Day: April 25, 2023

Sales of manga comic books are booming, both in Japan and the United States, thanks to innovative story lines that appeal across age groups, eye-catching graphics and the growing availability of titles online.

Sales of Japanese manga comics continue to soar to new highs, both at home and abroad, underlining the longevity and adaptability of a literary form that has in the past been dismissed as the preserve of children.

The potential for further growth is so significant that the Japan business federation Keidanren has called on the government to promote manga, anime, and games as the spearhead of the nation’s broader economic growth.

According to statistics released in March by the All Japan Magazine and Book Publishers’ and Editors’ Association, total sales of print, electronic comic books and magazines increased 0.2% in 2022, which is worth around 677 billion yen (€4.62 billion, $5.05 billion).

Sales of manga topped the 600 billion yen mark for the first time in 2020 thanks in large part to the popularity of the “Demon Slayer” series, although the industry believes the sector has also been boosted by people reading more while going out was restricted during the coronavirus pandemic.

Sales of print manga have remained relatively flat, accounting for around 250 billion yen in total, which is a contraction from sales of 335.7 billion yen reported in 1995. While the more traditional print format has shrunk, however, manga delivered as e-comics on smart phones or other mobile devices has risen dramatically. Sales of digital manga leapt up by 8.9% in 2022.

Dramatic 171% increase in US sales

It is a similar story in the United States, pointed out Roland Kelts, a visiting professor in the media and cultural studies department of Tokyo’s Waseda University and author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese pop culture has invaded the US.”

“I was stunned when I saw the figures for 2020 and 2021, which showed that year-on-year manga sales in the US were up by 171%,” he told DW. “That’s just an astonishing figure, and the figures made it clear that the overall graphic novel market grew much faster than the standard market for books.”

There are key differences between the Japanese and US markets, however, with sales of print manga in North America driven in recent years by anime that consumers will have seen on television, including such famous titles as “One Piece,” “Attack on Titan,” and “Spy Family,” Kelts highlighted.

The situation is reversed in Japan. Print manga which become popular are then made into anime movies.

More space to store books

According to Kelts, Japanese consumers have also been quicker to embrace online digital anime because North American homes are typically significantly larger than Japanese abodes, meaning they have more space to store print books.

Readers in Japan, on the other hand, used to treat manga as disposable and leave them on trains for other people to read. That no longer happens, as consumers now frequently read the latest instalment of their favourite manga on their mobile phones.

The aim is to as much as quadruple sales of Japanese content in overseas markets, from approximately five trillion yen at present, within 10 years.

“Fifteen years ago, Japanese business leaders sneered at the idea that manga and anime could become an important export sector for Japan, but that generation has now retired and been replaced by people who ‘get it’ when it comes to manga,” Kelts said.

Japan unchallenged world leader

Keidanren chairman Masakazu Tokura is known to be a fan of anime and manga, and discussed the film adaptation of the basketball manga “Slam Dunk” with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol during his recent visit to Tokyo.

“Tokura came of age during the 1970s and ‘80s, when manga were ubiquitous in Japan,” Kelts pointed out. “In fact, domestic print sales peaked in the mid-’90s, so he and his cohorts have none of the prejudices against manga that their predecessors may have held.”

“At present, Japan is the unchallenged world leader in anime and manga and Keidanren is right to get behind it as a driver of the economy.”

‘Fundamental themes’

Makoto Watanabe, a professor of media and communications at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, is currently re-reading the “Full Metal Alchemist” series of manga, which he first devoured as a boy.

“It’s quite a strange story, but when you interpret the characters’ actions, it’s all about friendship, love and telling the truth, which are all very fundamental themes and will resonate no matter the reader’s age,” Watanabe said.

“I think that is often what makes manga so appealing and timeless; you can read them as a child and enjoy the story but go back again much later and find a new story within them.”

“There are, of course, some negatives, such as excessive violence in some manga, but on the whole I believe strong storylines and images that appeal to everyone from school kids to salarymen, help to communicate many of the essential elements in life, and they are a valuable resource,” he said.

For Watanabe, Manga remain a valuable learning tool on the way to adulthood. DW

THE key role of the built environment in Northern Ireland’s present and future was on show to the world this month with the US President Joe Biden’s visit to Ulster University’s new Belfast campus.

The built environment has a central part to play in driving economic growth. But it also has a key role to play in shaping and influencing so much more, including the future of our young people, the climate, and perceptions of this place internationally.

So Rics is taking the opportunity to reiterate its call to our political parties in Northern Ireland to prioritise bringing about positive change in the built and natural environment to support all of this.

