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Samsung Malaysia, Yayasan Didik Negara partner to advance digital education
Samsung Malaysia Electronics and Yayasan Didik Negara (YDN) are partnering to expand access to digital learning tools and strengthen technology skills among students and educators.
In a memorandum of understanding signed on July 25 at SMKA Sheikh Tahir Jalaluddin in Penang, Samsung will provide mobile devices, displays and interactive smartboards to support digital learning infrastructure.
As YDN’s official technology partner, Samsung will also work with the foundation on smart classroom experiences, digital upskilling for teachers, STEM activities and other programmes aimed at developing future-ready skills.
Planned activities include Samsung AI Classroom showcases, STEM and artificial intelligence (AI)-focused learning programmes, interactive smartboard demonstrations and student innovation initiatives offering hands-on exposure to emerging technologies.
“The future of education lies in the effective integration of digital technology into everyday learning,” said YDN CEO Mohd Nasrul Khairi.
He said digitalisation should go beyond introducing devices into classrooms to transforming how students learn, educators teach and schools prepare young Malaysians for the future.
The partnership will also focus on educator development, digital literacy and encouraging innovation and creativity among students.
One in four consumers uses generative AI tools for product discovery in Asean e-commerce market
One in four consumers in Asean uses generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) tools to discover new products and services when shopping online, found the Southeast Asia (SEA) Influencer & Affiliate Marketing Report, released on July 23 by commerce market intelligence platform Cube Asia and partnership management platform Impact.
Despite the growing use of Gen AI, traditional channels remain dominant. The report found that 71% of shoppers still rely primarily on online marketplaces for product discovery while 57% turn to search engines.
The report is based on an online consumer survey conducted this year involving 2,400 respondents aged 18 to 69, a separate 2025 online survey of 6,000 respondents aged 18 and above, an online survey of 34 industry leaders across Southeast Asia and in-depth interviews with 30 influencers, brand marketing leaders, representatives from enablers, agencies, e-commerce platforms, industry stakeholders and experts.
Among consumers who use AI during their shopping journey, 29% primarily rely on it to better understand products on online marketplaces while 23% use it to compare products and streamline research.
The report estimates that by the end of 2027, one in five Southeast Asian shoppers will complete a Gen AI-native e-commerce purchase, with creator content evolving into a licensed asset class. It also expects in-chat purchases to become mainstream before fully autonomous AI-assisted buying, which remains constrained by economic and regulatory factors.
SEA’s e-commerce market is projected to almost double to US$410 billion by 2031 from US$219 billion in 2026, sustaining strong growth over the next five years. Indonesia and Thailand are expected to remain the largest e-commerce markets, valued at US$91 billion and US$36 billion respectively.
The report states that influencer and affiliate marketing continue to play distinct but complementary roles in driving e-commerce sales, accounting for an estimated 32% of the region’s online transactions or about US$70 billion in 2026. More than half of SEA consumers have made purchases through affiliate channels, with influencer and creator channels being the most widely used at 71%, followed by cashback and review sites at 41%.
Among SEA markets, Thailand records the highest level of consumer trust in both influencers and Gen AI while Indonesia leads AI adoption for online shopping, with 75% of consumers using Gen AI tools or AI-powered marketplace features.
Malaysia stands out as the only SEA market where messaging apps and group chats account for the largest share of affiliate link purchases, at 12%, ahead of influencers and Gen AI tools. Meanwhile, Singapore has the highest proportion of consumers who have never used AI tools when shopping on e-commerce platforms, at 40%
An example of a phishing page impersonating the Irish airline “Ryanair”
Nearly 270,000 cyberattacks disguised as travel brands detected
Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky detected nearly 270,000 cyberattack attempts disguised as popular travel-related brands over the past year as cybercriminals targeted travellers increasingly reliant on digital platforms for bookings and payments.
Between the second quarter of 2025 (2Q2025) and the first quarter of 2026, Kaspersky recorded 262,663 detections associated with major transport brands, including airlines, ride-hailing services and travel platforms. Emirates accounted for 61% of detections involving transport brands, followed by Uber at 37%.
Trojans were the most common threat associated with transport brands, making up 30.5% of detections, while Trojan-Bankers accounted for another 22.5%. The latter are designed to steal banking credentials and payment information.
