Globe Telecom has partnered with the local government of Davao del Norte for the creation of a government ID card that can also be used to pay taxes, goods and services using Globes GCash platform.

The card will be available to residents and government employees in Davao Del Norte.

The project will help promote a cashless ecosystem both in business and in government, Globe said in a statement.

There are 65 merchants and local government facilities in Davao Norte that can now accept GCash e-payments using their DavNor GCash accounts. Thus, residents can now pay their local taxes, business permits fees, property tax and other mandated fees through GCash Local Government Mobile Services, it added.

The telco estimated that more than 300,000 residents of Tagum City and Carmen would benefit from the project.

About 18,000 employees from the two areas will serve as pilot beneficiaries of the DavNor-GCash co-branded Citizen IDs by September this year.

This innovation shall enhance our clientele-focused mindset cutting down on costs and speeding up our processes to better serve our citizens in an efficient and responsive manner, Davao del Norte Governor Antonio Rafael del Rosario said.

Globe said its GCash PowerPay+ platform allowed monetary benefits such as payroll and salaries which were accorded to government employees and financial assistance for senior citizens and students to be credited to their GCash wallets in real-time.

This helps improve operational efficiency in government by tracking cash flow and offering lesser risks in the handling of cash for beneficiaries, Globe said.

Globe said it also provided connectivity through direct Internet and public wi-fi access in select locations.

A Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol allows agencies to connect to select remote agencies such as hospitals and rural health units while Enterprise Content Management enables real-time data capture, data management, data analytics and reporting tools, dashboarding capabilities for cloud for better archiving and data/document management.

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Globe, Davao Norte LGU push cashless ecosystem | Inquirer Business - Inquirer.net

After a photo of a woman holding a giant, seemingly bunny-eared snail went viral, social media users had plenty of questions about the massive mollusk.

TheGiant African Snailcan grow to be eight inches long and feed on roughly 500 different types of plants, as well as plaster and stucco used to build homes. Its considered the most damaging snail in the world.

To add insult to injury, theyre also known to eat rat feces and contract rat lungworm, which can cause meningitis in humans.

The creatures are native to East Africa and have also been found in Asia, according to New York Invasive Species. They were originally introduced to Hawaii in 1936 and Florida in 1966, where eradication efforts costing $1 million were launched to get rid of them. They were rediscovered in 2011 and efforts continued into 2015.

Though officials were able to get rid of hundreds of thousands of the snails, total eradication proved difficult as they have a nine-year lifespan and are hermaphrodites, which mean they dont need a partner to reproduce. And they reproduce often, resulting in as many as 1,200 eggs per year.

Giant African Land snails are sold and raised as pets in other countries, such as Europe.

View original post here:

Giant Snail Looks Like a Rabbit, But Would Destroy Our Ecosystem ... - The Weather Channel

Googles unnecessarily complicated streaming ecosystem will eventually become a bit more streamlined according to YouTubes Global Head of Music, Lyor Cohen.

During a recent panel session at the New Music Seminar conference in New York City, Cohen said his company plans to combine YouTube Red and Google Play Music into a single offering in order to help educate consumers and attract new subscribers.

Googles current streaming ecosystem is a bit of a mess.

A YouTube Red subscription removes all ads from videos on YouTube and offers both offline playback and background playback on mobile devices. YouTube Red subscribers also get a complementary subscription to Google Play Music, the search giants answer to Spotify.

YouTube Music, meanwhile, is a free offering thats driven by advertising (which can be eliminated if you subscribe to YouTube Red). Oh, and anyone that signs up for Google Play Music also receives all of the benefits afforded by YouTube Red. Confused yet?

The product teams behind Google Play Music and YouTube Music reportedly combined earlier this year, setting the stage for such a merger.

In a follow-up sent to The Verge, Google said music is very important and that theyre evaluating how to bring together different music offerings to deliver the best possible product for users, music partners and artists. Nothing will change for users today, the spokesperson said, adding that theyll provide plenty of notice before any changes are made.

More here:

Google to declutter streaming ecosystem by combining YouTube Red and Google Play Music - TechSpot

Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, has said India should evolve and nurture an innovative eco-system and respond to technology demands.

Addressing the 70th anniversary of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute (CECRI) here on Tuesday, he said creating such an eco-system needed a change in mindset across all domains of society and breaking out from silo mentality.

On technology vision for India 2035, he said the new vision betted on emerging technologies to overcome challenges in ensuring inclusive growth and improved quality of life.

Such a technology leap must take advantage of Indias democratic dividend, he suggested.

The vision statement envisioned Indias technology future modes comparing it to four gaits of a horse: galloping, cantering, trotting and walking, he said. India gallops in some areas such as space, nuclear, information and missile technologies, canters to keep pace in few areas such as civil aviation and road transport, and trots in a few others such as food, manufacturing and electronics, he said.

India has not been able to walk the talk in time in many areas such as room temperature superconductivity, he said. India shone well during the agrarian era, but missed the bus during the industrial era, he said.

India invested only 0.88% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in research and development programmes, but its investment was huge in absolute terms considering the countrys economy, he said.

It is sad that in most industries Indian expertise still lacks a global edge and we remain heavily dependent on many key foreign technologies, he regretted. The translation of research findings to commercialisation was strapped for want of funds, he said.

It is, however, a matter of pride that despite foreign rule, technology denial and embargos, India has managed to fly its flag high, he said.

Today, countries such as Israel were keen on making together with India, he said adding, the only way to sustain the momentum was to become a major player in the technology-production game.

Speaking on the occasion, Mr Vijayamohanan K. Pillai, Director, CECRI, said that with changing priorities it was necessary for scientists to prune their activities to those that impact the 125 million people of this country.

See more here:

Innovative eco-system stressed - The Hindu

July 26, 2017 Amphipods of the species Eulimnogammarus verrucosus react negatively to higher temperatures and pollutants like cadmium. Credit: V. Pavlichenko, ISU

Lake Baikal, with its exceptional species diversity and unique wildlife, is a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site. As part of the Helmholtz Russia Research Group LaBeglo, UFZ researchers are studying the impact of climate change and environmental toxins on the lake's fauna. In a recent study, together with researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the University of Irkutsk, they addressed the question of how Baikal amphipods that fulfil important ecological functions in the lake react to pollutants in the water.

Lake Baikal formed between 25 and 30 million years ago and contains around 20 per cent of all unfrozen fresh water on Earth. At approximately 23,000 cubic kilometres, its water volume is even larger than that of the Baltic Sea. Lake Baikal is not only the oldest and largest lake on Earth, but with a depth of over 1,500 metres also the deepest. It may also be one of the coldest: the average water temperature near the shore is only about 6 C. "The water is crystal-clear, the salt and nutrient content is low and it's extremely oxygen-richeven at the very bottom of the lake," says Dr Till Luckenbach, an ecotoxicologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). Over the course of evolutionary history, these particular conditions in Lake Baikal have resulted in a unique fauna. About 80 per cent of the 2,600 or so species living in Lake Baikal are endemicin other words they are not found anywhere else on Earth, indicating that they have adapted very well to the extreme conditions.

However, whether the fauna of Lake Baikal will remain so diverse and unique in years to come is uncertain. The lake is situated in a region in which global warming is particularly noticeable. Over the past 50 years, the average surface temperature of Lake Baikal has increased by nearly 1.5 C. "And it's still rising," says Luckenbach. "The period in winter when the lake is covered with ice has also become much shorter. In addition to this, there is detectable chemical pollution. Since the environmental conditions in Lake Baikal have remained stable for a very long time, these changes are dramatic." In the Helmholtz Russia Research Group LaBeglo, project leader Luckenbach and his team from UFZ have been working for the past six years with researchers from the University of Irkutsk, the AWI in Bremerhaven and the University of Leipzig to discover what consequences the changed environmental conditionssuch as rising water temperatures and chemical pollutionhave for the unique fauna of Lake Baikal. Two native amphipods of the genus Eulimnogammarus are being used as model organisms. Amphipods perform an important ecological function in water: they break down organic material, thus keeping the water clean, and serve as food for fish. This key role in the food network makes them important model organisms for ecotoxicologists.

Studies on the temperature sensitivity of Baikal amphipods carried out at the University of Irkutsk show that one species (E. cyaneus) can tolerate water temperatures up to around 20 C, which may occur in summer close to the shores of the lake. The research team found that E. cyaneus produces a constant level of so-called heat shock proteins, which protect important protein molecules in the organism that would otherwise be damaged at high temperatures. The other species, E. verrucosus, produces far fewer heat shock proteins and instead migrates to deeper, cooler regions of the lake to escape high water temperatures. "If water temperatures increase as a result of climate change, this could have far-reaching consequences not only for the individual species, but also for the balance of the ecosystem, which has developed over a long period of time," says Luckenbach. "In the case of E. cyaneus, the temperature maximum which the species can tolerate for long periods can sometimes already be reached in summera further temperature increase would be extremely critical. And if E. verrucosus has to migrate to deeper water more than is currently the case, the species will have to compete more with the amphipods living there for food sources."

