This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on January 24, 2022 - January 30, 2022
NEWS
Hiredly eliminates the need for work experience with #ZeroHero
Hiredly, a job discovery platform formerly known as WOBB, has launched the #ZeroHero campaign featuring jobs that are open to hiring candidates with no working experience.
In October 2021, the Department of Statistics Malaysia reported that the unemployment rate remained higher than it was pre-pandemic at 4.3%. With a saturated job market, the colossal task of building a career in a new field without any prior experience becomes even more daunting.
“Learning a new skill or starting over isn’t the hardest part of a career switch. Finding that first employer who is willing to give you your first shot despite the lack of experience is arguably the most difficult step for these jobseekers,” says Derek Toh, CEO and founder of Hiredly.
The campaign will run until Feb 28. Throughout the campaign period, participating employers and their jobs will be prominently highlighted through Hiredly’s promotional efforts.
All jobseekers with an approved Hiredly account are eligible to apply for the #ZeroHero positions.
Women’s health ads rejected by Facebook and Instagram, CIJ claims
Non-profit organisation Centre for Intimacy Justice (CIJ) has released a report together with pelvic health start-up Origin, claiming that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, rejects ads on women’s health.
This is despite allowing ads by men’s sexual wellness companies with sexual innuendos to run on Facebook and Instagram.
According to the report, the categories of start-ups with rejected ads included menopause, pelvic pain, pregnancy or postpartum care, menstrual health, fertility, sexual wellness and education. Meta commonly classified these health ads as “adult products” and the report claimed that “Meta appears to apply this policy unevenly”.
Of the 60 businesses studied in the report, all of them (100%) had experienced Facebook or Instagram rejecting an ad. Half of the survey respondents also reported Facebook suspending their entire ad accounts.
According to the report, 59 of the businesses were founded and led by women while one business was led by a non-binary individual.
AirAsia takes flight with drone training to support e-commerce deliveries
AirAsia has received the green light to conduct remote drone pilot training in support of its upcoming drone pilot project for the delivery of goods from the company’s e-commerce platforms using automated drones.
The training will be conducted at AirAsia Academy located in KL Sentral and practical training will be conducted at the YMCA Kuala Lumpur field, adjacent to KL Sentral.
AirAsia Aviation Ltd group CEO Bo Lingam says this new training programme provides an opportunity to upskill its employees and offer new programmes for the broader community, as well as to support the drone industry in providing quality training to have more qualified remote pilots in Malaysia.
AirAsia Group’s president (AirAsia Digital) Aireen Omar says innovation has always been in the company’s DNA and drone delivery will soon become its latest logistics solution, offering “a strong boost” to support the ever-growing e-commerce industry.
OctaFX Copytrading redesigns its copying settings
Global broker OctaFX has updated some of its copy trading service settings whereby users can now copy the Master Traders’ orders in equal, double, triple or any other desired volume.
OctaFX Copytrading is a popular service on the platform that allows its customers to copy orders from professional traders, also known as Master Traders.
The clients, known as copiers, choose professional traders to copy orders from. Whenever a Master Trader opens an order, the same order opens in a copier’s account automatically.
OctaFX Copytrading has been working on making the subscription process to Master Traders more transparent for the copiers. It updated the parameters a copier can set when subscribing to a professional trader, stated a recent press release.
Firstly, a copier can choose to copy a Master Trader’s orders in equal (×1), double (×2), triple (×3) or any other volume. Upon selecting a copying mode, a copier will see the investment required to start copying this Master Trader in this mode.
Another new feature for the copiers is the support funds. Copiers can choose to add support funds to protect their investments from unexpected market movements. This amount will only be used to support the trading strategy when the market fluctuates.
The required investment for each Master Trader is calculated automatically. An algorithm calculates this optimal amount from a pro’s trading history. This way, copiers can choose Master Traders based on how much they are ready to invest.
Traders utilise various trading strategies that involve different investment minimums for the copiers. In the Master Rating, copiers can filter Master Traders by the minimum amount required to invest with them. The system suggests Master Traders with strategies matching copiers’ financial opportunities.
Drones used to deliver medicine to flood victims in Selangor
Heavy rainfall in the country had displaced tens of thousands of people and left roads, access to medical facilities and hospitals inundated. This has caused many people to be stranded with no access to essential items and healthcare services.
