United News of Bangladesh

Leading global ICT solution and equipment provider, Huawei, has recently introduced four new inverters at a conference for industry stakeholders, Engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) partners. The conference ‘Huawei Partner Ecological Conference 2023’ has highlighted the efficacy of Digital Power and the attendees have discussed the prospects of renewable energy solutions in Bangladesh, reads a press release. Liang Weixing (Jack), Managing Director, Digital Power, Huawei South Asia, presented the different inverters for the Bangladesh market at the event. He has introduced SUN2000-100-KTL-M2, SUN2000-115-KTL-M2 and SUN2000-50-KTL-M3 model inverter for the Commercial and Industrial (C&I) market. And for the utility sector he put SUN2000-330KTL-H1 inverter in place, it said. Liang Weixing (Jack) said at the event, “Digital power is comparatively a new concept for Bangladesh’s industries. It has huge potential and can be very effective in tackling the energy crisis. Industries will not only be able to reduce costs and ensure operational excellence but also become independent. “With that intention, we have brought outstanding products to Bangladesh today. I believe Bangladesh will greatly benefit from these solutions. Besides, enabling Bangladesh to embrace renewable energy could not be possible without our partners. We are hopeful that we will grow together with the country.” “All the inverters for C&I are equipped with a feature, namely Smart String-Level Disconnector (SSLD) to detect reverse current flow, and short circuits. These inverters have PID (Potential Induced Degradation) recovery feature that can improve a solar PV system output by 5% as well. Besides, only Huawei inverters have TUV certified Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter (AFCI) safety function that resists fire hazards by detecting arc sparks within 200 meters in 0.5 seconds,” added the press release. “Bangladesh pledges to reduce 22% of its carbon emissions by 2030. Huawei has provided solar power solutions in Bangladesh for the last three years. In between, it has provided solutions to a number of government and industry projects. The country’s second-largest solar plant at Mymensingh is using Huawei’s digital power solution,” it added.

Facebook parent Meta is slashing another 10,000 jobs and will not fill 5,000 open positions as the social media pioneer cuts costs. The company announced 11,000 job cuts in November, about 13% of its workforce at the time. Meta and other tech companies have been hiring aggressively for at least two years and in recent months have begun to let some of those workers go. Early last month, Meta posted falling profits and its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue. The company said Tuesday it will reduce the size of its recruiting team and make further cuts in its tech groups in late April, and then its business groups in late May. “This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success.” The Menlo Park, California, company has invested billions of dollars to realign its focus on the metaverse. In February it said a downturn in online advertising and competition from rivals such as TikTok weighed on results. “As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs -- and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision,” said Zuckerberg. The biggest tech companies in the U.S. are cutting costs elsewhere, too. This month, Amazon paused construction on its second headquarters in Virginia following the biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history and its shifting plans around remote work. In early trading, Meta shares rose 6%.

Instant audio/video call and messaging app, imo, recently launched a new campaign on International Women's Day to offer enhanced privacy protection and ensure cyber security for the users. According to numerous data, cybercrimes such as hacking, blackmailing, and cyberbullying have been occurring regularly in Bangladesh. To be particular, online harassment against women, especially on different social networking sites, is on the rise as a recent study has found that 64 out of every 100 women in the country faced some kind of online harassment and violence owing to a lack of safe online space. As far as social platforms are concerned, a user may face privacy issues at different stages of communication and there are by far no proper solutions to address these problems. Against such a backdrop, imo introduced its new campaign: "Your privacy, Your Control." Read more: imo boosts security layer with new anti-fraud system Through this initiative, imo has brought three advanced security features – "Time Machine," "Block Screenshot for Calls," and "Friend Request." These features will help the users solve many of the security or privacy issues faced at any stage of their communication.  The Time Machine feature will allow users to delete the selected chat history timelessly. Also, the Block Screenshot for Calls feature will provide them with the opportunity to stop the person on the receiving end to take screenshots on calls. The Friend Request feature will further protect users' safety by prohibiting unknown/unfriendly people from reaching out when they are not a connection.     

Belgium is banning TikTok from government phones over worries about cybersecurity, privacy and misinformation, the country's prime minister said Friday, mirroring recent action by other authorities in Europe and the U.S. The Chinese-owned video sharing app will be temporarily prohibited from devices owned or paid for by the Belgium's federal government for at least six months, according to a post on Alexander de Croo's website. TikTok said it is “disappointed at this suspension, which is based on basic misinformation about our company.” The company said it's "readily available to meet with officials to address any concerns and set the record straight on misconceptions.” TikTok is owned by China’s ByteDance, which moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020. The company sought to distance itself from its Chinese roots, saying its parent company is incorporated outside of China and it's majority owned by global institutional investors. But the European Union's three main institutions and Denmark's defense ministry have already ordered employees to remove the app from devices used for official business. Similar bans have been imposed in Canada and the U.S. The tussle over TikTok is part of a wider global rivalry between China and the U.S. and its Western allies over technological and economic supremacy. De Croo said Belgium's ban was based on warnings from the state security service and its cybersecurity center, which said the app could harvest user data and tweak algorithms to manipulate its news feed and content. They also warned that TikTok could be compelled to carry out spying for Beijing, he said, without being more specific. “We are in a new geopolitical context where influence and surveillance between states have shifted to the digital world," de Croo said in an online statement. “We must not be naive: TikTok is a Chinese company which today is obliged to cooperate with the intelligence services. This is the reality. Prohibiting its use on federal service devices is common sense.” TikTok said user data is stored in the U.S. and Singapore and pointed to new measures to ease European concerns by storing user data in European data centers. “The Chinese government cannot compel another sovereign nation to provide data stored in that nation’s territory,” the company said in a statement.

