oradian’s advanced cloud-native core banking system to realize its ambitions for MSMEs across the Philippines......»»
Esquire adopts Oradian cloud core banking platform to scale business 10x in 5 years
Esquire Financing Inc., has adopted Oradian’s advanced cloud-native core banking system to realize its ambitions for MSMEs across the Philippines......»»
UK approves Amazon buy of robotic vacuum maker iRobot
Britain's Competition and Markets Authority regulator said Friday it has approved Amazon's $1.7-billion purchase of iRobot, the US maker of robotic vacuum Roomba. The CMA "has now concluded that the deal would not lead to competition concerns in the UK", it announced in a statement. The transaction, announced in August 2022, aims to expand Amazon's artificial intelligence and smart home ambitions. The US retail titan welcomed Friday's news. "We're pleased with the UK CMA's decision and are committed to supporting regulatory bodies in their work. We look forward to similar decisions from other regulators soon," said a spokesperson. Massachusetts-based iRobot builds robots and "intelligent home" innovations, having introduced the Roomba self-operating vacuums a decade ago. Amazon's deal to buy iRobot for $61 per share along with acquiring the company's debt was subject to the approval of shareholders and regulators. iRobot has a 30-year track record in robotics and underlying software such as mapping and navigation. Amazon has meanwhile invested in smart home and automation technologies with acquisitions such as Ring doorbells, Kiva warehouse robots, and self-driving startup Zoox. Friday's decision comes after the CMA had in April decided to block Microsoft's $69-billion takeover of "Call of Duty" video games giant Activision Blizzard, arguing it would harm competition in cloud gaming. That decision will be appealed by both companies. The post UK approves Amazon buy of robotic vacuum maker iRobot 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 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......»»
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......»»
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......»»
Alibaba Cloud revamps hybrid cloud strategy to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group revamped its hybrid cloud strategy to focus on bringing compatibility, security, compliance, scalability, and reliability with its newly upgraded product offerings and its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program......»»
Alibaba Cloud unveils & lsquo;magic& rsquo; behind world& rsquo;s largest online shopping festival
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today revealed the cutting-edge technologies rolled out in support of the 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival......»»
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 digitalizes sports with more AI solutions
During the Apsara Conference 2020, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, unveiled a series of artificial intelligence (AI) powered solutions which are set to transform and digitalize the way sports entertainment was traditionally organized, broadcast and consumed. The solutions are designed to bring spectators closer to the events’ center stage for more personalized and interactive engagement, while helping organizers and broadcasters operate more efficiently, effectively and securely......»»
Jack Ma’s Alibaba joins Philippines fintech group
Jack Ma’s Alibaba Cloud has joined the alliance of financial technology companies in the Philippines to contribute to the growth of the local fintech industry......»»
Two in Five Fortune 500 companies choose Alibaba Cloud
Hanhzhou---Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced that it has supported 38 percent of the Fortune 500 companies last fiscal year. .....»»