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When OnLive came out of hiding in March and declared it could let gamers play fast-action games over the network — a futuristic service dubbed video games on demand — a lot of critics said it was impossible.
But now Otoy, a startup with just seven people, says it can do the same thing with even fewer resources. And beyond delivering fast-action games to players on PCs, Otoy says it can deliver fast games to players on cell phones.
Jules Urbach, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Otoy, is certainly the underdog here. He has been talking about delivering this disruptive technology since 2004. But people took notice Otoy announced an alliance in January with chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, which is building its so-called Fusion Render Cloud around Urbach’s technology. That cloud is going to be a huge collection of servers that can deliver enormous server-based computing power.
“We’re going to use that cloud to deliver high end games to your living room,” Urbach said.
Otoy can demonstrate that it can deliver any game to any device by sending the content over broadband connections. I played Valve’s Left4Dead zombie-shooting game at full speed on a low-end MacBook laptop connected to Otoy’s servers. Then Urbach showed me how I could play the same game on a cell phone with relatively meager computing power. I noticed no slowdown, Urbach said, because most of the processing took place on a distant, centralized, web-connected server.
Otoy can do all of the computing necessary for a game on a server and then send the imagery back instantly to a display, wherever that display might be, as long as it is connected to the web. Normally, the game has to be computed on the user’s own machines because server connections are far too slow.
The key question is whether Otoy, OnLive or a third rival, Gaikai, can pull off server-based gaming for millions of consumers on the same network. If they can, they will turn the video game industry upside down by cutting out retailers and eliminating the need to buy high-end game hardware.
As we’ve said before, the goal of shifting computing from the client (i.e., the user’s machine) to the server is an inexorable trend. Google hopes to undermine Microsoft’s client-based Office software with server-based Google Docs software. If it succeeds, Google could disrupt Microsoft’s 500-million user base.
Doing something similar in the games market — creating video games that can be instantly played from a server with no download to a client machine — could be similarly disruptive. If you can buy a game over a network, you don’t need the retailer. And if the heavy computing is done on the server, you don’t need anything more than a display in the user’s device. There is no need for a gamer PC or a game console. You can also play your games on any machine as long as you log into the same account via the Internet. The cost of delivering these games will likely be small, which means consumers could enjoy more games for less money.
These benefits are so obvious, you would think companies would have done it already. But technically, it’s an enormously difficult problem. Faster broadband connections help, delivering better throughput, or one-way traffic speed. But games need low latency, meaning fast interactions back and forth. Improving broadband speed helps with throughput but not with latency.
Urbach and his partner Malcolm Taylor believe they can solve the problem far more economically than OnLive can. Perlman said that OnLive needs one Nvidia or AMD graphics card per instance, or per user. But Urbach says he can get 10 or more instances per graphics card. In a demo, Urbach showed that his server with a single graphics chip could run eight versions of the 3-D combat game DeadSpace. OnLive believes that it will be able to do the same thing, but it depends on the demands of the particular game bing played. OnLive’s technology could theoretically work on a cell phone, but the latency of the cell phone network means that the experience wouldn’t be very satisfying.
Skeptics would call this the battle of the hucksters. But what we have here is the emergence of competition, between David and Goliath. Perlman’s Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is well financed with major league backing from investors such as Warner Bros and more than 100 employees. It has been working on video games on demand for seven years and has accummulated scores of patents.
Urbach is just as driven, but his company has been bootstrapped since it formally began work on games on demand in 2003. He has seven employees and has raised no outside money. Charles Boswell, director of digital media and entertainment at AMD, said his company is working closely with Otoy because its solution scales nicely, making it much more economical to add servers.
AMD is in the process of testing the solution and how it works across the Internet in a mass deployment. A beta test is expected to launch this year, Boswell confirmed.
“It’s like any other technology where you have an evolutionary approach,” he said. “What we’re excited about is that this innovation will lead to the next phase of the Internet. Companies like Otoy and cloud computing itself are going to bring this about.”
Urbach was a co-founder of The Groove Alliance, a Flash game maker that made a splash in the 1990s with cool 3D web games. He also started LightStage, a facial capture company that helped capture human faces so they could be easily animated in movies such as Brad Pitt’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. LightStage, coincidentally, does work that is similar to that done by another Perlman company, Mova. Both were used in the Benjamin Button movie, but for slightly different effects. George Gilder is the one-time pundit who advocated the onset of the “Telecosm,” a world awash in bandwidth, in the days before the last bubble.
Gilder has been one of the true believers in Urbach’s vision, in part because Gilder himself publicized the whole notion — articulated first by Eric Schmidt, who was then at Sun Microsystems and now is the CEO of Google — that huge broadband connectivity would “hollow out the PC,” meaning that a world with so much networking connectivity would have no need for heavy-duty user computers.
It has taken time, but Otoy now works across a series of devices: Macs, PCs, netbooks, Tablet PCs, TV set-top boxes, and cell phones. It can display games with 720p resolution, or good enough for high-definition imagery. With a small 200,000 kilobyte browser plug-in, it can do full 1080p HD resolution. OnLive is focused on 720p because it believes that resolution works best, given the state of U.S. broadband.
The system relies on servers with AMD Opteron servers and AMD’s ATI brand of graphics chips. Urbach said those servers can run far more efficiently because they use both microprocessors and graphics chips. OnLive has a similar solution, though it uses either AMD or Nvidia graphics chips. Urbach said the company’s unnamed partners are going to launch a beta service sometime this year.
As Urbach gave me the presentation, I was sitting on the couch with Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and “father of video games.” He understood the significance of what Otoy could deliver to the video game industry and gamers.
“It makes walled gardens not nearly as compelling,” Bushnell said.
He also said that developers and publishers are under a huge amount of pressure to produce hits, mainly because the costs of making games has soared. If Otoy can take costs out of the food chain for making and distributing games, it can relieve some of that pressure. That, in turn, will spur creativity because it means that it will no longer be as financially risky to try out new ideas.
“People will try so much more weird shit if you eliminate the risk,” Bushnell said.
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Bharat Gandhi, Chairman, The Federation of Indian Art Silk Weaving Industry has averred that the phenomenal rise in the import of silk fabrics from Vietnam in last two years has deteriorated the conditions of silk fabric manufacturers hailing from Indian cities of Bhagalpur, Varanasi, Bengaluru, Surat and some parts of Tamil Nadu. Therefore, the Federation has urged the government to levy 10 per cent duty on the import of silk fabrics from Vietnam so as to create a little more favourable scenario for Indian domestic market.
Import from Vietnam has increased more than two-fold from two lakh sq. mt. in 2015-16 to 5 lakh sq. mt. in 2016-17. Currently, import of silk fabrics from Vietnam attracts zero per cent duty, which makes India’s silk fabrics expensive. This has significantly affected the domestic market of India. Also, several Chinese manufacturers have, lately, started their factories in Vietnam and, most importantly, dumped Indian silk fabrics.