Like the US President and others, Rics is pushing for a functioning government to form for a wide range of reasons, including that the role of the built and natural environment in promoting a healthy, sustainable, and productive regional economy can be recognised.

The built and natural environment impacts every aspect of our lives. Delivering safe and warm homes for our citizens, with easy access to essential services and future-proofed digital and physical infrastructure, will drive up living standards and unlock our collective potential. Buildings which are people-centred can transform places of work and study and elevate the productivity of their inhabitants.

As we mark 25 years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement this year, it is important to recognise the challenges that our built environment has overcome, and how much progress has been made.

During the historic visit to Northern Ireland, President Biden commented on how the development of Ulster University’s new state-of-the-art campus would not have happened 25 years ago. This highlights the power of infrastructure to make significant impact to the entire region and how infrastructure investment sends out a powerful positive message to global investors.

Although there has been great progress made, there is a significant skills gap in the built environment. To meet the future needs of communities, we need to attract and retain a larger, more diverse workforce, and we need to upskill them in retrofitting solutions. Rics is calling for a government to support more apprenticeships and to work with industry to deliver training which will close this gap.

Whilst we are pushing commercial real estate as a key economic driver, we must continue to recognise and protect the role of the built environment in maintaining Northern Ireland’s rich heritage and history. The fact that the highly impressive main building at Queen’s University Belfast was so prominent during the Good Friday Agreement events in recent weeks is a reminder of the calibre and quality of our built heritage.

Protecting Northern Ireland’s heritage assets is vital to place-making and brings substantial economic and social benefits. When formed, the Northern Ireland Executive should improve the stewardship of these assets for future generations by embedding industry best practice Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) Guidance, undertaken by competent and regulated professionals.

We recognise that the next ten years will be unprecedented for the built environment and as the pandemic recedes, we are calling for an Executive to acknowledge the importance of the built environment as a key economic driver and the role it can play in promoting a sustainable regional economy. The is vast potential over the next 25 years if we make the right decisions now.

:: Sharon McClements is chair of the Northern Ireland regional board of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), which promotes and enforces the highest professional qualifications and standards in the development and management of land, real estate, construction and infrastructure.

Microsoft (MSFT) will report earnings for its fiscal third quarter after the bell on Tuesday as the company continues to ride the generative AI hype train while a decline in cloud revenue could spoil the tech giant’s quarter.

Here’s what Wall Street analysts are expecting from the company with expectations also compared to the same quarter last year, according to data from Bloomberg

• Revenue: $51.1 billion expected vs. $49.3 billion in Q3 2022

• Adj. EPS: $2.23 expected vs. $2.22 in Q3 2022

• Productivity and Business processes: $17.1 billion expected vs. $15.8 billion in Q3 2022

• Intelligent Cloud: $21.9 billion expected vs. $19.1 billion in Q3 2022

• More Personal Computing: $12.3 billion expected vs. $14.5 billion in Q3 2022

Microsoft helped kick off Big Tech’s AI obsession with its multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

The Windows maker has since implemented versions of OpenAI’s technology in its Edge browser, Bing search engine, Microsoft 365 productivity software, and cybersecurity offerings.

That’s given Microsoft a perceived leadership position in the AI wars, leaving rival Alphabet’s Google (GOOG, GOOGL) playing catch up. Amazon (AMZN), meanwhile, is working to bring generative AI to its services, while Facebook parent Meta (META) is cobbling together teams to kick start its own efforts.

And while Microsoft’s stock has seemingly benefited from both the AI hype and overall market rebound after a rough 2022, the company’s main growth driver continues to be its cloud computing efforts in its Azure unit.

But that growth has slowed markedly over the last year. In Q2 2022, Microsoft reported year-over-year server products and cloud services revenue growth touched 29%. But as of Q2 2023, revenue growth fell to 20% when including the impact of currency fluctuations.

Part of the reason for this decline was large customers pulling back on spending as higher interest rates challenged global growth. Microsoft is also contending with flagging PC sales, as demand from consumers and business customers falls from pandemic-era highs.

Story continues

According to Gartner, worldwide PC shipments declined a stunning 30% in the first quarter of this year to 55.2 million units.

Analysts are calling for revenue in Microsoft’s More Personal Computing segment, which includes sales of Windows to third-party PC makers, to drop 15.5% year-over-year to $12.3 billion from $14.5 billion in the same period last year.

Analysts and investors will also be on the lookout for the impact of Microsoft’s January layoffs on the company’s bottom line. The firm cut 10,000 positions across its various business segments as it attempts to reconfigure its workforce after over-hiring during the pandemic.

