 TOP STORIES YOU MISSED | Featured Stories | | |   | TENCENT TO COMPETE MORE DIRECTLY AGAINST US BIG CLOUD WITH $70B INVESTMENT PLAN Chinese tech giant Tencent unveiled a 5-year, 500 billion yuan ($70 billion) plan to invest in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity, according to Reuters. The move will help diversify Tencent's revenue streams, more than half of which came from online video games (35%) and social networks (23%) in the company's Q1 2020 earnings. Tencent's fintech and business services segment, which encompasses cloud services, made up 25% of revenue that quarter. The company's cloud operations are concentrated in China, where it captured 18% of the cloud infrastructure services spend, a distant second behind Alibaba Cloud, which captured 46%, according to Canalys estimates for Q4 2019. Tencent will increasingly go head-to-head against US-based cloud providers as it looks to capitalize its cloud investments in markets outside of China. Indonesia and India will be crucial to Tencent's ambition to expand its cloud footprint and chip away at the dominance of Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud. | | | |   | VR STARTUP HOPES TO CHALLENGE OCULUS WITHIN SOCIAL DOMAIN VR startup XRSpace, led by the former HTC CEO Peter Chou, intends to challenge Facebook-owned Oculus in offering customers an immersive, virtual social experience. XRSpace is planning for a Q3 2020 launch of the $599 Mova, a 5G-capable VR headset that is lighter than both HTC's Vive Focus and the Oculus Quest, according to Engadget. The Mova is meant to be a portal to the virtual world of Manova, where users will be able to interact in virtual homes, cinemas, classrooms, and beaches. XRSpace is taking aim at Oculus with some of its proprietary social features, but those likely won't be enough to amount to a serious threat. XRSpace purports to support leg tracking in addition to hand tracking — which just launched on the Oculus Quest — allowing for full-body avatars rather than the half-body avatars native to Facebook Horizon, the VR social world for Oculus set to launch this year. But Facebook stands as a formidable presence in the social VR space — the social media giant encourages Oculus users to link their VR and Facebook accounts, tapping into a social network that hosts more than 2.6 billion monthly active users worldwide. | |   | RCS BECOMES STRONGER ALTERNATIVE TO SMS THROUGH T-MOBILE and GOOGLE partnership Both Google and US network operators furthered their attempts to make Rich Communication Services (RCS) the default messaging standard for texting, supplanting the old SMS system. RCS supports many of the features that have become commonplace on over-the-top (OTT) messaging services such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and GroupMe. For instance, unlike SMS, RCS allows for typing indicators, embedded video attachments, and improved group chat functionality. T-Mobile partnered with Google to extend this cross-network RCS compatibility to network operators supporting RCS outside the US. The extension will put RCS on par with popular services like WhatsApp, which offers free international messaging. Google is developing end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging. Supporting the functionality will also help Google address public concerns over its handling of sensitive user information. | |  | Like What You're Reading? Stay on top and subscribe to Connectivity & Tech Briefing for $695 and you'll receive:
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