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For years, British citizens and companies have become used to paying their taxes to HM Revenue & Customs with a credit card. Recent statistics from the authority reveal a dramatic increase in the number of individuals or entities paying taxes using a credit card.
Despite the increase in popularity, the HMRC has decided to no longer accept tax payments by personal credit card from the 13th of January. The reasons being the new surcharge ban.
There are however ways to keep up the habit of paying taxes with a credit card! One of them is via Billhop, a Swedish company governed by the Swedish Financial Services Authority. The company has already seen a dramatic increase in payments to the HMRC ahead of the ban later this month.
Sebastian Andreescu, CEO of Billhop said:
“…We have seen a surge in payments to HMRC amongst our users recently and we are of course very happy to offer every UK tax payer the possibility to keep paying their taxes using a credit card…”
Billhop charges a service fee, however the downside of the cost might be offset by traditional credit card benefits such as reward points and prolonged payment terms.
Billhop is a SaaS which enables businesses and consumers to pay their bills/invoices with their credit card. We are a Payment Institute regulated by, and under the supervision of, the Swedish FSA. We accept payments with all cards issued by MasterCard, VISA and American Express. The company was founded in 2011 and has its HQ in Stockholm, Sweden. For more information, please visit billhop.co.uk


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Maybank live with One Treasury in India; launches mobile app in Cambodia
Maybank Indonesia has gone live with Intellect’s integrated treasury management system, One Treasury, for its Indian operations.
Intellect says the solution has enabled the overseas branch to “eliminate dependence on intensive manual operations”. The firm says the deployment, user acceptance testing (UAT) and data migration were completed in seven months.
Pravin Batra, CEO, India, Maybank Indonesia, says: “This implementation has been smooth and has enabled us to meet India-specific regulatory needs in line with our business objectives.”
Intellect says One Treasury will let the bank’s Indian customers trade across fixed income, money market and foreign exchange securities electronically.
Also in Asia
In a separate announcement, Maybank has introduced its mobile banking app in Cambodia – and says it is the first bank in the country to offer an app with augmented reality and a QR code reader. The bank introduced a similar app in Malaysia in 2014.
Maybank group head of community financial services, Datuk Lim Hong Tat, who launched the new app in Phnom Penh, says usage of mobile phone users in Cambodia has been growing during the last few years, with close to 24.2 million mobile connections in January 2016 in the country of over 15 million people.
Datuk Lim adds that Maybank’s online banking channel, namely M2U, which was introduced in Cambodia in 2012, has seen its registered user base increase by over 50% within a year, and the volume of transactions has also risen by over 50% from 2014 to 2015.


