One Thing Today in Tech

One97 Communications Ltd., which operates the Paytm wallet and payments network, has formed a committee, headed by Meleveetil Damodaran, the former chief of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, the country’s capital markets regulator, to help the company meet compliance requirements.

On Jan. 31, the Reserve Bank of India, ordered the company’s Paytm Payments Bank unit to cease most of its operations after Feb. 29 for various regulatory violations.

The three-member committee includes Mukund Manohar Chitale, a former president of Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), and Ramachandran Rajaraman, a member of the Advisory Board at Central Vigilance Commission.

Meanwhile, India’s parliamentary committee on communications and IT has urged the central government to support the growth of domestic fintech players as alternatives to the duopoly of PhonePe, a unit of Walmart, and Google Pay which accounts for more than 83 percent of India’s digital payments transactions via the unified payments interface, TechCrunch reports.

PhonePe leads, with 46.91 percent of the UPI market share by volume for the period of October to November 2023, the committee notes in its report. Google Pay held a market share of 36.39 percent in the same period.

One thing today

India’s IT services companies will likely benefit as their customers take a hard look at outdated software applications in the age of AI. Many of these applications are being maintained only for the data they hold, the consultancy ISG points out in a recent newsletter.

Enterprises have large volumes of critical data locked in legacy applications, ISG’s Stanton Jones, Sunder Sarangan and Alex Bakker, note in the company’s weekly newsletter, Index Insider, with the tagline what’s important in IT.

AI will be a forcing function for businesses to overcome the reasons that have been preventing them from sunsetting or modernizing these applications, which will serve as an important driver for ADM activity this year, they write.

ISG’s most recent Application Development and Maintenance Buyer Behavior Study showed that about one in every ten enterprise applications has been classified as “end of life.”

Most large enterprises have thousands of applications, so in most cases, this means that hundreds of applications are at the end of their life for any one company, they point out.

And, the primary reason companies continue to support these legacy applications is because of the data they hold.

According to ISG, 10 percent of enterprise applications being at end of life translates to more than 150 applications on average per company. Half of all enterprises ISG surveyed continue to support these applications because of the data stored in them.

ISG, which tracks all IT outsourcing contracts worth $5 million or more, expects enterprises to double the number of AI-enabled applications in their portfolios by the end of 2024.

This means that application optimization will be an important attribute of ADM activity in 2024. Companies will rely on their outsourcing providers for the resources required for these legacy transformation programs as well as their ability to combine cost optimization with modernization, according to the consultancy.

Even in regions like the Asia Pacific, where companies currently lag their North American counterparts in GenAI spending, for example, Infosys, India’s second biggest IT services provider, forecasts a bigger increase than in any other region – 140 percent in the next year.

This translates to an estimated $3.4 billion to be invested across Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, India, and Singapore, according to Infosys’s Generative AI Radar APac Report, released two weeks ago.

The action taken by the powerful banking regulator “is always proportionate to the gravity of the situation,” the bank’s Governor Shaktikanta Das, said in a media briefing, TechCrunch reports.

Amazon Web Services India has started a space accelerator programme that will offer technical, business, and mentorship help to startups focused on space technology, with support from, T-Hub, and Minfy, an AWS systems integrator partner.

This is AWS’s first accelerator program in India focused on startups in the space sector, and follows the MoU it signed with ISRO and IN-SPACe in September last year, to nurture startups in space-tech, and support innovation in the sector.

One thing today

A year after introducing Bard, Google is retiring the name and rebranding its AI products and features under its Gemini brand. It is also launching Ultra 1.0, its most capable large language model yet.

“AI is also now central to two businesses that have grown rapidly in recent years: our Cloud and Workspace services and our popular subscription service Google One, which is just about to cross 100 million subscribers,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, writes in a blog post.

“Gemini is evolving to be more than just the models,” Pichai writes. “It supports an entire ecosystem — from the products that billions of people use every day, to the APIs and platforms helping developers and businesses innovate.”

The largest model Ultra 1.0 is the first to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects — including math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics — to test knowledge and problem-solving abilities.

Gemini is available in 40 languages on the web, and is coming to a new Gemini app on Android and on the Google app on iOS.

The version with Ultra will be called Gemini Advanced, which is more capable at reasoning, following instructions, coding, and creative collaboration.

“In blind evaluations with Google’s third-party raters, Gemini Advanced with Ultra 1.0 is now the most preferred chatbot compared to leading alternatives,” Sissi Hsiao, vice president and general manager for Gemini and Google Assistant, wrote in a blog post.

With the Ultra 1.0 model, Gemini Advanced is more capable at complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, following nuanced instructions and collaborating on creative projects, Hsiao writes. Gemini Advanced allows you to have longer, more detailed conversations, and it also better understands the context from your previous prompts.

Gemini Advanced can be a personal tutor, help with more advanced coding scenarios, or generate fresh content. Gemini Advanced is available today in more than 150 countries and territories in English, as part of a new Google One AI Premium Plan for about $20 a month, with all the existing features of the Google One, including the 2TB of storage. In addition, AI Premium subscribers will soon be able to use Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Slides, and Sheets. And Google is offering a two-month free trial.

