One Thing Today in Tech

Freshworks will become perhaps the first Indian founder-led cloud software venture to become a publicly listed company in the US, on Wednesday. The company will sell its shares at $36 each—on strong demand — after initially setting a range of $28 to $32 and then raising it $32 to $34. At $36 a share, Freshworks will raise about $1 billion and have a market value of $10 billion. In our tech chat, K...

Pfizer and BioNTech have said that the first test results of their Covid-19 vaccine tested on children, age group of 5 to 11 years, showed the vaccine to be effective. The Covid-19 vaccine was well tolerated, with side effects generally comparable to those observed in participants in the age group of 16 years to 25 years, the companies said in a press release. In our tech conversation today, Naray...

Google has adopted anti-competitive, unfair, and restrictive trade practices in the mobile operating system and related markets in India, the investigative arm of the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has said following an investigation that started in April 2019. That, and SpaceX's first civilian crew returns, and in today’s tech conversation, we speak to Vasanth Kamath, founder and CEO of sm...

Byju’s, an EdTech company and India’s most valuable startup, is acquiring Tynker—a coding platform for children in the US—to accelerate its expansion in America. Tynker’s creative coding platform has been used by over 60 million kids and 100,000 schools in 150 countries. a16z may invest in CoinSwitch. In our tech conversation, Ultraviolette Automotive’s founders give us an update on their electric...

On Wednesday, India’s government announced a relief package and a series of structural reforms for the cash-strapped telecom sector. Union Minister for IT and Communications, Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the cabinet has approved 100 percent Foreign Direct Investment in the telecom sector through automatic route—from 49 percent earlier. In our tech conversation, we talk to Amagi’s co-founder and CEO...

India and Singapore will link their digital payments systems to enable “instant, low-cost fund transfers,” making cross-border transactions between the two countries very convenient. According to the central banks of both countries, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Singapore’s PayNow network will be linked by July 2022. Apple unveiled its iPhone 13 models on Tuesday. In our tech conver...

Change comes from within, and that is what Tata Consultancy Services—one of the world’s biggest IT services providers—has been undergoing, even before Covid-19 struck. In this free-ranging conversation with Forbes India, CEO Gopinathan articulates what it takes to change an organisation that has more than half a million employees—most of them engineers. The aspiration is to set the company on to i...

Messenger RNAs, or mRNAs, that became famous because they can fight Covid-19, as German company BioNTech showed in its vaccine, can fight cancer too, the company has found. BioNTech has just started human tests of a cancer treatment that uses mRNAs, which was found to completely shrink tumours in mice. Apple must allow developers to point to their own payment options, a judge ruled in California....

The Tata Group has been given the go-ahead by India’s Cabinet Committee on Security for a new military transport aircraft that it is making in collaboration with Airbus—marking it the first such military aviation contract given to a private enterprise in India, where the sector is dominated by the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. In tech conversation, we talk to the founders of Sanas.ai on...

Hyundai Group is planning to introduce a new generation hydrogen-based fuel cell system in 2023. It is part of the automaker’s plan to achieve a fuel cell vehicle price point comparable to a battery electric vehicle by 2030. Climeworks, a direct air capture CO2 trap maker is switching on its first large plant on Wednesday. In our tech conversation, we talk to Aneesh Reddy, co-founder and CEO of Ca...

Tata Consultancy Services will soon ask its staff to be based in their “work cities” as India’s biggest IT services company prepares to bring work back to the offices. TCS has vaccinated more than 90 percent of its over half a million employees with at least one shot against Covid-19, Milind Lakkad, the company’s global head of human resources told Forbes India in a recent interview. In our tech c...

While solar power is widely accepted as a clean energy source, and hydroelectric projects have both advantages as clean energy and drawbacks in terms of the impact on the environment around them. According to those in the industry, advances in wind power are making it an increasingly important option. We bring you a conversation with Renjith VK, a wind turbines specialist at GE, and Arvind Bansal,...

Apple is facing an antitrust complaint in India for allegedly abusing its App Store’s dominance by forcing developers to use its proprietary in-app payments system. The allegations are similar to a case Apple is facing in Europe, where regulators are probing the iPhone maker’s imposition of an in-app fee of 30 percent for the distribution of paid digital content, and other restrictions. In our tec...

