INTERVIEW: THE YOUTH COALITION OF UNITY AND DEVELOPMENT (YCUD)

The Youth Coalition of Unity and Development (YCUD) is an organisation that stands for the development, participation and wellbeing of youths. We interviewed Mr Pha Sina from the YCUD to learn about his organisation and what they aim to achieve.

This interview has been edited for length, clarity and flow.

Can you tell us more about YCUD?

YCUD is a coalition of youth organisations which consists of seven NGO members. YCUD is working to advocate for youth representations in the country, especially by advocating on a national level to promote youths in leadership roles in the government and the leadership roles in other workplaces.

How did the idea for YCUD’s online platform come about?

We can say that we have youth members in our member NGOs and other provinces. They do separate activities, and their voices are split. Their voices are not mobilized and are not unified, so we came up with the idea that we can have a platform that can be used in the provinces and by our different NGO members. They can come together and join, so that we have a more unified voice, a bigger voice, for youths to advocate for the demands or solutions that they need.

What is the expected impact of YCUD in Cambodia?

After launching the platform we hope to see more and more youths coming to use the platform, because on the platform we will put the topics mostly from the youths themselves, and mostly on issues that are most relevant to them. They can join and participate with, for example, one of the functions on the platform is debate on issues related to them. So by unifying all the voices and collecting all the voices on the platform, you can use that as the evidence to advocate to the government and the decision makers to participate with providing solutions to the youths. So by this, we hope to see more and more of youths’ voices being recognized by leaders and by the government.

What is your opinion on the impact that technology can have on the youth of Cambodia?

Actually everyone knows that Cambodian youths are having enough smartphones to use and that the Internet connection is widespread in Cambodia and it is also cheap. We can say that most youths own smartphones and have Internet connection, so it’s easier for them to get connected through their mobile phones, as long as we have the right platform for them. This is a good chance for us to build the platform, and try to test with youths to see whether it is good for youths or not. So if it is good for youths, then we’ll try our best to update the platform according to the youths’ needs, so that we can get more youths to use the platform. The right technology helps them to get connected in the right way and through the right connection, they can become big enough for the right causes that help make their society prosper.

What does YCUD hope to achieve in the coming years?

What we really want to achieve is to mobilize youths on a platform. To have thousands of youths or all of the youths network members from our member NGOs on the platform. We want to encourage them to engage with us on a regular basis so that we can get a combination of their voices to be a voice that is big enough to advocate for solutions for them. That is what we hope for.

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“KNOW & GROW” PROJECT BY CARE CAMBODIA HELPS STUDENTS TO LEARN TECHNOLOGY

For the ethnic minority living in the northeast of Cambodia, access to the latest education and healthcare is not easy. CARE Cambodia is a humanitarian organisation that aims to help this situation.

Funded by the Patsy Collins Trust Fund Initiative, “Know & Grow” is their latest project in improving education for young children.

The objective of the project is to expose students to modern skills that allow them more life choices to become active ASEAN citizens. Information communication technology (ICT) and sexual reproductive health will be taught to children in schools.

There are also other key activities involved in this project. One of CARE’s activities is to develop a career-counseling app to assist students in learning about possible career paths. Another activity would be to set up school magazine clubs to help students improve digital literacy skills, in Khmer and local ethnic minority languages.

Students in Ratanakiri are excited to partake in this project. One of them shared how he “would like to learn ICT (as) it’s a good technology that allows you to communicate with people all around the world”. His school has currently three new computers.

The project is currently in operation and will continue until June 2020.

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Zuckerberg Resolves to Invent, Encourages Girls to Invent Too

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2016 resolution to challenge himself outside his work is to build a simple artificial intelligence assistant to run his home and help him do a better job juggling his business responsibilities.

"You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in 'Iron Man,'" he suggested.

Zuckerberg first will explore the available technology, then train it to understand his voice to control everything in his home.

At work, the AI will allow him to visualize data in virtual reality to help him build better services and lead his organizations more effectively.

"It's a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so my personal challenge is to do that," Zuckerberg said.

He could be tempted by some of the shortcuts already available, however.

"Mark says he wants to write the code, but he'd find it easier if he starts with a kit like the one from iRobot," remarked Sue Rudd, a research director atStrategy Analytics.

Or, he could look at Brookstone's Robotis Mini Robot Kit, she told TechNewsWorld.

The Masses React

Zuckerberg's announcement drew responses from a crowd of people marketing their products, along with some who offered observations ranging from wise to wacky.

One comment that elicited great interest -- as well as a reply from Zuckerberg -- came from Darlene Loretto, who wrote that she keeps telling her granddaughters to "date the nerd in school, he may turn out to be a Mark Zuckerberg!"

