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  • Call for entries: High-growth companies Asia-Pacific 2026

    Call for entries: High-growth companies Asia-Pacific 2026

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    Growing a company can be difficult at the best of times. But with the threat of US tariffs, rising geopolitical tension and a slowing economy, now is a particularly tough time for entrepreneurs and managers.

    And yet despite those challenges, many companies are still managing to prove that rapid growth is possible.

    For the past seven years, the Financial Times and its research partner Statista have ranked high growth companies in the Asia-Pacific region. From Singapore-based energy companies to Indian scooter rental businesses, we have highlighted those organisations that have pressed ahead with their business plans regardless of the external environment, and made them work.

    Register for our list of high-growth companies Asia-Pacific 2026

    © Getty Images

    If your company has a record of revenue growth between 2021 and 2024, click here to fill in our online form to be considered.

    Last year, Lendbox, an Indian peer-to-peer lending platform, had the highest ranking, followed by south-east Asian ecommerce groups Borong and Etaily.

    Enter your company

    This year, for the eighth time, we are asking for nominations for our list. We will aim to identify those Asia-Pacific businesses with the strongest revenue growth between 2021 and 2024, as the region was emerging from the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic while also dealing with rising oil prices and inflation.

    All you need to do is fill in this simple form.

    We will publish the list of companies in March next year, followed in April by a report highlighting some of the most interesting businesses.

    Eligibility

    To be eligible for entry, companies must:

    • Have generated revenue of at least $100,000 in 2021*

    • Have generated revenue of at least $1mn in 2024*

    • Revenue growth between 2021 and 2024 should have been primarily organic

    • Be independent (ie, not a subsidiary or branch office of another company)

    • Be headquartered in one of the following Asia-Pacific locations: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand or Vietnam

    *Or average currency value equivalent over course of the relevant fiscal year

    The survey will run from July 2, 2025 to October 31, 2025. More information can be found here.

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  • Jury says Google must pay California Android smartphone users $314.6m | California

    Jury says Google must pay California Android smartphone users $314.6m | California

    A jury in San Jose, California, said on Tuesday that Google misused customers’ cellphone data and must pay more than $314.6m to Android smartphone users in the state, according to an attorney for the plaintiffs.

    The jury agreed with the plaintiffs that Alphabet’s Google was liable for sending and receiving information from the devices without permission while they were idle, causing what the lawsuit had called “mandatory and unavoidable burdens shouldered by Android device users for Google’s benefit”.

    Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement that the company would appeal, and that the verdict “misunderstands services that are critical to the security, performance, and reliability of Android devices”.

    The plaintiffs’ attorney Glen Summers said the verdict “forcefully vindicates the merits of this case and reflects the seriousness of Google’s misconduct”.

    The plaintiffs filed the class action in state court in 2019 on behalf of an estimated 14 million Californians. They argued that Google collected information from idle phones running its Android operating system for company uses like targeted advertising, consuming Android users’ cellular data at their expense.

    Google told the court that no Android users were harmed by the data transfers and that users consented to them in the company’s terms of service and privacy policies.

    Another group filed a separate lawsuit in federal court in San Jose, bringing the same claims against Google on behalf of Android users in the other 49 states. That case is scheduled for trial in April 2026.

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  • NZ’s digital breast screening platform goes live and more briefs

    NZ’s digital breast screening platform goes live and more briefs

    NZ launches online breast screening platform 

    Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand’s latest digital breast screening platform has gone live nationwide.

    Called Te Puna, it allows users to enrol, book, and manage their breast screening appointments through a secure personalised link or QR code sent via text, email, or letter.

    The new system, accessible via Zero Data, which provides free access to web-based government services, can automatically identify eligible persons for breast screening and invite them to book a mammogram.

    It replaced an outdated legacy system with a modern platform with enhanced data tracking, accuracy, and reporting.

    “This change will significantly boost participation and help close the gap for the 135,000 eligible women who aren’t currently getting screened,” said Health Minister Simeon Brown in a statement.


    NSW researchers unveil neuroscience-backed mental health app 

    A new mobile application developed in New South Wales seeks to promote mental wellbeing and resilience among adults through neuroscience.

    The app called ReNeuWell is based on the COMPAS‑W Wellbeing Scale, a validated tool that assesses a person’s subjective and psychological wellbeing. It is created by researchers from Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney).