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We live in an internet-enabled world that has become increasingly powered by, but also dependent on, information.
As technology makes it easy for information to be transferred, amalgamated, changed or used at the touch of a button, there are concerns that we, as individuals, are losing control our personal data with the consequent loss of privacy, not to mention the irritation of spam and unsolicited calls and the risk and anxiety of fraud or scams.
For international organisations, however, too many differing rules and restrictions on how personal data can be handled impedes legitimate activity as it makes it difficult for them to move data across borders in ways that are needed to support often complex and transnational business structures.
The European Union’s response to these concerns takes the form of a piece of legislation called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will usher in the biggest shake-up of data protection law in a generation.
GDPR will take direct effect in the UK (as with all other EU member states) on 25 May 2018 and the last Conservative Government made it clear that, despite Brexit, it expected GDPR to take effect in the UK on that date as originally planned.
Against that backdrop, the Queen’s Speech announced a new Data Protection Act which “will ensure that the United Kingdom retains its world-class regime protecting personal data”.
According to the explanatory policy paper that accompanied the Queen’s Speech, the new Bill will “ensure the UK has a data protection regime that is fit for the 21st century” by:
- ensuring that the UK’s data protection framework cements the UK’s position at the forefront of technological innovation, international data sharing and protection of personal data;
- strengthening rights and empowering individuals to have more control over their personal data;
- establishing a new data protection regime for non-law enforcement data processing; and
- modernising and updating the regime for data processing by law enforcement agencies.
We already know that the GDPR is coming down the track and, given GDPR, the UK would have had to enact complementary UK legislation to supplement GDPR in areas that were left to member states some form of UK data protection legislation inevitable in the next parliamentary session anyway.
The UK Government has said that one of the main benefits of the Bill will be to implement GDPR and, indeed, the stated aims of this new Data Protection Bill are very much in line with GDPR, but given that GDPR will take effect in the UK automatically anyway, it is not entirely clear what this new Data Protection Bill will actually do that is new.
For example, the explanatory policy paper says that the new Bill will include “a right to be forgotten when individuals no longer want their data to be processed, provided that there are no legitimate grounds for retaining it”.
This right is already included within GDPR so it the intention to strengthen or modify that right? It’s not clear.
One of the stated benefits of GDPR is that it establishes a harmonised single legislative regime for data protection across all EU member states and, whilst the UK will leave the EU, maintenance of that harmonised regime (albeit with some changes) would be helpful in terms of facilitating cross-border trade and allowing the sort of ‘frictionless’ transfers of personal data between the UK and EU that the Government again aspires to.
If the UK is to enact specific data protection legislation that puts a UK overlay on GDPR then, depending on what it says, that may have a bearing in UK/EU negotiations as to whether personal data can be transferred freely between the UK and EU (and vice versa).
A decision by the EU to accord the UK status that allows free movement of personal data is not a formality and the European Court of Justice has struck down in the past decisions where it considers that the arrangements concerned do not afford equivalent protection to EU law.
It is encouraging at least, therefore, that the UK Government clearly sees that it will be hugely important that data protection continues to be taken seriously because impediments to the free movement of personal data between the UK and EU are likely to prove a major headache for international businesses operating within a post-Brexit UK.
With that in mind, to encourage international business to operate in the UK, it will be important to create an environment that should make that less – rather than more – likely.
The continuation of the stated aim to implement GDPR should undoubtedly help.
Grant Campbell is head of the commercial services division at Brodies LLP


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AppleInsider is reporting today that a recent survey from investment bank RBC Capital Markets shows that over 50% of consumers looking to purchase a smartphone in the next 90 days are likely to purchase the new 3G iPhone which is scheduled for release on the 11th of July.
Symbian currently enjoys 65% of smartphone market share (53% Nokia), with Windows on 13% and RIM on 12%. With over 35M smartphones being sold each quarter, Apple could expect to ship over 15M iPhone 2.0 devices in the first quarter after release. To gain market share and accelerate past Windows and RIM, the iPhone would only need to sustain a 50% sale rate for two consecutive quarters. The iPhone market share for smartphone (or ‘converged’ devices) is currently at 7%, so the iPhone 2.0 could double, based on this survey, Apple market share relatively quickly.
Nokia shipped 60.5 Million smartphones in 2007, and it set to break the 100M device barrier for 2008. Apple have a very long way to go to surplant Nokia and Symbian, but the same survey reports that only 2% of respondants were considering purchasing a Nokia smartphone. Nokia is very strong internationally, but for the first time the new iPhone will see a very broad international launch on the 11th of July – launching in 21 markets including all of the big smartphone markets. The iPhone 2.0 will therefor not have the disadvantage its predecessor had – strong sales in the USA but a lag in releases to other international markets.
The smartphone market is going to be transformed throughout the next 12 months – not only because of the iPhone and Mac OS X but also because of the upcoming Andriod from Google, and Microsoft releasing frequent updates for Windows mobile. Defensive moves from Nokia via the open sourcing of Symbian and the ever-present RIM are always threatening to the new entrants and incumbants, although it seems that they are both losing market share to the iPhone, especially with the new enterprise features of the iPhone 2.0.
While currently Nokia leads RIM, Windows and then Apple and others – in a very short time we could see a huge shift in the smartphone platform market of the likes that were never imagined possible in the desktop PC market.
Statistics and numbers for this post were taken from Canalys Market Reports