It would be "even better ... to encourage them to *be* the nerd in their school so they can be the next successful inventor!" Zuckerberg responded.

That triggered a spate of comments.

"Amazing response, Mark!" wrote Melanie Maiorca.

"I say the same to my daughter Eden," commented Debbie Parry, who said she was "badly bullied at school" and didn't want her daughter to go through that.

"Great answer," wrote Cookie Caporaso. "Love that. I taught myself how to rebuild and repair computers and build gaming systems. I had no idea 20 years ago but never gave up."

Women in STEM

The Obama administration considers supporting women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) an essential part of America's competitive strategy.

The United States Office of Science and Technology Policy is working with the White House Council on Women and Girls to increase the participation of women, girls, and other underrepresented groups in STEM.

In Europe, there's the TWIST (Towards Women in Science and Technology) project.

However, the number of women in physics, engineering and computer science is low globally, according to Women in Global Science & Technology, and it's declining in several leading countries -- including the U.S.

In countries where the number of women studying science and technology has increased, it has not followed that more women have been employed in those fields.

The Zuckerberg Factor

"It would be great to see STEAM and STEM programs at schools quoting [Zuckerberg] on this suggestion that girls should be nerds, not just try to date them," said Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, a research director at Strategy Analytics.

"There are lots of sports role models, but fewer good nerd role models, especially female role models," she told TechNewsWorld. Schools could then move beyond that to "transform the idea that innovating and creating technology is not just a nerd thing, or that being a nerd is a very positive thing."

Zuckerberg should promote the idea of girls becoming nerds jointly with his COO, Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Rudd suggested.

"Even in my youth many executives were encouraging to women, but I find there are fewer women in technology today than when I started," Rudd said. "Sheryl's book deals with some of the reasons."

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Samsung Rolls Out Stylish Gear S2 Classic Smartwatches

Samsung on Monday began a global rollout of the latest versions of its Gear S2 Classic smartwatch, hitting China first.

There are two models in the Gear S2 Classic New Edition line -- one with 18K rose gold plating and the other with a platinum finish.

They have ivory and black genuine leather bands, respectively.

The watches' new faces feature characters from the Peanuts comic strip, as well as designs created by artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Twisting the bezel changes the face.

New apps from CNN and Bloomberg include their own specialized watch face features.

Samsung also has added apps from eBay, ESPN, Uber and Voxer.

Introduced at CES in January, the New Edition line also includes Samsung Pay, NFC technology that soon will be available to users, beginning in the United States.

Samsung didn't indicate pricing for the line.

Fashion Forward

"The new designs launched at CES are part of the larger trend towards more bling and enhanced appeal for women that we also saw from Huawei at CES, and from models like the Moto 360 2 and Pebble Time Round earlier this year," remarked Cliff Raskind, a senior research director at Strategy Analytics.

That sensibility is reflected in "the premium metal-plated models, campy watch faces, and ... leather straps," he told TechNewsWorld.

"The larger trend, of course, is that smartwatches are meeting the challenge of adding style and fashion a lot faster than they're meeting the challenge of practical day-to-day convenience -- battery life, comfort, size," Raskind said.

Too Cool for the Real World?

Despite being extremely well made, with an intuitive interface and other good features, the Gear S2, predecessor of the New Edition line, reportedly has connectivity issues and only a limited number of apps for its Tizen OS, according to Kris Carlon, who reviewed it for AndroidPit.

Those aren't the only reported problems.

"You can't use the Verizon Message+ to respond through the watch. Typing is a joke ... can't use Gmail app to look at entire mailbox, only notifications, have to set up the email app to see everything," said Foxy in a comment posted in response to the AndroidPit review.

When using WhatsApp on the Gear S2, the reply icon disappeared and couldn't be retrieved even after the smartphone had been reset, reported Alfred Tang in another comment.

Battery life was "five to seven hours instead of the advertised 30 or 48" after the Instagram app was downloaded and used, BlueEyed Apache complained. "You can get a good 25+ hours from the battery but only if you use the watch solely for telling time."

However, dropped connections weren't a problem for commenter Adeshina Adeniran, who wrote that using the Gear S2 was "amazing and fun."

Getting Better All the Time?

Lack of apps is a problem, but "with ESPN, Uber and CNN, I think we're seeing the big names come in," said Ramon Llamas, a research manager at IDC.

"We need to see more local ones, but these are good ones to have," he told TechNewsWorld.

Tizen smartwatch shipments will grow from 1.7 million units shipped in 2015, with 8.2 percent of the market, to 2.5 million in 2019, according to IDC.