    “The app is designed for anyone looking for ways to understand and boost their own level of mental wellbeing,” explained Justine Gatt, associate professor and director of the Centre for Wellbeing, Resilience and Recovery at NeuRA and UNSW Sydney’s School of Psychology. 

    It offers a four-week tailored program of activities based on psychological concepts, such as mindfulness, meditation, self-compassion, and goal setting. A 12-week clinical trial of the app is currently underway, seeking 500 adult participants who could commit 10 minutes daily to use it.  

    The app is also available on the Apple App Store in Australia for a one-time fee. 


    Mental Health Foundation Australia develops mental health app with Infosys

    Mental Health Foundation Australia, one of the longest-running non-government mental health organisations in the country, has released a new mobile self-help application. 

    Developed by Infosys for MHFA, the Supportive Mind app provides a wide range of features to help users promote their wellbeing, including mood tracking and insights, personalised activity recommendations, walking challenges, fundraising campaigns, self-care tools, and wellness tips delivered via push notifications.

    The app was built on Infosys’ generative AI stack, Topaz, which enables it to analyse performance metrics and measure social impact. 

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  • From 30 days to 1: Chevron’s cloud migration ROI in real numbers

    From 30 days to 1: Chevron’s cloud migration ROI in real numbers

    Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more


    The No. 1 way AI is changing 150-year-old energy giant Chevron? How technical practitioners engage with data. 

    Offshore in the Gulf, Chevron is drilling for oil resources miles below the ocean floor in pockets and reservoirs that may or may not yield results. Agentic architectures need to be able to process petabytes of critical data — which not only provides insights on where to drill, but how to do so without negatively impacting human lives or the environment — in the cloud and at the edge. 

    “Data is the ultimate accelerant for all of our AI use cases,” Steve Bowman, GM for enterprise AI at Chevron, said onstage at this year’s VB Transform. “It’s something that we’ve embraced in a big way.”

    How AI is changing the way Chevron interacts with its untold amounts of data

    In 2019, Chevron teamed up with Microsoft and oilfield services company SLB in a project called ‘Triple Crown’ to modernize and standardize cloud-based tools. The three companies have built Azure-native apps into SLB’s DELFI* cognitive exploration and protection (E&P) to help Chevron process, visualize, interpret and gain meaningful insights from multiple data sources. DELFI* E&P covers exploration, development, production and midstream environments. 

    The $250 billion energy giant with 1,000s of employees in 180 countries worldwide has “an enormous amount of data out there,” said Bowman. And, while Chevron has “very robust systems of record,” large amounts of unstructured data have existed in a variety of share points. 

    Over the years, Chevron has built some “really great algorithms” that have traditionally been run at small scale on-premises, he explained. However, there has been an increasing push to scale up, running those algorithms at a much larger scale and more efficiently in the cloud. 

    By doing that, “instead of looking at one three-mile-by-three-mile block in the Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of America, we can look at much larger areas we’re trying to operate on,” he said. 

    The Microsoft-SLB collaboration has focused on three products: FDPlan, DrillPlan and DrillOps. FDPlan utilizes high-performance computing (HPC) to integrate subsurface models, enabling employees to make faster and more informed decisions in complex environments, leveraging the best available data. For instance, in the Gulf, FDPlan helps Chevron analyze different options for developing a reservoir so its teams can focus on the most optimal scenarios.

    Meanwhile, DrillPlan is designed for engineers developing drilling plans, while DrillOps is used by teams that drill wells. 

    Before the initiative, some subsurface Chevron employees were spending as much as 75% of their time looking for data, Bowman noted.  “We can see that the time people spend looking for data is beginning to decrease, and the speed at which we can get insights is really accelerating,” said Bowman. 

    DrillPlan has also helped Chevron reduce its deepwater well planning process by 30 days. For instance, in Argentina, the company has reduced its planning cycle time for an eight-well pad from two weeks to less than a day.

    Ultimately, Bowman called the move to the cloud “a real force multiplier” that has allowed Chevron to enter into a new phase of modernization. 

    A focus on modular systems

    Now, as they work to integrate AI, Bowman’s team is focusing heavily on modularity. 