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Britain slaps security curbs on UPS air cargo: ministry
UPS air cargo faces restrictions on movement through Britain until the company conforms with current security regulations, the Department of Transport said Friday.
"We can confirm that, following careful consideration, the department has restricted the number of sites in the UK at which UPS Ltd are permitted to screen air cargo until it has satisfied current security requirements," it said in a statement.
A department spokesman told AFP the move was "not in relation to any specific threat."
Britain introduced new security measures affecting the transport of cargo through the country last November after the discovery of a parcel bomb sent from Yemen on a US-bound UPS flight at a central England airport.
A parcel bomb hidden in a printer ink cartridge was found on a plane at East Midlands Airport which had stopped off en route to Chicago in the early hours of October 29.
The bomb was one of two packages sent from Yemen and addressed to synagogues in Chicago containing the hard-to-detect explosive PETN, sparking a global scare. The other package was discovered at Dubai airport.
The Yemen branch of Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the plot, according to the monitoring website SITE.
© 2011 AFP


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According to information released to the ASX, listed fintech Beforepay has continued its strong growth and path towards profitability, driven by a combination of pay advance growth, user growth, and machine learning powered credit risk decisioning, while providing an award-winning ethical lending solution to working Australians.
Beforepay provided $628 million in pay advances during FY23, up 92% YoY. This lifts cumulative advances since inception to over $1 billion.
Continued strong growth was achieved during Q4 FY23 with pay advances of $162 million, up 51% on Q4 FY22, driven by both new customer acquisition and continued usage by existing customers.
Despite the current difficult macroeconomic backdrop, due to earlier limit reduction efforts on defaults reported in Q3FY23, including selective reduction of some limits, decreasing limits for customers where creditworthiness had changed, and refinement of the credit model, we have seen a decline in delinquencies in Q4 FY23. Further details will be provided in the company’s full Q4 FY23 Quarterly Activities and Appendix 4C Cash Flow Report to be released at market opening on 28 July 2023.
Beforepay’s active user base grew 35% YoY to 234K (FY23), up 5% on Q3 FY23.
In total, more than 1 million customers have now registered for Beforepay’s pay advance service.
As stated in the announcement, Beforepay’s substantial growth is in line with its journey towards profitability, characterised by increases in user and advance numbers, sustainable unit economics, and tightly controlled costs.
Active users in Q4 FY23 (being 234K users) had an average loan size of $341 and a 95% return rate.
In addition to this growth, Beforepay was recently recognised as the 2023 Ethical Lender of the Year in the Global Pan Finance Awards.
This post originally appeared on TechToday.


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NAIROBI (Reuters) – The World Trade Organization reached deals on agricultural export subsidies, food aid and other issues yesterday, capping a ministerial conference in the Kenyan capital where rich and poor countries had been split over the path of trade reform.
Members said the Nairobi deal had drawn a line under years of stalemate over the direction of global trade negotiations.
“Our work in Nairobi marks a turning point for the World Trade Organization,” US Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement. The negotiations “started a new phase in the WTO’s evolution” and showed “what is possible when the multilateral trading system comes together to solve a problem.”
The Geneva-based WTO, which invited Liberia and Afghanistan to become its 163rd and 164th members, has been trying and largely failing to agree on a worldwide package of trade reforms since a meeting in Doha in 2001 hatched an ambitious plan for knocking down trade barriers.
The four-day Nairobi conference was extended by a final non-stop 24-hour negotiation between the major trading powers, who agreed on a package that included phasing out agricultural export subsidies and restricting agricultural export credits.
But they agreed to disagree about the potential for success in the Doha round of talks.
Both India, which had insisted on completing the existing Doha talks before any further negotiation, and the United States, which wanted to move on from Doha, had had to give ground, an EU official said.
The compromise means that more issues can be loaded onto the negotiating agenda, the EU official said.
Trade experts greeted the deal on the talks, also known as the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), with scepticism.
“DDA = Doha Dead Again?,” Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at Geneva’s Graduate Institute, said in a tweet.