The Year 2017: A Look at Whats Coming in Asia

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It is somewhat arbitrary and has moved since its first conception in classical antiquity. The division of Eurasia into two continents reflects East-West cultural, linguistic, and ethnic differences, some of which vary on a spectrum rather than with a sharp dividing line. The most commonly accepted boundaries place Asia to the east of the Suez Canal separating it from Africa; and to the east of the Turkish Straits , the Ural Mountains and Ural River , and to the south of the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian and Black Seas , separating it from Europe.

China and India alternated in being the largest economies in the world from 1 to CE. China was a major economic power and attracted many to the east, [7] [8] [9] [10] and for many the legendary wealth and prosperity of the ancient culture of India personified Asia, [11] attracting European commerce, exploration and colonialism. The accidental discovery of a trans-Atlantic route from Europe to America by Columbus while in search for a route to India demonstrates this deep fascination.

The Silk Road became the main East-West trading route in the Asian hinterlands while the Straits of Malacca stood as a major sea route. Asia has exhibited economic dynamism particularly East Asia as well as robust population growth during the 20th century, but overall population growth has since fallen. Given its size and diversity, the concept of Asia—a name dating back to classical antiquity —may actually have more to do with human geography than physical geography. It also has a mix of many different climates ranging from the equatorial south via the hot desert in the Middle East , temperate areas in the east and the continental centre to vast subarctic and polar areas in Siberia.

The border between Asia and Europe was historically defined by European academics. The major geographical theorist of the empire was actually a former Swedish prisoner-of-war, taken at the Battle of Poltava in and assigned to Tobolsk , where he associated with Peter's Siberian official, Vasily Tatishchev , and was allowed freedom to conduct geographical and anthropological studies in preparation for a future book.

In Sweden, five years after Peter's death, in Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published a new atlas proposing the Urals as the border of Asia. The Russians were enthusiastic about the concept, which allowed them to keep their European identity in geography. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg. The latter had suggested the Emba River as the lower boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River prevailed in the midth century. The border between Asia and the region of Oceania is usually placed somewhere in the Malay Archipelago. The Maluku Islands in Indonesia are often considered to lie on the border of southeast Asia, with New Guinea , to the east of the islands, being wholly part of Oceania.

The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had several vastly different geographic meanings since their inception. The chief factor in determining which islands of the Malay Archipelago are Asian has been the location of the colonial possessions of the various empires there not all European. Lewis and Wigen assert, "The narrowing of 'Southeast Asia' to its present boundaries was thus a gradual process.

Geographical Asia is a cultural artifact of European conceptions of the world, beginning with the Ancient Greeks , being imposed onto other cultures, an imprecise concept causing endemic contention about what it means. Asia does not exactly correspond to the cultural borders of its various types of constituents. From the time of Herodotus a minority of geographers have rejected the three-continent system Europe, Africa, Asia on the grounds that there is no substantial physical separation between them.

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Geographically, Asia is the major eastern constituent of the continent of Eurasia with Europe being a northwestern peninsula of the landmass. Asia, Europe and Africa make up a single continuous landmass — Afro-Eurasia except for the Suez Canal — and share a common continental shelf. The idea of a place called "Asia" was originally a concept of Greek civilization , [19] though this might not correspond to the entire continent currently known by that name. The English word comes from Latin literature, where it has the same form, "Asia". Whether "Asia" in other languages comes from Latin of the Roman Empire is much less certain, and the ultimate source of the Latin word is uncertain, though several theories have been published.

One of the first classical writers to use Asia as a name of the whole continent was Pliny. Before Greek poetry, the Aegean Sea area was in a Greek Dark Age , at the beginning of which syllabic writing was lost and alphabetic writing had not begun. Prior to then in the Bronze Age the records of the Assyrian Empire , the Hittite Empire and the various Mycenaean states of Greece mention a region undoubtedly Asia, certainly in Anatolia, including if not identical to Lydia. These records are administrative and do not include poetry.

The Mycenaean states were destroyed about BCE by unknown agents although one school of thought assigns the Dorian invasion to this time.

The burning of the palaces baked clay diurnal administrative records written in a Greek syllabic script called Linear B , deciphered by a number of interested parties, most notably by a young World War II cryptographer, Michael Ventris , subsequently assisted by the scholar, John Chadwick. A major cache discovered by Carl Blegen at the site of ancient Pylos included hundreds of male and female names formed by different methods.

Some of these are of women held in servitude as study of the society implied by the content reveals. They were used in trades, such as cloth-making, and usually came with children. The epithet lawiaiai , "captives", associated with some of them identifies their origin. Some are ethnic names. One in particular, aswiai, identifies "women of Asia".