“To mitigate issues like unsafe content or bias, we’ve built safety into our products in accordance with our AI Principles,” Hsiao writes in her post.

You can find more details in Google’s updated Gemini Technical Report.

Gemini and Gemini Advanced are being rolled out on smartphones via a new app on Android. And in the Google app on iOS in the coming weeks.

Hyundai Motors is planning to list its Indian unit to raise at least $3 billion in what would be the country's biggest IPO, Reuters reported yesterday, citing two people it didn’t name.

Hyundai, the second-biggest automaker in India with a 15 percent market share, is in early talks with several banks for the fund raising, which would value the Korean automaker’s Indian operations at up to $30 billion, which is more than half its market capitalisation of $42 billion in Seoul, according to Reuters.

As Paytm reels under the Reserve Bank of India’s tough stance over the fintech company’s non-compliance issues, some founders of startups in India have written to Governor Shaktikanta Das and finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, urging them to “review” and “reconsider” the regulatory directive asking Paytm’s payments bank unit to shut its main banking services after February 29, Economic Times reported earlier today.

Policybazaar's Yashish Dahiya, Bharat Matrimony’s Murugavel Janakiraman, Makemytrip’s Rajesh Magow and Ritesh Malik of Innov 8 are among the signatories to the letter. They’ve said the punitive measures against Paytm would have a far-reaching impact on India’s fintech ecosystem, according to ET.

One thing today

Tech companies have already shed about 32,500 jobs in 2024, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts at 5,000 tech companies. Snap, which operates the photo and video sharing app, Snapchat, is the latest internet company to announce job cuts in 2024. The company said in an SEC filing on Feb. 5 it would reduce its headcount by 10 percent worldwide.

Snap expects it will incur charges ranging from $55 million to $75 million, according to its filing, from this latest round of cuts. The company previously laid off 20 percent of its staff and restructured its business lines in August 2022, CNBC notes.

Several other well-known tech companies have reduced their staff strength this year, including Paypal, Microsoft, Zuora, Zoom, and Okta. Indian food delivery unicorn Swiggy, ahead of its IPO plans, recently cut another 400 jobs, TechCrunch reported on Jan. 25.

And India’s top IT services companies entered the year with their collective workforce lower by tens of thousands of employees. Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT company, for example, reduced its workforce by close to 11,500 people in the nine months through December 2023.

Infosys, the second biggest, has reduced its workforce by more than 20,500 staff in the same period.

Tech and IT companies around the world recruited aggressively as the world came out of the Covid pandemic. Since then, the combination of the global economic slowdown and the rise of AI and AI-based automation, has changed the world. Now, even as things are beginning to look up in the world’s biggest tech market, the US, hiring will increasingly reflect investments in AI.

A UK minister on a trade mission last year assured Infosys that he would do what he could to help the company grow in the country, where founder NR Narayana Murthy’s son-in-law Rishi Sunak is prime minister, The Mirror reported.

The paper obtained details of the April 2023 visit of Dominic Johnson, a minister in PM Sunak’s cabinet, using Britain’s freedom of information laws. Sunak has faced intense scrutiny over his wife Akshata Murty’s ownership of close to 1 percent of Infosys. 

Freshworks, a Chennai-to-Silicon Valley software company, will report its fiscal fourth quarter and full year earnings results tomorrow, according to the investor page on the company’s website. The Nasdaq-listed provider of cloud software for customer engagement and IT services management expects to end the year with revenue of about $595 million, a growth of about 20 percent. Analysts will also be watching Freshworks’s net dollar retention, an important SaaS metric, that the company has projected at 105 percent.

One thing today

Apple, on Feb. 2 announced that its Vision Pro AR headsets were available for sale in stores in the US. Apple calls the headset a spatial computer, which works by tracking natural hand gestures and movement of your eyes.

Last year, after Apple unveiled this, I’d spoken with Milind Manoj, an AR expert and founder and CEO of a company called PupilMesh here in Bangalore. I thought a quick recap of the features of the Vision Pro from that conversation might be interesting, so here goes.

The first takeaway was that, like with any other Apple product, there's a lot that’s gone into the design and specs. Especially given that they have a dedicated processor, the R1 chip, that helps to make functions like the display rendering seem like near real time although it's a pass-through headset, is remarkable.

In a pass-through headset, one is not really seeing the world around directly, but through the cameras on the headset, and then being streamed to the display. This is an interesting, and important, question according to Milind, because the user is seeing what the device sees.

Therefore, the question is if you’d be okay with a device controlling what you are actually seeing because you are essentially blocking out one of your senses and relying on cameras – this might be okay or not, depending on what you’re using the device for.

This is the biggest difference versus what are called optical see-through headsets which don’t block off your vision. These kinds of headsets will become increasingly important as the sophistication of AR applications that overlay digital information on top of the real world that we can see and touch and feel increases – think of applications like surgery, for example, where precision is critical and therefore what you’re seeing through the headset has to be accurate.

The original Apple Glass project probably had such ambitions, where one could see through. Apple must surely be continuing to work on that technology, but we don’t know anything about a commercial product.

The second takeaway from my chat with Milind was that unlike other Apple products so far, the Vision Pro still feels a little bit experimental, especially because it has a waist-mounted external battery pack that connects to the headset via a cable.

