HKSTP INVITES THE WORLD'S BRIGHTEST INNOVATORS TO JOIN HONG KONG'S FIRST HYBRID ELEVATOR PITCH COMPETITION 2021

Global EPiC pitch event in HK returns to SKY100 and offers US$200,000 in cash prizes plus exclusive cross-border business and investment opportunities to entrepreneurs 

HONG KONG, Sept 6 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) has formally kickoff the Elevator Pitch Competition 2021 (EPiC 2021) by inviting applications from tech ventures in Hong Kong around the world. Taking place from 5 to 12 November, 2021, participating entrepreneurs can join their peers, investors and innovation eco-system leaders in an international week-long fest of pitching, investment and business matching as well as learning from icons in the startup landscape.

Companies and individuals are invited to EPiC 2021, which is in its sixth year and taking place for the first time as a hybrid event – a dynamic physical and virtual platform to meet the diverse needs of overseas and local innovators. To celebrate HKSTP’s 20 years of leading Hong Kong innovation, the event will return to its iconic SKY100 venue at the top of International Commerce Centre in West Kowloon to re-create a genuine elevator pitch experience.

Over 100 contestants will be shortlisted for the opportunity of competing in the hybrid event where physical attendees deliver a signature 60-second elevator pitch for their world-changing ideas, while virtual participants will make their pitch to our judges via video call. A further ten finalists will be selected to compete for the winning cash prize of US$100,000 as well as unique opportunities for cross-border investment, business collaboration and technology development and adoption.

The international week-long festival of investment and innovation will focus on high-potential ideas in FinTech, Health Technology, Smart City, and the emerging area of Green Tech & Construction Tech.

Robert Luo, CEO and Co-founder of 2020 champion winner MiTerro from the US, said: “Winning EPiC was a validation of our business and vision. We not only met investors but also other entrepreneurs who are finding innovative solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.”

HKSTP is committed to acting as a bridge between innovators and investors, with HKSTP nurturing over 500 start-up companies and connected them to more than 1000 active investors. All winners from the competition can proceed to leverage the full resources of the HKSTP ecosystem for investment, incubation, market access, technology, and partnership opportunities.

The competition attracted a record number of 476 entries from 37 countries around the globe in 2020. Over 70% of the 170 contestants reaching the semi-final round were from 31 international markets. The event brought more than 1,000 entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, angel investors, industry players, incubators, accelerators and tech disruptors together, to showcase the growing strength of the I&T ecosystem in Hong Kong.

Who can apply:

· Tech startups that are less than five years old and have received less than US$10 million in funding by 31 March 2021 OR individuals who have not yet established any companies
· Ideas should focus on one of the four technology areas: FinTech, Health Technology, Smart City, and Green Tech & Construction Tech. 

Applications will close on 10 September 2021, at 23:59 hrs, Hong Kong time. 

Please visit https://epic.hkstp.org/ for more detailed information on EPiC 2021. 

List of awards and prizes

 

Award	Cash Prize (for each winner)
Champion	US$100,000
4 Tech Winners (FinTech, Health Technology, Smart City and Green Tech & Construction Tech)	US$10,000
Top 10 Finalists	US$6,000

About Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation

Comprising Science Park, InnoCentre and Industrial Estates, Hong Kong Science & Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) is a statutory body dedicated to building a vibrant innovation and technology ecosystem to connect stakeholders, nurture technology talents, facilitate collaboration, and catalyse innovations to deliver social and economic benefits to Hong Kong and the region.

Established in May 2001, HKSTP has been driving the development of Hong Kong into a regional hub for innovation and growth in several focused clusters including Electronics, Information & Communications Technology, Green Technology, Biomedical Technology, Materials and Precision Engineering. We enable science and technology companies to nurture ideas, innovate and grow, supported by our R&D facilities, infrastructure, and market-led laboratories and technical centres with professional support services. We also offer value added services and comprehensive incubation programmes for technology start-ups to accelerate their growth.

Technology businesses benefit from our specialised services and infrastructure at Science Park for applied research and product development; enterprises can find creative design support at InnoCentre; while skill-intensive businesses are served by our three industrial estates at Tai Po, Tseung Kwan O and Yuen Long. More information about HKSTP is available at www.hkstp.org

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210906005047/en/ 

Contact

Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation
Karmen Cheung
Tel: +852 2629 2339
Email: karmen.cheung@hkstp.org

Edelman Public Relations
Claudia Yau
Tel: +852 2837 4769
Email: Claudia.Yau@edelman.com/ Edelmanhkstppr@edelman.com

Source : Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation

--BERNAMA

Cradlepoint unveils industry’s first 5G Enterprise Router for wireless WAN era

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 1 -- Cradlepoint, the global leader in cloud-delivered LTE and 5G wireless network edge solutions, is continuing its mission to enable businesses to connect beyond the limits of wired networks through the expansion of its second-generation 5G product portfolio.