Huawei recently organised a campus recruitment program at the Khulna University of Engineering and Technology (KUET) to give the students a chance to work with it. Around 200 students from three departments – CSE, EEE, and ECE – took part in the written and verbal examination under the campus recruitment process. Qualified students will get the opportunity to join Huawei soon. Professor Mostafizur Rahman of the ECE department, Professor Saifur Rahman of the EEE department and other faculty members were present. Read: Huawei scoops up four awards at MWC 2023 Huang Baoxiong, human resource director of Huawei South Asia, said: "Operation in more than 170 countries and regions allows Huawei to ensure a diversified working environment and an atmosphere to learn and grow." "We maintain a ratio where 80 percent of employees are recruited locally in Bangladesh and every year we recruit a good chunk of fresh graduates from different universities. It ensures a very good mix of fresh minds and experts in Huawei." Mostafizur said: "Huawei creates enough opportunities for the local students and talents. It has come forward to recruit our students directly from campus. Our students have the merit and ambition to always do better in their careers."

— If you’re not told you are fired, are you really fired? At Twitter, probably. And then, sometimes, you get your job back — if you want it. Haraldur Thorleifsson, who until recently was employed at Twitter, logged in to his computer last Sunday to do some work — only to find himself locked out, along with 200 others. He might have figured, as others before him have in the chaotic months of layoffs and firings since Elon Musk took over the company, that he was out of a job. Instead, after nine days of no answer from Twitter as to whether or not he was still employed, Thorleifsson decided to tweet at Musk to see if he could catch the billionaire’s attention and get an answer to his Schrödinger’s job situation. “Maybe if enough people retweet you’ll answer me here?” he wrote on Monday. Eventually, he got his answer after a surreal Twitter exchange with Musk, who proceeded to quiz him about his work, question his disability and need for accommodations (Thorleifsson, who goes by “Halli,” has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair) and tweet that Thorleifsson has a “prominent, active Twitter account and is wealthy” and the “reason he confronted me in public was to get a big payout.” While the exchange was going on, Thorleifsson said he received an email that he was no longer employed.Late Tuesday afternoon, however, Musk had a change of heart. “I would like to apologize to Halli for my misunderstanding of his situation. It was based on things I was told that were untrue or, in some cases, true, but not meaningful,” he tweeted. “He is considering remaining at Twitter.” Thorleifsson did not immediately respond to a message for comment following Musk’s tweet. In an earlier email, he called the experience “surreal.” “You had every right to lay me off. But it would have been nice to let me know!” he tweeted to Musk. Thorleifsson, who lives in Iceland, has about 151,000 Twitter followers (Musk has over 130 million). He joined Twitter in 2021, when the company, under the prior management, acquired his startup Ueno. He was lauded in Icelandic media for choosing to receive the purchase price in wages rather than a lump sum payout. That’s because this way, he would pay higher taxes to Iceland in support of its social services and safety net. Thorleifsson’s next move: “I’m opening a restaurant in downtown Reykjavik very soon,” he tweeted. “It’s named after my mom.” Twitter did not immediately respond to a message for comment.

The government on Tuesday launched national mobile browser “Torjoni”.+ State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak inaugurated the browser at the BCC Auditorium in Agargaon. The browser has been launched at the initiative of the ICT Division on the occasion of the historic March 7 to help common people of the country to use internet in Bangla. "On March 7, Bangabandhu gave hint to the 7.5 crore people with his index finger . At the behest of that index finger, the country's banks, insurance, office, courts and everything ran. He raised his index finger and united the nation for the freedom struggle and gave the direction of the Liberation War,” said Palak. “Today we are launching the "National Mobile Browser Torjoni” in the name of that index finger,” he said. “We are now entering smart Bangladesh from Digital Bangladesh. To get the benefits of this smart Bangladesh, we should not rely solely on foreign-based services. We have to be self-reliant. We want to create such a 'Smart Bangladesh' ecosystem, which will be self-reliant. We have brought the ‘Torjoni’ for that self-reliant smart Bangladesh,” the junior minister said. “We want to build a self-reliant smart Bangladesh where we will have our own operating system, users will use the internet in their own browser.” The Torjoni browser has been launched by the Establishment of Secured E-mail for Government and Digital Literacy Centre of Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC). Google Chrome is a fast and secure browser, which is widely used all over the world. On the other hand, Torjoni has been created to remove the linguistic complexity of Bengali language users. The browser does not just have Bangla; There is also an English language option for users. This safe and fast Bangladeshi browser will be available on Apple and Google Play Store. Executive Director of Bangladesh Computer Council Ranjit Kumar presided over the function while ICT Division Secretary Md Nojibur Rahman, among others, spoke on the occasion, among others.