By Daniel Howley, tech editor at Yahoo Finance. Follow him @DanielHowley

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As pest control in residential, commercial, lawncare and public health segments of the industry evolves, so does the need to find new effective and environmentally friendly mosquito control solutions.  Innovative and sustainable mosquito control methods, such as the In2Care Mosquito Station, decrease the overapplications of liquid products to further protect the health of the end-user and the environment, and the industry from future regulatory issues. This webinar will cover the basic biology, distribution, and disease-related facts of Aedes and Culex container-breeding mosquitoes in the US,  the technology behind effective biocide transfer using differential static charges, the concept and principles of biocide auto-dissemination, the methods to incorporate auto-dissemination in mosquito control to keep mosquito populations sustainably low and tactics to make a mosquito control business profitable with the In2Care Station. Click here to register for the webinar!

Ted Worster graduated from California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California with a B.S. Agricultural Biology, Pest Management Option. Ted was a Pest Control Technician in California from June 1977 to Jan 1978. He then moved to work with Univar/Veseris from November 1983 to June 2017. He carried various titles including Sales Representative, District Manager, Marketing Manager, International Marketing Manager, and EPA Regulatory Manager. Other jobs and responsibilities include Orange County Vector Control District, California as mosquito control technician, California Department of Agriculture as a weed control specialist, Pest Control Operators License from the State of Texas in GP and Termite, Certified Pesticide Safety Trainer from 1988 to 1992, State of Hawaii.

“Target Specialty Products is excited to announce our partnership with In2Care! This webinar will showcase how PMPs and Vector Control Professionals can implement In2Care mosquito stations into residential, commercial, lawncare and public health segments of the industry,” said David Helt, Target Specialty Products’ leader.

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Digital transformation has become more than a mantra for organizations that want to stay competitive in today’s ever-shifting global business landscape. Digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, are increasingly embedded in key areas of businesses to improve processes, satisfy fluctuating consumer demands, and boost operational resilience in times of uncertainty. 

“Technology has become the nervous system of the enterprise—connecting corporate strategy, finance, innovation, operations, and HR to ensure that all parts of the business are in alignment,” says Ken Wong, president of Lenovo’s Solutions & Services Group (SSG). Technologies such as cloud computing, AI, machine learning, internet of things (IoT), and edge computing—once housed in on-premises environments—are becoming critical as data mobility and portability have increased.

According to IDC, global spending on digital transformation is forecast to grow 16.3% annually for the next five years, reaching $3.4 trillion in 2026. Not all that investment, however, will be fruitful. A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study has found that only one-third of digital transformations are successful. 

The complexities of change

Digital transformation involves multiple stakeholders and relies heavily on integration across business units. As the technology architecture for digital solutions becomes increasingly complex and costly, poorly managed digital transformation can lead to system vulnerabilities, data silos, and other costly IT headaches. 

Against this backdrop, digital transformation as a service (DTaaS) has emerged as a solutions-led approach to help organizations adapt to a fluctuating business environment. It combines multiple technology solutions—from cloud computing to AI—on a single platform for continuous end-to-end transformation.

“Digital transformation as a service helps rebuild an organization from the ground up to make it more efficient and more flexible, empowering it with the agility to respond to new market opportunities faster at scale,” says Wong. “Because IT complexity is growing, many businesses are opting for technology consumption models that revolve around services. Echoing the B2C market, which offers a variety of subscription services, enterprises can now turn to services ecosystems that make it easier to manage IT and optimize buying, deploying, managing, and scaling infrastructure without incremental capital expenditures.”

DTaaS in action

When China-based Huzhou Central Hospital wanted to create a digital solution in 2018 to help doctors monitor and manage patients with chronic medical conditions, they needed to ensure that their existing on-premises data center would be able to handle the vast volumes of data that would likely be generated. Stringent regulations also prevented the hospital from relying on a public cloud for storage and computing resources. 

The hospital turned to Lenovo, which designed, developed, and deployed a new chronic disease management solution that helped improve the speed and accuracy of diagnoses. Thanks to Lenovo’s TruScale Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, the facility gained access to a platform with the security and control of an on-premises environment, pay-as-you-go pricing, 24/7 monitoring, and much sought-after scalability. 

Driving the need for a new model

Digital transformation has become a permanent fixture in many organizations—IT complexity, mounting competition, an increasingly distributed workforce, expanding cyberthreats, and rising demand for business continuity and sustainability are just some of the reasons behind the trend. However, many organizations are not equipped to deal with these challenges. 