To cater for the emergency, Meraque Services Sdn Bhd, a Malaysian drone tech company, in partnership with Pharmaniaga Bhd, delivered critical medicines to flood victims across Kuala Langat using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) on Dec 22 last year.
Four UAVs took to the skies for three days, delivering critical medical supplies to over 30 homes within the vicinity of Bandar Seri Ehsan, Banting. Capable of carrying 15kg in payload and travelling up to 20km, the drones flew over 8.6km — equivalent to over 25km using actual road access.
“The successful drone deployment and delivery of medicines is proof of concept of the use of drones in pharmaceutical-grade medical delivery. Even with unfavourable weather conditions, geographical challenges and limited landing space, this operation proved to be a success,” says Md Razalee Ismail, CEO of Meraque.
“It is more cost and time effective in comparison to traditional emergency modes of delivery, without compromising on the safety, efficacy and quality of the medicines by maintaining product temperature specification. Drones for medical delivery use are becoming widely accepted across the globe and are rapidly revolutionising the healthcare landscape by making faster delivery of critical life-saving medicines.
“In Malaysia, not only can drones be deployed in emergencies, but they can also be used for more rapid instances to deliver vaccines and medications to remote areas more speedily.”
Medical personnel available at the flood-stricken site ensured the medicines were distributed safely at the relief centre.
PEOPLE MOVES
HSBC Malaysia appoints Omar Siddiq as CEO
Omar Siddiq has joined HSBC Bank Malaysia Bhd as its new CEO. Omar was recently deputy CEO of Malaysia and CEO of CIMB Group Holdings Bhd’s wholesale banking. Before joining CIMB, he was the head of group wholesale banking at RHB Bank Bhd. He also had a stint as an executive director and group chief financial officer of Malaysia Airlines Bhd.
In the past, he has held roles in the investments division at Khazanah Nasional Bhd and was a member of the sovereign fund’s senior management team focusing on the aviation and airport sectors.
Omar is also part of the boards of HSBC Bank Malaysia and HSBC Amanah Malaysia Bhd as an executive director, as well as a member of the Asia-Pacific executive committee.
Mitchell Kreuch named Twitter’s Southeast Asia MD
Twitter has named Mitchell Kreuch as its new managing director of Southeast Asia, responsible for continuing and accelerating Twitter’s revenue growth in the region. Before this role, Kreuch led Twitter’s agency development in Asia-Pacific and has been a key part of its success in the region.
“Continuous growth in Southeast Asia is a top priority. Having led agency development in the APAC region for the past two years, I am very excited to expand the role to lead the revenue growth team in the Southeast Asian region,” he says.
Before joining Twitter, Kreuch spent nearly three decades in the sales, marketing and media industries across the US and Asia-Pacific. He has worked for brands such as The Walt Disney Company, Yahoo! and The New York Times.
Karen McGregor promoted to Visa’s Asia-Pacific consumer brand marketing head
Visa has promoted Karen McGregor to head of consumer brand marketing, Asia-Pacific. According to Marketing Interactive, her new role will steward the brand to support business growth, champion Visa’s strategic brand evolution efforts and provide strategic leadership across brand, campaign, content and media.
McGregor will also represent Asia-Pacific on Visa’s global brand council and remain on the Asia-Pacific marketing leadership team. She was formerly Visa’s head of marketing for Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand for close to two years.
Jasmine Lee becomes U Mobile’s first chief digital officer
U Mobile has appointed Jasmine Lee as its chief digital officer. She was U Mobile’s chief marketing officer (CMO) for eight years.
In her new role, she will be responsible for building and exploring new opportunities in the digital space, creating new digital experiences as well as data-driven solutions that will benefit customers. She also oversees all customer digital channels, including web, e-commerce and also the company’s app.
In her eight years as CMO, Lee’s strategic leadership enabled U Mobile to roll out appealing, innovative products and services that disrupted industry norms, launch a financial services ecosystem as well as expand the connectivity business to include fibre.
Andrew Pinto heads brand and marketing at Telekom Malaysia
Telekom Malaysia Bhd has appointed Mudah.my’s former head of marketing, Andrew Pinto, as its head of brand and marketing. In his new role, Pinto will be responsible for growing all of Telekom Malaysia’s brands, which include TM, unifi and TM ONE.
