Ant – USA NEWS LIVE

Ant Group gets a brand new CEO as billionaire founder Jack Ma talks AI

chandankumarsoft — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 08:30:13 +0000

Ant Group president and chief financial officer Cyril Han will take over as chief executive officer starting next yr, the financial technology giant said on Sunday, because it looks to spice up growth following Beijing's crackdown on the tech sector.

According to an email obtained by CNBC announcing the changes, Han will take over the role from Eric Jing, who stays chairman. Han will report back to Jing and the changes will take effect on March 1, 2025.

Ant Group, which runs the large payment app Alipay, is one in every of China's largest technology corporations. The changes in management were announced as a part of the corporate's twentieth anniversary celebrations, at which a speech was also given Alibaba and Ant Group founder Jack Ma.

Ma said his generation was fortunate to benefit from the opportunities the Internet provided. However, the era of artificial intelligence in the subsequent 20 years would “beyond anyone's imagination,” Ma said, in accordance with a transcript published by Chinese media.

It is a rare public appearance by Ma, who has been affected by the Chinese government's regulatory tightening of the domestic technology sector. Ant Group's record-breaking stock market listing was abruptly canceled by Chinese authorities at the top of 2020. Since then, Ant Group has overhauled its business to comply with regulators' requirements.

Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company that Ma co-founded, was also the topic of Beijing's investigation.

The crackdown hurt the expansion of lots of China's biggest technology corporations, but regulators have recently softened their stance as China's economy stays under pressure.

image credit : www.cnbc.com

Ferns and flowers bribe helpful ant defenders with nectar, but ferns developed this ability much later – our study shows why

chandankumarsoft — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 08:30:07 +0000

If you are taking a better have a look at a plant in your park, your garden, and even your kitchen, you'll probably see damage. Whether a caterpillar has gnawed off a part of a leaf or a mealybug is sucking sap, animals feed on plants on a regular basis.

Of course, herbivory, or eating plants, is just not ideal for a plant's survival, so plants have evolved many various defense mechanisms to counteract this threat, including physical and chemical weapons. Cacti, for instance, are equipped with spines that pierce skin. Herbs reminiscent of mint, lavender, and rosemary produce volatile scents that might help deter herbivores.

Other plants bribe their bodyguards by secreting thick, sweet nectar.

Nectar is mostly related to flowers, where it’s used to draw bees, birds or butterflies to move pollen from one flower to a different. But other plants also produce other forms of nectar glands, called extrafloral nectariesPlants produce these glands to bribe ants with a sweet reward; in return, the ants defend the plant from herbivorous insects.

I study Evolutionary biology of plantsand recently worked with Fern biologist Fay-Wei Li At the Boyce Thompson Institute and Cornell University Ant biologist Corrie Moreau to research the evolution of ant defense mechanisms in plants.

We found something amazing: almost 130 million years ago, throughout the Cretaceous period, ferns and flowering plants Ant bribery nectar glands developed independently at concerning the same timeWe found this out by utilizing complex algorithms to estimate the evolutionary origins and history of ferns, flowering plants, and ants.

This cut-off date is sort of interesting since it was very early within the evolutionary history of flowering plants, but quite late in Evolutionary history of the fernOur work has shown that old dogs can learn some recent tricks – and, more importantly, how this happened in ferns.

Meeting above ground

Plants are the first producers of just about all food on Earth, so virtually all living things rely upon them for survival. For this reason, herbivory is a component of life. But it also imposes significant costs on many industries, from houseplants to crops. Major pest infestations may even threaten global food security.

For all these reasons, understanding how plants defend themselves against predators is an important challenge.

The evolution of ant-based defense strategies inextricably linked two lineages in the dominion of life. This meant that ants and plants ultimately evolved together – a process called coevolutionWhen one species changes, the opposite may change in response, and these changes may even be encoded of their genes.

Flowering plants emerged within the Cretaceous period about 150 million years ago, and our analyses showed that they formed close bonds with ants early on. These flowering plants and their ant partners appear to have co-evolved over time.

However, this was not the case with ferns. Although they’d the potential to evolve nectaries concurrently flowering plants, they only began to rapidly evolve nectaries once they learned to live amongst trees.

Ferns were originally land plants, but after flowering plants evolved into large trees, jumped onto their branches as epiphytes – Plants that grow on other plants, often with none connection to the soil.

Drynaria pilosacommonly generally known as basket fern, secretes nectar.
Jacob Switzerland, CC BY-ND

Ferns may also climb up trees, like ivy, or form their very own trunk, like Tree ferns. This also helped the ferns to succeed in the treetops.

The undeniable fact that ferns didn’t produce nectar for ants until they moved to trees puzzled me as a fern biologist. That was until my co-author Corrie Moreau identified that the majority ants live in treetops.