The Cradlepoint E3000 Series 5G Enterprise Router, orderable now, is the industry’s first enterprise-class router that provides businesses with fast, agile, secure, and resilient 5G connectivity for primary, failover, or SD-WAN use cases without traditional performance compromises.

“The pandemic has drastically altered the business climate, forcing companies to embrace technology like 5G to enable their WANs to become more agile and resilient,” said Cradlepoint VP of Product Marketing, Donna Johnson in a statement.

“Cradlepoint is making the Wireless WAN a reality with products like the E3000 5G Series Enterprise Router, giving customers 5G branch connectivity without compromising enterprise-class management, features or performance.”

The Cradlepoint E3000 Series 5G Enterprise Router supports the features and capabilities including choice of 5G, high-speed fiber and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet WAN ports; the most LTE and 5G connectivity options; nine downstream switched Ethernet ports (4 with PoE) plus Wi-Fi 6 and optional Bluetooth 5.1; and, Private Cellular Networking support for CBRS in both 5G and LTE modes.

While LTE has been enabling businesses to leverage wireless and ‘cut-the-cord’ solutions for a while, the speed, intelligence, and resiliency of next-generation 5G services is becoming a catalyst to Wireless WAN adoption.

Not only does it make today’s applications better, but will also enable a new generation of immersive customer experiences at the network edge, as well as more cost-effective SD-WAN 5G architectures, anywhere connectivity, and high-speed wireless failover for larger sites.

While other vendors are trying to get their first 5G products to market, Cradlepoint is already shipping its second-generation of purpose-built 5G for Business solutions, giving customers the most pathways to all flavours of 5G.

More details at www.cradlepoint.com.

-- BERNAMA

BEST'S COMMENTARY: HSBC'S ACQUISITION OF AXA SINGAPORE HIGHLIGHTS SINGAPORE LIFE INSURANCE GROWTH PROSPECTS

SINGAPORE, Aug 26 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- The recent agreement to acquire AXA Insurance Pte Ltd (AXA Singapore) by HSBC Insurance (Asia-Pacific) Holdings Ltd (HSBC Insurance) demonstrates the continued growth potential of Singapore’s life insurance segment, according to a new AM Best commentary.

In its new Best’s Commentary, “HSBC’s Acquisition of AXA Singapore Highlights Singapore Life Insurance Growth Prospects,” AM Best states that demand for long-term financial planning and health protection is continuing to support Singapore’s life insurance market prospects. The HSBC Insurance-AXA Singapore deal takes place at a time when the Singapore life market has seen a strong rebound in weighted new business premiums recorded in the first half of 2021. In addition, recent and future life insurance growth is expected to be supported by the city-state’s attractiveness as a home for affluent and high net worth individuals.

Generally, AM Best is of the view that life insurance companies with international expertise in investment and wealth management have notable advantages in designing sophisticated products with more attractive investment terms and features — an important value proposition amid the current low-interest rate environment. Nonetheless, life insurers with product offerings that include significant investment risks/guarantees have to balance the attractiveness of these products with the capital requirements that arise for the insurer.

The health and employee benefits lines of business also remain important growth drivers for life insurers in Singapore. Nonetheless, AM Best notes that companies engaging in these line of business continue to face underwriting performance challenges, particularly for individual medical and critical illness products. In Singapore, aside from group health business, which delivered adequate profitability in 2020, health insurance is viewed as a difficult line of business due to the weak results of long-term individual policies.
 

To access a copy of this commentary, please visit http://www3.ambest.com/bestweek/purchase.asp?record_code=312005.

AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specialising in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

Copyright © 2021 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210825005791/en/


Contact

Tran Nhat Trung
Financial Analyst
+65 6303 5019
trung.tran@ambest.com

Christopher Sharkey
Manager, Public Relations
+1 908 439 2200, ext. 5159
christopher.sharkey@ambest.com

Myles Gould
Senior Director, Analytics
+65 6303 5020
myles.gould@ambest.com

Jim Peavy
Director, Communications
+1 908 439 2200, ext. 5644
james.peavy@ambest.com

Source : AM Best

--BERNAMA

Grafana Labs secures US$220 million, hastening open source visualisation, observability platform global adoption

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 25 -- Grafana Labs, the company behind the world’s most ubiquitous open and composable operational dashboards, has announced a US$220 million Series C investment round, co-led by new investors Sequoia Capital and Coatue, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lead Edge Capital, and GIC. (US$1 = RM4.211)

As part of the funding, Carl Eschenbach, partner at Sequoia and former President and COO at VMware, and David Schneider, general partner at Coatue and former President at ServiceNow, will join the company’s board of directors.

