Emerging Technology

Frankfurt Airport Retail will now allow Chinese tourists to use Alipay and WePay to purchase goods at the airport. FAR integrates both apps with Wirecard. (link)

Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) announced that it will use blockchain as the enabling technology to track…

China’s biggest messaging app, WeChat, has reached 1 billion users. Here is how it ranks against other dominant messaging apps. (link)

688 million people send Chinese New Year hongbao (red envelop containing money) through Wechat’s mobile wallets. Hongbao is sent traditionally from elders to kids in celebration of the new year. (link)

UK health care data startup, Medopad, takes capital from Chinese investors and strikes strategic partnership with China’s tech giants to tap into the 1 billion potential users to collect data for machine learning. (link)

Competition for self-driving car continues to heat up. Changan, one of the major auto makers in China, has obtained a self-driving car permit in California to start conducting public road test of self-driving cars. Changan is a member of Baidu’s Apollo artificial intelligence program.

Bytedance, the Chinese company that makes the news aggregator app Toutiao, is acquiring Musical.ly close to $1B. Based in Shanghai, Musical.ly allows more than 60M teen users to create and share music videos.

October venture capital reached close to $900M, excluding the $4B funding in Meituan Dianping.

Microsoft Azure announced that it will triple its presence in China in the next few months through its local partners. Microsoft reportedly has more than 1000 cloud partners…

The Chinese government will begin regulating mobile payment platforms given the transaction volume of non-banking payments has risen to $16 trillion in 2016. This has a number of implications including sharing of data by Alipay and Tencent with the Chinese government.

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IDC expects that more than 50% of the devices in China will have embedded conversational interfaces. Big challenges remain for AI experts to make machines understand Chinese language.