Finding new and meaningful ways to engage readers is a hot topic for news organizations of any size, and the first Google News Initiative (GNI) Innovation Challenge for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa prompted a myriad of different approaches. The GNI Innovation Challenges, part of Google’s $300 million commitment to help journalism thrive in the digital age, saw news innovators step forward with new thinking. In South Africa, Daily Maverick proposed a “relevancy engine” that would aggregate data feeds about reader behavior for small and medium publishers. In Jordan, podcast startup Sowt looked to tackle the challenge with a new hosting platform for news podcasts.

They launched the Middle East, Turkey and Africa Innovation Challenge last June, and received 527 applications from 35 countries. After a rigorous review, a round of interviews and a final jury selection process, Google selected 21 projects from 13 countries to receive $1.93 million in funding.

The call for applications listed four criteria: impact, feasibility, innovation and inspiration, and the successful projects clearly demonstrated all four. Here are just a few of the awardees:

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  Demirören Teknoloji Anonim Şirketi in Turkey wants to solve the tagging process for the Turkish language to help with the news discovery distribution process. Currently this work requires cumbersome manual work from their journalists, taking a precious share of their time. 

• Daily news publisher Israel Hayom will be creating a loyalty scheme where online users get real-life rewards in the form of tickets or money-saving offers. 
• Nas News wants to engage Iraq’s citizens in video debates for positive change with a mobile-first social and news platform that allows users to read and debate on local and national topics.
• L’Orient le Jour in Lebanon wants to build a new loyalty plan to offer special and personalized privileges to subscribers via an interactive platform.
• The National in the UAE will develop a service that converts quality text news into audio in real time, in both English and Arabic.
• Ringier Africa Digital Publishing in Nigeria will be increasing personalization across their platform using a blend of prediction, recommendation and local information pages to increase user engagement.

A second round of the Middle East, Turkey and Africa Innovation Challenge will open for applications later in the year.

Source: Google Blog

Recently, Huawei releases the 10 trends of data center facility in 2025., aiming to provide the industry a clear picture of data center facility evolution and enlighten the way to the future.

From 2010. to 2019., the data center industry experienced a spectacular decade. Data center has evolved from ICT equipment rooms to cloud data center. Rapid development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, and 5G will bring a new golden era and market demand for data centers will increase dramatically. At the same time, data centers are facing challenges such as difficulty to obtain construction resources, long construction period, and high energy consumption. In addition, data centers also face many challenges in terms of architecture flexibility and O&M.

Trend 1: High Density

The CPU and server capacity keep continuously increasing with the evolving of IT computing capacity. As the demand for AI applications increases, the importance of AI computing power further rises. To balance efficiency and costs, data centers will develop towards high density. Currently, the average power capacity in a data center is 6 to 8 kW/rack. It is anticipated that power density of 15 to 20 kW/rack will predominant data centers by 2025.

Trend 2: Scalable Architecture

Generally, the lifecycle of IT devices is 3 to 5 years, and the power density doubles every 5 years. However, the lifecycle of data center infrastructure is 10 to 15 years. The data center facility will support IT device evolution for 2-3 generations. It demands scalable expansion and phased investment for optimal CAPEX in the lifecycle of data center. In addition, the data center must support hybrid deployment of IT devices with different power densities because of diversified IT services running there.

Trend 3: Green

Currently, the power consumption of data centers accounts for 3% of the world’s total power consumption. It is estimated that the total power consumption of data center will reach more than 1000TWh by 2025. Energy saving, emission reduction, and operating expense (OPEX) reduction are big challenges. Reducing the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of data centers and building green data centers are inevitable. It is an irresistible trend to use clean energy and waste heat, and to save resources (such as energy, land, water, and materials) throughout the life cycle of the data center. It is estimated that the average PUE of new data center in China will drop to 1.1 in the next five years.

Trend 4: Quick Deployment

Internet services usually burst in a short period of time, and data and traffic demands on the service side increase sharply. Therefore, data centers must be rolled out quickly. On the other hand, data center is changed from a support system to a production system. Faster rollout means faster benefits. The typical TTM of a data center is 9 to 12 months, which is expected to be shortened to less than 6 months in the future.

Trend 5: Full Digitalization and AI-enablement

Data center facilities will inevitably evolve towards digital and intelligent. With the continuous improvement of IoT and AI technologies, data centers will gradually evolve from single-domain digitalization in terms of O&M, energy saving, and operation to full-lifecycle digitalization and automatic driving in terms of planning, construction, O&M, and optimization. AI will be widely applied.

Trend 6: Full Modularization

More data centers will be constructed in full modular mode to address the problems of slow construction and high initial investment costs. Modular design will evolve from component modularization to architecture modularization and equipment room modularization, finally achieving full modularization of data center. The full modular design will enable fast deployment, flexible capacity expansion, simple O&M, and high energy efficiency.

