Microsoft, USAID launch 'Imagine Cup Thailand'

The contest, organised in collaboration with USAID, is focused around major development challenges affecting Thailand and the whole of Southeast Asia: forests, ecosystems and climate change; clean energy and climate change; food security and climate change; HIV/Aids; biodiversity conservation; and governance.

It exemplifies the power of the private sector, technology and open innovation platforms in developing meaningful and cost-effective approaches to improving quality of life, enhancing natural-resource management, and affecting social change, said Michael Yates, director of the USAID Regional Development Mission for Asia. 

Imagine Cup Thailand 2014 centres around three main competitions: World Citizenship (in partnership with USAID), Games, and Innovation (in partnership with the “National Software Contest” run by the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre). 

To inspire more students and encourage a wider variety of students to participate in the cup, Thailand’s winning team in each category will land a three-day, two-night trip to visit the Microsoft Technology Centre in Singapore and a chance to compete to win a trip to participate in the World Final round hosted next July in Seattle, the hometown of Microsoft.

 

Crowd-behaviour analysis tech from NEC

NEC Corp has developed the world’s first “crowd-behaviour analysis technology”, which utilises security camera footage to understand the behaviour of crowds and detect abnormalities. 

It is expected to contribute to greater safety and security through the early detection of unusual conditions and accidents.

NEC’s newly developed technology analyses the influence that an unexpected incident, or the signs of an incident, has on the behaviour of a crowd in order to accurately identify changes in the crowd’s behaviour. 

As a result, existing security cameras can be used to detect disturbances, such as a sudden change in the flow of foot traffic or a crowd formed around a fallen individual, and to accurately estimate the degree of congestion, even in an extremely crowded environment, such as an event venue or train station during rush hour.

 

Lenovo posts impressive quarterly results

Lenovo Group has announced revenue of US$9.8 billion (Bt308 billion) for the quarter ending September 30, some 13 per cent more than in the same period last year. 

Profit in its second fiscal quarter grew even faster, with pre-tax earnings increasing 30 per cent year on year to $265 million, while net earnings grew 36 per cent to $220 million. 

Lenovo posted a record 29 million devices sold in the quarter, which is about four every second. The company’s strong global execution of its “Protect and Attack” strategy, innovative product portfolio and an increasing mix of PC Plus revenues drove the results.

For the second straight quarter, the Chinese company was the world’s largest PC vendor, with its highest-ever quarterly market share of 17.7 per cent – up two points from the same period last year. 

No-1 positions in five of the top seven PC markets – which cover one-quarter of the world’s population – supported this strong performance. 

Lenovo’s PC shipments in the quarter were 14.1 million units, again making it the fastest growing of the top five PC vendors. This was also the 18th quarter in a row that the maker outperformed the industry as a whole.

 

Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform

Seagate Technology has announced the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform. 

A significant leap forward in scale-out storage architectures, the platform simplifies data management and improves performance and scalability, while lowering the cost of ownership of average cloud infrastructures by up to 50 per cent, the company said.

The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage platform eliminates the storage-server tier of traditional data-centre architectures by enabling applications to speak directly to the storage device, thereby reducing expenses associated with the acquisition, deployment and support of hyper-scale storage infrastructures. 

Companies can realise additional cost savings while maximising storage density through reduced power and cooling costs, and receiving potentially dramatic savings in cloud data-centre build-outs.