That's a 9.5 percent compound annual growth rate, but it won't be enough. The market share for Tizen smartwatches will slip to 2.8 percent in 2019.

"More ecosystem and SDK focus is clearly needed if Tizen is to compete head to head in apps with watchOS, Android Wear, and even Pebble's budding developer ecosystem," said Strategy Analytics' Raskind.

Tizen "remains much more confined to Samsung, limiting its ecosystem potential," he continued, while Android Wear, watchOS and Pebble OS "continue to evolve and gain a following." Attracting more developers to build more Tizen apps "will not be an easy task from its current low base."

There might yet be hope, Raskind suggested, because Samsung Electronics' new chief, DJ Koh, who took over the role Dec. 1, has the required software chops to address the apps shortfall.

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Can Apple escape iPhone fatigue?

A year ago, the iPhone 6 helped Apple report the best quarter in its 38-year history. This time around, the company must deal with consumers who don't race to buy the latest smartphone like they once did.

iPhones -- heck, phones in general -- don't rev you up like they used to, and that's a problem for Apple.

The Cupertino, California-based electronics giant has expanded its horizons over the past few years, entering the wearables market, broadening its phone and tablet lineups, and launching a streaming-music service. But its fortunes are still closely tied to the iPhone, which is responsible for two-thirds of its sales and much of its profit. So what happens when demand starts to slacken?

The outcome of the company's fiscal first quarter, which ended in December, will be released Tuesday. It may mark the start of a slowdown.

Disappointing results would reaffirm the belief that we're suffering from phone fatigue, meaning that new phones no longer excite us and that we're increasingly content with the one we own. Rival Samsung has had to contend with sputtering smartphone sales, and some worry that Apple may no longer be immune.

We'll see if that's the case come Tuesday. It will be tough for Apple to top last year's results, when the tech giant posted the highest profit of any public company ever, thanks to the larger screens of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Can Apple do it again and sell more iPhones than ever before? In October, CEO Tim Cook said the company's iPhone sales would rise in its first quarter. Most analysts polled by Fortune agreed, but they've also grown more cautious over the past few weeks.

The problem is that the latest iPhone models, the 6S and 6S Plus, didn't add enough new features to prompt customers in places like the US to upgrade. In addition, the economy in China, one of Apple's most important markets, has been struggling and may have put a damper on the willingness of consumers there to snap up a new phone.

Analysts now expect iPhone sales to rise only 2.8 percent from a year earlier, to 76.5 million units, below the earlier forecast of 78 million units, according to Fortune. Many believe unit sales could actually decline in the quarter ending in March and in the full fiscal year, which would mark the first time iPhone sales have dropped since Apple started selling the device in 2007.

Wall Street analysts polled by Thomson Reuters also expect a modest 3 percent rise in revenue in Apple's first quarter, followed by a 3 percent revenue drop in its second quarter, a rare slip for Apple.

The company declined to comment.

Reading the tea leaves

Apple isn't alone in dealing with waning enthusiasm. Samsung has warned that its December-quarter profit and sales would be weak. Even super-hot Chinese startup Xiaomi struggled and sold fewer phones in 2015 than anticipated.

Market researcher Gartner said last week that while global shipments of mobile phones will rise 2.6 percent this year, overall spending will decline. Consumers in countries like China are buying cheaper phones instead of shelling out hundreds of dollars for high-end models.

"Local and Chinese brands are delivering more-capable basic smartphones with appealing features at a lower price," Gartner said, "which means that there is less of a need for users to upgrade to a premium smartphone."

Some of Apple's key component suppliers and partners have issued their own warnings. They include Analog Devices, which makes components for the iPhones; Cirrus Logic, which provides audio chips; Dialog Semiconductor, which makes power-management chips; and Qorvo, which provides radio frequency processors.

Intel, which supplies processors for Apple's Macintosh computers, reported disappointing quarterly results, and Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith warned about the conditions in China. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which builds chips for Apple's mobile devices, said demand for high-end phones has been weak.

Apple has said in the past that faltering financial results at its suppliers don't necessarily translate to its own condition. But industry watchers say it's getting tough to ignore warnings that sales are slowing down.

Said JP Morgan analyst Rod Hall: "The drumbeat of bad news from Apple suppliers keeps building."

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Facebook's Sports Stadium steals a page from Apple playbook

When Facebook announced a foray into sports, the question on everyone's mind was, "Hey, didn't Twitter do that first?" But Facebook is simply borrowing ideas from competitors -- a time-honored tradition espoused by none other than the late Steve Jobs.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Twitter should be glowing with pride.