This is obviously the best trade off that Apple’s engineers could think of with respect to the design and how long people could use the headset at one go, but it does make the Vision Pro a somewhat inelegant gadget in my view – you may be perfectly fine with an outside battery pack.

The headset costs about $3,500 and its success will depend on the applications that developers come up for it. It’s unlikely to be in India any time soon, but Apple will probably show off the headset at its own stores in Mumbai and Delhi – just to pique your curiosity.

Apple’s focus on India is paying off and the company also captured the top position in revenue in a calendar year for the first time, due to strong demand for both its latest iPhone and older models, according to market research provider Counterpoint. Overall, Samsung maintained its lead with the biggest market share, at 18 percent, in the predominantly Android market, and Vivo took the number two spot with 17 percent share.

The conference will focus on India's Strategic Trade Control related to SCOMET and export controls system and international best practices on export of dual-use (meaning industrial and military) goods, software and technologies, according to a government statement circulated by the Press Information Bureau yesterday.

SCOMET stands for Special Chemicals, Organisms, Materials, Equipment and Technologies.

Registrations for the conference have been invited by DGFT through its website. International speakers including the Chair of 1540 Committee of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and the Chair of Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), senior government officials including the Commerce Secretary, Member (Customs) of CBIC, Director General of DGFT, and others would be participating.

DGFT expects that more than 500 industry representatives will attend the conference.

The thematic sessions planned during the day-long conference will focus on various aspects of India’s Strategic Trade Control system, including the legal and regulatory framework, the steps taken to streamline the SCOMET policy and licensing processes, the enforcement mechanism and supply chain compliance programs.

India published its first Scomet list as part of its Foreign Trade Development and Regulation Act of 1992. In 2010, the Act was amended to add a new chapter, including a section that deals with controls on exports of specified goods, services and technologies – giving the central government the power to monitor and amend the list of such goods, services and technologies.

Currently the list includes goods, services and tech under nine categories, ranging from nuclear technologies to aviation and aerospace to electronics to chemicals and biotech.

Japanese media and tech giant Sony Corp. is planning to call off the merger of its Indian unit with Zee Entertainment, more than two years after the deal was announced, over a disagreement on who will lead the $10 billion entity, Reuters reports, citing a Bloomberg News report from Monday that’s behind a paywall.

Sony plans to file a termination notice before the extended Jan. 20 deadline to close the merger, while discussions between Sony and Zee were still ongoing.

Wipro's lawsuit against former chief financial officer Jatin Dalal with respect to a non-compete clause in his employment contract was referred to arbitration by the Bengaluru City Civil Court in a hearing on January 3, Moneycontrol reports.

The court's decision, thereby, allows the admission of a counter petition moved by Dalal, who’s joined Wipro’s larger rival Cognizant Technology Solutions, according to Moneycontrol.

One thing today

In one thing today, VinFast, an electric vehicle manufacturer from Vietnam, plans to invest up to $2 billion, to set up an EV plant in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu, the company said in a press release on Jan. 6, coinciding with the state’s global investor summit.

Vinfast, plans to invest $500 million in the first phase of the Project, spanning five years from the commencement date, later this year.

The India expansion will help VinFast to seize growth opportunities in the world’s most populous nation and rapidly expanding EV market, the company said in the release. This initiative forms a crucial part of VinFast’s strategy to establish a strong presence in vital markets and strengthen its supply chain for global expansion, the company said. 

The integrated EV manufacturing facility is to be set up in Thoothukudi, in Tamil Nadu. It is envisioned as evolving into a first-class electric vehicle production hub in the region, with an annual capacity of up to 150,000 units. Construction of the plant is anticipated to begin in 2024. The project is expected to generate between 3,000 and 3,500 jobs, according to VinFast.

VinFast also expects to set up a nationwide dealership network in India.

The US Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday ordered the grounding and immediate inspection of about 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft worldwide after a mid-flight emergency late Friday involving a plane operated by Alaska Airlines, NPR reports. 

The US aviation regulator announced this order after an Alaska Airlines flight was forced to abruptly land in Portland, Oregon after a door plug blew out in midair, leaving a hole in the aircraft next to two unoccupied seats.

Unicommerce eSolutions Limited, a software provider to ecommerce companies for transaction processing, has filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus with India’s capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board, seeking an IPO.

The proposed listing comprises of an offer for sale aggregating up to about 29.84 million equity shares of face value of Rs. 1. This includes up to 11.46 million shares by Unicommerce’s promoter AceVector Limited (formerly known as Snapdeal Limited), up to about 2.21 million shares by B2 Capital Partners and up to about 16.17 million shares by SB Investment Holdings (UK) Limited.

One thing today

In one thing today, Apple suppliers Tata Electronics and Pegatron, and automaker Hyundai Motors have signed investment pacts worth more than $4.39 billion with the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Reuters reports, citing a statement from the state government at a global investor summit.

Industry analysts estimate India could account for as much as a third of Apple’s iPhone production in the coming years, as the tech giant steps up its efforts to reduce dependence on China. Apple is also looking at India as its next big market, where it has seen quarterly records in sales over the last two years.

