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    Panasonic to sell consumer electronics products on Amazon UAE soon

    Mohammed Fahad
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    Panasonic to sell consumer electronics products on Amazon UAE soon
    • Al-Futtaim Panatech will be the sole distributor for Panasonic products in UAE.
    • Japanese giant focusing on boosting online sales as consumer’s purchasing patterns have changed.

    Dubai: Panasonic Middle East is going to sell its entire range of consumer electronics products on e-commerce giant Amazon UAE soon.

    “The deal is almost finalised and a public announcement will be made within days,” sources close to the matter told Tech Channel News.

    Al-Futtaim Panatech is the sole distributor for Panasonic products in the UAE and that will remain intact.

    “Consumer habits have changed during the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown scenarios have inevitably changed the way people look at retail experiences, giving a boost to online sales tremendously and it is expected to continue,” the source said.

    Retailers in the UAE saw a sudden spike in online sales during the first three months of the lockdown and industry experts said that online sales are expected to decline slightly as brick-and-mortar stores are opened.

    “Panasonic is focusing on boosting online sales as consumer’s purchasing patterns have changed but Al-Futtaim Panatech’s sales will not be impacted as the prices are expected to be fixed by them and they will be supplying products to Amazon UAE,” the source said.

    According to a recent survey by McKinsey & Company’s on UAE’s consumer sentiment, most consumers are not yet fully comfortable going back to regular out-of-home activities and are waiting for milestones beyond government lifting restrictions to return to regular activities.

    At the same time, the survey showed that people have started adopting digital and low-touch activities and grocery delivery, with a high intent to continue some behaviours after the crisis for many categories.

    Apple valuation crosses $2tr, first US-listed firm to do so

    Mohammed Fahad
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    Apple valuation crosses $2tr, first US-listed firm to do so

    Apple became the first US-listed firm to hit a market cap of $2 trillion, just two years after it became the first to reach the $1 trillion mark.

    It is significant that Apple has achieved this feat amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, despite a general sump across businesses worldwide.
    Apple’s shares are up by more than 50 per cent compared to the same period last year.

    Apple’s share price crossed $2 trillion market cap just before 11 a.m. ET. Market capitalisation measures the total value of a company based on their stock price multiplied by the shares outstanding.

    Despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, Apple’s share price is up more than 50 per cent this year, as the company’s business has proven surprisingly immune to the negative impact of the global crisis. 

    Strong financial results

    Last month Apple announced financial results for its fiscal 2020 third-quarter ending June 27, 2020, where the company posted quarterly revenue of $59.7 billion, an increase of 11 per cent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.58, up 18 per cent.

    According to Apple, international sales accounted for 60 per cent of the quarter’s revenue.

    “Apple’s record June quarter was driven by double-digit growth in both Products and Services and growth in each of our geographic segments,” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, had said last month.

    “In uncertain times, this performance is a testament to the important role our products play in our customers’ lives and to Apple’s relentless innovation,” he added.

    Apple started off its journey within the personal technology space with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today it has over 100,000 employees managing a range of products – iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV along with software platforms — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

    Apple was the first company to top $1 trillion in August 2018.

    However, the credit of being the first to cross the valuation of $2 trillion is held by Saudi Aramco in December 2019, when it achieved the feat after it launched its IPO at Tadawul stock exchange in Riyadh. However the year 2020 was tough for the oil & gas giant, which witnessed its valuation drop significantly.

    Last month, Apple overtook Saudi Aramco, after its impressive third quarter result. Aramco’s market cap is currently valued at $124 billion.

    Microsoft and Amazon are the other tech companies with market caps hovering above $1.60 trillion.

    BlackBerry making a comeback to smartphone space in 2021?

    Mohammed Fahad
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    BlackBerry making a comeback to smartphone space in 2021?
    • BlackBerry’s branding partnership with TCL ended in February 2020.
    • Sales of existing TCL-made BlackBerry phones will end by the end of this month.
    • Support, including customer and warranty support, will continue until August 31, 2022.

    Bengaluru: Onward Mobility, a US-based company in the mobile security space, will work closely with BlackBerry and FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group, to launch new BlackBerry 5G smartphones next year.

    BlackBerry is making a comeback into the smartphone space with Onward Mobility after ending the branding partnership with TCL in February this year.  BlackBerry had signed a deal with Optiemus Infracom for making phones for only Indian market.

    In 2015, BlackBerry finally switched to Android after its BB10 market share fell below 0.5 per cent.

    BlackBerry in 2016 said that it would no longer design and make its own smartphones and TCL released the BlackBerry KEYone in 2017 and Key2 LE was the last BlackBerry-branded phone to be made by TCL.

    Sales of existing TCL-made BlackBerry phones will end by the end of this month but the support, including customer and warranty support, will continue until August 31, 2022.

    On a mission

    Onward Mobility is planning a new QWERTY keyboard and touch screen Android devices in the first half of next year in in North America and Europe.

    “To provide all businesses, from government to enterprise to those who power the gig economy—the most productive, most user-friendly and most secure mobile devices ever created. So nothing gets in the way of their mission,” Onward Mobility said on its website.

    “Top of mind for us is not just making the most secure and productive device, but also being an everyday device. That means things like a top-notch camera, and the other specs you’d expect from your day-to-day phone. Simultaneously, we know that we must be competitive, and so is our pricing,” OnwardMobility CEO Peter Franklin told The Register.

