Tencent Cloud has released an odd robot-adjacent device designed to provide telemedicine services.

The effort is called i-Care and is the result of a tie up with USA-based IT services Millennium Technology Services (MTS)'s subsidiary Invincible Technology. The two companies set out to create "a digital solution that aims to improve patients' experience and quality of life as well as draw patients, families and caregivers closer than ever."

"Customers' habits and expectations have evolved dramatically over the last few years across various industries including the medical and healthcare field, driven by the further emergence of digital technologies and cloud computing," said Tencent Cloud in a canned statement.

But i-Care isn't just an opportunity to jump onto the pandemic-era bandwagon carrying mediocre remote services. It also provides a use case for Tencent Cloud, which provides tech that's meant to improve "patient comfort and … healthcare outcomes."

It's hard to see how the machine will improve anything – it appears to be a monitor on mounted on a swiveling stand so its googly eyes can follow patients around the room. Just why designers went for floating eyes rather than something more human is not explained. Nor is how a baby boomer might react to having their autumn years overseen by a cartoon figure.

The i-Care. Click to enlarge

Behind its googly eyes, the machine offers a Windows-like tiled UI – complete with a friendly homepage, calendar and weather, video conferencing, picture gallery, and apps.

The robot has a 360-degree rotatable base station and also comes with an emergency button so it can help users if they fall or experience other emergencies.

The i-Care device and service also offers instant messaging, speech-to-text service that enables automatic generation of onscreen subtitles for hearing-impaired patients as well as real-time Chinese-English translation, and predictive analysis of patients' health risk.

Tencent Cloud said it is working with i-Care to "perform testing on medical monitoring using machine learning and computer vision" to read vital signs. Other planned features include reading hand gestures, facial expression analytics and medication reminders.

Tencent – the Chinese company responsible for WeChat – already boasts several initiatives in the healthcare vertical. WeChat itself offers services like booking medical appointments, paying hospital bills, purchasing medicines and doctor consults. The company also invest in medical startups and counts among its products in the vertical both connectivity and platforms.

"We are already working with different cities to create a middle layer, so that the hospitals can still have their own information living in their own server while also contributing to a regional health-information system," Alex Ng, vice president of Tencent Healthcare, told consulting firm McKinsey back in pre-pandemic 2019.

Ng said that China is heading toward that reality while Australia and Scandinavia have been doing it to some degree for years.

And while a dedicated telehealth computer in your home might seem ridiculous in some parts of the world, in a country like China – notorious for having to wait in line half a day to see a doctor – it might be genius. Just as long as it's not expected to replace an actual medical professional. ®

Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it’s completed a massive migration of its own apps to its own cloud.

The company started thinking about this in 2018 after realising that its many services had each built their own technology silos.

Plenty of those services – among them WeChat, social network, qq.com, games like Honour of Kings and YouTube-like Tencent Video – have tens or hundreds of millions of users. Each service appears to have built infrastructure to cope with peak traffic requirements, leaving plenty of unused capacity across Tencent’s operations.

Chinese web giant Tencent has admitted to a significant account hijack attack on its QQ.com messaging and social media platform.

In a post to rival social media platform Sina Weibo – a rough analog of Twitter – Tencent apologized for the incident.

The problem manifested on Sunday night and saw an unnamed number of QQ users complain their credentials no longer allowed them access to their accounts. Tencent has characterized that issue as representing "stolen" accounts.

China's ban on cryptocurrency mining – and general dislike of any form of blockchain-based assets – has seen web giant Tencent clamp down on discussion of the subjects on its massive WeChat and Weixin messaging platforms.

News of Tencent's policy can be found in recent amendments to its terms of service which last week added a section about cryptocurrency and NFTs.

The added verbiage states that accounts engaged in discussion of crypto trading, exchange between bit-bucks and real money, or provision of pricing services for digital currencies, all need to stop it.

The world's server market will grow in 2022 – but more slowly than in the past – and could dip further, according to analyst firm TrendForce.

Supply chain issues are, unsurprisingly, one reason for predicted modest growth. Shanghai's COVID lockdowns, for example, mean China's server makers have struggled to open, and get the parts they need.

The likes of Dell and HPE were hurt by those lockdowns, but TrendForce feels they'll recover.

Amazon unveiled its first "fully autonomous mobile robot" and other machines designed to operate alongside human workers at its warehouses.

In 2012 the e-commerce giant acquired Kiva Systems, a robotics startup, for $775 million. Now, following on from that, Amazon has revealed multiple prototypes powered by AI and computer-vision algorithms, ranging from robotic grippers to moving storage systems, that it has developed over the past decade. The mega-corporation hopes to put them to use in warehouses one day, ostensibly to help staff lift, carry, and scan items more efficiently. 

Its "autonomous mobile robot" is a disk-shaped device on wheels, and resembles a Roomba. Instead of hoovering crumbs, the machine, named Proteus, carefully slots itself underneath a cart full of packages and pushes it along the factory floor. Amazon said Proteus was designed to work directly with and alongside humans and doesn't have to be constrained to specific locations caged off for safety reasons. 

The Japanese outpost of Indian services giant Tata Consultancy Services has revealed it is working on the "Internet of Actions" – an effort to bring the sense of touch to the internet.

Tata has paired with a Japanese upstart from Keio University, Motion Lib, to spearhead the endeavor.

TCS said it will eventually deliver a "new social infrastructure" by commercializing Motion Lib tech. But first and more practically, the company will create a demonstration environment for "real haptics" technology at its Digital Continuity Experience Center (DCEC) showroom.

Microsoft has indefinitely postponed the date on which its Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) will be required to sell software and services licences on new terms.

Those new terms are delivered under the banner of the New Commerce Experience (NCE). NCE is intended to make perpetual licences a thing of the past and prioritizes fixed-term subscriptions to cloudy products. Paying month-to-month is more expensive than signing up for longer-term deals under NCE, which also packs substantial price rises for many Microsoft products.

Channel-centric analyst firm Canalys unsurprisingly rates NCE as better for Microsoft than for customers or partners.

IBM has quietly announced its first-ever cloudy mainframes will go live on June 30.

Big Blue in February disclosed its plans to provide cloud-hosted virtual machines running the z/OS that powers its mainframes. These would be first offered in a closed "experimental" beta under the IBM Wazi as-a-service brand. That announcement promised "on-demand access to z/OS, available as needed for development and test" with general availability expected "in 2H 2022."

The IT giant has now slipped out an advisory that reveals a “planned availability date” of June 30.

VMware today revealed details about Project Arctic, the vSphere-as-a-service offering it teased in late 2021, though it won't discuss pricing for another month.

VMware's thinking starts with the fact that organizations are likely to run multiple instances of its vSphere and VSAN products, often in multiple locations. Managing them all centrally is not easy.

Enter vSphere+ and VSAN+, which run in the cloud and can control multiple on-premises instances of vSphere or VSAN. To make that possible, users will need to adopt the Cloud Gateway, which connects vSphere instances to a Cloud Console.

Updated Hitachi has taken a modest step towards becoming a public cloud provider, with the launch of a VMware-powered cloud in Japan that The Register understands may not be its only such venture.

The Japanese giant has styled the service a "sovereign cloud" – a term that VMware introduced to distinguish some of its 4,000-plus partners that operate small clouds and can attest to their operations being subject to privacy laws and governance structures within the nation in which they operate.

Public cloud heavyweights AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba also offer VMware-powered clouds, at hyperscale. But some organizations worry that their US or Chinese roots make them vulnerable to laws that might allow Washington or Beijing to exercise extraterritorial oversight.

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