In their study, published recently in Environmental Science and Technology, a team of researchers from UFZ, the AWI and the University of Irkutsk investigated how these two species of amphipods react to chemical pollution in the water. The animals were exposed to the heavy metal cadmium, which served as a model toxin. Although the water in Lake Baikal is still largely unpolluted, cadmium is a relatively frequent environmental pollutant whose toxicity makes it extremely problematic to ecosystems. It seems likely that Lake Baikal could see increasing heavy metal pollution. The lake's largest tributary, the Selenga River, is increasingly polluted with mining waste water from Mongolia, and via air, pollutants reach the lake from the industrial region around Irkutsk.

The reactions of the amphipods were observed in the laboratory. "The smaller species E. cyaneus absorbed the pollutant faster and thus died at lower pollutant concentrations in the water," explains Dr Lena Jakob, an ecophysiologist at the AWI, who carried out the experiments at Lake Baikal. "We also observed that E. verrucosus slowed down its metabolism even at low concentrations of cadmium. This is a warning sign, because the animals might avoid feeding when this happens, do not reproduce and are more likely to fall prey to predators due to reduced activity. Even a low but constant level of chemical pollution in Lake Baikal could have massive impacts on individual species and the ecosystem as a whole."

In another study, the UFZ researchers together with bioinformatics experts from the University of Leipzig obtained the first insights into the genome of E. verrucosus. It is surprisingly largeabout three times the size of the human genome. The genome data will be used as the basis for further investigation of physiological adaptation strategies in different environmental conditions. According to Luckenbach: "We want to shed a little more light on this area, understand the physiological level even better and find out whether there are other mechanisms that enable the organisms to withstand the effects of climate change and exposure to pollutants, because ultimately we want to be able to predict how the ecosystem might change."

Explore further: Image: Orbital view of Irkutsk and Lake Baikal

More information: Lena Jakob et al, Uptake Kinetics and Subcellular Compartmentalization Explain Lethal but Not Sublethal Effects of Cadmium in Two Closely Related Amphipod Species, Environmental Science & Technology (2017). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b06613

The city of Irkutsk (centre left) and part of Lake Baikal (right) are pictured in this Sentinel-1A image over Russia's Siberia region.

Russia sounded the alarm Tuesday as water levels in Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake, dropped to record lows, with environmentalists blaming dry weather and overuse by local industry.

Despite widespread concerns about preserving the worlds largest body of fresh water, researchers report that pollution is continuing in Russias fabled Lake Baikal. The study is scheduled for the April 15 issue of ACS ...

A controversial Soviet-era paper mill on the shores of Lake Baikal will be closed down, a government spokeswoman said Thursday, after years of complaints about pollution at the UNESCO-protected Siberian site.

Ecologists are warning the world's deepest and oldest lake is at risk from climate change and faces a new threat from plans to build a dam.

Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's largest and most biologically diverse lake, faces the prospect of severe ecological disruption as a result of climate change, according to an analysis by a joint US-Russian team in the May ...

Britain said Wednesday it will outlaw the sale of new diesel and petrol cars and vans from 2040 in a bid to cut air pollution but environmental groups said the proposals did not go far enough.

A new study projects that if climate change continues unabated, heat-related deaths will rise dramatically in 10 major U.S. metropolitan areas compared to if the predicted increase in global warming is substantially curbed ...

Hydrogen at elevated temperature creates high electrical conductivity in the Earth's mantle.

The idea of geoengineering, also known as climate engineering, is very controversial. But as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in our atmosphere, scientists are beginning to look at possible emergency measures.

A new study found that Caribbean staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) are benefiting from "coral gardening," the process of restoring coral populations by planting laboratory-raised coral fragments on reefs.

Humanity will have used up its allowance of planetary resources such as water, soil, and clean air for all of 2017 by next week, said a report Tuesday.

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Research at Lake Baikalfor the protection of a unique ecosystem - Phys.Org

The Siletz River in Lincoln, Oregon. (Photo: USFWS - Pacific Region)

On July 24, the Siletz River Ecosystem (SRE) in Northwestern Oregon took legal action to protect itself.

Becoming the third US ecosystem to do so, the SRE took this self-defense step by filing a motion to intervene in the lawsuitRex Capri and Wakefield Farms, LLC v. Dana W. Jenkins and Lincoln County, and Lincoln County Community Rights.

Carol Van Strum, a farmer, author, parent, naturalist, copy editor and co-custodian of 20 acres of temperate rainforest, bottomland and river in the Oregon Coast Range, is an advocate for the intervention of the SRE. She told Truthout why.

"This is a significant and groundbreaking effort, literally from the ground, offering a far more effective, comprehensive way to protect the planet we're part of than piecemeal campaigns to ban a single chemical or fight a single fracking or mining operation at a time," she said. "It is also significant because it starts with communities taking back control of their lives and environment that industry-controlled governments have taken from them."

"If Nature Has No Rights, Neither Do We"

The two plaintiffs, Rex Capri of Newport and Wakefield Farms of Eddyville, claim that it is their "right" to spray toxic pesticides aerially, and that this right is greater than the right of the people of Lincoln County to protect public health, clean water, and the rights of ecosystems and natural communities.

To see more stories like this, visit "Planet or Profit?"

The SRE has been in trouble for years. Its watershed has lost nearly half of its forest in just the last 16 years alone, and massive clear-cuts from strip logging plague the ecosystem.

Much of the area has been sprayed with pesticides from the air multiple times, and huge parts of the watershed are completely barren of vegetation. This has also resulted in critical habitat for salmon and steelhead being degraded and, in some cases, completely annihilated.

Today, because of this mistreatment, mudslides into the river are common, and pesticide run-off into the river and creek tributaries is rampant. This runoff now poses a major risk of contaminating one of Lincoln County's main drinking water sources.

Van Strum, who has lived in the area for nearly 50 years, explained to Truthout that she herself is part of the SRE ecosystem, and pointed out that the US Declaration of Independence asserts that the laws of nature "pre-empt human law." She also cited the Dr. Seuss bookThe Lorax,which chronicles the plight of the Lorax and his environment. The Lorax speaks for the trees against an entity that is seeking to destroy them. Van Strum told Truthout she is acting as the Lorax for the SRE.

"I speak for the rights of waters and forests and wildlife to challenge human violations of natural law," she said.

Dr. Seusshadsaidthat The Lorax was his personal favorite of his books, as it addressed economic and environmental issues. Hesaid the book"came out of me being angry," explaining, "I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might."

There are precedents for ecosystems filing lawsuits to defend their rights in other countries.

Ecuador has written the rights of nature into its constitution, and in New Zealand, rivers are granted personhood with human rights.Over the last year, high courts in India and Columbia have also recognized the rights of rivers as a means of creating higher protection standards for their ecosystems.

The federal constitution of Ecuador has recognized the rights of nature since 2008, and there, two different legal cases have affirmed that rivers have rights and damaging human activity violates those rights.

The United States hasn't taken any of these steps so far -- but, of course, that doesn't mean it never will.

"So far, I don't think any of those efforts have succeeded in this country, but no one [in power] gave the women's suffrage movement or civil rights movements here much chance but ultimately, they succeeded," Van Strum added. "I think this will, too, inevitably, because no matter how many suits and ties and shiny vehicles we hide behind, we are still and always a part of nature, so if nature has no rights, neither do we."

Rights Essential for Nature

Court documents for the case, obtained by Truthout, state, "The Freedom from Aerially Sprayed Pesticides Ordinance of Lincoln County (hereafter "the Ordinance") for the first time in Oregon law recognizes the rights of ecosystems and natural communities," and, "Pursuant to Section 3(a) of the Ordinance, the Siletz River Ecosystem and all natural communities and ecosystems within Lincoln County secured legal rights to be free from toxic trespass and aerially sprayed pesticides. These rights are essential for nature -- the physical world including human beings -- to survive and thrive."

The Ordinance thus sets a precedent by giving standing to ecosystems and natural communities to enforce and defend their rights through a human member of the system or community.

That means that the SRE is a real party with legal standing to participate in litigation to enforce or defend its rights. This then enables the SRE and all natural communities and ecosystems within Lincoln County to be a named party in an action brought by a Lincoln County resident or for Lincoln County to enforce or defend the ecosystem or natural community's rights.

Kai Huschke with theCommunity Environmental Legal Defense Fund(CELDF), the public interest law firm representing the SRE and Lincoln County Community Rights, in a press release about the recent filing, said that this case is a perfect example of what can happen when individuals as well as communities step forward "to secure nature's rights."

Van Strum encouraged people around the country to fight for both their communities' rights and nature's rights, and pointed to CELDF as a valuable resource in these struggles.

The lawsuit is now moving forward, but there is currently no indication of when the court will respond to the SRE's motion to intervene.

Did you know? Truthout is a nonprofit publication and the vast majority of our budget comes from reader donations. It's easy to support our work -- click here to get started.

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Oregon Ecosystem Files Lawsuit to Defend Its Rights - Truth-Out

Financial institutions are riding the digital transformation wave.

In this new era, the financial services industry is looking to invest in innovative technologies that improve business processes and address changing consumer expectations. Financial institutions are also looking to engage reliable tech partners to help them with IT engagements.

