Category: International

‘Never let a crisis go to waste’: How 3 CEOs helped their companies thrive in a pandemic

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The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted different responses from company CEOs seeking to ensure their businesses survive. Keeping their employees safe has been the first priority, but beyond that, their task has involved understanding the situation, launching countermeasures, and trying to evolve ways of working to ensure their businesses can continue. We spoke to the chief executives of three major companies in three very different industries. In their responses to the crisis we found that Winston Churchill’s adage of “never let a crisis go to waste” was as relevant as ever, with businesses finding positives during the pandemic. Accelerate strategy Shipping giant AP Møller-Maersk embarked on a historic transformation in 2016 to become an integrated transport and logistics company—combining its shipping line, port operations, and freight forwarding businesses into a single entity. However, progress had been limited . The pandemic brought unprecedented challenges to Maersk’s customers who, faced with falling demand, had to manage their global supply networks as effectively as possible. They wanted better information across the supply chain and the ability to change outcomes while goods were in transit. These demands affirmed Maersk’s strategy to shift from being a port-to-port container transport company to an integrated, end-to-end logistics company, making use of digital technologies to provide the connectivity and visibility that customers required. Maersk’s customers turned to its blockchain-enabled supply chain platform TradeLens , where the number of transactions almost tripled from 70,000 a week in January 2020 to 194,000 a week in June. Transactions through Maersk.com increased by 20% to 25% between January and October 2020. Maersk’s CEO Soren Skou told us: “The investments we made in the last five years in digital capabilities came in very handy during COVID-19.” The pandemic accelerated Maersk’s technological transformation efforts, which led to new digital products and services while modernizing its customer interface, back-end infrastructure, and assets such as ships and terminals. Maersk also built expertise through acquisitions, purchasing warehousing and distribution company Performance Team , and customs management firm KGH Customs . Skou was able to apply what he’d learned from the financial crisis of 2008-09, when Maersk and its competitors fought for market share and ended up driving down freight rates. This time, Skou focused on profitability: cutting capacity by 20%, but filling the remaining vessels even as the pandemic caused shipping volumes to drop. The plunging price of oil also helped Maersk’s financial performance, and its earnings actually increased in the first three quarters of 2020 , despite near-paralysis of the global economy. Scale-up innovation Large companies are often seen as slow and trailing in innovation compared to smaller, more nimble competitors. Standard operating procedures mean they focus on developing “perfect” solutions, testing in pilot markets and proving the business case over a couple of years, before finally rolling out—by which time they have probably missed the boat. Mars Petcare, a global leader in pet food and pet health services, found that COVID-19 necessitated scaling up innovation Read More …

With just 7 COVID-19 deaths in Taiwan, even huge events are back in business

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It’s a Saturday afternoon at 3:00 in the afternoon, and Taipei Metro’s blue line is packed. Riders are standing shoulder to shoulder. Exiting passengers positioned in the interior kindly ask those in front of the doors to make way. All passengers are sporting compulsory masks—including those heading to the four-day Outdoor Show at the Nangang Exhibition Center. Right inside the exhibition center entrance, a young man is positioned off to the side behind a standup desk. On top sit a laptop and connected security camera. As attendees flow through the doors, the camera captures their body temperature and relays it to the laptop, where their respective temperatures pop up in front of their faces on the screen Read More …

The hottest new video game is . . . chess?

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As a global pandemic continues to determine a new normal, tens of thousands of viewers have been tuning in to watch people play chess on a live-streaming website called Twitch.tv . An American chess grandmaster, Hikaru Nakamura, along with a number of celebrities of the video game world, is leading a renaissance in the ancient game. While viewers eagerly wait for Nakamura’s streams to begin, they are treated to a slideshow of memes involving Nakamura’s face superimposed into scenes from pop culture. First a reference to a well-known Japanese animation, next a famous upside-down kiss with Spiderman, and finally, Nakamura’s characteristic grin is edited onto the Mona Lisa herself. From August 21 to September 6, Twitch and Chess.com are hosting a tournament, called Pogchamps, where some of the most popular gaming streamers in the world compete in a chess tournament with $50,000 on the line . The current renaissance in chess is happening at the confluence of live-streaming technology, video game culture, and one grandmaster’s exceptional skills as both a chess player and entertainer. What is emerging is an unexpectedly good pairing between chess and a digital generation that is showing how influential gamers can be. The game of kings is more popular than ever , with over 605 million players worldwide, and now, memes are involved. Chess explodes on Twitch.tv Twitch.tv is a live-video streaming website that was started in 2011 as a platform for users to watch other people play video games. In recent years, Twitch has grown to become the cultural hub of the gaming community. It now hosts tens of thousands of creators who broadcast live to a global audience of around 17.5 million viewers a day . Since 2015, chess viewership has experienced exponential growth on Twitch. Read More …