Pegatron is setting up a second factory in India, Reuters notes, and the Tata Group, which last year began to assemble iPhones, has also purchased a factory on the outskirts of neighbouring Bengaluru from Wistron, another Apple supplier.

Tata Electronics has committed to investing Rs. 12,080 crore for mobile phone assembly operations, the state government said during the signing of the agreements, according to Reuters.

Taiwan’s Pegatron expects to invest Rs. 1,000 crore to expand production, the government added.

South Korean Auto giant Hyundai Motors plans to invest Rs. 6,180 crore, a part of which will go towards electric vehicle battery and car manufacturing.

Vietnamese EV maker VinFast is setting up its first manufacturing facility in India and expects to invest up to $2 billion in Tamil Nadu, according to Reuters.

The semiconductor giant Qualcomm yesterday, announced what it called a significant expansion in Chennai with a new facility for its design centre, with an investment of about Rs. 177 crore.

The Design Centre is expected to generate jobs for up to 1,600 skilled professionals. It will specialize in wireless connectivity solutions, with a focus on innovations that complement Wi-Fi technologies. It will contribute to Qualcomm's global research and development in 5G cellular technology, Qualcomm said in a press release.

Separately, Tata Power is exploring investments of up to Rs. 70,000 crore in Tamil Nadu over the next several years, including investments in some existing projects, the company’s chief executive officer Praveer Sinha said at a press briefing at the investors meet, Reuters reports.

And JSW Energy has announced plans to invest Rs. 12,000 crore to develop renewable energy projects.

You can find the full list of improvements and updates on Discord’s website. Or you can use the link to the blog post in our show notes.

One area where Discord has faced criticism is with respect to how it dragged its feet on protecting youngsters, according to multiple media reports. The company implemented some limited parental controls since only July this year, when it added an opt-in feature called family center.

This feature requires the consent of your child to set up the family center on both the teen’s app and on the parents’ smartphones. Once done it will provide some high-level information to parents on the teen’s Discord activity.

I would highly recommend reading a post titled A Parent’s Guide to Discord by the Social Media Victims Law Center in the US. The center warns that Discord requires users to be 13 years of age but does not ask for any documentation for proof of age. Like many other internet platforms, Discord can also be used by youngsters to access pornography and even drugs.

And if you are parents to young teens, especially, this might be a good time to find out if they use Discord, talk about it, and agree on using the Family Center feature.

“I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us,” Ek said in a company blogpost.

Venture capital funding for India’s startups sank to the second-lowest level in almost seven years, Moneycontrol reported last week, citing data from Venture Intelligence.

Indian startups recorded $223 million in funding from 35 deals in November, a fall of about 66 percent from $655 million in 52 deals in the previous month. The last time funding was lower than this was in January 2017 at $207 million in 43 deals, according to Moneycontrol.

One thing today

IN-SPACe, or the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre, the nodal agency of India’s Department of Space responsible for commercialization of space tech in private industry, or among Non-Government Entities, has announced a Seed Fund for startups in the areas of Urban Development and Disaster Management by using space technology.

The scheme, launched in collaboration with the National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO will help NGEs that use space technology for societal benefits to “graduate to the next level,” IN-SPACe said in a press release yesterday. 

Selected start-ups will receive seed funding for transforming an original idea into a prototype using space technology, ISRO facility support including Earth Observation data for validation of the concept, mentorship support, and access to data algorithms as transfer of technology from the Department of Space.

“The role of the space sector is crucial to the overall development of the national economy … this scheme is designed to support Indian space startups that aim to develop innovative space products and services that can improve the quality of life for communities in India and around the world,” Pawan Goenka, chairman of IN-SPACe said in the press release.

Under this fund, selected startups can get up to Rs. 1 crore in funding, in addition to mentorship support, training and networking opportunities.  

For urban development, there are several opportunities for startups in areas including urban planning, monitoring and infrastructure management, telecommunication, navigation, broadband connectivity, water resources management, energy efficiency, climate and weather monitoring, disaster risk reduction, public health, and healthcare, In-space noted in the press release.

Similarly, disaster management offers opportunities for startups specializing in the domains including Geographical Information Systems (GIS), early warning and monitoring systems, insurance and risk assessment, communication and navigation systems, climate change monitoring, search and rescue operations, space-borne sensors, and instruments.

Cyclone Michaung pounding Tamil Nadu currently is another reminder that such technology solutions are urgently needed as the effects of climate change worsened in 2023.

The funding scheme details can be downloaded from IN-SPACe’s website, inspace.gov.in and the last date to apply for funding under this scheme is Dec. 20.

Mika, who will be responsible for leading the company’s global marketing and customer experience teams, comes to Freshworks from F5, also a Nasdaq-listed company, where she most recently served as the Executive Vice President and the Chief Marketing and Customer Engagement Officer, according to Freshworks’s press release from Nov. 28.

At F5 she led the company’s data, marketing, digital transformation, and customer experience efforts for products, segments, channels, and geographies. Mika joined the executive team at Freshworks on Nov. 20 and reports to Girish, founder and CEO, and President Dennis Woodside.