The ‘actually useful’ free forever tier of Grafana Cloud provides the industry’s most generous no-cost observability stack, and with the funding round, Grafana Labs is adding 50GB of traces to the 50GB of logs, 10,000 series of Prometheus metrics, and 3 Grafana dashboard users that come with the free offering.

Both Grafana Cloud and the on-premises Grafana Enterprise Stack offering include access to free and commercial plugins, such as Elasticsearch, Jira, Datadog, Splunk, AppDynamics, Oracle, MongoDB, Snowflake, ServiceNow, and more.

“It’s been an incredible year at Grafana Labs, highlighted by the rapid adoption of Grafana Cloud, the growth of our Loki logs and Prometheus metrics offerings, the introduction of Tempo 1.0 for tracing, and the continued development of the Grafana frontend,” said Grafana Labs co-founder and CEO, Raj Dutt in a statement.

“This new investment of capital, as well as the addition of two highly experienced technology executives to our board, will focus us on accelerating product development to support our community’s and customers' success.”

Eschenbach said: “We’re eager to partner with Grafana Labs and look forward to working with Raj and team to continue building world-class observability products.”

Grafana Labs has doubled its headcount since the beginning of the year, with nearly 500 Grafanistas working remotely in more than 40 different countries. 

For more information, visit www.grafana.com.

-- BERNAMA

Arowana bags 3 Gold Stevie Awards at the 2021 International Business Awards

 

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 20 -- Arowana, the established B Corporation accredited investment group, has been awarded three sought-after Gold Stevie Awards at the 18th Annual International Business Awards, the world’s premier business awards programme.

Arowana has been awarded Gold in Most Innovative Company of the Year (up to 100 employees), Achievement in Organization Recovery and Chairman of the Year, according to a statement.

Arowana was awarded a Gold Stevie for Most Innovative Company of the Year (up to 100 employees), recognising its unique purpose and approach to building companies that it invests in and operates.

As a B Corp, Arowana is selectively focussed on enterprises that serve a real purpose, working directly with companies that deliver a positive impact to all stakeholders.

Meanwhile, Arowana’s Gold Stevie Award for Achievement in Organization Recovery recognised its successful turnaround of VivoPower International.

In March 2020, VivoPower's share price was below US$1.00 with a market cap of US$10 million; seven months later, following a transformational intervention by Arowana, VivoPower’s price achieved an all-time high of US$24.00. (US$1 = RM4.236)

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Arowana, Kevin Chin was awarded the Gold Stevie Award for Chairman of the Year for his leadership in successfully driving innovation across Arowana’s group of companies as well as for the execution of VivoPower’s turnaround.

Arowana was also awarded three Bronze Stevies for Company of the Year - Business or Professional Services (Medium-size), Energy Industry Innovation of the Year and Achievement in Growth.

-- BERNAMA

Hyatt enters definitive agreement to acquire Apple Leisure Group

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 16 -- Hyatt Hotels Corporation has announced that Hyatt has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Apple Leisure Group (ALG), a leading luxury resort-management services, travel and hospitality group, from affiliates of each of KKR and KSL Capital Partners LLC for US$2.7 billion in cash. (US$1 = RM4.241)

The transaction is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2021, subject to customary closing conditions, according to a statement.

ALG’s resort brand management platform AMResorts® provides management services to the largest portfolio of luxury all-inclusive resorts in the Americas under the AMR™ Collection brand portfolio.

The acquisition also includes ALG’s membership offering, Unlimited Vacation Club®, travel distribution business ALG Vacations®, as well as destination management services and travel technology assets.

Following completion of the transaction, ALG’s business will continue to be led by current ALG Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Alejandro Reynal and the current ALG leadership team. Reynal will become a member of Hyatt’s executive leadership team and report to Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian.

Hoplamazian, who is also Hyatt president, said: “The addition of ALG’s properties will immediately double Hyatt’s global resorts footprint.”

“ALG’s portfolio of luxury brands, leadership in the all-inclusive segment and large pipeline of new resorts will extend our reach in existing and new markets, including in Europe, and further accelerate our industry-leading net rooms growth.

“Importantly, the combination of this value-creating acquisition and the US$2 billion increase in our asset sale commitment will transform our earnings profile, and we expect Hyatt to reach 80 per cent fee-based earnings by the end of 2024.”