Chadwick suggests that the names record the locations where these foreign women were purchased. There is a masculine form, aswios. This Aswia appears to have been a remnant of a region known to the Hittites as Assuwa, centered on Lydia, or "Roman Asia". This name, Assuwa , has been suggested as the origin for the name of the continent "Asia".

Reid supports this alternative etymology, noting that the ancient Greek name must have derived from asu , meaning 'east' in Assyrian ereb for Europe meaning 'west'. The Romans named a province Asia , located in western Anatolia in modern-day Turkey. The most likely vehicles were the ancient geographers and historians, such as Herodotus , who were all Greek. Ancient Greek certainly evidences early and rich uses of the name. The first continental use of Asia is attributed to Herodotus about BCE , not because he innovated it, but because his Histories are the earliest surviving prose to describe it in any detail.

He defines it carefully, [25] mentioning the previous geographers whom he had read, but whose works are now missing. Herodotus comments that he is puzzled as to why three women's names were "given to a tract which is in reality one" Europa , Asia , and Libya , referring to Africa , stating that most Greeks assumed that Asia was named after the wife of Prometheus i. Hesione , but that the Lydians say it was named after Asies, son of Cotys, who passed the name on to a tribe at Sardis. In ancient Greek religion, places were under the care of female divinities, parallel to guardian angels.

The poets detailed their doings and generations in allegoric language salted with entertaining stories, which subsequently playwrights transformed into classical Greek drama and became "Greek mythology".

For example, Hesiod mentions the daughters of Tethys and Ocean , among whom are a "holy company", "who with the Lord Apollo and the Rivers have youths in their keeping". Doris, Rhodea, Europa, Asia. For there are three-thousand neat-ankled daughters of Ocean who are dispersed far and wide, and in every place alike serve the earth and the deep waters.

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The history of Asia can be seen as the distinct histories of several peripheral coastal regions: The coastal periphery was home to some of the world's earliest known civilizations, each of them developing around fertile river valleys. These civilizations may well have exchanged technologies and ideas such as mathematics and the wheel. Other innovations, such as writing, seem to have been developed individually in each area.

Cities, states and empires developed in these lowlands. The central steppe region had long been inhabited by horse-mounted nomads who could reach all areas of Asia from the steppes. The earliest postulated expansion out of the steppe is that of the Indo-Europeans , who spread their languages into the Middle East, South Asia, and the borders of China, where the Tocharians resided. The northernmost part of Asia, including much of Siberia , was largely inaccessible to the steppe nomads, owing to the dense forests, climate and tundra. These areas remained very sparsely populated. The center and the peripheries were mostly kept separated by mountains and deserts.

The Caucasus and Himalaya mountains and the Karakum and Gobi deserts formed barriers that the steppe horsemen could cross only with difficulty. While the urban city dwellers were more advanced technologically and socially, in many cases they could do little in a military aspect to defend against the mounted hordes of the steppe. However, the lowlands did not have enough open grasslands to support a large horsebound force; for this and other reasons, the nomads who conquered states in China, India, and the Middle East often found themselves adapting to the local, more affluent societies.

The Islamic Caliphate 's defeats of the Byzantine and Persian empires led to West Asia and southern parts of Central Asia and western parts of South Asia under its control during its conquests of the 7th century. The Mongol Empire conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe. Before the Mongol invasion, Song dynasty reportedly had approximately million citizens; the census which followed the invasion reported roughly 60 million people. The Black Death , one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, is thought to have originated in the arid plains of central Asia, where it then travelled along the Silk Road.

The Russian Empire began to expand into Asia from the 17th century, and would eventually take control of all of Siberia and most of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century. In the 17th century, the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing dynasty. Map of western, southern, and central Asia in [36].

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The map of Asia in , which also included the continent of Australia then known as New Holland. Asia is the largest continent on Earth. Asia is generally defined as comprising the eastern four-fifths of Eurasia. Asia is subdivided into 48 countries, three of them Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey having part of their land in Europe. Asia has extremely diverse climates and geographic features.

Climates range from arctic and subarctic in Siberia to tropical in southern India and Southeast Asia. It is moist across southeast sections, and dry across much of the interior.

Some of the largest daily temperature ranges on Earth occur in western sections of Asia. The monsoon circulation dominates across southern and eastern sections, due to the presence of the Himalayas forcing the formation of a thermal low which draws in moisture during the summer. Southwestern sections of the continent are hot.