This was entirely logical. When ferns became cover dwellers, they became closer to ants, which were already related to nectar-bearing trees. By interbreeding with these ants, the ferns eventually took advantage of the established, mutually useful relationship between the ants and flowering plants.

The evolution and ecology of fern-ant relationships

While our study uncovered recent features of ant-mediated plant defense, it left many questions unanswered. For example, are some ants specialized on ferns, or are they generalists that may feed on nectar from a greater diversity of plants? How exactly did plants originally evolve the physical ability to provide extrafloral nectar? Are the genes encoding nectar development the identical in ferns and flowering plants? Is the chemistry of nectar from ferns and flowering plants the identical?

Our study lays the inspiration for further research into the evolution and ecology of those nectaries. This is significant basic research. It can be conceivable that research on this area could contribute to breeding programs that promote nectary-mediated ant defense, thereby reducing the necessity for pesticides to guard plants from predators.

image credit : theconversation.com

Chinese fintech Ant Group is doubling its global expansion with Alipay+

chandankumarsoft — Mon, 06 May 2024 13:09:34 +0000

The Chinese fintech group Ant Group desires to strengthen its global presence through its digital offering Alipay+ and connect mobile payment apps all over the world.

“We found that people want to use their domestic e-wallets when traveling abroad. “So they don’t want to have to load their card into another app that they don’t know very well,” said Douglas Feagin, senior vp of Ant Group, a subsidiary of the Chinese tech giant Ali Babasaid CNBC.

The group's global arm, Ant International, launched Alipay+ in 2020, allowing foreigners to make use of apps from their home countries to make payments in China by scanning QR codes from Alipay – Ant's largely domestic-focused platform Group – and in other countries via local partners.

“We see huge potential for expansion and the relatively broad coverage we have in Asia – we.” [would] “We like to breed in places like the Middle East, Latin America and Europe,” Feagin said. “People from all of these regions are going to other regions, so there’s a big opportunity for expansion.”

Ant has invested in country-specific e-wallets across Asia, but CEOs wish to take their products abroad, said Feagin, also president of Ant International.

The company has some cross-border tourism business with customers traveling outside of China, Feagin said, but that’s “mainly focused on where the Chinese tourists are traveling.” Ant had entered Europe and the US via Alipay, where Chinese tourism was booming before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ant is attempting to profit from its early forays into these markets with its Alipay+ offering.

“We had the advantage that Alipay was already accepted by many merchants around the world, so one of our first steps was [to] Convert these merchants to Alipay+ merchants. So instead of just accepting one wallet, they can accept many wallets,” Feagin said.

Alipay+ now connects 88 million merchants in 57 countries and regions with 1.5 billion consumer accounts across greater than 25 e-wallets and banking apps ant.

Growth markets

As a part of its business expansion abroad, Ant acquired shares in several firms including The payment company 2C2P from Singapore in 2022 and South Korea's Kakao Pay in 2017.

Ant has also collaborated with national digital payment services comparable to: Singapore's SGQRMalaysia DuitNow QR And South Korea's ZeroPay last 12 months.

“Ant Group’s early vision for global expansion focused on Southeast Asia. The company strategically participated in e-wallets in all major Southeast Asian economies,” said Zennon Kapron, founder and director of consulting firm Kapronasia, in a press release January report.

Ant can also be expanding into emerging markets comparable to Sri Lanka in addition to Cambodia. The company has also expanded into Europe and the Middle East and works with European e-wallets fertilizer in July last 12 months and I connected in February as well Dubai duty free within the Middle East earlier this 12 months.

There are also growth opportunities in the corporate's established markets comparable to Singapore and South Korea. For example, many individuals in China use mobile payments, but still far fewer in comparison with people in other countries, Feagin said.

“There is still a lot of room for growth. I think a lot of people only think about using traditional payment methods when they go abroad.”

“If you think about the big markets like Thailand and Japan that attract a lot of tourists, the growth opportunities for mobile app payments are huge.”

From problems to solutions

“Following the restructuring ordered by Chinese regulators, which occurred concurrently with various geopolitical tensions affecting its ability to expand in certain markets, Ant changed its global expansion strategy. The result was Alipay+, which aims to address interoperability issues in e-wallets,” Kapron said.

The company initially targeted countries with large populations to quickly expand its user base, Feagin said. Major tourism destinations comparable to Japan, Thailand and Singapore were also examined.

“These are big markets for people who want to come to us, and that’s why we’ve been very focused on expanding their dealer coverage there,” Feagin said.

And now the corporate is doubling down on its global expansion, targeting markets in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

image credit : www.cnbc.com