Before joining Telekom Malaysia, Pinto was head of marketing at Mudah.my for more than five years. And before that, he was general manager for Dentsu’s creative arm, Isobar. During his time there, he was responsible for transforming the “loss-making creative powerhouse” by combining brand leadership with digital innovation.
PICTURE OF THE WEEK
Colombo, 19, who is a cybersecurity researcher based in Germany, found vulnerabilities in a third-party software while he was performing a security audit for a French company. He had noticed a software programme on the company’s network that exposed all the data on the chief technology officer’s Tesla vehicle.
The data included a full history of where the car had been driven and its exact location at that moment. Upon further investigation, he realised he could take over more than 20 Tesla vehicles from owners who were using the programme around the world.
With the data, Colombo says he is able to hijack some functions on the cars, including opening and closing the doors, turning up the music and disabling security features. But he admits that he could not take over the cars’ steering, braking or other operations.
He had shared the feat on Twitter saying it is not Tesla’s fault, but the owners who had downloaded the software that holds their personal information.
WHILE YOU WERE WORKING
(FROM HOME)
Communicate with your teammates with Walkie Talkie app
Microsoft’s Walkie Talkie app on Microsoft Teams is now available for all users, a service that was previously only available to its enterprise users.
The Walkie Talkie app provides instant push-to-talk (PTT) communication for a team. It allows users to connect with their team using the same underlying channels they are members of. Only users who connect to Walkie Talkie in a channel become participants and can communicate with each other using push-to-talk, one at a time.
According to Microsoft’s corporate vice-president of modern work transformation, Emma Williams, the reason for the move is to make life easier for frontline workers as the company has seen a 400% increase in Microsoft Teams usage among them from March 2020 to November 2021.
With Walkie Talkie in Teams, users can now securely communicate with a familiar PTT experience without needing to carry bulky radios, and Walkie Talkie — which is available on Android and iOS — works anywhere with WiFi or cellular internet connectivity.
TECH BOOKS
Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff
Team Human is a manifesto — a fiery distillation of preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s most urgent thoughts on civilisation and human nature.
In one hundred lean and incisive statements, he argues that we are essentially social creatures and that we achieve our greatest aspirations when we work together — not as individuals. Yet today, society is threatened by a vast anti-human infrastructure that undermines our ability to connect.
Money, once a means of exchange, is now a means of exploitation; education, conceived as a way to elevate the working class, has become another assembly line; and the internet has only further divided us into increasingly atomised and radicalised groups.
Team Human is a call to arms. If we are to resist and survive these destructive forces, we must recognise that being human is a team sport. In Rushkoff’s own words: “Being social may be the whole point.” Harnessing wide-ranging research on human evolution, biology and psychology, Rushkoff shows that when we work together we realise greater happiness, productivity and peace.
If we can find others who understand this fundamental truth and reassert our humanity — together — we can make the world a better place to be human. Available on Amazon.
EDITOR’S MUST-HAVES
Wrinkle-free clothes without ironing — LG Styler
For many who have started returning to their workplaces after having spent close to two years working from home — during which most practically lived in their PJs — ironing or lugging work clothes to the dry cleaners is probably a much-dreaded task.
Here’s where the LG Styler comes in handy, considering that not many of us have personal assistants to get our clothes sanitised, refreshed and ready for the day.
A one-of-a-kind smart wardrobe, the Styler uses cutting-edge technology to keep clothes hygienic and fresh — in just 20 minutes and making it feel like the clothes have been sun-dried.
According to a press release, the Styler refreshes, deodorises and sanitises clothes using the power of steam, without any chemicals. It has a patented moving hanger, which shakes out light wrinkles and unpleasant odours while the “gentle dry” cycle removes moisture quickly and thoroughly without the fear of shrinking or damage from high-heat dryers, making it perfect for delicate fabrics.
The Styler is also certified asthma and allergy-friendly, as its TrueSteam technology reduces 99.9% of allergens from clothes and jackets, pillows, bags, soft toys and more.
Using the LG ThinQ app, one can control the setting remotely, choose the different cycles, use diagnostic options to troubleshoot minor issues and even monitor energy consumption. It even has an additional speciality cycle setting for sports equipment.
The Styler comes in two colour models, white and essence mirrored finish. It is available on Shopee from RM7,399.
DIGITIONARY
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