One Thing Today in Tech

Facebook has rebranded itself as Meta. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees the future of the business being built increasingly around the virtual world of metaverse that the company is investing heavily into. Zuckerberg was widely anticipated to reveal the new name at the company’s annual Connect event. Meta will now be the parent company of businesses that comprise the family of apps including Face...

India   successfully tested its surface-to-surface ballistic missile Agni-5 on Wednesday. According to a statement by the Ministry of Defence, it can strike targets at ranges up to 5,000km with a very high degree of accuracy. The successful test of Agni-5, which can carry nuclear bombs, is in line with India's stated policy to have credible minimum deterrence that underpins the commitment to...

Google’s  parent Alphabet reported strong results for its fiscal third quarter that ended September 30, with better-than-expected ad sales at Google. The company reported revenues for the quarter rose 15 percent in constant currency terms year-on-year to $65.1 billion. Profits rose 68 percent to nearly $19 billion. Google Cloud saw revenues rise to almost $5 billion from $3.45 billion a year...

Greenhouse emissions continue to rise at an alarming rate, hitting new records. The economic slowdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t slow them down, the World Meteorological Organisation warned on Monday as ministers from countries around the world prepare to meet in Scotland for the COP26 climate talks. COP26 is the next annual UN climate change conference. COP stands for ‘Conference of the...

Facebook, which sees India as a vital market, is also a platform used for spreading hate and misinformation in the country, Bloomberg reports, citing a 46-page research note that is part of the documents released by Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager who turned whistleblower. The report — ‘An Indian test user’s descent into a sea of polarizing, nationalist messages’ — shows how li...

Ericsson is one of the world’s biggest telecom equipment makers, already supplying gear to more than half of the world’s telecom operators rolling out 5G networks. The Swedish company has had a presence in India since 1904. Spanning operations and R&D, today it has more employees in India than at home. As India prepares for 5G, the opportunity ahead will unleash tremendous innovation enabled w...

PayPal, is looking to buy Pinterest—a platform that allows people to collect and share content about their interests—as the US payments giant moves to expand into online commerce. PayPal could pay about $70 dollars a share, valuing Pinterest at $39 billion, according to Bloomberg. Facebook is planning to change its name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, and ambition to be s...

Google released its Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro smartphones on Tuesday, which are equipped with some of the AI capabilities that the internet search giant has to offer. Most notably, the new phones have an AI-powered camera system so big that it takes up an entire bar across the width of the phones, jutting out on the back. The phones run on Google’s Tensor processor, a system-on-chip designed by Goog...

India is revising its space industry policies and is also in the process of bringing in new ones to increase private industry participation, K Sivan, chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation and secretary, department of space, said. He was speaking at the inaugural session on ‘Future of space — international participations and collaborations' at the India pavilion in Dubai’s Expo 2020 trade...

China has amped-up its military technology race against the US, demonstrating advanced space capabilities with the test of a new hypersonic missile in August, the Financial Times reports. The missile missed its target by about 24 miles, but the test demonstrated China had made “astounding progress” on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realised, according to the report....

IBM has announced a suite of environmental intelligence software that uses AI to help organisations prepare for and respond to weather and climate risks, the company said in a press release. Apple’s next hardware event is set for October 18, 2021, according to invites it sent out on Tuesday. In our tech conversation, we ask Fred Rafilson—chief I/O psychologist at Talview—what Indian startups can d...

OneWeb, a satellite communications company backed by India’s Bharti Airtel, has partnered with NewSpace India—the commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organisation—to use ISRO’s PSLV rockets and the heavier GSLV-MkIII launch vehicles to place its satellites in space in 2022. VC firm 100x. VC is calling on women founders to pitch for funding. In our tech conversation, we speak to Tapan Barma...

Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest software services company, kicked off the fiscal second quarter earnings season on Friday. It reported revenues of $6.33 billion for the three months ended September 30. Revenues grew 15.5 percent over the same period one year ago, in constant currency, the company said in a press release after the close of Mumbai trading on Friday. Profits rose 14 percen...

According to a report by India’s ministry of education—called Initiatives by the School Education Sector in 2020-21—large sections of school-going children in seven large states don’t have access to digital devices, the Indian Express reports. These states are Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttarakhand. Google Ads team has announced that advertisers, publishe...

CoinSwitch Kuber, a crypto exchange startup in India, has surged in privately-held value to $1.91 billion after it raised $260 million in series C funding from marquee US VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. The funding mark’s the first investment in an Indian startup for a16z, as the VC firm is popularly known. Telangana is testing an e-voting app. The Mom Project raises $80 million. In our tech conversa...

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, was roundly criticised by US lawmakers on Tuesday at a hearing for employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen. Haugen had gathered evidence from the company's own research on how the social networking giant was harming young people. Notably, US senator Richard Blumenthal said, "Big Tech now faces the Big Tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth", accordin...

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all had major outages for many hours on Monday. On Tuesday, they issued statements that services were coming back online gradually. The first lawsuit blaming a death on a ransomware attack has been filed in the US. Byju's is raising more money. In our tech conversation, we talk to the founders of GalaxEye, about their plans for a low earth orbit constellation of sa...

Jeff Bezos is investing in an Indonesian ecommerce startup, Ula, via his family office Bezos Expeditions, TechCrunch reports. Oyo Hotels and Homes filed its draft prospectus with India's capital markets regulator on Friday aiming to raise Rs 8,430 crore ($1.2 billion) through an initial public offer of shares. Google has abandoned its plan to offer a banking service, Plex, less than a year after l...

Ola Electric, the EV unit of ride-hailing business Ola, has raised over $200 million led by Falcon Edge, Softbank and others, at a valuation of $3 billion, the company said in a press release. Founder Bhavish Aggarwal also tweeted that the money will help Ola Electric accelerate its development of electric motorcycles and four-wheelers. In our tech conversation, Dev Roy—chief innovation and learni...

At its Search On Livestream event, Google showcased some of the features that will roll out in the coming months. One of them is the capability to search visually, allowing for more context-based results that would be more useful. Amazon has launched a home assistant robot called Astro. CredAvenue raised $90 million in series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. In our tech conversation, we tal...

It was about 10 years ago that Shekhar Kirani took a flight from Bangalore to Chennai, and spent the better part of the day talking to a couple of young entrepreneurs before taking an evening flight back. He had been introduced to them by a colleague and the partner at Accel was looking to find out if the VC firm should invest in them. The two entrepreneurs—Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasam...

Instagram's head Adam Mosseri said the Facebook unit will "pause" development of a version of the photo and video sharing app targeted at children, dubbed 'Instagram Kids'. However, Instagram will continue to develop and integrate parental supervision features into the existing app, Mosseri said in a blog post, while also arguing YouTube and TikTok had children's apps. In our tech conversatio...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission today at 11 am via video conferencing. The main components of this platform include a health ID for every citizen that will also work as their health account to which personal health records can be linked and viewed via a mobile app. Healthcare Professionals Registry and a Healthcare Facilities Registries will act as a repos...

Apple users of the lightning connector will likely be the most affected if a proposed rule to make the Type-C USB connector a common charger standard is adopted as a law in Europe. The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, Thursday said it is putting forward legislation to establish a common charging solution for all the relevant devices. That, and in our tech conversati...

Freshworks became perhaps the first Indian-founder-led cloud software venture to publicly list in the US, on September 22, after a successful initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Shares of the company, which listed under the symbol FRSH, were 32 percent higher at $47.55 at the close of normal trading on the exchange. The shares rose to over $49 in after-hours trading. In tech conv...