Siberia is one of the coldest places in the Northern Hemisphere, and can act as a source of arctic air masses for North America. The most active place on Earth for tropical cyclone activity lies northeast of the Philippines and south of Japan. The Yangtze River in China is the longest river in the continent. The Himalayas between Nepal and China is the tallest mountain range in the world. Tropical rainforests stretch across much of southern Asia and coniferous and deciduous forests lie farther north.

A survey carried out in by global risk analysis farm Maplecroft identified 16 countries that are extremely vulnerable to climate change. Each nation's vulnerability was calculated using 42 socio, economic and environmental indicators, which identified the likely climate change impacts during the next 30 years.

The Asian countries of Bangladesh , India, Vietnam , Thailand, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were among the 16 countries facing extreme risk from climate change. Some shifts are already occurring. For example, in tropical parts of India with a semi-arid climate , the temperature increased by 0.

A study by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics ICRISAT aimed to find science-based, pro-poor approaches and techniques that would enable Asia's agricultural systems to cope with climate change, while benefitting poor and vulnerable farmers.

The study's recommendations ranged from improving the use of climate information in local planning and strengthening weather-based agro-advisory services, to stimulating diversification of rural household incomes and providing incentives to farmers to adopt natural resource conservation measures to enhance forest cover, replenish groundwater and use renewable energy. Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul. Around 68 percent of international firms have office in Hong Kong. The dogs went around enjoying what the area has to offer, taking photos and videos along the way using tail-activated cameras.

Staff can also bring their pets to the office, where they are kept in a designated area for the day. After uploading a photo of a deceased pet, an algorithm sorts through a database to match owners with a shelter dog identical to the one they lost. November saw the opening of the Freedom Cafe in Sanchaung, Burma. Singapore is the first city in Asia, as of October , to introduce the service.

The 5 trends featured here are important, but they represent just a small fraction of the consumer landscape. Clients of our Premium Service have an instant global Trend Department at their fingertips. They have access to our entire Trend Framework, built around the 16 mega-trends that define modern consumerism. A highly sought after speaker, in the past year she has delivered over 55 trend keynotes and innovation workshops across the globe. Acacia's regional trend briefings and expert opinions have also been featured in various publications such as Campaign Asia, Inside Retail, Warc and Mumbrella.

This Trend Briefing has many hands on it. A huge thanks to the team that pulled this together with such positivity and enthusiasm, especially: We're on hand to answer any questions you may have about our products and services. Community Connect with us and fellow trend enthusiasts. Follow us on your preferred social platform. We have been hard at work to identify these five trends that will shape Asian consumerism in , so you can get a head start on your innovation journey ; 1. Catch the Early Bird. This is spelling out the next direction for both online shopping and social connections: One market in particular is offering a window into that future, but the rest of Asia is soon to follow.

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For many, the ability to talk to sellers and buyers can build trust and allay fears about counterfeit goods. Pearl Bro turned buying a mussel into an exciting and competitive shared experience - can you create similar moments of delight? Think about how you can go beyond transactional shopping and allow consumers a real look into relevant local issues and topics - kumquat farming, anyone? See how XL Axiata in Indonesia livestreamed a game show that required real-time viewer participation.

An array of challenges traffic jams! At the same time, tech companies think Gojek, Grab, and WeChat are connecting consumers on the cloud and harnessing massive data on their platforms. Overwhelmed urbanites will welcome brands that leverage connected platforms - their own or via partners - to create innovative data-driven services and solutions for urban living. From shared basketballs, umbrellas, chargers, and fans, dense Asian cities provide the perfect home for access-based services, which give off more data than ownership-based models.

This data is key for creating new civic solutions. As more of these partnerships are formed, consumer expectations on what brands can and must do for their cities will heighten. Can you use your data to deliver solutions that improve the experience not only for your customers, but for everyone? All consumers will come to expect data-driven services that facilitate a more seamless experience! Bringing together entrepreneurs and innovators from across the entire e-commerce value chain.

From storefront creation to digital marketing and from payment to fulfilment. The connected shopper is changing the face of retail. Seamless Retail will enable Asian retailers to adapt, grow and thrive in this brave new world of connected commerce. Take your store into the future with new ideas, exciting innovations and cutting-edge technology. Governments, banks and enterprises alike need to continually invest in the latest ID and security technologies to protect their customers, their employees and their information.

To combat increasingly sophisticated ID fraud and crime, collaboration and interoperability are vital. Seamless Identity explores the latest trends, ideas and solutions in digital ID, authentication and access control. To remain relevant in the future, banks are transforming.

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