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To seize opportunities in this burgeoning market, large IT vendors are offering platforms on which fintech companies, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators can build new applications. The result is a still-developing channel ecosystem that aims to deliver IT solutions tailored to the financial services sector. These emerging financial services platforms are surfacing as financial institutions place their bets on such technologies as cloud computing, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI).

"What we are seeing is a confluence of technologies," said Tom Eck, CTO at IBM's Industry Platforms unit. Eck said cloud computing has not only brought about economies of scale to financial institution's data centers, but it has also increased the pace of application development.

"Banking technology traditionally has been on quarterly release cycles, but now they've learned by seeing what's going on with fintech companiesthat have shortened the cycles of getting new products and updates out into the marketplace," Eck said. "Cloud has accelerated innovation because it's much quicker to get from a concept into production on cloud platforms."

By working with cloud technologies and agile software development methodologies, Fintechs are able to develop applications faster --on the order of months rather than years, Eck said. He added that banks can do the same by utilizing these tools and techniques, but the difference is that many fintechs were "born on the cloud" and hence these practices are instinctual. Nevertheless, banks are learning to adapt to these technologies as well.

Beyond cloud, financial institutions are also drawn to the attractiveness of using blockchain technology to keep a shared digital ledger of transactions that maintain a growing list of records. In addition, AI's cognitive capabilities, which can augment the intelligence or capabilities of a financial advisor, for example, are driving banks, insurance companies, wealth management firms and other financial companies to embrace this technology.

As the competition to build the next generation of financial apps takes shape, the IBM Cloud for Financial Services platform was launched in March to give fintech companies, ISVs and others access to APIs, data and content to build, monetize, and speed up the pace of developing financial services apps.

"IBM Cloud for Financial Services is a platform for developers to rapidly build next-generation financial services products and, as a platform, the value increases as more functionality is added," Eck said.

He added that IBM has capabilities that were previously only available as monolithic, on-premises applications. Now, the new platform is enabling some pieces of the functionality of those systems through APIs.

One example Eck cites is taking pieces of IBM Algorithmics, a risk management offering and financial modeling platform, and making it accessible to a much broader range of application developers. He said IBM is focused on accelerating the value of the platform by building out its ecosystem of third-party partners.

"We have a marketplace where we are plugging in offerings from fintechs that want to start selling some of their capabilities through the marketplace," Eck said. "By offering one platform with an integrated marketplace, a developer can tap in just as easily to the offerings from IBM as they can to offerings from the third parties. We think it is critical to build out this ecosystem so that we can more rapidly bring and expose value from our platform."

Executives at Actiance Inc., an ISV based in Redwood City, Calif., said it joined the IBM Cloud for Financial Services platform to extend its software offerings and introduce its tools to global financial customers. Actiance provides products for communications compliance, archiving and analytics.

"We are trying to sell our products to the biggest global banks worldwide," said Barry Ruditsky, Actiance's senior vice president of business development, channels and alliances. "Having a partner like IBM that has the infrastructure, the resources, and the relationships with these customers -- not just in New York, but in London and Hong Kong -- can help us deploy our capability to these global banks. IBM helps us gain that scale," he added.

Specifically, Actiance has three products: The company's Vantage and Socialite offerings enable organizations to add compliance policies to unified communications, collaboration and social media communications. These products capture this content and send it to a third product, Alcatraz, a cloud-based content archive for electronic communications. Actiance will use the IBM's financial services platform to take advantage of its AI technology and worldwide infrastructure.

Part of the strategy, Ruditsky said, is developing apps that, for example, track trader-to-trader discussions or communications between wealth managers and their clients on Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media products. That communication tracking feature is important in a regulated sector like the financial industry. Furthermore, employees at financial companies are using various social media platforms to interact with younger clients.

It's costing them a lot of money to stay on the status quo and they are looking for new platforms that reduce cost and open opportunities to adopt new, compelling types of applications. Barry Ruditskysenior vice president of business development, channels and alliances, Actiance

To deepen their understanding of this burgeoning market, companies want a better handle on customer behavior and financial product preferences. As a result, financial institutions can benefit from using AI along with archiving tools to mine communications data, spot trends and gain insights in a predictive and cognitive manner throughout their value chain, Ruditsky said.

"Many financial institutions can't do that right now," Ruditsky said, noting that those organizations are stuck in traditional on-premises environments that prevent them from digging into the content. They are unable to search through content and access the detailed metadata that would help them adopt predictive or cognitive applications moving forward, he said.

"It's costing them a lot of money to stay on the status quo and they are looking for new platforms that reduce cost and open opportunities to adopt new, compelling types of applications," he said.

As the financial industry marches toward adopting blockchain technology, Red Hat Inc. has been moving in that direction as well. Last year the company announced the OpenShift Blockchain Initiative, which encourages fintech companies and ISVs to develop blockchain solutions on Red Hat's OpenShift Dedicated, a container application platform.

"ISVs in general are struggling with the idea of how they do containerized app development and how they handle on-premises, hybrid and public cloud deployments," said Rob Cardwell, Red Hat'svice president of strategic partnerships and alliances. "We believe our technologies help them solve a lot of those struggles with how to architect their systems to meet these various demands from their customer base."

Cardwell described the initiative as being set up to facilitate building blockchain solutions on OpenShift which, in general, can work in a variety of environments. Options for deployment include the customer's site, Red Hat's managed cloud, public clouds or a sandbox brought in by a partner. As fintechs and ISVs develop newer applications more quickly, part of what Red Hat offers is a platform that lets them develop, test and deploy software on the same underlying application architecture, he added.

Similarly, Red Hat believes its technology lets application developers manage transitions from an on-premises environment to a hybrid private-public cloud mix without having to change their approach or architecture.

"Moving from one environment to the next is one of the foundational elements toward being able to develop applications more quickly and can change the turnaround time, or the cycle time, for developing these apps from months to weeks to days," Cardwell said.

The ability to work in different environments is one reason BlockApps Inc., an ISV, became a Red Hat partner. The company recently deployed its BlockApps Strato, an Ethereum blockchain infrastructure, on OpenShift.

Victor Wong, CEO at BlockApps, said many customers that originally launched the BlockApps offering primarily on a public cloud noted that they wanted more flexibility as they moved to serve larger blockchain production systems.

"OpenShift gave us the ability to provide our customers that flexibility of deployment on public clouds, private cloud or any sort of hybrid cloud environment," Wong said.

Wong added that financial companies have been toying with the idea of implementing blockchain in recent years, but they are suddenly moving into more serious production-grade applications and that has been a driving force behind the partnerships between vendors and application developers. It's the main reason why BlockApp is partnering with Red Hat.

"Prior to this partnership there was a big question about how our company was going to manage to serve new blockchain infrastructure," Wong said. "The primary reason we decided to work with Red Hat is to show that blockchain is a real technology that enterprises can start to take seriously."

Learn more about channel opportunities in the financial sector

Read about the potential for blockchain in financial services

Gain insight into multicloud computing and fintech companies

More here:

Financial services platform efforts drive new partner ecosystem - TechTarget

Tokyo Electric Power Company has cemented its interest in blockchain technologies with a major stake in peer-to-peer energy trading platform developer Conjoule.

The Japanese utility giant pumped 3 million ($3.5 million) into the German startup as part of a 4.5 million ($5.3 million) Series A funding round alongside German energy company Innogy SE.

Innogy had been incubating Conjoule within its Innovation Hub division since late 2015, after one of the Hubs staffers, Conjoulesco-founder and Managing Director Sam Warburton, came up with the idea for the renewable energy peer-to-peer marketplace.

Using blockchain technology, the Conjoule team [is] building one of the most exciting technology developments to enable new transactional models in energy, according to a press releasefrom Tepco.

The investment, which should allow Conjoule to increase its technical team and launch its platform commercially across Europe, follows Tepcos alliance with Shell, Statoil, Centrica and others in the blockchain-focused Energy Web Foundation in May.

We aim to develop the use cases and the platforms using blockchain technology in the electricity and energy sector with this participation, Maki Murayama, of Tepcos international public relations group, told GTM.

Tepco sees a growing role for peer-to-peer energy transactions in Japan as distributed generation leads to an increasing level of "prosumers"being involved in local production for local consumption, Murayama said.

Conjoule is beta-testing its blockchain-based peer-to-peer platform with a restricted number of users this year, after developing a simulation based on real historic data in 2015 and creating a minimally viable product for real-world testing in 2016.

It is planning to launch commercially in 2018, with an initial focus on Germany and the Netherlands and possible expansion into Austria and the U.K.

Our target is to be the peer-to-peer platform of choice for distributed electricity producers, consumers and prosumers in Europe and in selected markets globally, said Warburton.

He admitted Conjoule was entering an increasingly crowded market for energy blockchain platforms, though. Other startups in the space include Drift, Grid Singularity and Electron.

Nevertheless, Warburton said: We believe our energy market experience, track record, focus on the needs of our customers and improvement of their customer journey with us mean that we are in an extremely strong position compared to many of the other companies.

For now, other energy blockchain players have been broadly receptive to Conjoules appearance on the scene.