    He pointed out that the initial ‘ask’ was search; they offered up a very simple use case allowing people to retrieve information that existed within a “very, very” complex SharePoint. But as users have engaged more and more, their asks are increasing; in response, his team has added a retrieval agent, an agent that can evaluate findings from a technical standpoint and an orchestrator agent to link the two.

    “We really realized pretty early that we needed to lean in heavily on modularity, because we knew that these agents would be called upon in other workflows, based on the demand,” he said. 

    Another effort is ‘Chevron Assist,’ a chat interface to operate on health, safety and environmental (HSE) standards. “We work in an enormously complex industry, and the stakes of the game are always higher,” said Bowman. 

    The tool provides a natural way for people to interact with documents related to critical standards and procedures, eliminating the need to click through links or search within documents. So, for instance, a user can combine all of the standards they need for a drilling crew, an operations crew and a maintenance crew. 

    “We realized we weren’t thinking of the problem in the way that individual users are thinking of those things all together at once,” said Bowman. “There has been so much value in that integration. That’s really changed the way people do their work.”

    Not focusing too much on POCs

    As it builds out its programs, Bowman’s team has actively avoided falling into the habit of undertaking pilots and proofs of concepts (POCs) that drag on too long. “There’s no value in that,” he said. 

    The goal has always been to deploy the most promising use cases into production, he said. Everything must be linked back to Chevron’s bottom line and offer up a strong value proposition.

    “We know that with a curated data set and really enthusiastic, well-meaning group of users and a super narrowly defined use case, there’s almost 100% certainty that your POC will be successful,” said Bowman. 

    Another important element in deploying next-gen tools is overcoming the trust hurdle. From a behavior change standpoint, enterprise leaders must understand not only the expectations the company places on users locally and at the edge, but what those users expect in turn, said Bowman.

    “If you’ve built out these systems or tools in such a way that the individuals who are going to put hands on them don’t trust them, or can’t trust them, or there’s something holding them back, then you never really get the full enthusiastic deployment,” he said. 

    Editor’s Note: As a thank-you to our readers, we’ve opened up early bird registration for VB Transform 2026 — just $200. This is where AI ambition meets operational reality, and you’re going to want to be in the room. Reserve your spot now. 


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  • Dar reviews project pay scale reforms

    Dar reviews project pay scale reforms


    ISLAMABAD:

    Deputy Prime Minister/Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar Tuesday chaired a meeting of the committee constituted by the Prime Minister to review the project pay scale framework.

    The meeting was attended by the Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal, SAPM Tariq Bajwa, secretaries of Establishment and Planning and senior officials from relevant departments, DPM Office said in a press release.

    The committee reviewed existing policies for hiring skilled professionals under special pay scales, and considered multiple reform proposals, including competitive pay scales, and performance-based incentives.

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  • John Cena and Idris Elba team up for buddy movie 'Heads of State' – Reuters

    1. John Cena and Idris Elba team up for buddy movie ‘Heads of State’  Reuters
    2. Heads of State UK Premiere Red Carpet Interviews: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, John Cena & more  HeyUGuys
    3. Himesh Reshammiya’s hilarious review of Heads of State leaves fans in splits: ‘PC ne film mein desi tadka daal diya’  Hindustan Times
    4. Heads Of State: Cast & Character Guide  Screen Rant
    5. Priyanka Chopra shares fun BTS moments from ‘Heads of State’ sets, poses with John Cena, Idris Elba  Times of India

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  • Decision Moment. IV: History Remade – Events

    Decision Moment. IV: History Remade – Events

    Decision Moment. IV: History Remade

    Admission:

    General $10

    Student $7


    Date
    July 29, 2025, 8:30pm

    172 Classon Avenue
    Brooklyn
    11205

    USA

    Join us at the e-flux Screening Room rooftop for History Remade, the final program of the four-part series Decision Moment, presenting artists’ films and cinema features that reflect on historical moments of action and inaction and examine cinematic ways of approaching them.

    At the core of each screening lies a past event shaped—knowingly or not—by a decision pursued, postponed, or left unmade, whose consequences continue to linger. Rather than reconstructing the past events as heroic acts, the films presented in this program embrace the limits of linear narration as ethical commitment to the complexities of historical decisions, and encourage viewers to reflect on their own actions and decisions in the present.

    Screenings take place on Tuesdays from July 8–29, 2025, and begin after sunset.