Travel and accommodation platforms were targeted on a smaller scale. Kaspersky recorded 5,414 attack attempts disguised as major services between 2Q2025 and 1Q2026, with Trojans accounting for 54.6% of detections.
The brands analysed in the transport category included Emirates, Uber, Expedia, Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, Trip.com, Skyscanner and Ryanair. For travel and accommodation services, Kaspersky tracked threats impersonating Booking.com, Tripadvisor, Agoda, Airbnb and Viator.
Malaysia outperforms Asean in data governance, but lags behind OECD, says report
Malaysia outperformed its Asean peers in data governance but continued to lag behind OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries in some areas, according to a report by the World Bank Group and the Ministry of Digital.
Titled “Building Malaysia’s Future Government — Unlocking Public Sector Productivity with GovTech”, the report draws on international benchmarks, including the World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index (GTMI), and findings from Malaysia’s first national GovTech Skills Survey involving 16,500 civil servants across 28 ministries.
Malaysia recorded an overall GTMI score of 0.79, compared with the Asean average of 0.51, and emerged as a regional leader in GovTech infrastructure, supported by cloud adoption and innovation.
The report found, however, that Malaysia lagged behind Asean and OECD countries in areas such as monitoring technology usage and its advisory approach to open-
While the country has established strong institutional foundations for digital transformation, barriers to data sharing remain a concern.
The report identified a “secrecy culture” surrounding data sharing within the government and access to data by citizens and businesses, potentially limiting the use of data to improve public-sector productivity and service delivery.
“It’s striking that only 3% [of civil servants] said that there are no barriers [in data sharing within government] and 97% indicated there might be a problem or challenge in data sharing,” said Marco Larizza, lead public sector specialist at the World Bank Group.
During a fireside chat titled “From Ambition to Results: Advancing Malaysia’s GovTech Transformation for Public Sector Productivity”, Ministry of Digital secretary-general Datuk Fabian Bigar outlined what successful digital transformation could look like over the next five to 10 years.
“I hope that in a couple of years, most public services will be available online. It’s already about 86% online. Hopefully, we reach up to 95%. We have to make sure that people don’t have to enter their details five, six times on different apps. They just want to deal with a single portal to get public services,” said Fabian.
He also urged civil servants not to fear technology but to learn to master it as digitalisation becomes increasingly embedded in government services
Huawei launches four AI-ready data centre solutions
Huawei Malaysia has launched four AI data centre solutions to support Malaysia’s growing computing and energy requirements of AI workloads.
The portfolio comprises the PowerPOD 5.0 integrated power system, UPS5000-H-800k power protection solution, SmartLi 5.0 energy storage solution and Thermal Management Unit (TMU) integrated cooling system.
Huawei Malaysia executive vice-president of digital power Chong Chern Peng said rising AI workloads were pushing data centres towards higher rack power densities, greater electricity capacity and more advanced cooling.
“This is driving operators to rethink how data centres are designed, built and operated. Every watt of electricity now has to deliver greater value, every system must be more dependable and every facility must be built faster,” he said.
Among the solutions, PowerPOD 5.0 can reduce the delivery period for data centre power infrastructure from 60 days to two weeks, while the TMU provides thermal management for high-powered AI servers.
Alibaba unveils Qwen3.8-Max, its largest AI model so far
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has launched Qwen3.8-Max, its largest and most capable AI model so far, featuring 2.4 trillion parameters and a context window of up to one million tokens.
The multimodal model ranked fifth in Text Arena and second in Vision Arena, and is designed for coding, research, workplace applications and long-running tasks. It is available globally through APIs (application programming interfaces) on Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, while its model weights are scheduled for release next week.
Built on Qwen 3.5, Qwen3.8-Max uses a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture that activates 95 billion of its 2.4 trillion parameters, which Alibaba says reduces computational costs and latency while maintaining performance.
The model is capable of operating independently over extended periods. In an internal test, Qwen3.8-Max spent 16 days autonomously developing a self-evolving agent framework, generating and testing code while incorporating feedback and analysing logs. The resulting framework, “oh-my-cli”, has been open-sourced on GitHub, said Alibaba.
Its multimodal capabilities also allow it to process lengthy documents, TV series and livestreams and turn the content into searchable knowledge bases.
