South Asia Investor Review

A Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB discovered in June that over 100,000 ChatGPT user accounts were compromised and their credentials found on the Dark Web. Among the accounts reported compromised, India topped with 12,632, followed by Pakistan with 9,217 and Brazil with 6,531. Bangladesh witnessed the fewest instances with 2,463. This report gave a glimpse of the high interest level of Indians and Pakistanis in generative AI.  Another  report  attributed to Similarweb, which tracks popularity of websites by number of visitors, ranked  ChatGPT  in Pakistan at number 7, ahead of Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Globally ChatGPT website is ranked 17th. Prior to this, there was a series of news reports about the launch of Presidential Initiative for Artificial Intelligence and Computing (PIAIC) by President Arif Alvi, and then came the government's policy to train one million AI experts in the country by 2027. Pakistanis published 2,600 AI-related research ...

Microsoft, the world's largest software company, has named Satya Nardella, an Indian-American company veteran of 20 years, as its new CEO to replace its long-time leader and Bill Gates' pal Steve Ballmer. It's clearly a matter of great pride for not only his fellow Indian-Americans in the United States but also in India, Nadella's country of birth. I offer my sincere congratulations and best wishes to Mr. Nadella and his fellow Indians who are celebrating it as their own success. The question on everyone's mind now is whether he has what it takes to bring back the Wintel-era glory to Microsoft. Wintel Era: Wintel (Windows+Intel) represented the most successful period for Microsoft and its partner Intel when the two companies together made history with the personal computer revolution. Working for Intel as an engineer in 1980s and 1990s, I had a chance to work with both Microsoft and Intel executives to help bring about the PC revolution. Both companies offe...

Arfa Karim Randhawa passed away at the tender age of just 16. Inna Lillah Wa Inna Elaih Rajeon! Born in 1995, she achieved celebrity status after becoming the world's youngest computer expert at the age of 9, passing a tough series of Microsoft tests designed for software professionals. Her success brought her an invitation to Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, where she met its chairman, Bill Gates, and discussed her idea for a self-navigating car in 2005. She spent the last month of her short life in a Lahore hospital after reportedly suffering an epileptic seizure and cardiac arrest. Two weeks ago her prognosis appeared to improve. In recent weeks, Microsoft stepped in to help provide expert medical care. Todd Bishop, a Seattle-based newspaper reporter covering her Redmond visit, wrote about her as follows: "She made an impression through a combination of charm, flattery and boldness uncommon for someone her age. For example, during Arfa’s meeting with Gates, she presented...

Walking into the local Fry's stores in Silicon Valley during Christmas shopping season, I was fascinated by the latest Xbox 360 demo complete with excited kids dancing in front of a big screen wth a 3D sensor mounted on top of it. Upon closer examination, I learned that Microsoft Xbox 360 has acquired a few new game-changing tricks thanks to the use of the amazing 3D gensture recognition technology from Canesta , a company co-founded in 2002 by my Pakistani-American friend Nazim Kareemi in Silicon Valley. Cyrus Bamji, an Indian-American, and Abbas Rafii, an Iranian-American, are the other members of the Canesta founding team. Just before Christmas 2010, Microsoft started shipping Kinect, a $150 add-on for its Xbox gaming consoles, which uses gesture recognition to allow people to play games with body motions instead of controllers. Players work through menus with hand gestures and then move to make their on-screen avatars run, jump, duck, swing and dance. In fact, Microsoft CEO Ste...

"The Web has clearly evolved to where people are running complex applications in the browser," said Google's Sunder Pichai. "It's not just a window where you show a Web page." Pichai, vice president of Product Management at Google, describes Chrome, Google's newly released Web browser, as a new platform for Web development. As the Web becomes a powerful platform for complex applications development and deployment, the browser wars are becoming more heated. The holy grail for the Web based companies such as Google and Yahoo is to offer Web applications to achieve the look and feel as well as the power and performance of desktop applications. A powerful Web browser will help in this pursuit but it won't be sufficient. Ubiquitous, reliable, high-bandwidth, always-on connectivity will be essential. Significant improvements in mini browser software and reliable, broadband, wireless connectivity will also help spawn a mobile Internet revolution . Google c...