    Flipcart to use AI, ML and NLP to translate consumer reviews

    TCN Bureau
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    Flipcart to use AI, ML and NLP to translate consumer reviews

    Bengaluru: Online retailer Flipcart has partnered with Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IIT Patna), one of the country’s premier science, engineering and technology institute in its efforts to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to understand and translate user reviews in English to other Indian languages.

    The MoU will help create industry focused applied research in the areas of AI, NLP and Machine Learning ML and will enable the students to gain industry experience and the faculty member(s) to work closely with Flipkart on research projects.

    “The research is particularly aimed at developing robust machine translation techniques for translating the large amount of user reviews written in English to the Indian vernacular languages,” Asif Ekbal, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said.

    The work, he says, will ensure that the translation process should preserve the domain knowledge (e.g. sentiment, emotion, gender traits etc), which is extremely crucial for the translation service providers (TSPs) that make use of machine translation (MT) in production.

    Collaboration

    “Through this initial collaboration, we expect to come up with at least two high-quality publications…. and create a baseline translation workflow in the product review domains. This academic collaboration is expected to bring real world industry exposure to the students and scholars of IIT Patna, and at the same time will provide an opportunity to the faculty member(s) to work closely with Flipkart on research,” he adds.

    As a part of this MoU, IIT Patna will undertake a number of programs such as joint research activities, writing research papers, organising seminars, internship / mentorship opportunities to name a few.

    The Flipkart Group which includes group companies Flipkart, Myntra, and PhonePe has a registered customer base of over 250 million, offering over 150 million products across 80+ categories.

    Among the companies that have invested in the e-commerce giant are China’s Tencent, eBay and Microsoft.

    Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist Flipkart says “The aim behind this collaboration is to create industry-focused applied research which could help reach ecommerce to more consumers and sellers alike. With this MoU, we aim to establish deeper academia collaborations which could help students and the academia to leverage our data and platform knowledge to work on India specific e-commerce challenges, in addition to publishing research papers.”

    Flipcart has been partnering with academic institutions for the past five years through some of the leading institutes including Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIT (Kharagpur, Bombay and Kanpur), IIM (Ahmedabad and Kolkata) and a few foreign universities like Carnegie Mellon University and University of California.

    Saudi Arabia gets more phishing attacks among GCC countries

    Mohammed Fahad
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    Saudi Arabia gets more phishing attacks among GCC countries
    • Kaspersky analysis reveals that phishing attacks are becoming increasingly more targeted.
    • There were 2,578,501 phishing attacks detected in the second quarter in the GCC.

    Dubai:  Saudi Arabia had the highest phishing attacks among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in the second quarter of this year as hackers have increasingly performed targeted attacks, with most of their focus on small companies, Kaspersky report shows.

    To attract attention, fraudsters forged emails and websites from organisations whose products or services could be purchased by potential victims. In the process of making these fake assets, fraudsters often did not even try to make the site appear authentic.

    A number of new tricks have also been found – from HR dismissal emails to attacks disguised as delivery notifications.

    There were 2,578,501 phishing attacks detected in the second quarter in the GCC.

    “When summarising the results of the first quarter, we assumed that Covid-19 would be the main topic for spammers and phishers for the past few months. And it certainly happened. While there was the rare spam mailing sent out without mentioning the pandemic, phishers adapted their old schemes to make them relevant for the current news agenda, as well as come up with new tricks,” Tatyana Sidorina, security expert at Kaspersky, said.

    Luring unwary users

    Phishing is one of the oldest and most flexible types of social engineering attacks. They are used in many ways, and for different purposes, to lure unwary users to the site and trick them into entering personal information.

    The latter often includes financial credentials such as bank account passwords or payment card details, or login details for social media accounts.

    In the wrong hands, this opens doors to various malicious operations, such as money being stolen or corporate networks being compromised. This makes phishing a popular initial infection method.

    Phishing is a strong attack method because it is done at such a large scale.

    By sending massive waves of emails under the name of legitimate institutions or promoting fake pages, malicious users increase their chances of success in their hunt for innocent people’s credentials. The first six months of the year, however, have shown a new aspect to this well-known form of attack.

    Catalyst’s waterproof and airtight cases for smart devices

    TCN Bureau
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    0
    Catalyst’s waterproof and airtight cases for smart devices
    • Designed to make cleaning and disinfecting devices safe and easy.
    • Idle for kids as they prepare to remote learning.

    Dubai: Smart devices such as iPads and smartphones collect a lot of germs and bacteria from being constantly handled and passed around.

    As kids prepare for back to remote learning when schools reopen, concerns of parents are going to be paramount and they should be taking every precaution they can to stay safe, healthy and disrupt the spread of Covid-19.

    Cleaning a naked phone or a tablet can prove to be challenging as device manufacturers like Apple warn users to avoid getting moisture in any opening, and not to submerge electronic devices in any cleaning agents.

    Research recently published in the Journal of Hospital Infection shows coronaviruses can be disinfected in one minute using 6271% ethanol, 0.5% hydrogen peroxide or 0.1% bleach.

    The Hong Kong-based company Catalyst has launched waterproof cases that are designed to make cleaning and disinfecting devices safe and easy using most of the validated cleaning methods that kill Covid-19 including soap and water or an alcohol solution to keep them free of germs and bacteria.

     “No matter which methods you choose, we want you to know there are solutions to help ensure effective phone hygiene, especially during this time. Airtight cases protect the devices from dust, dirt and small particles that can scratch the surface of the devices. It provides an easy, safe way to keep your device clean apart from the drop proof of up to 6.6 feet,”  June Lai, Co-Founder and CEO of Catalyst, said.

    Catalyst is available in more than 70 countries around the world and from major retailers.

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