Trend 7：Simplified Power Supply Architecture. Lithium Battery Replace Lead-acid Battery

The power supply and distribution system of a traditional data center is complex and fragmented, occupies a large footprint, and is difficult to locate faults. A simplified power supply architecture will reduce power conversion times, shorten the power supply distance and footprint, improve the space utilization rate and system energy efficiency. Compared with lead-acid batteries, lithium batteries have advantages in terms of footprint and service life. As the cost of lithium batteries decreases, lithium batteries will be widely used in data centers in the future.

Trend 8: Convergence of Liquid Cooling and Air Cooling. More Indirect Evaporative Cooling and Less Chilled Water Cooling

GPU and NPU applications generate more high-density scenarios, and liquid cooling systems will become more and more popular. However, some storage and computing services are still in low-density scenarios. To quickly adapt to uncertain IT service requirements in the future, the cooling solution must be compatible with the air cooling system and liquid cooling system. In addition, the complex architecture of the chilled water cooling system hinders quick deployment and easy O&M. Indirect evaporative cooling system, with modular architecture, will shorten the deployment time and simplifies O&M. In addition, by fully utilizing the natural cooling resources, power consumption of the cooling system will be greatly reduced. In areas with suitable climate, the chilled water system will gradually be replaced by indirect evaporative cooling system.

Trend 9: Dynamic Linkage between Bits and Watts

Reducing PUE doesn’t mean that the overall energy consumption of the data center is optimal. Instead of focusing on the data center energy facilities, the energy consumption of the data center needs to be evaluated and optimized as a whole. Through full-stack innovation among facility, IT, chipsets, data, and cloud, bits and watts will work collaboratively to achieve dynamic energy saving and optimal energy efficiency of the entire system.

Trend 10: Trustworthiness

As data center facility becomes more intelligent, the network security threats will multiply. The data center must have six features: resilience, security, privacy, safety, reliability, and availability to prevent attacks and threats from environments and malicious personnel, including network intrusion threats.

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has drawn fresh attention from all walks of life in China’s 2020 Spring Festival holiday.

ZTE has promptly established an emergency working group for the new pneumonia on January 21st, and has made systematic arrangements in the areas of supply chain, communication guarantee, field service, and employee health and safety.

Externally, ZTE is fully supporting operators to construct and secure 5G networks in Wuhan, Huanggang, Chengdu and other cities, building 5G communication bridges for life-saving treatment.

Internally, to protect the health and safety of employees, ZTE has established emergency measures for prevention and control, and is promoting them in an orderly manner. These measures are supporting employees in epidemic areas, guaranteeing emergency materials, extending the Spring Festival holidays, reducing employee mobility at home and abroad, enhancing work area hygiene, and etc.

ZTE has issued Emergency Preparedness Guide about the new coronavirus pneumonia to all employees, and has distributed masks to employees in Wuhan for free. In the meantime, all employees are required to check in their health status on a daily basis through icenter, one of the company’s in-house platforms.

ZTE has extended the Spring Festival holiday in accordance with Chinese government regulations, while strictly abiding by the requirements of local governments for the date of resumption of work, and has made guidelines for employees to resume work.

If the employees are in Hubei Province, they should continue to stay there for the relevant requirements of the local government. Based on the actual situation, and on the premise of ensuring the health and safety of employees, ZTE will reasonably arrange employees to work or work from home, and will not arrange overseas trips during this special period any more.

Employees who work in other cities in China and can work normally are required to wear masks, wash hands frequently, and reduce chances of long-term face-to-face communication with others while being at work in office.

ZTE has sorted out the situation of employees traveling abroad for business, returning to overseas office locations and returning to China, and has issued the procedures and requirements for travel during the emergency period. ZTE will take a two-week observation period before the employees take the business trip to confirm that there is no problem before leaving. All employees are required to wear masks on the way out. When they arrive, the local office will arrange for the airport pick-up. Employees must be self-isolated for health observation in the designated dormitories or hotels for 2 weeks.

ZTE has vigorously strengthened the cleaning of relevant places, including offices, canteens, dormitories, and shuttle buses, and increased the frequency of disinfection for several areas, especially in canteens, conference rooms, elevators, and dormitories to ensure environmental hygiene.

Taking temperature checks of people accessing office buildings, ZTE has set up a temporary rest area for people with abnormal body temperature. At the same time, ZTE has established communication channels with local governments and hospitals to ensure timely support in case of emergencies.

With great commitment to the current epidemic situation, ZTE will fully support operators, promptly responding to the needs of temporary networks construction in various places, and will continue to care for the health of employees and related personnel by making prevention arrangements accordingly. ZTE will undertake the public responsibility to help curb the epidemic as soon as possible.