Annie Satow, media relations manager for Siemens, which last November partnered with New York-based peer-to-peer platform developer LO3 Energy, said: This announcement is further confirmation of the markets interest in blockchain technology.

Other energy blockchain developers noted how Conjoule might form part of a wider technology ecosystem in which different blockchains are used for different forms of exchange.

Conjoule superficially appears to be very similar to the blockchain-based solar generation rewards program SolarCoin. ButFrancois Sonnet, co-founder of ElectriCChain, an energy generation data project, said there are differences between them.

SolarCoin comes on top of peer-to-peer energy platforms such as Power Ledger, Grid Singularity or LO3 Energy, and provides a solution to the whole solar value chain, utilities and governments, he said. It is distributed on top of government-backed subsidies.

Ian Worrall, founder of an energy blockchain startup called MyBit, which is aiming to raise funds through a token sale crowdfunding initiative, was similarly quick to draw a distinction between his companys offering and Conjoules.

What they are doing is tokenizing energy itself to trade to neighbors, he said. What MyBit does is tokenize the actual hardware so investors can profit from the revenue solar panels produce and make solar panels more accessible to people with financial constraints.

What seems to be emerging is a web of different energy blockchains with very specific applications, such as trading electrons with the person next door, helping landowners raise cash for solar panels or making it easier to take advantage of subsidies.

While this arrangement may suit energy blockchain startups seeking a niche in a bustling market, it isn't clear how so many choices of peer-to-peer systems will make things easier for end users, as all the platform developers claim.

Trying to understand blockchain's role in the energy sector? Listen to our recent episode of The Interchange podcast for a detailed overview.

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New Startups Fuel Growth in the Energy Blockchain Ecosystem - Greentech Media

Two global tech forces are putting their mark and money into Southeast Asias nascent startup ecosystem, butthey may not be the Western names that you expect.

Rather than Google, Facebook or Microsoft, increasingly Chinese duo Alibaba and Tencent are the driving forces behind the importing of large sums of capital and vast business experience into Southeast Asias most promising startups.

Both companies, sworn enemies in China, appear to have realized the potential in the region and are now acting on it. That means battles, drama and probably more welcome to Southeast Asias tech Game Of Thrones.

Southeast Asia has long been an area of interest for business for its neighbors. Tech aside, Southeast Asia is home to more than 600 million consumers, with six primary markets Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines standing out for growing economies and rising middle-classes of consumers.

In todays digital era, smartphones have been a key catalyst. Like India, Southeast Asias internet users are primarily on mobile, with most having skipped the PC altogether and jumping straight to phones and tablets.

A much-cited report co-authored by Google last year showed that Southeast Asia has 260 million internet users with 3.8 million more going online per month. Thats tipped to grow the internet population to 480 million people by 2020. Sure, that isnt China level yet the country has 731 million internet users, half of which are mobile but it does mean that, alongside India, Southeast Asia is a region of serious tech development potential.

That same Google report forecasted that the regions internet economy i.e. all business generated from the web will be worth $200 billion by 2025. Thats up from 6.5-fold from 2015, when it was estimated to be worth $31 billion. E-commerce alone is tipped to rise from $5.5 billion in 2015 to $88 billion in 2025, of which half will originate from Indonesia, the worlds fourth largest country, according to the report.

Key slides from the Google-Temasek report on Southeast Asias digital economy

Over the past year, it seems that Chinese companies have gone from scouting the region to actively owning chunks of it.

The first step was Alibabas $1 billion investment in Lazada, an Amazon-like e-commerce company serving six countries in Southeast Asia, in April 2016. The deal represented the first major investment into the region from a Chinese company.

Alibaba has since firmed up its shareholding, paying another $1 billion in June to take its ownership to 83 percent, while, under its tutelage, Lazada expanded its business into groceries with the acquisition of Singapore-based Redmart while it launched an Amazon Prime-style offering in partnership with Netflix and Uber. Amazon is expected to enter Southeast Asia this year, with sources telling TechCrunch an original goal of launching Q1 proved to be too ambitious.

Lazada CEO Max Bittner told TechCrunch last month that his company plans to extend both services, which are currently only available in Singapore, to different markets. Arguably, this is where Alibabas capital and experience is really coming into play for Lazada.

Were found theright balance between us having the freedom [for our business] and falling back on Alibaba as our big brother willing to help us when we need it, Bittner said of the relationship in an interview.

Alibaba hasnt stood still there, however. It has embarked on a series of fintech investments in Southeast Asia through Ant Financial, its financial services affiliate.

Ant Financials global investment spree has included a $1.2 billion deal for U.S.-headquartered Moneygram and Koreas Kakao Pay, but in Southeast Asia it has done deals with Thailand-based Ascend Money, Mynt in the Philippines, Emtek in Indonesia, and Singapores M-Daq.

Then, earlier this month, Alibaba itself opened the coffers again to invest in a $50 million round for online insurance site Compare Asia Group.

Tencent, meanwhile, has a long-standing investment in Thailand-based media company Sanook, while it invested $19 million in a joint media venture with Ookbee, another Thai company. On the product-side, it has aggressively pushed its free-to-play music service Joox in Southeast Asia as a rival to Spotify, while it recently invested in U.S. karaoke app Smule which has strong traction in the region and plans to expand in Asia.

Through their investments and acquisitions, its very clear that Alibaba and Tencent are interested in Southeast Asia. They share our vision, that this region is ripe for opportunities in the e-commerce, payments, and marketplaces space, Vinnie Lauria, founding partner at Singapore-based VC firm Golden Gate Ventures, told TechCrunch in a statement.

Alibaba chairman Jack Ma has led his company to expand into India and Southeast Asia for growth opportunities

That collection of deals is just those that have been reported or made official. There are plenty more either lurking in a press pipeline waiting to be announced, or subject to negotiations.

Through discussions with founders, TechCrunch understands that Tencent and Alibaba have held discussions with at least a dozen startups that operate in Southeast Asias e-commerce or fintech space. In almost every instance, it seemed that both Chinese giants had been in touch with a near-identical set of companies to make investment offers, or to register interest for when the startup in question is ready to raise new funds.

To borrow a phrase from a prominent tech investor, who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity to avoid offending either company, Tencent and Alibaba are carving up Southeast Asias startup ecosystem.

The dogfight has spilled into the ride-sharing space, for one.

Alibaba is expected to be part of a group of investors behind a new funding round for Uber rival Grab which could reach $2 billion and is expected to close soon, a source told TechCrunch. But Alibaba is also rumored to have held talks with Go-Jek, a rival to Grab and Uber which is widely acknowledged as the market leader in Indonesia. However, in a twist, Go-Jek ended up agreeing to take investment from Tencent as part of an as-yet-unannounced $1.2 billion round that would value the company at $3 billion, as we reported in May.

In e-commerce, Tencents strategic ally JD.com which includes Tencent among its investor base has been strongly linked with an investment in Indonesia-based company Tokopedia, which previously raised money from SoftBank. However, a source told TechCrunch that Alibaba is also talking to the company with a view to making an investment. Alibabas long-standing relationship with SoftBank, which included an early investment in Alibaba, could prove to be a clincher in this case.

The decision of Alibaba or Tencent is tough one because essentially companies are being asked to join one of two rival sides.

Its akin toa Game Of Thrones-style allegiance.There are few examples in China of companies that share both Tencent and Alibaba as investors both firms own stock in Didi by virtue of a merger between their respective investees, Didi Kuaidi and Didi Dache so the decision of which to go with has real long-term implications on future relationships and investors.

They are clearly drawing lines in the sand with their checkbooks, and we can see a war of these two titans playing out across Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, Lauria, whose firm invested in Redmart, said.

While Alibaba and Tencent are among the first (and heaviest) movers, many are predicting that others from China and beyond will follow the same steps if they havent already.

Singapore, serving as the hub for the Southeast Asia ecosystem, continues to attract major investment interest from Chinese companies and Chinese VCs,Michael Smith, an operating partner with early-stage VC firm SeedPlus, told TechCrunch.

Obviously Tencent and Alibaba are some of the biggest companies looking for growth in areas like e-commerce, fintech and logistics but JD.com is also investing and looking for further opportunities in the region, he said.

Smith also pointed out that bike-sharing companies Mobike and Ofo both selected Singapore for their first overseas expansion, while, outside of the startup space, China-backed consortium Nesta is bidding to buySingapores Global Logistic Properties for around $11 billion.

We continue to believe that Singapore and the companies created here will rise in their attraction to not only Chinese but European and American companies looking for Asian expansion, Smith said.

Uber rival Grab is close to taking investment from Alibaba, according to sources.

U.S. tech firms have increased their presence in Southeast Asia, with Google and Facebook in particular operating local offices in multiple countries, but their presence has centered around product localization, sales and marketing rather than investments.

Google acquired a chat messenger app to staff its Next Billion teamtasked with tweaking existing services and creating new ones for emerging markets like India, Southeast Asia and Africa. (It recently did the same in India, too.)

Facebook and Twitter are among those that have long conducted deep market research projects to learn more about how users in frontier markets use the internet. Facebook even trialled a social payment feature in Thailandto explore the potential of social media commerce.