Amazon’s new CEO Andy Jassy expects to hire 55,000 recruits in corporate and tech roles worldwide in the coming months. Of the new jobs, over 40,000 will be in the US, and the rest in countries including India, Germany and Japan. Apple will allow reader apps—spanning magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music and video—to link their software to external websites for payments. In our tech conversat...

Google and Apple will have to allow alternative payment systems on their app stores in South Korea, which has become the first country to ban the tech giants’ restrictive practice of forcing developers to use their payments systems exclusively and then charging them fees of up to 30 percent. In our tech conversation, Venkat Vallabhaneni at Inflexor Ventures discusses the VC firm’s new deep-tech fo...

China has imposed strong rules to curb gaming addiction among minors in the world’s most populous nation that is also home to some of the world’s biggest tech companies. On Monday, Chinese regulators slashed the time period players under the age of 18 can spend on online games to an hour of gameplay on Fridays, weekends and holidays. In our tech conversation, we discuss how India’s new drone rules...

Girish Mathrubootham never went to one of India’s premier technology schools—the IITs—nor did he attend one of its hallowed business schools—the IIMs. But, he’s just made corporate and tech history in India, with Freshworks, the company he founded more than 10 years ago, becoming the first cloud software venture started by an Indian founder to start an IPO in the US. Freshworks filed its initial r...

Drones will now be much easier to operate in India. The central government has notified new rules that do away with several onerous requirements for those in the sector, paving the way for startups to ramp up the use of drones for everything from delivery of medicines and ecommerce purchases to aerial surveys for agriculture and conservation. In our tech conversation, Abhinav Aggarwal talks about...

Five members of an all-girl robotics team from Afghanistan have arrived in Mexico, along with several media workers, fleeing an uncertain future at home after the recent collapse of the US-backed government and takeover by the Taliban. Infosys is planning a new AI centre in Canada staffing 500. In our tech conversation, Amit Somani talks about Prime Venture’s fourth fund and hunt for a new partner

Google and Apple may no longer be able to charge their lucrative app store fees in South Korea if a plan to ban the practice in the country goes ahead. South Korea—home to Samsung Electronics—could become the first among the world’s major economies to bar Google and Apple from charging software developers commissions on in-app purchases. In our tech conversation, a peek into Zoho’s new Canvas, a n...

India may record an unprecedented 600,000 new infections a day if the country fails to boost the pace of vaccination and avert a third coronavirus wave, according to a new study. The National Institute of Disaster Management—which falls under the interior ministry—predicts a surge in cases as early as October. In our tech conversation, Rahul Chowdhri of Stellaris Venture Partners discusses the VC...

Infosys CEO Salil Parekh has been summoned by India's finance minister to explain why the new income tax portal the IT services giant developed for the country remains glitch-ridden. Infosys had to undertake emergency maintenance over the weekend and the site even went offline until Sunday night. In our tech conversation, Ajay Mandlekar—a researcher at Stanford AI Lab—unpacks 'Robomimic' a new fra...

Amazon has rolled out India’s first celebrity voice feature on Alexa with the country’s best known movie star Amitabh Bachchan. Indian customers can choose to add Bachchan’s voice to their Alexa voice assistant on Echo devices or by pressing the mic icon on the Amazon shopping app (Android only) for an introductory price of Rs 149 for one year. Samsung has signed Alia Bhatt as brand ambassador or...

Amazon has invested in Smallcase Technologies, a Bangalore startup that is making it very easy for people to invest in baskets of stocks and exchange traded funds, which it calls, well, smallcases. Amazon has joined a $40 million investment in Smallcase led by Faering Capital and Premji Invest, IT billionaire Azim Premji’s family office. And today’s conversation is a hark back to chat with Abhinav...

Google has announced its Pixel 5a smartphone with 5G wireless support, for $449. The latest A-series Pixel phone from Google arrives on August 26 in the US and Japan, and includes IP67 water resistance, a bigger battery than the Pixel 5, and a dual camera system. No word on availability in India yet. And in our tech conversation today, Harsh Rajat unpacks his Ethereum Push Notification Service