Alibaba said Qwen3.8-Max can also handle real-world workloads ranging from legal document reviews and financial research to application design and architectural 3D modelling.
PEOPLE MOVES
SAP appoints Ellian Teo as Malaysia managing director
SAP has appointed Ellian Teo (pic) as managing director for Malaysia, succeeding Vipin Chandran, who has relocated to Singapore with the company. Teo will oversee SAP’s strategy, operations and customer success in Malaysia, with a focus on helping businesses adopt cloud, data and AI technologies. She will report to SAP Southeast Asia president and managing director Liher Urbizu.
Teo has more than 20 years of enterprise technology experience, having worked with organisations across financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and government-linked companies.
She is also involved in initiatives supporting women in leadership and technology, including the 30% Club.
TECH BOOKS
House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company by Eva Dou
On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires, with hardly anyone noticing.
But things changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.
In House of Huawei, Washington Post technology reporter Eva Dou pieces together a remarkable portrait of Huawei’s reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and how he built a sprawling corporate empire — one whose rise Western policymakers have become increasingly obsessed with halting.
Based on wide-ranging interviews and painstaking archival research, House of Huawei dissects the global web of power, money, influence, surveillance, bloodshed and national glory that Huawei helped build — and that has also ensnared it
EDITOR’S MUST-HAVES
Build your own retro gaming device — CircuitMess Bit 2.0
For anyone nostalgic for 8-bit gaming but keen to understand what actually goes on behind the screen, the CircuitMess Bit 2.0 turns a retro handheld console into a hands-on lesson in electronics and coding.
The Bit 2.0 is a DIY kit that lets users assemble the device using the supplied circuit board, battery, buttons, acrylic casing, screws and screwdriver.
According to maker CircuitMess, the process takes up to an hour and requires no previous electronics experience.
Once assembled, the handheld comes with a selection of games inspired by classic 8-bit arcade titles. Users can move beyond playing them and create their own games using CircuitMess’ CircuitBlocks visual programming interface or Python.
This makes Bit 2.0 less of a regular gaming device and more of a lesson on how hardware and software work together. Designed for ages seven and above, it is suitable for children, parents looking for a hands-on STEM project and adults who miss the simplicity of old-school handheld gaming.
The console can also be expanded with collectible Wacky Robots, each unlocking an additional game.
Priced at US$69 (RM282), Bit 2.0 is available on CircuitMess, which offers international shipping.
PICTURE OF THE WEEK
Autonomous Logistics Solution, Sidec and Cyberview launch country’s first remote operations centre for autonomous logistics vehicle trials
Malaysia’s first remote operations centre (ROC) has been launched to support public-road trials of autonomous logistics vehicles along the Cyberjaya Malaysia Autonomous Vehicle (MyAV) route.
Located at CoPlace 9 in Cyberjaya, the ROC will serve as a central command centre for monitoring autonomous vehicles through live video feeds, vehicle telemetry, route status and system diagnostics.
The centre will monitor RoboVan, a Level 4 autonomous logistics vehicle operated by Autonomous Logistic Solutions Sdn Bhd (ALS), during trials in real-world mixed traffic.
The facility is a collaboration among ALS, the Selangor Information Technology and Digital Economy Corp (Sidec) and Cyberview Sdn Bhd.
Trials are expected to begin in the coming months along the 22km MyAV route, following approval from the Ministry of Transport under Malaysia’s national regulatory sandbox for autonomous vehicles. Data collected is expected to inform future standards and regulatory frameworks for autonomous logistics.
RoboVan is equipped with a 16-sensor system that combines light detection and ranging with vision-based sensing, enabling it to operate without relying on roadside sensors or connected infrastructure.
The vehicle can travel up to 210km on a single charge without cargo and 180km when fully loaded, carrying up to 1.5 tonnes. It has a top speed of 55kmph but typically travels below 10kmph during deployments.
Testing will begin without cargo before progressing to cargo transport once performance requirements are met.
ALS managing director Alan Chong said: “Our initial submission was between three and six months of ‘empty cargo testing’. We hope that after fulfilling all of the criteria and performance metrics, we can move into actual cargo movement.”
ALS currently operates one RoboVan in Malaysia and plans to expand its fleet to at least three
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