The results of these exercises havehelped shape products like Facebook Lite, the social networks fastest-growing app, and Twitters new mobile web app, but for now none of the Western tech giants have dived into the ecosystem with quite the impact of their peers from China and were just getting started.

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Alibaba and Tencent are carving up Southeast Asia's startup ... - TechCrunch

I wanted to make something meaningful, and this has a lot of meaning to me.

Our campers had spent the morning hiking and exploring the diverse ecosystems of Indiana Dunes State Park and were now nearly 2-hours into their Arts In The Parks, funded ecosystem mandala workshop, led by artist, teacher, and self-described arts activist, Bonnie Zimmer.

Nearly all of Bonnies work is created with natural and found materials harvested from the fields, woods and roadsides near her rural home. By limiting myself to local objects and materials to which I have a deep connection, Ive discovered my ideal media for exploring my sense of place and finding meaning, says Zimmer.

That sense of place and meaning is exactly what she is currently imparting to these eager young artists.

The workshop began with a discussion about the wide variety of plants and animals found in the dunes.

The diversity of the dunes is just mind boggling, isnt it? prompts Zimmer. Youre in a desert. Youre in a forest. Youre beside a pond. Youre at a beach, with waves crashing how lucky are we to have this?

Her enthusiasm is infectious. Soon campers are eagerly perusing a 25-foot long art material buffet, looking for inspiration. While few elected to let the mandala format confine their thinking, all were deeply engaged as they reflected upon their new knowledge, recent experiences, and growing connection to the Park. Learn more about Dunes Learning Center summer camps at duneslearningcenter.org/summer.

Mighty Acorns Nature Camp is made possible through funding to the Northwest Indiana Mighty Acorns Partnership by ArcelorMittal, with additional support from BP, Dr. Scholl Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the IDNR Coastal Management Program, and contributions from parents and individuals. Arts activities made possible with support by the Indiana Arts Commission and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

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Dunes Blog: Learning about the ecosystem by making art - nwitimes.com (blog)

A few small islands off the coast of Antarctica are the incubator for nearly all the marine life around the worlds southernmost continent. Thats according to new research from Yale and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The same researchers also believe that climate change on those islands could have a devastating domino effect.

The first time Yale biologist Thomas Near visited the islands of the Scotia Arc, he said it was unlike any other place hed seen on earth.

Its a very stark landscape. The islands just appear to rise out of the ocean.

He says youd never guess these islands are the cradle of life in the worlds most extreme habitat. Its the home of fish like the Chilean sea bass, popular on plates. Millions of years ago, Antarctica was a pretty warm place. But then it got cold. Massive ice sheets and glaciers crept in from the south and took over the coast.

The near shore areas around the continent are a really hard place to live. If you are an Antarctic fish living along the shores of the Antarctic continent, these communities have continually been disrupted by these advancing ice sheets.

The islands stayed ice sheet-free. They served as an incubator for the fish and other marine life who spread throughout the continent. But Near says the new threat isnt ice sheets. Its warming seas, which put fish at risk and attract new predators to the region. Nears research shows these islands give the Antarctic life, and without them, the whole regions ecosystem is in danger.

This pattern where the islands are the hot spot of biodiversity origination means the biodiversity of the Antarctic is much in peril by potential dangers of climate change.

Its not just Antarctica thats in trouble. Fishing in the Southern Ocean is a billion-dollar industry, and those fish feed bigger animals like whales and penguins. So Near says the health of Antarcticas ecosystem is kind of like a barometer for the health of our planet.

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Warming Seas Endanger Antarctic Ecosystem, And Billion-Dollar ... - WSHU

Ever tried to grow an orchid? You spend a long time working to create something beautiful, but if you are careless and leave the greenhouse door open for even a moment, the orchid quickly shrivels and dies.

As a Dean of Business, I rarely compare gardening to universities but the analogy currently seems particularly apt.

Our tertiary education sector has deep roots that may look secure; some would even have you believe that the sector is awash with taxpayer money. In reality our universities, which are facing major disruption from the proposed federal reforms, are part of a fragile, global ecosystem.

One can only hope the senate committee currently considering these reforms take into account the delicate nature of this situation as public hearings continue ahead of their August 9 report.

Australia has the third-highest number of international students in the world. They underpin one of our most successful growth industries international education. However, this vital and significant source of university income could evaporate in an instant if negative economic or political winds blow.

Australian universities are now only just able to compete with the costs of studying in the USA. Issues such as a change in our relationship with China, global turmoil or significant currency fluctuations could hit Australia hard.

So, with many variables beyond our control already, why would we want to upset the delicate balance ourselves?

The government is currently trying to secure support for the Birmingham Higher Education Package - a proposal designed to provide budget relief, but which could prune so severely that it kills parts of the very sector it professes to nurture.

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Under the new measures, students will meet half the proposed 10 per centsavings from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme with universities making cuts to fund the rest. The proposed 2.5 per cent'efficiency dividend' will come with a 7.5 per centCommonwealth Grant reduction based on broad, performance-related targets that will be measured in ways still to be announced. Universities unable to secure the performance-related funds will be forced to make even more cuts to their core business.

And that's not all: funding of post-graduate, Commonwealth-supported places will go along with some support for New Zealand citizens and permanent Australian residents moves likely to impact university revenue streams in varying, but significant, ways.

Of course, universities should be held accountable for their performance and the funds that they receive, but it's hard to see how this particular set of proposals will improve the quality of learning experiences and student outcomes, which are major attractions for students here and overseas.

Australia's universities have worked hard to get where they are today. They have continued to improve educational standards while heeding calls to broaden the appeal of their projects, go for demand-driven funding, and encourage a more diverse, representative and larger cohort of domestic students.

At the same time, they've also marketed and recruited very effectively on the highly competitive international stage. Business schools like Griffith, which have been at the forefront of this, now account for more than half of the international university graduates in Australia. In the 2016 International Student Survey, 89 per cent of all international students indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with their overall experience here.

Cutting funding because universities are doing well seems counter-intuitive as the cuts may hurt the very elements that have created the success. They could also create a vicious cycle, but not the same vicious cycle for all.

Leading capital city universities will be able to weather the storm better than their regional counterparts, which contribute so much to our regions and industries of the future like agribusiness. The cuts are also likely to more adversely impact second or third players in metropolitan areas, which often provide higher education access to many students from more marginalised and disadvantaged groups.

Do we want a two-tier system of leading universities with a large number of full fee-paying students at one end of the spectrum and institutions reliant on domestic, commonwealth-funded students who have a small ,but financially significant, number of fee paying students at the other? Future deals done in Parliament may mediate the impact of the reforms on some of those institutions most adversely affected, but I fear that recalibrating in this way will simply result in robbing 'Peter to pay Paul'.

The money made by the international and domestic success of Australian universities has been used to enhance the educational experience and drive world-class research and innovation. it has underpinned much of the past decade's investment in student services, infrastructure and academic talent.

It is no accident that Australian universities punch well above their weight in international rankings and that international education worth $20.3 billion per year is our nation's third largest export.

The Australian university sector has taken years to build. Government and Australia may be about to learn that it will take no time at all to break, and forever to repair.

David Grant is Pro Vice Chancellor (Business) at Griffith University and Secretary of the Australian Business Deans Council.

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Universities have deep roots but are part of a fragile ecosystem - Brisbane Times

We salute the winners of the third edition of the ET Startup Awards. The jury members, comprising entrepreneurs, investors, an academic and a policymaker, had to work hard to choose the winners from a crowded field. While a chief consideration for the jury was the potential for job creation, the winners show a diverse range of activity, serving to dispel the notion that Indian startups are, by and large, me-too imitators of e-commerce success stories. True, one of the winners, Nykaa, and several contenders Big Basket, LensKart do belong to this category, but the awards shortlist and the final winners demonstrate the diversity in Indias startup ecosystem.

Startup of the year, Swiggy, delivers food, from 12,000 restaurants across eight cities, employing 20,000 people in the delivery business. It catalyses investment and jobs in the restaurant business and in the two-wheeler and accessories businesses as well. The biggest, unnamed winner of this years ET Startup Awards is IIT-Madras. Its alumni have won awards and figure among contenders. This is a most welcome development, as it clearly shows that the culture of the institution promotes entrepreneurship. This is something that other IITs, technical institutions, management schools and medical colleges should emulate.

Top innovators, Bugworks and Pandorum work, respectively, in developing new antimicrobials to combat drug resistance and in 3D printing of human tissue. Both are also examples of state funding being successful in creating socially relevant innovation. DeTect, a company conceived on the campus, serves to monitor large engineering assets using drones and sensors. Wingify helps companies make their websites generate more business. Aibono helps farmers improve yield, by adopting new technologies. NestAway locates rental homes.

Saif Partners Ravi Adsumalli won the Midas Touch award. By allocating global savings to grow young businesses in India, venture funds play a transformative role. As do campuses like IIT-Madras, several of whose alumni figure among the award winners and contenders.

This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Economic Times.

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ET Startup Awards: Winners demonstrate diversity in startup ecosystem - Economic Times (blog)

July 25, 2017 06:05 ET | Source: Research and Markets

Dublin, July 25, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "The C-RAN (Centralized Radio Access Network) Ecosystem: 2017 - 2030 - Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts" report from SNS Research has been added to Research and Markets' offering.