    IV: History Remade
    Tuesday, July 29, 2025, 8:30pm

    Can cinematic reenactments create new spaces for critique and self-reflection? Rea Tajiri’s Off Limits (1988) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence (1996) reflect on the ethical and aesthetic implications of remaking past events—not only in order to achieve a deeper understanding of history but also to envision new perspectives for the future.

    Rea Tajiri, Off Limits (1988, United States, 8 minutes)
    Juxtaposing the text of another film titled Off Limits (1987), which portrays Saigon in 1968, with the soundtrack and visuals of the ending of Easy Rider (1968), Tajiri plays with the evocation and emptiness of the image across the two representations. She blacks out parts of Easy Rider while the words of a Vietnamese assassin crawl up the screen, building a structure of selective memory. The film points to the similarities and contradictions between 1960s hippie iconography and memories of the Vietnam War.

    Mohsen Makhmalbaf, A Moment of Innocence (1996, Iran, 78 minutes)
    In a deeply self-reflexive film, Mohsen Makhmalbaf casts himself and his former adversary—a policeman he stabbed in his youth—as directors of parallel reenactments of the event. The film folds autobiography into fiction, revolutionary fervor into post-revolution disillusionment, and reopens the wound it cannot heal. Cinema for the Iranian director becomes the site of unfinished business, where memory is reconstructed not to settle the past, but to examine its enduring claims on the present.

    For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

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  • Biologists Uncover How Plants Sense Heat during Day

    Biologists Uncover How Plants Sense Heat during Day

    New research led by University of California, Riverside’s Professor Meng Chen shows that plants rely on multiple heat-sensing systems and that sugar — produced in sunlight — plays a central and previously unrecognized role in daytime temperature response.

    Arabidopsis plants growing in a greenhouse. Image credit: Elena Zhukova / UCR.

    “Our textbooks say that proteins like phytochrome B and early flowering 3 (ELF3) are the main thermosensors in plants,” Professor Chen said.

    “But those models are based on nighttime data.”

    “We wanted to know what’s happening during the day, when light and temperature are both high because these are the conditions most plants actually experience.”

    To investigate, Professor Chen and colleagues used Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant favored in genetics labs.

    They exposed seedlings to a range of temperatures, from 12 to 27 degrees Celsius, under different light conditions, and tracked the elongation of their seedling stems, known as hypocotyls — a classic indicator of growth response to warmth.

    They found that phytochrome B, a light-sensing protein, could only detect heat under low light. In bright conditions that mimic midday sunlight, its temperature-sensing function was effectively shut off.

    Yet, the plants still responded to heat, growing taller even when the thermosensing role of phytochrome B was greatly diminished.

    “That pointed to the presence of other sensors,” Professor Chen said.

    One clue came from studies of a phytochrome B mutant lacking its thermosensing function.

    These mutant plants could respond to warmth only when grown in the light.

    When grown in the dark, without photosynthesis, they lacked chloroplasts and did not grow taller in response to warmth.

    But when the researchers supplemented the growing medium with sugar, the temperature response returned.

    “That’s when we realized sugar wasn’t just fueling growth. It was acting like a signal, telling the plant that it’s warm,” Professor Chen said.

    Further experiments showed that higher temperatures triggered the breakdown of starch stored in leaves, releasing sucrose.

    This sugar in turn stabilized a protein known as PIF4, a master regulator of growth. Without sucrose, PIF4 degraded quickly. With it, the protein accumulated but only became active when another sensor, ELF3, also responded to the heat by stepping aside.

    “PIF4 needs two things. Sugar to stick around, and freedom from repression. Temperature helps provide both,” Professor Chen said.

    The study reveals a nuanced, multi-layered system. During the day, when light is used as the energy source to fix carbon dioxide into sugar, plants also evolved a sugar-based mechanism to sense environmental changes.

    As temperatures rise, stored starch converts into sugar, which then enables key growth proteins to do their job.

    The findings could have practical implications. As climate change drives temperature extremes, understanding how and when plants sense heat could help scientists breed crops that grow more predictably and more resiliently under stress.

    “This changes how we think about thermosensing in plants,” Professor Chen said.

    “It’s not just about proteins flipping on or off. It’s about energy, light, sugar, as well.”

    “The findings also underscore, once again, the quiet sophistication of the plant world.”