“Mika’s combined CMO and CXO roles have given her a unique perspective that has ultimately led to innovative, measurable changes for employees, customers, and prospects,” Woodside said in the press release.

“She has a long-standing track record of leading global and diverse customer experience teams and delivering exceptional go-to-market results at large public technology companies with multi-domain businesses serving customers big and small,” he added.

Before F5, Mika was president at a company called Marketo, which was acquired by Adobe, and then she was a senior VP at Adobe for a bit.

She has previously served as Chief Digital Marketing Officer and CMO of SMB at SAP, and held senior leadership roles, working approximately six year each at Amazon, in the books business, Microsoft, in the Windows and Stores businesses, research at Gartner, and as a manager at Accenture where she started her career in 1994.

Mika has a BCom (Honours) degree in Economics and Marketing from Queen’s University in Canada, according to her LinkedIn profile. The Freshworks press release says she holds a B.A. in Commerce, with a focus on Economics and Marketing.

“My whole career has been spent on transforming go-to-market approaches and customer experiences within global companies to steepen the growth curve,” she says in the press release. I truly believe that bringing the end-to-end customer experience with marketing and customer success teams together at Freshworks will help accelerate growth while keeping our customers at the heart of all we do.”

She also serves on the boards of BlackLine, another Nasdaq-listed cloud software company that specializes in finance and accounting, where she chairs the compensation committee; and the Rainier Valley Food Bank and the United Way of King County.

Yamamoto, by the way, is a well-known Japanese surname. In fact, another Mika Yamamoto was an award-winning Japanese photo and video journalist who died in the line of duty while she was covering the conflict in Syria in 2012.

Perhaps the most well-known Yamamoto was Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral, who is widely believed to have been opposed to war, but when he was overruled, ended up as the decision-maker behind the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which united the Americans in the decision to enter the second world war.

The name Yamamoto, in Japanese, means one who lives in the mountains or one who dwells at the foot of a mountain.

In 2021, a group of 60 companies from the airline, transport and cargo industries promised to ensure that 10 percent of all the jet fuel they used was SAF. And last year, the aviation industry set itself the target of reaching net zero status by 2050.

SAF is made from waste products, and delivers CO2 lifecycle emissions savings of up to 70 percent, whilst performing like the traditional jet fuel it replaces, according to Virgin’s press release.

Today, SAF represents less than 0.1 percent of global jet fuel volumes and fuel standards allow for only 50 percent SAF blend in commercial jet engines.

CNBC notes that other airlines have used SAF on commercial flights, although generally on shorter journeys and in up-to-50 percent blends with regular fuel, which was previously the regulatory limit. Tuesday’s Virgin Atlantic flight was approved by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority earlier this month.

The SAF used on Flight100 is a dual blend comprising 88 percent hydro-processed esters and fatty acids (HEFA), supplied by AirBP and 12 percent synthetic aromatic kerosene, supplied by Virent, a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum Corporation.

The HEFA is made from waste fats while the SAK is made from plant sugars, with the remainder of plant proteins, oil and fibres continuing into the food chain. The kerosene is needed in 100 percent SAF blends to give the fuel the required aromatics for engine function 

In 2022 aviation accounted for 2 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions, having grown faster in recent decades than rail, road or shipping, the International Energy Agency notes in its assessment of the industry.

As international travel demand recovered following the Covid-19 pandemic, aviation emissions in 2022 reached almost 800 million tonnes of CO2, about 80 percent of the pre-pandemic level.

Earlier this year, the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences, published a report assessing a variety of alternative fuels, including biofuels, and found that availability and accessibility are big problems, Mongobay, a US-based non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform, notes in a July report.

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms knowingly employed methods that lured children on to these platforms, The New York Times reported on Nov. 25, citing un-redacted court documents from a federal lawsuit in the US, filed last month by California, Colorado and 31 other states in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Apple contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology will invest more than $1.5 billion in an Indian construction project to fulfill “operational needs,” CNBC reports, citing company filings in Taiwan yesterday.

Tata Consultancy Services has launched its AWS generative AI practice, with an extensive catalog of use-cases for the technology, the company said in a press release yesterday.

One thing today

India’s consumer EV landscape is changing. Startups are emerging offering new products like e-bikes and slow-speed scooters that don’t require users to obtain a driving licence, and new purchase options are also being innovated to reduce the upfront cost of these vehicles to make them more competitive with their petrol burning counterparts.

Yulu Bikes, for example, has started directly selling a consumer version of its low-speed moped Miracle, which it calls Yulu Wynn and which is being manufactured by Bajaj Auto. With a top speed of only 25kmph, one doesn’t need a license to use this scooter on Indian roads. 

Yulu Wynn costs about Rs. 55,000 to buy, and then you will also have to sign up for one of Yulu’s subscription plans to use the scooter. The purchase price doesn’t include the battery or the software, which are included in the subscription plans, and you get access to the company’s Yuma battery swapping network. 

This is similar to how Ather Energy or Tata Nexon users pay to use premium features on those vehicles, Amit Gupta, Yulu’s co-founder and CEO told me recently. And you can find that detailed conversation on Forbes India’s website. 