Global provider of information and communication technology solutions ZTE Corporation, together with its partners, specifically, the Dahaize coal of China Coal Group Shaanxi Company, China Coal Technology and Engineering Group, China Coal Information Technology, China Mobile and China Broadnet, recently won the GSMA "5G Energy Challenge Award" 2023. They received the recognition for their joint efforts in the project "Dual-frequency 5G Networks for Smarter Coal Mining." Currently, although the intelligent transformation of the coal mine has become the consensus of the industry, negative factors like high risk for the underground personnel, insufficient data transmission capacity in production, complex production and management systems as well as difficult business integration still pose a great threat to the industry, which makes it difficult to promote the current "5G private network 1.0" construction mode. As one of the first batches of intelligent demonstration mines in China, Dahaize Coal Mine, bolstered with 5G 700MHz and 2.6GHz integrated networking, original intrinsically safe base stations and new cloud network architecture, has improved the coverage of base stations while ensuring large bandwidth. It solves the problem of coal mine underground dispatching, realizes no optical cables in the working face, effectively reduces the network construction cost and promotes the intelligent development of Dahaize Coal Mine, shaking off the image of being "bitter, dirty and tired" of the coal industry. The success of the "Dual-frequency 5G Networks for Smarter Coal Mining" project marks the successful practice of the first 5G 700MHz band and 2.6GHz fusion technology in the coal field in China, and it also lays the foundation for the in-depth development of "5G+" virtual interactive applications, robot clusters, unmanned driving, intelligent wearable equipment, intelligent patrol inspection, intelligent comprehensive mining, intelligent tunnelling and other applications in coal mines.  

Foxconn is going to build another Apple iPhone manufacturing plant in a 300-acre new factory in India’s Karnataka, the country’s Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar and the state Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai have said. According to them, the manufacturing facility will employ 100,000 people, reports NDTV. The investment, one of Foxconn’s largest single expenditures in India to date, comes as global businesses increasingly move away from China as Washington-Beijing tensions grow. In the outskirts of Bengaluru, land has been made available to Foxconn, the leading manufacturer of iPhones. The 300-acre site is said to be one of the largest manufacturing units for Apple’s iPhones. The Taiwanese company is planning to invest US$ 700 million in the new plant to ramp up local production, according to a Bloomberg report. The factory may also assemble Apple handsets, Bloomberg said, quoting sources. Foxconn might manufacture some components for its budding electric vehicle industry at the new site, added the report. “Bengaluru was the preferred destination for global companies and had been a forerunner in attracting investment,” Foxconn Chairman Young Liu said after visiting the factory site. Foxconn, meanwhile, continues to produce iPhones at its massive manufacturing facility in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, where it currently employs some 200,000 people. Foxconn has made a significant investment in India twice now. In a facility in Tamil Nadu, the firm is already producing iPhones of the latest generation. Foxconn reported earnings of USD 206 billion in 2021, placing it second globally in the production of Apple phones. According to reports, Foxconn is the biggest producer of electronics worldwide. It ranked 20th in the Fortune Global 500 as of the previous year. There are 173 campuses and offices for Foxconn spread over 24 countries or regions, including those in China, Japan, Vietnam, the Czech Republic, and the US.

Mobile World Congress (MWC)-2023 downed its curtain on Thursday in Spain’s Barcelona with the call of ‘Join with the advancement of 5G and the data-driven economy’. The gathering drew a huge crowd of experts and telecommunication sector officials from across the world. Organisers of the Mobile World Congress GSMA said on Thursday that the contribution of the mobile telecommunication sector to the world economy will exceed $6 trillion by 2030 in the journey of 5G and data-driven economy. Read more: Huawei scoops up four awards at MWC 2023 In the closing speech, GSMA Chairman Hose Maria Alvarez Palet Lopez said that every country in the world should now prepare themselves for the 5G and data-dependent society and economy. “Because falling behind in this journey will mean holding back its economy from the bright possibility of progress,” he said. The GSMA Chairman also said that this year's Mobile World Congress will be particularly memorable as from this congress, the fast journey of 5G and data dependent future economy started. “Within the next one year, 5G and data technology will bring significant changes in the life journey of common people starting from the society and state management”, said the chairman. Mobile World Congress 2024 will be held in Barcelona from February 26 to 29 in 2024.