A lack of strategy can be a main hindrance. “Without a clear strategy and goals, it can be difficult to prioritize and focus on the most important digital transformation initiatives,” warns Wong. Employee resistance to change is another obstacle to successful digital transformation, as many workers fear automation could jeopardize job security. 

Some organizations struggle to find the necessary IT talent to oversee digital transformation. And then there are budgetary constraints, and the heightened cybersecurity concerns that accompany any new technology deployment. 

For these reasons, organizations are increasingly leaning on DTaaS, and there are signs showing its potential growth. According to Allied Market Research, the global market for everything as a service was worth about $475 billion in 2021, and is projected to reach $2.6 trillion by 2031. 

Keen competitive advantages

One of the top competitive advantages of DTaaS is its ability to grant organizations access to world-class, high-performance resources that might otherwise be out of reach, and turbocharge innovation. “Innovation today is not just about harnessing the latest technology,” Wong says. “Innovation is also about solving your businesses’ biggest pain points and driving measurable results for your bottom line.” 

At the University of Birmingham, innovation is a necessity. The institution, ranked among the world’s top 100 universities, collaborated with Lenovo to build a powerful new supercomputer, known as BlueBEAR, to drive AI and big data research at a new institute opened in 2021. The processing power of BlueBEAR allows researchers to delve deeper into data, and inch closer to making scientific discoveries in everything from proton therapy treatment for cancer patients to genome sequencing. 

Using BlueBEAR, clinicians developed a physical model of an operating theater that allowed them to track airflow that can contaminate surgical instruments, thereby reducing potential patient suffering and financial burden. The project was voted “best use of high-performance computing in life sciences” by industry publisher HPCwire.

The UK institution also worked with Lenovo on a water-cooling technology for its data center. The new design reduced cooling energy usage by as much as 83%, demonstrating that DTaaS could also improve business processes by supporting sustainable practices, such as reducing waste and CO2 emissions. “By centralizing and vertically integrating capabilities across the company, organizations can react quickly to market fluctuations while future-proofing their business by choosing more sustainable operational practices,” Wong says.

In addition to helping enterprises in the climate fight, Wong says DTaaS providers can also offer a wide array of competitive advantages, ranging from easy access to skilled talent to lower operating costs. Specifically, DTaaS providers can: 

• connect organizations to experts with specialized skills and experience in deploying digital transformation solutions; 
• enhance talent acquisition and retention by providing more seamless, productive work experiences for employees; and 
• lower operating costs by providing a more cost-effective alternative to building and maintaining an in-house IT team while, at the same time, improving security and control. 

Best practices to maximize value

Gleaning long-term value from DTaaS requires more than the right solutions and skilled talent. Best practices are also critical for success. Digital transformation can lead to sweeping changes in everything from technology infrastructure to business workflows. IT and non-IT leaders should therefore join forces and foster cross-functional collaboration.

“Organizations that prioritize digital collaboration, automation, and cloud-based solutions can help multiple teams work together, share best practices, and increase transparency on program progress,” Wong says. “This is critical for digital transformation efforts because they require participation of teams across the organization to succeed.”

Selecting tools that align with business goals is also crucial, he adds. Leaders must take the necessary steps to determine which technologies are most likely to meet their current business needs, and how their technology stack must evolve to meet future requirements. 

The best tools will mean little without the right technology partner. While technology stacks aren’t meant to remain static, the right partner can ensure organizations are consistently working with tools that help them solve some of the toughest IT and business problems. This requires a partner with deep experience in technology, heavy investments in research and development, and a proven track record. 

Up next for DTaaS

Digital transformation, along with the technology landscape, will continue to evolve. OpenAI’s ChatGPT shows that some of the technological shifts in AI and machine learning most likely to impact organizations and their digital transformation initiatives have already happened. “The use cases for these technologies will also grow as tools become more sophisticated and capable of automating more tasks and improving business decision-making,” Wong says. 

He predicts that demand for cloud-based solutions, which promise unprecedented scalability and flexibility, will continue to increase. A more powerful IoT ecosystem of devices and sensors will help organizations make better decisions. Mass deployments of 5G networks will bring faster internet speeds and lower latency. And cyberthreats and other security risks will also become increasingly complex. 

DTaaS will grow in importance as enterprises grapple with challenges, such as increasing pressure from disruptive startups and competitors to invest in digital technology, and a digitally literate and distributed workforce that needs support and access to key systems and infrastructure. “Businesses will continue to adopt digital solutions to improve operational efficiency, customer engagement, and revenue growth,” Wong says. “Expect to see surprising use cases in 2023 that show the value of digital transformation in the enterprise.”

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.