ALG’s hotel portfolio consists of over 33,000 rooms operating in 10 countries. The portfolio has grown from nine resorts in 2007, to approximately 100 properties by 2021-end and has a pipeline of 24 executed deals with a large number of additional hotels in the development process.

At closing, Hyatt expects to fund more than 80 per cent of the purchase with a combination of US$1.0 billion of cash on hand and new debt financings, and the remainder with approximately US$500 million from equity financing.

Hyatt has secured a US$1.7 billion financing commitment from J.P. Morgan. Cash proceeds from the US$2 billion asset sale programme are expected to be used to pay down debt, including debt incurred to fund the acquisition.

More details at www.hyatt.com.

-- BERNAMA

ECLOUDVALLEY FIRST AWS CONSULTING PARTNER IN ASEAN TO ACHIEVE AWS MACHINE LEARNING COMPETENCY

 SINGAPORE, Aug 12 (Bernama-BUSINESS WIRE) -- eCloudvalley Technology announced that it is the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) Consulting Partner to achieve the AWS Machine Learning Competency status in the ASEAN region.

AWS Machine Learning Competency Partners have demonstrated expertise delivering machine learning (ML) solutions on the AWS Cloud. These partners offer a range of services and technologies to help businesses create intelligent solutions, from enabling data science workflows to enhancing applications with machine intelligence.

As one of the fastest growing areas in technology, ML is a highly sought-after skillset in today’s job market as The World Economic Forum states a significant increase in the number of firms to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) in their 2020 report. The benefits of ML are endless as it is an open platform which provides users with controlled access to resources with granular permission policies, while choosing from a comprehensive set of services for data analysis together with data storage, business intelligence, batch processing, stream process and data progress orchestration. Achieving the AWS Machine Learning Competency positions eCloudvalley to serve a growing market in the Asia Pacific region looking to automate operations.

eCloudvalley has successfully helped mobile advertising solutions and content developer PureTech Global to leverage AI to optimize their billing revenue by implementing a time-series forecasting model using Amazon Forecast, a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts, to predict the optimal times for sending renewal notices for each of PureTech’s applications. eCloudvalley has also assisted PureTech Global to successfully deploy Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), storing raw historical data to train AI models and develop insights generated after forecasting. AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, is utilized to provide compute resources for analysis and forecasting.

“We have benefited from the support received from AWS and eCloudvalley, and continue to benefit from AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities like machine learning.”－ John Lim, Chief Technology Officer, PureTech Global.

AWS enables scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

"Now more than ever, businesses are looking to transform themselves with the latest ML solutions on AWS. To help customers make the right choices when finding the most qualified AWS Partner for the job, we launched the AWS Machine Learning Competency to help customers easily identify expert AWS Partners who have deep expertise and a solid track record of success in this area," said Conor McNamara, Managing Director, AWS ASEAN. "We are delighted that eCloudvalley is the first AWS Consulting partner in ASEAN to achieve this competency. We look forward to innovating together and continuing to serve our customers in Southeast Asia with innovative and validated AWS Partner technology and consulting offerings.”

In 2021, eCloudvalley has participated in the AWS Managed Service Provider Program which helped grow and promote its business. eCloudvalley also holds the AWS Migration Consulting Competency status, demonstrating its ability to help enterprise customers migrate applications and legacy infrastructure to AWS. In addition, eCloudvalley also has achieved the AWS Data and Analytics Competency status, demonstrating its success in helping customers evaluate and use the tools and best practices for collecting, storing, governing, and analyzing data at any scale.

eCloudvalley has also achieved AWS SAP Competency status, with the experience, tooling, methods, and best practices to streamline migration or transformation through integrated SAP solutions. These services extract key data from cloud-based SAP solutions, conducts analytics on the data, and utilizes the results to assist users in building a framework for digital transformation besides focusing on recolonizing the traditional IT models in various ways, from IT infrastructure to development methodology, triggering the business culture within an organization through offering Next-Generation Managed Services. Finally, eCloudvalley’s AI/ML team provides a complete solution, from platform construction to scheme design, training model to parameter tuning, and business situation interview to deployment and online operation, assisting customers from start to the end with their digital transformation journey.

About eCloudvalley

Founded in 2014 as a born-in-the-cloud partner focused entirely on AWS services, eCloudvalley has grown to 400+ employees with geographic footprints across APAC region, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and United States. With a mission to evolve the customer’s business with cloud technology, eCloudvalley has built a professional technical team with over 500 AWS certifications and has served 1,000 enterprises to perform any digital transformation.

 

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210801005001/en/


Contact

Melody Wee
+65 6223 2062
eCloudvalley Technology
www.ecloudvalley.com
Email us at info@ecloudvalley.com 

Source : eCloudvalley Technology

--BERNAMA