It should be, but perhaps the company is nervous instead. That's because the imitator is Facebook, Twitter's biggest rival in the war for your social-media attention.

Facebook on Wednesday announced a new feature to help the more than 1 billion people who use its service every day follow sports games live. You can track the game with friends, and the feature encourages you to discuss stats, plays and everything else from anywhere around the globe. It's called Sports Stadium, and it arrives just in time for Super Bowl 50, set for February 7.

But longtime tech watchers said Facebook's newest feature should have a different name: Sports Twitter.

The perennial second-banana to Facebook, Twitter is a darling of the tech and media worlds, but one that's struggled to meaningfully expand its social-networking site. It's about a fifth the size of Facebook in terms of people who use it regularly. Now one of Twitter's most promising features, people talking about sports in real time, may be undercut by Facebook's Sports Stadium.

Let the games begin.

Whenever there's a big event, Twitter lights up with commentary, links and photos from people watching in real time. Twitter has at times helped to encourage this by creating quick links people can tap on to find the conversation. Or it'll highlight tweets through its Moments news feature or company-run account, @TwitterSports, which is followed by more than 12 million people. Sports fan are, well, fanatics, and the thinking is that people who care about sports are more likely to want to talk, or tweet, about them.

A good move on Twitter's part, but now Facebook has shown that anything Twitter can do, it can do too. The question is, can Facebook do it better? Or does that even matter?

Let's face it: If we had to declare a winner in the war for social-networking supremacy, it'd be Facebook. More than half the world's online population is using the service. It's already the world's top place to post photos, and plenty of people are sharing political opinions there ahead of the US presidential election. More and more people are also checking in during disasters and terrorist attacks to let friends know they're safe.

As new projects like Internet-beaming drones get off the ground to bring even more people online, Facebook has pounced on them to make sure most of us communicate with our friends and family using its service. The trick now is to get you and me to use Facebook even more than we already do.

Can sports be the next big thing? Well, Twitter users think so. And now Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, do too. What's unknown is whether sports broadcasters and fans will follow suit.

You may look at all of this and think Facebook is just nicking a competitor's idea. But that's what rivals do -- steal each other's best ideas. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1996 famously repeated a quote he attributed to Picasso, "Good artists copy; great artists steal." Jobs then added, "we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." For years, some software developers would watch Apple events with some trepidation, fearful the computer maker would build their ideas into its software, give it away for free and put them out of business. They weren't being irrational, as You Control: Desktops, Quicksilver and Menuet can attest. (Never heard of them? That's the point.)

Though Zuckerberg hasn't talked much about his opinions around borrowing ideas, Facebook didn't make him available for comment for this story. A look at Facebook's initiatives over the past year, however, shows that sports isn't the first idea Facebook has borrowed from some of its social-media rivals. The company also added popular ideas like trending topics (another key part of Twitter), ephemeral messaging (a hit from Snapchat) and location services (made popular by Foursquare).

Just because a company creates a smart new idea doesn't mean it can't be improved on and made even more popular, said Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner. "Ideas are a dime a dozen; execution isn't."

So maybe the question isn't whether Facebook stole from Twitter. Instead it's, what app will you be swiping through during the Super Bowl?

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Facebook To Open $500M Wind-Powered Data Center in Texas

Social networking giant Facebook is developing a 200-megawatt wind-energy project to power its new data center in Fort Worth, Texas. Unveiled on Tuesday, plans for the wind-powered data center are part of the company's long-term goal to eventually meet all of its data center energy needs with renewables.

Facebook already powers two of its existing four global data centers with renewable energy, and plans to achieve a 25-percent renewables goal by the end of this year, according to Vice President of Engineering Jay Parikh. By 2018, the company aims to meet half of its data center energy needs with clean power, he said.

Construction of the new data center has already started, and the facility is expected to come online in late 2016, a Facebook spokesperson told us. While the company isn't disclosing full cost and capacity plans for the data center, the spokesperson said that "we have publicly committed to at least 40 full-time jobs and $500 million in investment."

Efficiency Has Saved '$2B in Costs'

The company has worked with Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corp. and Starwood Energy Group to develop a wind farm that will power the facility, West Region Director of Data Center Operations Ken Patchett said in a Facebook blog post. Currently under construction, the wind farm is located on a 17,000-acre site 90 miles from the data center's location.

"We put a lot of effort into choosing where to locate a facility like this," Patchett noted. "There are a lot of things we look for -- everything from a shovel-ready site, to access to renewable energy, to great partnerships with the local community, to a strong pool of local talent for construction and long-term operations staff. We think we've found all that and more in Fort Worth, and we're excited to be getting started."

