Maria Korolov

Maria Korolov is an award-winning tech journalist who covers cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and extended reality. She’s also a science fiction author and the editor and founder of MetaStellar, an online magazine of speculative fiction, and of Hypergrid Business, one of the world’s top virtual reality blogs. Contact her at maria@korolov.com to pitch articles or to hire her as writer, editor, or speaker at your event.

Banking on IT in China

SHANGHAI — In the first 10 months of 2006, Chinese regulators uncovered 776 banking crimes,  including 205 cases involving more than 1 million yuan ($125,000 U.S.). Fraud and other  irregularities at Chinese banks added up to $95.9 billion in 2005, an increase of 31% from 2004,  according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission. In one

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SunGard Buys Chinese Trading Systems Supplier Fudan Kingstar

In a sign that the maturing of the Chinese financial markets is creating new opportunities for Western technology suppliers, SunGard Data Systems of Wayne, Pa. has acquired Shanghai-based Fudan Kingstar Computer Co. SunGard, which did not disclose the purchase price, said Kingstar’s management team would remain in place. The financial technology giant described Kingstar as

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Foreign Broker Ban

From its founding on Dec. 25, 1925 as a spin-off of Osaka Nomura Bank Co., Nomura Securities grew into one of the giants of Japanese capital markets and a player on the global financial stage. But in terms of corporate structure, the firm didn’t change much until 2001, when its holding company, Nomura Holdings, was

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Creative Recruiting

Four years ago, CEO John Cestar took a novel approach to increasing the skill levels at Freeborders, a small outsourcing provider that operates in China. He took a road trip around the U.S., looking for Chinese engineers working in U.S. companies who were interested in returning to China or would soon be compelled to do

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Outsourcing in China

About two years ago, Kevin Miller needed a little help supporting legacy applications and developing new software for large automotive manufacturers. He decided to conduct a Cobol pilot project with Information Technology United Corp., a Beijing-based outsourcer with U.S. offices in Redwood City, Calif. “We’d seen their marketing and qualifications; we just wanted to do

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Back-End Authentication Moves to Forefront

User authentication has been getting a lot of attention lately, what with lingering threats of identity theft, a U.S. regulatory initiative to have banks and other depository institutions raise their level of customer validation technology, and the Securities and Exchange Commission looking closely at how the brokerage industry is handling the issue. The technological solutions

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Seagate Award

U.S.-based hard disk drive maker Seagate Technology International today won the prestigious  Singapore Manufacturing Excellence Award. The award, presented by Singapore’s Economic Development Board in cooperation with McKinsey & Co. and the Singapore-MIT Alliance, considered such factors as product innovation, systems innovation and operational excellence. “Seagate came up tops in all aspects and is indeed,

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Brokers on Hold

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) has said that it will issue no new licenses to brokerages set up as joint ventures with foreign firms until the country’s market reforms are completed. In a Sept. 13 statement, the agency gave no indication of when the ban will be lifted. New branches and subsidiaries of domestic

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Brokers vs. Exchanges

The U.S. pattern of stock-exchange consolidation, which has recently spawned a flurry of new investments by market participants in alternative or smaller trading venues, is repeating itself on two continents. Just as NYSE Group and Nasdaq Stock Market are integrating acquisitions and looking to Europe for expansion while competition is stirring at home, new industry-backed

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