Estimates suggest that global investments in C-RAN architecture networks will reach nearly $9 Billion by the end of 2017.

The market is further expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 24% between 2017 and 2020. These investments will include spending on RRHs (Remote Radio Heads), BBUs (Baseband Units) and fronthaul transport network equipment.

The C-RAN (Centralized Radio Access Network) Ecosystem: 2017 - 2030 - Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts report presents an in-depth assessment of the C-RAN ecosystem including enabling technologies, key trends, market drivers, challenges, standardization, regulatory landscape, deployment models, operator case studies, opportunities, future roadmap, value chain, ecosystem player profiles and strategies. The report also presents forecasts for C-RAN infrastructure investments from 2017 till 2030. The forecasts cover 3 individual submarkets and 6 regions.

Centralized RAN or C-RAN is an architectural shift in RAN (Radio Access Network) design, where the bulk of baseband processing is centralized and aggregated for a large number of distributed radio nodes. In comparison to standalone clusters of base stations, C-RAN provides significant performance and economic benefits such as baseband pooling, enhanced coordination between cells, virtualization, network extensibility, smaller deployment footprint and reduced power consumption.

Initially popularized by Japanese and South Korean mobile operators, C-RAN technology is beginning to gain momentum worldwide with major tier 1 operators - including Verizon Communications, AT&T, Sprint, China Mobile, Vodafone, TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile), Orange and Telefnica - seeking to leverage the benefits of centralized baseband processing.

Key Findings

- Expected to reach nearly $9 Billion in global spending by the end of 2017, C-RAN is increasingly becoming the preferred approach to deploy future mobile networks. The market is further expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 24% between 2017 and 2020. - Small cells are also beginning to be deployed in a C-RAN architecture to leverage the benefits of resource pooling and multi-cell coordination. This trend is particularly prevalent in the indoor and enterprise segments, with a number of dedicated vendor solutions such as CommScope's OneCell, SpiderCloud's E-RAN, Ericsson's Radio Dot, and Huawei's LampSite. - Mobile operators are exploring multiple baseband functional split options for C-RAN implementation, as they seek to ease the transition to 5G networks while reducing fronthaul costs. - By the end of 2020, the author estimates that vRAN/Cloud RAN deployments with virtualized baseband processing will account for nearly 20% of all C-RAN investments. - The vendor arena is continuing to consolidate with several prominent M&A deals such as Mavenir Systems' recent merger with C-RAN specialist Ranzure Networks, which has positioned the company as an end-to-end provider of 5G-ready mobile network solutions.

Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction 1.1 Executive Summary 1.2 Topics Covered 1.3 Forecast Segmentation 1.4 Key Questions Answered 1.5 Key Findings 1.6 Methodology 1.7 Target Audience 1.8 Companies & Organizations Mentioned

2 An Overview of C-RAN 2.1 What is C-RAN? 2.2 Competing RAN Architectures 2.3 Key Architectural Components for C-RAN 2.4 Baseband Functional Split Approaches 2.5 Fronthaul Interface Options & Technologies 2.6 vRAN (Virtualized RAN): Transforming C-RAN to Cloud RAN 2.7 Market Growth Drivers 2.8 Market Barriers

3 Standardization, Regulatory & Collaborative Initiatives 3.1 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) 3.2 Broadband Forum 3.3 CPRI Initiative 3.4 ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) 3.5 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 3.6 ITU (International Telecommunications Union) 3.7 MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) 3.8 NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks) Alliance 3.9 ONF (Open Networking Foundation) & ON.Lab (Open Networking Lab) 3.10 OSA (OpenAirInterface Software Alliance) 3.11 SCF (Small Cell Forum) 3.12 TIP (Telecom Infra Project) 3.13 xRAN Consortium

4 C-RAN Deployment Models & Case Studies 4.1 Deployment Models 4.2 Mobile Operator Case Studies

5 Industry Roadmap & Value Chain 5.1 Industry Roadmap 5.2 Value Chain

6 Key Market Players 6.1 3Roam 6.2 6WIND 6.3 Accelink Technologies Corporation 6.4 Accelleran 6.5 Actelis Networks 6.6 ADLINK Technology 6.7 ADTRAN 6.8 ADVA Optical Networking 6.9 Advantech 6.10 Airspan Networks 6.11 Alpha Networks 6.12 Altiostar Networks 6.13 Amarisoft 6.14 Anritsu Corporation 6.15 APRESIA Systems 6.16 Aquantia Corporation 6.17 Argela 6.18 Aricent 6.19 ARM Holdings 6.20 ARRIS International 6.21 Artemis Networks 6.22 Artesyn Embedded Technologies 6.23 Artiza Networks 6.24 ASOCS 6.25 ASTRI (Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute) 6.26 Aviat Networks 6.27 Azcom Technology 6.28 Baicells Technologies 6.29 Benetel 6.30 Blu Wireless Technology 6.31 BluWan 6.32 Boomsense/Bangxun Technology 6.33 BridgeWave Communications 6.34 Broadcom 6.35 CableFree (Wireless Excellence) 6.36 Cadence Design Systems 6.37 Calix 6.38 Cambium Networks 6.39 Casa Systems 6.40 Cavium 6.41 CBNL (Cambridge Broadband Networks Ltd.) 6.42 CCI (Communication Components, Inc.) 6.43 CCS (Cambridge Communication Systems) 6.44 cellXica 6.45 Ceragon Networks 6.46 CEVA 6.47 Ciena Corporation 6.48 Cisco Systems 6.49 Clavister 6.50 Cobham Wireless 6.51 Coherent Logix 6.52 Collision Communications 6.53 Comcores 6.54 CommAgility 6.55 CommScope 6.56 Contela 6.57 Corecess 6.58 Coriant 6.59 Corning 6.60 Dali Wireless 6.61 DASAN Zhone Solutions 6.62 Datang Mobile 6.63 Dell Technologies 6.64 DragonWave 6.65 eASIC Corporation 6.66 E-Band Communications 6.67 EBlink 6.68 ECI Telecom 6.69 Ekinops 6.70 ELVA-1 6.71 Eoptolink Technology 6.72 Ericsson 6.73 Ethernity Networks 6.74 ETRI (Electronics & Telecommunications Research Institute, South Korea) 6.75 Exalt Wireless 6.76 EXFO 6.77 ExteNet Systems 6.78 Extreme Networks 6.79 Facebook 6.80 Fairwaves 6.81 Faraday Technology Corporation 6.82 FastBack Networks 6.83 FiberHome Technologies 6.84 FibroLan 6.85 Finisar Corporation 6.86 Flex Logix Technologies 6.87 Foxconn Interconnect Technology 6.88 Fraunhofer FOKUS (Institute for Open Communication Systems) 6.89 Fraunhofer HHI (Heinrich Hertz Institute) 6.90 Frog Cellsat 6.91 Fujian Sunnada Network Technology 6.92 Fujitsu 6.93 Furukawa Electric Group 6.94 GigaLight 6.95 GlobalFoundaries 6.96 Google 6.97 HCL Technologies 6.98 HFR 6.99 Hisense 6.100 Hitachi 6.101 HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise) 6.102 Huahuan 6.103 Huawei 6.104 HUBER+SUHNER 6.105 HXI 6.106 IBM Corporation 6.107 IDT (Integrated Device Technology) 6.108 Imec International 6.109 InCoax 6.110 Infineon Technologies 6.111 Infinera 6.112 InfiNet Wireless 6.113 InnoLight Technology 6.114 Intel Corporation 6.115 InterDigital 6.116 Intracom Telecom 6.117 IP Light 6.118 ip.access 6.119 IPITEK 6.120 Iskratel 6.121 IS-Wireless 6.122 ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute, Taiwan) 6.123 JMA Wireless 6.124 JRC (Japan Radio Company) 6.125 Juni Global 6.126 Kathrein-Werke KG 6.127 KEYMILE 6.128 Keysight Technologies 6.129 Kisan Telecom 6.130 KMW 6.131 Lattice Semiconductor 6.132 LightPointe Communications 6.133 Lindsay Broadband 6.134 Loea Corporation 6.135 Lumentum 6.136 Luminate Wireless 6.137 MACOM Technology Solutions Holdings 6.138 Maja Systems 6.139 Maven Wireless 6.140 Mavenir Systems 6.141 MAX4G 6.142 MaxLinear 6.143 Mellanox Technologies 6.144 Microsemi Corporation 6.145 Microwave Networks 6.146 MIMOtech 6.147 Mitsubishi Electric Corporation 6.148 Mobiveil 6.149 Molex 6.150 Moseley Associates 6.151 MRV Communications 6.152 MTI (Microelectronics Technology, Inc.) 6.153 N.A.T. 6.154 Nash Technologies 6.155 NEC Corporation 6.156 Netonomics 6.157 NETSCOUT Systems 6.158 New Postcom Equipment 6.159 Nexcomm Systems 6.160 NexxCom Wireless 6.161 Node-H 6.162 Nokia Networks 6.163 NuRAN Wireless 6.164 NXP Semiconductors 6.165 Octasic 6.166 OE Solutions 6.167 Omnitron Systems 6.168 OneAccess Networks 6.169 Parallel Wireless 6.170 Peraso Technologies 6.171 Phluido 6.172 PMN (Private Mobile Networks) 6.173 Polewall 6.174 Potevio 6.175 Proxim Wireless Corporation 6.176 Qualcomm 6.177 Qucell 6.178 Qwilt 6.179 RACOM 6.180 RAD Data Communications 6.181 Radisys Corporation 6.182 RADWIN 6.183 Raisecom 6.184 Range Networks 6.185 Red Hat 6.186 Redline Communications 6.187 REMEC Broadband Wireless Networks 6.188 Saguna Networks 6.189 SAI Technology 6.190 Samji Electronics 6.191 Samsung Electronics 6.192 Sarokal Test Systems 6.193 SerComm Corporation 6.194 SIAE Microelectronica 6.195 Siklu Communication 6.196 Sistelbanda 6.197 SITRONICS 6.198 SK Telesys 6.199 SkyFiber 6.200 Solectek Corporation 6.201 SOLiD 6.202 Sooktha 6.203 Source Photonics 6.204 Spectronite 6.205 SpiderCloud Wireless 6.206 SRS (Software Radio Systems) 6.207 Star Solutions 6.208 Sumitomo Electric Industries 6.209 Sunwave Solutions 6.210 Tarana Wireless 6.211 Tata Elxsi 6.212 TEKTELIC Communications 6.213 Telco Systems 6.214 Tellabs 6.215 Tellion 6.216 Telrad Networks 6.217 TI (Texas Instruments) 6.218 Trango Systems 6.219 Transition Networks 6.22 Ubiquoss 6.221 UTStarcom 6.222 Vanu 6.223 Viavi Solutions 6.224 VMware 6.225 Vubiq Networks 6.226 Wave1 6.227 WiPro 6.228 Xelic 6.229 Xilinx 6.23 ZTE

