Reports and coverage APAC

Japanese automakers have looked beyond the industry trend to develop self-driving cars and instead are focusing their attentions on developing robots in an effort to keep Japan's elderly population on the move. The country's population is ageing faster than the rest of the world and its birthrate continues to decrease. Toyota Motor Corp has recognized the potential in becoming a mass producer of robots in order to alleviate and help Japan's elderly citizens.

A leading Japanese multinational IT services provider has setup a security operations center in California as part of its effort to combat against the rising number of cybersecurity attacks and hacking scandals currently blighting the IT sector. NEC Corporation announced that specialized security company Infosec Corporation which is owned by the NEC Group will open the center in Santa Clara, California. It is expected that the construction on this new project will start in April, 2017.

A group of researchers in Japan have suggested that small insect sized drones covered in a coat of horsehair and sticky gel could pollinate crops which would significantly reduce the costly loss of bee populations across the globe. The miniature drones are still a long way off in terms of their production and subsequent introduction into the field, but researchers believe they offer a partial solution to the loss of bees with disease and climate change decimating its population.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Ernst & Young (EY) China have released the results of a joint survey into the adoption of cloud computing by the financial services industry in China, saying adoption has reached a tipping point within the industry.

Blockchain might not be something you've heard of before, but leading governments around the world have certainly taken notice. It's a technology that could revolutionize the way organizations are run. The hidden value of bitcoin, the digital crypto-currency platform, lies in the technology that verifies and tracks transactions by network nodes that record the information in a public distributed ledger called the blockchain, which uses bitcoin as its unit of account. It works without a central repository or single administrator, and many governments have announced plans to adopt the technology to keep track of transactions and simplify processes.