Kunal Khattar, a prolific VC investor in the EV space, points out that if we find ways to take out the cost of the battery, then that’s practically half the cost of the electric vehicle. So models more like Yulu’s will surely emerge, where a bank might finance the battery and the consumer gets an affordable subscription plan.

Yesterday, TechCrunch reported that EMotorad Ventures, an electric bicycle maker in Pune, has raised $20 million in a Series B round. EMotorad’s electric bicycle models feature self-diagnostics, removable batteries, dual disc brakes, portable chargers, and retractable aluminum frames. 

TechCrunch reports that the company offers a 48-hour resolution of customer complaints. Founded in 2020 by Kunal Gupta, Rajib Gangopadhyay, Aditya Oza and Sumedh Battewar, EMotorad today exports its e-bikes to more than 18 countries through white labeling and selling its own brand in the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, and some Middle Eastern markets.

Of its 14 e-bike models, seven or eight are available in India and the rest are sold overseas, priced between $600 to $1,200 in the US, according to TechCrunch.

Emotorad has raised more than $22.5 million in total funding, from investors including Singapore’s Panthera Growth Partners, Alteria Capital, xto10x Technologies, and Green Frontier Capital.

Economic Times reported yesterday that Gensol will make electric “reverse trikes,” which have two wheels in the front and one in the back, starting February, citing co-founder Anmol Singh Jaggi, who is also the managing director of Gensol, a solar engineering procurement and construction company.

Jaggi expects to soon start production at a factory in Chakan, India’s biggest auto manufacturing hub, with capacity to turn out 30,000 vehicles. So cheaper Blusmart rides may be on offer next year.

The visit by Nelson, a former US senator, “fulfills a commitment through the US and India initiative on critical and emerging technology spearheaded by President Joe Biden,” Nasa said in a press release on Nov. 24.

Nelson was appointed as the 14th Nasa administrator in May 2021. During this visit to India, he is expected visit several locations, including the Bengaluru-based facilities where the NISAR spacecraft, a joint Earth-observing mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), is undergoing testing and integration for launch in 2024.

NISAR is short for NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar. It is the first satellite mission between NASA and ISRO. It is an Earth-observing instrument, the first in the Earth System Observatory, which was announced by NASA last year.

The observatory will be put in space via five satellite missions, including Nisar, which is set for launch next year. The observatory will measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses providing information about biomass, natural hazards, sea level rise, and groundwater, key information to guide efforts related to climate change, hazard mitigation, agriculture, and so on.

Senator Nelson is also expected to meet students to discuss STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and how they can participate in the Artemis program, Nasa’s initiative to return humans to the Moon and make it a launchpad for missions to Mars.

The Nasa chief is also expected to travel to UAE during this trip to participate in the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Over the last few years, India has opened up its space efforts to private industry and startups and established the institutional infrastructure and policies to foster this ecosystem. The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) is tasked with expanding the commercialization of India’s space tech capabilities.

In April, the government also released India’s space policy, to promote a comprehensive approach to the space economy opportunity ahead.

The government’s estimate projects India’s space market to be worth $40 billion in 2030. This could go as high as $100 billion, the consultancy Arthur D. Little says, if investments and efforts in certain focus areas are stepped up.

Meanwhile, OneWeb India, the local subsidiary of low-earth orbit operator Eutelsat OneWeb, said last week, it had become the first company to receive India’s go ahead to launch its commercial satellite broadband services. Bharti Airtel owns about 21 percent of UK-based OneWeb, which was recently merged with Europe’s Eutelsat.

Other multinational companies including billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite broadband business, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s project Kuiper, which are all putting large low earth orbit satellite constellations in space are also expected to offer to their services in India.

And JioSpaceFiber, part of the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, is also in the race to offer its own satellite based internet services in the country soon. 

On the startups front, Indian space tech startups have gone from raising only $35 million in funding between 2010 and 2019, to $28 million in 2020 to $96 million in 2021 and $112 million in 2022, according to Tracxn, a private markets intelligence provider.

This year the sector has attracted $62 million in funding as of August, according to Tracxn. Indian space startups are developing a range of technologies and products, including hyperspectral imaging, 3D-printed rocket engines, satellite propulsion systems and sustainable less toxic rocket fuels.

NVIDIA, which has a near monopoly on computer chips for AI applications, reported its fiscal third-quarter numbers yesterday that beat street expectations. 

The semiconductor company’s Q3 revenues of $18.12 billion is a 206 percent year-on-year jump, reflecting the extent to which big tech companies are ramping up AI investments. Sales to the data centre segment, which accounted for 80 percent of the company’s Q3 revenues, was even more impressive, rising 279 percent.

Sales rose 34 percent sequentially over Q2, and data centre sales, 41 percent. NVIDIA expects this scorching growth to continue. Q4 revenues are expected to touch $20 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, representing a 231 percent increase year on year.

“Our strong growth reflects the broad industry platform transition from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said in the company’s Q3 earnings press release.

“Large language model startups, consumer internet companies and global cloud service providers were the first movers, and the next waves are starting to build,” Huang said.

Nations and regional communications services providers are investing in AI clouds to meet local demand, enterprise software companies are adding AI co-pilots and assistants to their platforms, and enterprises are creating custom AI to automate the world’s largest industries, he said.

“NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, networking, AI foundry services and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software are all growth engines in full throttle. The era of generative AI is taking off,” he said.

Meanwhile, at the very company that made generative AI mainstream with its ChatGPT bot, we await the final word on whether Sam Altman will return to the company he co-founded, or make his rift with the it permanent.

Altman was abruptly fired from the company on Nov. 17 and two days later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Altman was joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research unit.

Microsoft, expecting to welcome any of the 770 OpenAI researchers who leave to join it, is said to be readying workspaces at its LinkedIn office, complete with Macbook laptops, Axios reported earlier today. About 95 percent of OpenAI staff have threatened to leave and follow Altman if the board of OpenAI doesn’t resign, making way for his return.

What’s happened “highlights the growing rift between the proponents of a more measured rollout of the technology, that emphasizes safety guardrails above commercialization and monetization of solutions. This could have deep-reaching implications for the market,” Beatriz Valle, Senior Technology Analyst at the UK based consultancy GlobalData, said in an email yesterday.

The events also shine a light on the legal structure of OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 as a non-profit company and adopted a new structure in 2019, following Microsoft’s involvement, Valle writes.

The company’s founding charter still allowed the four-person board to fire Altman.

OpenAI is controlled by its non-profit board, which has no fiduciary obligations towards stakeholders or investors, she points out.

“This was a very immature board with members who had never built companies, never moved from ideology to commercialization, nor had any pragmatic board experience,” Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research in San Francisco, writes in a blog post.

The board's big worries included ownership of training data, impact of untested models and detection of unwanted bias, Wang writes.

OpenAI's biggest challenge is making the economics work, and Altman’s move to accelerate commercialization was the right thing, he says.

And then, a letter signed by more than 95 percent of the employees at OpenAI called for the resignation of the company's board and Altman’s return, Wired reports.

The employees threatened to quit and join Microsoft if their demands were not met. Among the signatories to the letter are company board member Ilya Sutskever as well as Mira Murati, who briefly served as interim CEO after the departure of Altman.

The letter, addressed to OpenAI’s board of directors, says: “Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI,” ABC News reports, citing a copy of the letter.

“We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman,” the letter reads.

Altman was pushed out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors, which had lost confidence in his ability to lead the company, OpenAI said in a statement on Friday, according to an Associated Press report carried by PBS.

Emmet Shear said yesterday in a post on X that he would hire an independent investigator to look into what led up to Altman’s ouster and write a report within 30 days, according to Associated Press.

He wrote that the reason behind the board removing Altman was not a “specific disagreement on safety.” This could be a reference to the debates around OpenAI’s mission to safely build AI that is “generally smarter than humans,” AP reports.

With billions of dollars in investments from Microsoft and other investors, OpenAI has moved to commercialise its AI technology, chiefly through ChatGPT, which can generate essays and poems and other human-like text.

OpenAI’s board includes Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, AP notes.

Casey Newton, whose tech newsletter Platformer is widely followed, pointed out in his latest letter today that Toner has the power under the company’s charter to halt OpenAI’s efforts to build an artificial general intelligence.

As to what is being seen as something of a coup for Nadella, he didn’t really have a choice, according to one analyst. “If Microsoft lost Altman he could have gone to Amazon, Google, Apple, or a host of other tech companies craving to get the face of AI globally in their doors,” Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, said in a research note, according to AP.

For example, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.com posted on X that “Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity” including unrealised open trade equity to immediately join his company’s AI team.

Among those who may have been targeted are members of parliament including TMC's Mahua Moitra, Shiv Sena (UBT's) Priyanka Chaturvedi, Congress's Pawan Khera and Shashi Tharoor, AAP's Raghav Chadha, and CPIM's Sitaram Yechury, Moneycontrol reports, citing the politicians as saying they have received notifications from Apple stating that their devices were being targeted by state-sponsored attackers.

One thing today

US President Joe Biden yesterday issued an executive order outlining new regulations and safety requirements for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, as the pace at which such technologies are advancing has alarmed governments around the world about the potential for their misuse.

The order, which runs into some 20,000 words, introduces a safety measure by defining a threshold based on computing power for AI models. AI models trained with a computing power of 10^26 floating-point operations, or flops, will be subject to these new rules.

This threshold surpasses the current capabilities of AI models, including GPT-4, but is expected to apply to next-generation models from prominent AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others, Casey Newton, a prominent technology writer who attended the Whitehouse conference at which President Biden announced the new rules yesterday, notes in his newsletter, Platformer.

Companies developing models that meet this criterion must conduct safety tests and share the results with the government before releasing their AI models to the public. This mandate builds on voluntary commitments by 15 major tech companies earlier this year, Newton writes in his letter.

The sweeping executive order addresses various potential harms related to AI technologies and their applications ranging from telecom and wireless networks to energy and cybersecurity. It assigns the US Commerce Department the task of establishing standards for digital watermarks and other authenticity verification methods to combat deepfake content.

It mandates AI developers to assess their models' potential for aiding in the development of bioweapons, and orders agencies to conduct risk assessments related to AI's role in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons.

Newton references an analysis of the executive order by computer scientists Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor and Rishi Bommasani to point out that despite these significant steps, the executive order leaves some important issues unaddressed.