7 Market Analysis & Forecasts 7.1 Global Outlook for C-RAN Investments 7.2 Segmentation by Air Interface Technology 7.3 Segmentation by Network Architecture 7.4 Segmentation by Submarket 7.5 Segmentation by Region

8 Conclusion & Strategic Recommendations 8.1 Why is the Market Poised to Grow? 8.2 Competitive Industry Landscape: Acquisitions, Alliances & Consolidation 8.3 Setting the Foundation for 5G NR (New Radio) Upgrades 8.4 Integration with MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) 8.5 Towards a User Centric RAN Architecture 8.6 RAN Disaggregation: Blurring the Lines Between Small Cells and C-RAN 8.7 The Emergence of Enterprise RAN Platforms 8.8 Prospects of Cloud RAN 8.9 RANaaS (RAN-as-a-Service): Envisioning the Future of C-RAN 8.10 Enabling RAN Slicing 8.11 What is the Cost Savings Potential of C-RAN? 8.12 Geographic Outlook: Which Countries Offer the Highest Growth Potential? 8.13 Which Submarket will Lead the Market? 8.14 Strategic Recommendations

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/xrszrs/the_cran

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Analysis of the $9 Billion C-RAN (Centralized Radio Access Network) Ecosystem 2017 - 2030 - GlobeNewswire (press release)

ON July 15, Indonesia announced a partial ban on Telegram, which swiftly responded by shutting down the channels reported by the Indonesian government. The ban seemed a culmination of the governments frustration over Telegrams silence on complaints about channels used to recruit Indonesians into militant groups.

The application was confirmed by Indonesias National Police chief General Tito Karnavian as one of the means to receive terror-related materials in the recent stabbing of two police officers at a mosque in Jakarta. Yet, it is perhaps the lack of reciprocation from Telegram on complaints made since last year, which may have escalated tensions in the spheres of governance in cyberspace.

Telegram is not the first application caught in a skirmish with states over national security concerns. Conflict between the government and private sector occurs due to the structure of the Internet, which is not designed to keep cyberspace secure from threats to networks or discriminate against the transfer of information.

A network for a small community back then, the Internet was created with the presumed understanding that actors belonged in a close circle and were essentially benevolent. However, the expansion of cybersphere in the 1990s migrated more than 50 million users online.

In December 2000, an ITU report estimated that there were four million Malaysian users online and last year, the figure grew to 21 million.

The greater integration of cybersphere in daily life increases the surface for cyberattacks. In 2015, CyberSecurity Malaysia recorded 1,714 incidents, but the first quarter of last year registered 2,470 incidents.

The private sector drives Internet patronage, with technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook providing essential services for Internet users. The technology communitys large footprint online translates offline and impinges on traditional roles in the security architecture. The governments role as a user of such services presents difficulties to the states responsibility as the protector of the population.

Chinas cyber laws passed last year bring data centres to Chinese soil, where corporations are required to host data locally. This places control over data within the regulations of China, thus empowering the state to secure information systems. However, this is not the case with other nations, as Indonesias situation with Telegram illustrates. States have to work with private companies to ensure the experience online and offline is protected.

Yet, harmonisation can be an uphill climb, especially where interests do not align. The widely broadcasted legal kerfuffle between Apple and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stemmed from the FBIs request to unlock an iPhone belonging to the San Bernardino shooter in 2015. The FBIs concern relates to strong encryption that prohibits authorities from solving cases to stop terrorist attacks swiftly. The FBIs request was for Apple to provide a backdoor to Apples programmes in the interest of national security. Apple declined the request on the grounds of data privacy.

That cyberspace provides an avenue to air grievances outside the control of governments was addressed in the United Nations Human Rights Committee general comment No. 34 following the Arab uprisings in 2011. Encryption and anonymity are attached to the concept of freedom of expression, which is most important to end users.

Corporations, programmers and data centres that are suddenly called to play the role of honest brokers may experience difficulties in suiting up as participants in security. National security issues are not their initial trade, and perspectives on national security may differ in accordance to locality terrorism, its definitions and its amplification is only one national security concern. Additionally, parts of Asia where national security is seen as the sole responsibility of the state may not have the institutional knowledge and mechanisms of a multi-stakeholder system. If there is little trust between stakeholders, there can be suspicion on the part of the private sector towards the intention of states, as the Apple versus FBI case suggests.

Roles and responsibility should link cybersecurity players and authorities in a smooth system online and offline. The fear of over-regulation or being caught amid a political fight may lose private sector interest to participate.

However, failure to construct a healthy ecosystem may affect the direction of policies. While the WannaCry ransomware affected more than 230,000 computers in more than 150 countries, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission did not receive a single report, though this is not because there were no incidents in Malaysia. LGMS, a cybersecurity firm in Malaysia, found WannaCry in at least 10 devices. In the current threat to cybersphere, there is tremendous pressure for the fledgling environment of information sharing between stakeholders in Malaysia to mature rapidly.

The National Cyber Coordination and Command Centre (NC4) was formed with the intention of coordinating cooperation between public and private sectors. Yet, NC4 was created for cyber threats of national proportions and may not be the platform of outreach needed for threats not limited to cybersphere.

Details of the cybersecurity bill passed by Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi to Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohamed Apandi Ali are still pending, but one hopes it addresses the gaps in the ecosystem and aims to remedy them.

With the private sector expected to play a large role in providing cybersecurity services, there has to be mechanisms that ensure national security is fortified without sacrificing private sector innovation. After the Telegram debacle, cyberspace users need the giants to play well together for a safe experience online and offline.

**The writer is an analyst on foreign policy and security studies at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies Malaysia

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Cybersecurity ecosystem of tomorrow - New Straits Times Online

Long before Flipkart and Snapdeal became synonymous with Indian startups and e-commerce, K Vaitheeswaran had co-founded Indias first online e-commerce venture Indiaplaza in 1999. Despite the first-mover advantage, Indiaplaza failed and shut shop in 2013. Now, at a time when the sector is maturing, with firms and their investors looking for profitability, Vaitheeswaran, through his book Failing to Succeed, shares his experiences of starting up. He details his journey and looks at what went wrongsimply put, the company ran out of funding and was forced to shut down. Following is an excerpt from the book.

The Indian startup ecosystem is like the caste system.

The typical profile of an Indian technology entrepreneur is of a young person from a premier technology or management institute in India or abroad and with work experience in an MNC or overseas.

I did not tick any of these boxes. I was almost 50 years old.

I went to a government college in Tirunelveli, a small town in interior Tamil Nadu, and I had never worked for an MNC or in USA. The investors were probably shocked at (a) how I could, with such a poor background and unimpressive profile, co-pioneer an industry and (b) how I still managed to be around for so long without raising billions of dollars.

Asking me to get out of my company was the best way of resuming normal service.

Most investors cannot evaluate a startup with perfect insight at the initial stage; so they resort to the easier option of pedigree investing. If a startup founder matches their typical entrepreneur profile, investors decide to put money in them. Further, most funds also employ associates, senior associates, vice-presidents, and managing directors with similar pedigree and, hence, today you have this nice closed loop where investors and entrepreneurs are all from the same batch of the same institute and before they can recall who won their hostel basketball finals, theres a term sheet on the table.

