Meta has appointed Dhruv Vohra as Managing Director of its Global Business Group in Southeast Asia, putting a longtime regional executive in charge of one of the company’s most commercially important and behaviourally complex markets. Based in the region, Vohra will oversee Meta’s commercial strategy across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. He […] The post Meta appoints Dhruv Vohra to lead Southeast Asia business as AI and chat commerce reshape online retail appeared first on e27.

In global logistics, the problem is rarely a shortage of new technology. Ports, shipping lines, freight forwarders and warehouse operators are constantly pitched tools promising to predict delays, automate yards, optimise routes or cut emissions. The harder question is whether those tools can work inside real trade networks, where a single container journey may involve […] The post PSA, Granite Asia launch US$50M fund to scale supply-chain innovation appeared first on e27.

Researchers have identified a potential source of uranium in a long-explored mining district in the southern Philippines, as Manila moves to establish nuclear power and expand its critical minerals industry. The discovery, which could provide uranium for the nuclear fuel cycle if further exploration confirms its viability, was made in the Larap-Paracale mining district in Camarines Norte province, where exploration began in the 1950s. Researchers from the Philippine Nuclear Research Institute...

A good product can open the door to a market, but it does not guarantee business success. Many companies reach a point where their product or service has potential, customers are showing interest, and the team is working hard, but growth remains slower than expected. The challenge is often not the product itself. It is […] The post Why a good product isn’t enough for sustainable growth appeared first on e27.

In part one, I traced the early years of building Ngital, the frustration with an industry built on vanity metrics, the scramble to land the first clients, and the realisation that reshaped how the agency approached its work. Part two picks up from there: what trust actually looks like once that work is underway, the […] The post What building Bangladesh’s agency actually looks like from the inside – Part 2 appeared first on e27.

Across Southeast Asia’s technology hubs, the AI conversation has moved quickly from “Can it help developers write code faster?” to a harder question: “Can it be trusted to work on the codebase by itself?” That shift matters. The first wave of generative AI in software engineering was largely about assistance: autocomplete tools, chat-based coding helpers, […] The post The AI agent boom is exposing Southeast Asia’s startup codebase problem appeared first on e27.

In July 2011, a 27-year-old Stanford dropout secured a 10-minute slot with George Shultz at the Hoover Institution. The meeting ran two and a half hours. Before the month was out, the former secretary of state had joined the Theranos board, won over, he told Fortune, by her “purity of motivation.” Nothing said in that […] The post Why con artists get the meeting that honest founders can’t appeared first on e27.

For years, Chinese manufacturers have viewed Southeast Asia as a way to reduce exposure to higher US duties on goods made in China. But a new round of tariff cuts proposed by Washington and Beijing could weaken that incentive for some products, potentially changing the economics of the strategy. Under the new US-China Board of Trade, more than 90 per cent of Chinese products on a list of goods worth US$30 billion – mostly everyday consumer items, such as toys and household goods – would return...

Malaysia’s capital topped a global pollution ranking on Wednesday and nearby Singapore came in third, with smoke from wildfires in neighbouring Indonesia blamed for the unhealthy conditions. A milky haze has shrouded the cities for more than a month as smoke drifted from fires on Borneo and Sumatra islands. Kuala Lumpur was the world’s most polluted major city early on Wednesday, according to Swiss monitor IQAir, with an Air Quality Index (AQI) reading of 166. Singapore ranked third at 155. The...

Indonesia is pursuing plans to make public schools free at all levels, stretching from kindergarten to university, but mounting pressure on the state budget could hinder the government from pulling off the massive undertaking, analysts have said. President Prabowo Subianto summoned his ministers last week to discuss a plan to “accelerate the implementation of free education in public schools”, according to a statement released by cabinet secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya on September 23. “Free...