    “In the blur of photosynthesis and starch reserves, there’s a hidden intelligence.”

    “One that knows, sweetly and precisely, when it’s time to stretch toward the sky.”

    The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

    _____

    D. Fan et al. 2025. A multisensor high-temperature signaling framework for triggering daytime thermomorphogenesis in Arabidopsis. Nat Commun 16, 5197; doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-60498-7

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  • Famous brand is bringing back physical buttons to cars

    Famous brand is bringing back physical buttons to cars

    Ferrari first experimented with putting touch-sensing (or haptic controls in its SF90 supercar, which launched in 2019, just as the wider industry was starting to make the same moves.

    Subsequent models have also featured the technology, though customers were quick to criticise the lack of physical buttons and knobs, with touch-sensing controls being more difficult – and in some cases dangerous – to operate on the move.

    However, at the reveal of the new Amalfi grand tourer, Ferrari’s commercial boss Enrico Galliera admitted the brand had overlooked the potential flaws to the technology.

    “When we decided to create the SF90, the brief was to have the most performing Ferrari ever. We wanted to establish a distance versus our competitor. To achieve that, we put in all the most advanced available technologies,” Galliera said, as reported by Autocar.

    Ferrari Amalfi

    “So, we pushed our team to redesign the digital interaction. When we started this job, the idea was, when we interact with our phone is a touch, and the more you use the touch button the more you are quick in the execution, which, in principle, is absolutely true. So all the development was done following this path and these rules.

    “The final execution was, I think, extremely innovative, but we didn’t consider then when you use it, you’re also driving and the end result [goes against] our objective of eyes on the road, hands on the steering wheel.”

    “So this is the why we did it, because we wanted to have the most advanced system, and we realise, honestly, that it was probably too advanced and not 100 per cent perfect for the use that is done in the car. So this became clear and it was feedback that we received very loudly from our clients.

    “We believe that still the digital interaction has an advantage, but it should be blended in a way that the most used button should be physical, and some of them, like the start/stop, which are iconic, representing part of the history, should be there for this reason.”

    Ferrari Amalfi

    According to Galliera, the Amalfi will be the beginning of this new approach, which “will be deployed in every new launch we put in the market”.

    “We will rebalance the ratio between digital buttons and physical buttons.”

    Ferrari isn’t the first brand to walk back its approach to haptic controls, with arguably the most famous case being that of Volkswagen, which went as far to say touch-sensing buttons were a “mistake”.

    Still, buyers of the Amalfi will likely be paying more attention to the rest of the car than just what controls are inside the cabin.

    The successor to the Roma grand tourer, the Amalfi rides on the same platform as its predecessor but gets almost entirely new bodywork, while its twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 engine has also been tweaked.

    Now producing 471kW, it’s 14kW more powerful, though torque remains at a very healthy 761Nm. An eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission continues to send drive to the rear wheels, and Ferrari claims a 0-100km/h time of 3.3 seconds.

    While its general design appears to be a cross between the Roma and the Purosangue, the new looks – as well as some underbody tweaks – have helped to make the Amalfi more aerodynamic, with Ferrari claiming its new active rear wing can generate up to 110kg more downforce than its predecessor.

    Ferrari has also fitted it with Formula 1-esque drive-by-wire brakes, helping to make it more driveable.

    Inside the cabin there are three screens – a 15.6-inch digital instrument cluster, a 10.25-inch infotainment touchscreen and 8.8-inch passenger display – which are contrasted with an interior ‘bridge’, made from aluminium.

    The Amalfi hasn’t totally replaced the Roma, with the Roma Spider remaining on sale in Europe until a convertible version of the new model arrives.

    Torquecafe has contacted Ferrari Australia to find out when the Amalfi will come to local showrooms.

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  • Apple’s Surprising AI Strategy for Siri Reportedly Includes OpenAI or Anthropic – TechRepublic

    1. Apple’s Surprising AI Strategy for Siri Reportedly Includes OpenAI or Anthropic  TechRepublic
    2. Tesla sales fall for sixth straight month in Denmark and Sweden, rise in Norway  Sherwood News
    3. Apple’s next AI move could change everything for Siri  TheStreet
    4. Breakingviews – Apple fruitlessly ponders the innovator’s dilemma  Reuters
    5. Apple fruitlessly ponders the innovator’s dilemma  Breakingviews

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