Pedigree-based investing is not as clever as it sounds. Over 80% of venture capital funds are garnered by start-ups with a pedigree background. Over 90% of all start-ups in India will fail. Therefore, over 72% of all pedigreed start-ups will go down.

In reality, 72% failure rate is terrible. If you were averaging 28% in school, you would still be in school.

Pedigree investing has another drawback. It wrongly assumes that the countrys smartest young people are restricted to students of select engineering and management institutes. I have no doubt that we can find bright young potential entrepreneurs in arts and commerce institutes as well. I have the same complaint against the governments ambitious Startup India programmeall their state centres are only in top engineering colleges. When India is trying to encourage entrepreneurship, we must spread the net much wider.

Excerpted with permission from Rupa Publications India Pvt Ltd.

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The Indian startup ecosystem is like the caste system - Quartz

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Extinction event: how GST killed the octroi ecosystem The Hindu Around the nakas, a flourishing ecosystem took root, feeding off the opportunities that the octroi collection process created. At their centre were octroi agents who, for a fee, helped truck drivers make sure all the paperwork was correct and in order ...

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Extinction event: how GST killed the octroi ecosystem - The Hindu

We are all familiar with the expression green fingers', however, in the Indian Ocean Island of Seychelles it would probably be more fitting to say reef fingers'.

Scientists and marine biologists have in particular identified the damage caused by the Indian Ocean Dipole and El Nio phenomena which caused high-scale coral bleaching in 1998 and reduced live coral by close to 97%.

The damage was so severe that the coral was unable to regenerate and at the same time it became less resistant to disease.

In June this year, marine biologist Jude Bijoux told the Seychelles News Agency (SNA) that the coral reefs of Seychelles are in grave danger due to the damage sustained during last year's warm El Nio and the general effect of climate change. He added that the level of coral bleaching is currently similar to the bleaching catastrophe which happened in 1998.

According to Bijoux, should the reefs not get sufficient time to recover, they will become smaller and eventually upset the ecosystem as many underwater species depend on the coral reefs for food and shelter.

For an island state like Seychelles, coral reefs are also extremely important as they contribute to the two most important sectors of the countrys economy - tourism and fisheries.

The first scientific restoration programme was launched by non-governmental organisation Nature Seychelles in 2010. The organisation took corals that had survived the 1998 bleaching, and began to grow over 45,000 fragments of corals in underwater nurseries and planted them in a degraded area in the Cousin Island Special Reserve.

In 2015, the Seychelles National Parks Authority (SNPA) also embarked on another coral nursery project off Curieuse Island to try and restore the reefs.

While the scientists are yet to measure the long-term success, of coral gardening, the projects have been successful in terms of gathering data about the coral reefs and how to repair them.

In its simplest form, coral farming is best described as the process whereby samples of healthy corals are collected from the local reefs, raised in nurseries until mature, and then installed at an identified site of restoration.

Coral farms are basically not very different to underwater gardens, requiring plenty of nutrients and the right temperature. After about a year or two, the corals have more than tripled in size and are ready to be harvested.

A single coral finger may grow into several new ones, all ready to be planted back onto the reef or into a new nursery to promote regeneration of the ecosystem.

While the long-term success of coral gardening is yet to be monitored, the short-term success is already evident in some of the reefs where restoration has taken place.

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#CSIMonth: How the Seychelles is restoring its marine ecosystem through coral farming - Bizcommunity.com

The Defense Information Systems Agency's realignment of its computing and storage operations is all about standardization, optimization and consistency.

The end result of this realignment, described by DISA's operations center director David Bennett as a computing ecosystem, is one holistic computing environment physically dispersed across multiple sites with the functions and capabilities managed remotely based upon who owns each capability, Bennett told C4ISRNET in a recent interview.

Previously, there were ten different defense enterprise computing centers, each with their own chain of command, data center tools and way of doing business to execute their mission, Bennett said.

When Bennett first started working in the computing side of the agency around 2013, one of his tasks was reducing costs, he said. One way to reduce costs involved examining how the agency was running computing.

"As I became more familiar with the structure and how we did computing in the agency, it became more and more clear that we didn't have one computing environment, we didn't have one way of doing business; we had ten," he said. "From a cost perspective, I was essentially paying for ten iterations of generically the same function."

With a singular computing ecosystem built around "one way of doing business, one set of tools that everybody would use, one set of techniques, tactics, procedures," Bennett said he would only need one director and one support staff member in the front office of a data center.

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How DISA moved to a single computing ecosystem - C4ISR & Networks

Its early days for the self-driving industry and yet the network of alliances among companies in the space is already incredibly complex. Now, its only going to get more complicated as Lyft begins to expand its role in the driverless ecosystem.

Lyft has announced its starting to develop a hardware and software kit that will enable self-driving cars. The company already works with self-driving tech companies, like Waymo or nuTonomy, which are expected to plug their tech into Lyfts network of cars.

Lyft will continue to operate the network, but this move means it will also be competing, to some degree, with its own partners. That raises questions for the future of this complex ecosystem, which in the case of Lyft also includes automakers like Jaguar.

The idea is that people will eventually be able to hail a self-driving Jaguar using the Lyft app.

Lyfts new initiative includes building software for mapping and computer vision algorithms, which can help the car know where to go and understand what its seeing. That technology stack will include off-the-shelf hardware, like cameras and radars, from other companies.

But why would Lyft, a company that was well positioned to serve as an agnostic on-demand platform for a series of automakers and tech companies, decide to take on the cost and burden of building out its own tech?

Part of it may have to do with trying to become more appealing for current and future automaker partners (or maybe even a potential buyer). Other automakers without the technology could find Lyft more appealing either as an acquisition target or a partner if it owns more of its technology particularly since Lyft has a built-in path to market.

Lyft also appears to be willing to piecemeal out some of the components of its kits, so if one automaker just needs better maps it can use Lyfts maps, as one example. Other partners could simply choose to plug their self-driving cars into the network without using any of Lyfts technology.

Second, the company appears to be hedging its bets on its partnerships by owning more of the self-driving value chain. The autonomous ecosystem consists of three primary parts: The car, the tech and the path to market. Without the tech, Lyft just served as the path to market.

Its not necessarily a bad position to be in. The company is working on ways to own more of the user experience beyond hailing the cars. That includes working on features within the app and eventually on in-car tablets that will walk customers through what the self-driving car is seeing, where its going and why it does specific things. This way, customers continue to interact with Lyfts brand throughout the ride.

The companys pitch to partners is its geographic scale and that it offers the added benefit of already having a pool of drivers on its network. This is key to its value proposition, the companys chief strategy officer Raj Kapoor said during a press briefing, because automakers or tech companies dont have to worry about not meeting rider demand as they incrementally deploy self-driving cars into the network.

But Lyft seems to not want to take any chances by being beholden to one company or its timeline for deployment. Autonomy could be a huge boon to the companys business down the line and without it, its marketshare could be at risk.

Other players in the space appear to be jockeying for position as well. Alphabets Waymo has previously hinted at working on its own ride-sharing service.

So to ensure that Lyft maintains some of its power in a situation where one partner creates a competing service, pulls out of the network or takes longer than expected to build the technology, the company is diving into the ever-crowded driverless tech space head first.

[Self-driving cars] are going to be critical to our longer-term existence, the companys head of product Taggart Matthiesen told Recode. That makes it critical that we work [on] and have access to this technology longer term.

Theres a lot of competition in building autonomous technology. That makes Lyfts value proposition look a lot like its partners: Waymo and nuTonomy.

By contrast, Alphabets self-driving car division, Waymo, is building some of its own hardware, like the laser-based radars called lidar, in a bid to supply carmakers and other self-driving technology companies. Nevertheless, each of these companies while theyre working together are also now competing for the same business relationships with carmakers.

Matthiesen told Recode that the company has been transparent with its self-driving tech partners Waymo and nuTonomy about this since the beginning. NuTonomy co-founder Karl Iagnemma echoed that in a statement saying that hes excited about the work the company is doing with Lyft.

The AV ecosystem is constantly evolving and no single winner will be crowned, Iagnemma said. Partnerships remain critical to nuTonomy's success, and our aim is to work with groups with whom we share strategic aims and core values. These are partners that are transparent, innovative, and are focused on putting autonomous fleets on the road.

Eventually, what well see at least based on todays development is a network wherein Waymo, nuTonomy, GMs Cruise or Lyft-powered cars will drive alongside each other on the Lyft platform.

Building out a self-driving kit in-house wasnt the initial plan for the $7.5 billion company. But Matthiesen said Lyft has been working on this new version of its autonomous ambitions for the better part of the last year and a half.

Its not exactly an easy or inexpensive endeavor, however. Uber has been working on driverless tech since at least 2015. As of earlier this year, the companys cars had to be taken over by a human driver once every .8 miles, according to documents Recode first obtained.

Lyft which Matthiesen said wants to make sure people know theyre serious about this is also building out a Palo Alto site where he and the companys vice president of engineering Luc Vincent will lead a team of self-driving engineers.

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Lyft wants more leverage in the self-driving ecosystem so it's building its own tech - Recode