In this edition: Taiwan chips and Apple devices; Vietnam leads in crypto adoption; Indonesia’s social commerce space; Korea’s NFT citizenship; agri-insurance & weather in Australia; and more.
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• Indonesia: UENA backed with 1-stop online food service, taking and processing orders from end-to-end including delivery, with kitchens covering a hyperlocal area to optimise delivery cost and time
• Insider cyber threats pose ‘significant’ risk to Australia’s defence force, brief warns
• Download: ‘The Future of Corporate Innovation in the Philippines’ from Embiggen Consulting (pdf)
• India: Agnikul nears $20M funding close with the country’s first private small-satellite system, capable of carrying 300kg payloads to low Earth orbits up to 700km
• India: MeitY Startup Hub gov’t initiative and Meta unveil XR Startup Program, accelerator to support and boost XR technology startups, skills and ecosystem
• The future of the internet?: “Russia and China are seeking to move…governance to the ITU where bottom-up design of internet standards could be replaced with top-down decisions based on the politics of nation-states…”
• Australia: Nutromics medtech firm raises additional $14M with wearable diagnostics platform using single patch and DNA technology to enable tracking for multiple targets in the human body
• Australia: Hillridge insurance-tech raises $2.3M seed funding with agriculture-focused insurance, using weather data, machine learning and farms focus to provide insurance and self-executing blockchain contracts
• Indonesia: Gov’t announces that remote workers to be allowed to work online up to 6 months, with a longer-term digital nomad visa of potentially up to 5 years under discussion
• India: Taiwan’s Foxconn and Vedanta mining giant announce $19.5BN plan to build chipmaking factory, potentially creating 100K jobs in Gujarat
• South Korea: Google fined $50M, Meta fined $22M over privacy infringements in tracking consumers’ online behavior without consent, and using data for targeted advertising
• Australia: WA state gov’t launches Dealroom WA, a data-driven public dashboard to develop the State’s early-stage innovation ecosystem
• Vietnam and The Philippines take top spots in Chainalysis report on global cryptocurrency adoption, with Asia and emerging markets leading overall
• Taiwan: A brief overview of the government’s National Development Fund and its 5-year Startup Business Angel Investment Program
• Thailand: Securities and Exchange Commission announces ban on crypto firms from offering staking and lending services to investors in the country, aiming to safeguard investors from liquidity risks
• “Social commerce accounted for about 44% of SE Asia’s $109BN e-commerce market last year…Vietnam led the region, with social commerce accounting for 65% of its $22BN online retail economy…”
• “In just one day in October 2021, two of China’s top live-streamers, Li Jiaqi and Viya, sold $3BN worth of goods. That’s roughly three times Amazon’s average daily sales.”
• Foreign investment vs sanctions: “Chinese investment in Mexico jumped from $154 million in 2016 to $271 million the following year, when Donald Trump took office threatening a trade war.”
• Australia: Nuroflux medical-tech startup takes overall excellence award at inaugural Fishburners Tech for Good Awards with device to monitor brain activity and blood flow following a stroke
• South Korea: City of Seongman unveils plans for a digital copy, Metaverse Special City Seongnam, with denizens accessing key services and information via NFT citizenship
• Philippines: An intro to MooMart, online market allowing farmers of any scale to sell produce directly to consumers, from households to businesses, side-stepping middlemen and resellers
• An intro to Singapore-based Itsmyne, a Web3 startup delivering a ‘social network meets marketplace’ for licensed NFTs, recently the official NFT partner of 2022 Global Sports Tech Summit
• India: Google partners NASSCOM industry body and gov’t IT Ministry for first batch of Google Cloud Computing Foundations with Kubernetes, aimed at higher education students and early-career graduates
• China: Huawei unveils new flagship Mate 50-series smartphones, minus 5G capability due to sanctions on the company, but instead featuring ability to connect with BeiDou satellite navigation system
• “China’s third-party payments business is withering, with at least 20 operators reselling or giving up their licences, which once fetched billions of yuan in the second-hand market.”
• Australia: ANZ banking services head talks of metaverse services, smart contracts, blockchain-based services and more as part of banking’s future
• Taiwan: Apple to be first company to use updated Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s latest chip technology, adopting TSMC chips for some iPhone and Mac computers in 2023
• China: 3 autonomous driving companies to trial 10 robocars on Henqin island in Guangdong province, with major backers including Baidu, Meituan, Softbank and Bytedance
• China: Shiseido cosmetics giant launches Fibona Co-Creation with Startups program, delivered by Plug and Play China, seeking startups in ‘medical beauty tech’ and ‘holistic beauty tech’
• Indonesia: SerMorpheus raises $2.5M with Web3 enablement platform, onboarding and aiding brands and creators to develop NFTs, and manage engagement with customers and communities
• Singapore: A look at KNN3, permissionless, decentralized tool for developers to pull insights from cross-blockchain user data, seeing dApp and smart contract integration opportunities
And in case you missed it…
ICYMI: Wider-world technology news headlines with Asia-Pacific / Indo-Pacific relevance, alongside useful points of outside-world tech reference.
» Diamond Standard blockchain startup set to gain funding with Ethereum-based tokens backed by physical diamonds that can be sold on crypto exchanges
» “More than $100m (£85m) worth of non-fungible tokens were stolen in the year to July, research shows, with criminals making off with an average of $300,000 per scam.”
» Download: ‘Value creation in the metaverse — The real business of the virtual world’ from McKinsey (pdf)
» The Metaverse in 2040: “Hype? Hope? Hell? Maybe all 3…. Many worry that current online problems may be magnified if Web3…is led by those who built today’s dominant web platforms.” From Pew Research
» Ethereum’s merge: A Netscape moment for Web3? Five issues that will determine the significance of the crypto world’s switch, from the Financial Times
» “As the world’s largest corporations & most ambitious start-ups pursue the metaverse, it’s essential that we — users, developers, consumers, voters — understand we still have agency…the ability to reset the status quo, but only if we act now.”
» Smartphone firms: “…guilty of treating consumer technology as if it were fashion wear, releasing products each year that become harder to repair and adding features that hasten obsolescence…Apple even invented its own screw.”
» A Sceptic’s Guide to Crypto, Episode 5: ‘The Crypto Wild West’, a podcast from the Financial Times
» Privacy & Big Tech: “Incessant data collection and tech monopolies are inherently linked…leaving users feeling like they have no option but to accept a lack of privacy to use the Internet.”
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