Amazon is selling its no-checkout tech to other stores, and we have questions

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After two years of running its own cashierless “ Amazon Go ” stores, Amazon now wants other retailers to start using the tech. The “ Just Walk Out ” service, which launched this week, lets retailers equip their stores with cameras, weight sensors, and other technology to detect what people grab from the shelves. Shoppers scan a credit card when they enter the store, and the system automatically bills them for each item when they exit, with an optional kiosk allowing them to enter an email address for receipts. It’s unclear what size of stores Amazon is targeting, but the company says it’s ideal for places where customers are in a rush and have long lines. The company told Reuters that it has “several” unnamed retail customers on board already. If Just Walk Out takes off, it could upend the entire brick-and-mortar retail system even without shifting ever-greater amounts of shopping online . Yet in announcing the new program, Amazon has chosen not to discuss many fundamental issues, such as how it’ll affect jobs and what it will do with all the data it collects. The company declined to answer most questions for this story, instead referring to a brief question-and-answer section on its website . Will Just Walk Out stores accept cash? Although Amazon says it can retrofit existing stores with its tech, the company isn’t saying whether those stores could (or should) continue to accept cash Read More …

These are the sneaky new ways that Android apps are tracking you

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You could admire the tenacity if it didn’t come with such trickery: After years of effort by Google to stop Android apps from scanning users’ data without permission, app developers keep trying to find new work-arounds to track people. A talk at PrivacyCon , a one-day conference hosted by the Federal Trade Commission last Thursday, outlined a few ways apps are prying loose network, device, and location identifiers. Officially, apps generally interact with Android through software hooks known as APIs, giving the operating system the ability to manage their access. “While the Android APIs are protected by the permission system, the file system often is not,” said Serge Egelman , research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the University of California at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. “There are apps that can be denied access to the data, but then they find it in various parts of the file system.” In a paper titled ‘ 50 Ways to Leak Your Data: An Exploration of Apps’ Circumvention of the Android Permissions System ,’ Egelman and fellow researchers Joel Reardon, Álvaro Feal, Primal Wijesekera, Amit Elazari Bar On, and Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez outlined three categories of exploits discovered through an array of tests. One common target, Egelman explained Thursday, is the hard-coded MAC address of a WiFi network—”a pretty good surrogate for location data.” The researchers ran apps on an instrumented version of Android Marshmallow (and, later, on Android Pie). Deep-packet inspection of network traffic found that apps built on such third-party libraries as the OpenX software development kit had been reading MAC addresses from a system cache directory. Other apps exploited system calls or network-discovery protocols to get these addresses more directly. Egelman added that the workings of these apps often made the deception obvious to researchers: “There are many apps that we observed which try to access the data the right way through the Android API, and then, failing that, try and pull it off the file system.” Obtaining a phone’s IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity), an identifier unique to each device, can be even more effective for persistent tracking. The researchers discovered that advertising libraries from Salmonads and Baidu would wait for an app containing their code to get permission from the user to read the phone’s IMEI, then copy that identifier to a file on a phone’s SD Card that other apps built on these libraries could read covertly. “This corresponds to about a billion installs of the various apps that are exploiting this technique,” Egelman warned. Finally this team observed the Shutterfly photo-sharing app working around the lack of permission for location data by reading geotags off photos saved on the phone—and then transmitting those coordinates to Shutterfly’s server. Shutterfly communications director Sondra Harding responded in an email on Tuesday, saying the app only reads photos after a user allows access: “There are multiple opportunities in the user experience for granting this permission, including opting in to auto-upload, pulling a local photo into a product creation path, the app settings, etc.” This study and another presented Thursday—’ Panoptispy: Characterizing Audio and Video Exfltration from Android Applications ,’ by Elleen Pan of Northeastern University with Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes—did not, however, report evidence that Facebook’s apps were exploiting any loopholes to surreptitiously listen to ambient real-world audio. The theory that Facebook or others are doing that keeps coming up despite strenuous, on-the-record denials —and in any case, the current Android Pie release blocks apps from recording audio or video in the background Read More …