Data center design efforts focused efficiency, "have helped us save more than $2 billion in infrastructure costs over the last three years," said Tom Furlong, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, in another blog post. Coupled with Facebook's investments in renewables, "the carbon impact of one person's use of Facebook for an entire year is the same as the carbon impact of a medium latte," Furlong said.

Outdoor Air-Cooled, Even in Texas

The Forth Worth data center will be Facebook's fifth. It also operates data centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, Calif.; Altoona, Iowa; and Lulea, Sweden. Both the Altoona and Lulea facilities are also powered by renewable energy.

Through its participation in the Open Compute Project, which the company helped launch in 2011, Facebook openly shares its data center designs to "design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing."

Patchett said the Fort Worth data center will "feature the latest in our Open Compute Project hardware designs" -- including Yosemite for compute and fabric, Wedge and 6-pack at the network layer. Yosemite is a system-on-a-chip compute server aimed at improving speed and more efficiently serving Facebook traffic.

The new Fort Worth facility will also be cooled exclusively through the use of outdoor air instead of energy-intensive air conditioners, Patchett noted. "Yes, we can make that work even in the middle of the kinds of summers we have here in Texas," he added.

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Deepening Dependency on Technology Raises Risk of Breakdowns

Modern technology has made it easier for people to do all kinds of things, from banking to shopping to finding a date. So when technology breaks down, people's lives go haywire, too.

Computer outages at United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange and The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday delivered a reminder about our growing dependence on interconnected networks to get through each day.

For the most part, technology has worked smoothly while hatching innovations and conveniences that have made our lives easier and our jobs more productive. Computers, though, could bring more frequent headaches as they link together with billions of other electronic devices and household appliances -- a phenomenon that has become known as the "Internet of things."

This technological daisy chain will increase the complexity of the systems and raise the risks of massive breakdowns, either through an inadvertent glitch or a malicious attack.

"The problem is humans can't keep up with all the technology they have created," said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner. "It's becoming unmanageable by the human brain. Our best hope may be that computers eventually will become smart enough to maintain themselves."

Technology already is controlling critical systems such as airline routes, electricity grids, financial markets, military weapons, commuter trains, street traffic lights and our lines of communications.

Now, computers are taking other aspects of our lives as we depend on smartphones to wake us up in the morning before an app turns on the coffee pot in the kitchen for a caffeine fix that can be enjoyed in a the comfort of a home kept at an ideal temperature by an Internet-connected thermostat designed to learn the occupant's preferences.

Within the next few years, we may even be unlocking our doors with high-tech watches after being chauffeured home in robotic cars.

Technology's relentless march demands better security measures to prevent hackers from breaking into system and more rigid programming standards to reduce the chances of crippling outages, said Lillian Ablon, a technology researcher for the Rand Corp.

"Instead of just letting the technology rush ahead of us and then trying to catch up in terms of privacy and security, we should be baking those things into the systems from the start," she said. "We need to be a little smarter on how we are coding things."

The sequence of Wednesday's outages appears to have been a fluke. Sabotage isn't suspected, FBI Director James Comey said during an appearance before Congress.

But a domino effect may have contributed to The Wall Street Journal's outage. Comey believes the newspaper's website buckled after the New York Stock Exchange's problems caused alarmed investors looking for information to swamp the Journal's website.

The length of Wednesday's outages also is disconcerting, Gartner's Litan said.

It took the New York Stock Exchange more than three-and-half hours to resume trading, slowing Wall Street's usually furious pace. A "router issue" at United Airlines grounded its planes for nearly two hours, leading to 800 flight delays and 60 cancellations.

"Everyone needs to assume technology is going to go down sometimes, but you should be resilient enough to quickly recover from the outage within a half hour, if not a few minutes," Litan said.

Wednesday's breakdowns were minor inconveniences compared with what might happen if better security measures aren't imposed to keep out intruders bent on wreaking havoc, said Jeff Williams, chief technology officer for Contrast Security.

Too often, the technology industry's focus is on creating something cool and worrying about security later, Williams said. He said the lackadaisical attitude breeds a mindset like this: "Oh, we'll just put your blender on the Internet, there are no security issues there. And hackers figure out a way to turn on your blender in the middle of the night and set your house on fire."

Computers may get smarter through a combination of better programming, machine learning and more sophisticated chips. If computers can reach the still far-off goal of becoming artificially intelligent, they could be better equipped to prevent problems and fend off unauthorized users. Self-reliant and self-aware computers would still confront humans with a scary question, Litan said: "Are the computers going to be nice to us or are they going to take us out?"

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