Notably, it lacks specific requirements for transparency in AI development, such as pre-training data, fine-tuning data, the labour involved in annotation, model evaluation, usage, and downstream impacts.

Experts like them argue that transparency is essential for ensuring accountability and preventing potential biases and unintended consequences in AI applications.

The order hasn’t also addressed the current debate surrounding open-source AI development versus proprietary tech. The choice between open-source models, as advocated by Meta and Stability AI, and closed models, like those pursued by OpenAI and Google, has become a contentious issue, Newton writes. 

Prominent scientists, such as Stanford University Professor Andrew Ng, who previously founded Google Brain, have criticised the large tech companies for seeking industry regulation as a way of stifling open-source competition. They argue that while regulation is necessary, open-source AI research fosters innovation and democratizes technology.

India’s department of telecommunications has used facial recognition to disconnect more than 6.4 million illegal phone connections over the last six months, Moneycontrol reports. It detects when a photograph has been used multiple times to procure SIM cards and flags instances where an individual has acquired more than the nine SIM cards allowed per Aaadhaar number under Indian telecom rules, according to Moneycontrol.

Apple yesterday announced the next iteration of its computer processors, the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, chips featuring technologies that the company says deliver dramatically increased performance and make new capabilities possible on the Mac computers.

These are the first personal computer chips built using the 3-nanometer process technology, Apple says. The iPhone maker also released new Macbook Pro laptops with these chips and finally, offered a refresh of the iMac all-in-one desktop computer, which up until now was only available with the M1 chip.

One thing today

In one thing today, for those of you who particularly care about a good audio experience – from music to podcasts to the audio that actually makes video look good – I stumbled upon an opportunity to bring you the gist of an interesting report from Qualcomm.

The smartphone chip giant recently released its latest State of Sound report, and here’s a summary.

One finding is that consumers want to use the same device across all use cases, from listening to music, or gaming, while commuting, and for work. As premium devices expand in capabilities and features, this year’s responses suggest that consumers will be willing to spend more on one device which is optimized for multiple purposes, Qualcomm notes in its report.

The 2023 study, conducted in July, surveyed 7,000 smartphone users, covering the US, UK, Germany, China, India and Japan, and South Korea included for the first time. The report examines the factors that influence audio device purchases and interest in present and future usage scenarios, among consumers in the age group of 18 years to 64 years.

The focus of this year’s research is on how consumer use of wireless audio devices is evolving to include more complex use cases, from traditional uses like music, voice calls and watching video to the use of devices in the workplace, for gaming and hearing enhancement. 

Earbuds and headphones are now considered crucial for activities such as working, commuting, gaming, and exercising, according to the report. Globally, the demand for true wireless earbuds and headphones is growing, with listeners using devices more often daily, and for longer periods of time.

Therefore, comfort in the ear has become the top purchase driver for the first time, according to this report. The typical length of time that people are wearing true wireless earbuds is increasing, across multiple use cases, which is making comfort much more important.

Consumers are also looking for increased device range, particularly around the home. And, there is also increasing demand for more premium sound experiences. For example, 73 percent of the respondents said they make sure that sound quality on their devices gets better with every new purchase, up from 67 percent in 2022.

Demand for good quality audio in music is at an all-time high, with 69 percent of consumers listing lossless audio quality as a likely purchase driver. This shift is paired with a growing interest in premium audio features such as spatial audio, clear voice calls and lower audio latency.

Isro, announced last week the successful test of “In-flight Abort Demonstration of Crew Escape System (CES)” at Mach number 1.2 with the space agency’s newly developed Test Vehicle, followed by Crew Module separation & safe recovery. This is in an important milestone in India’s Gaganyaan human space flight effort.

VC firms are doubling down on AI and deep tech. TechCrunch reports today that these are the prevailing themes in the latest early-stage cohort from Peak XV Partners, formerly Sequoia Capital India, the largest India and Southeast Asia-focused VC fund.

One thing today

Big changes are coming to H1B visa rules, that could have significant impact for India’s $245 billion IT services industry.

In a move aimed at enhancing the H-1B specialty occupation worker program, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in conjunction with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Oct. 20, according to a press release on the department’s website.

The proposed rule intends to streamline eligibility requirements, boost program efficiency, provide more benefits and flexibility for both employers and workers, and reinforce integrity measures.

The H-1B program is pivotal for US employers, allowing them to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations, a classification that mandates highly specialized knowledge and a bachelor's degree or higher in a specific field, the press release notes.

It has also been used extensively by India’s IT services providers such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services to send software engineers and others to work on client sites.

“DHS continues to develop and implement regulations that increase efficiency and improve processes for employers and workers navigating the immigration system,” US Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in the press release.

One of the central changes proposed in the rule is the alteration of the H-1B registration selection process to reduce the potential for misuse and fraud. Currently, the odds of an individual being selected in the lottery system increase with the number of registrations submitted on their behalf.

The new proposal, however, would change this by ensuring that each unique individual is entered into the selection process only once, regardless of the number of registrations submitted for them. This modification aims to enhance the chances of a legitimate registration being selected while minimizing the advantage of submitting multiple registrations for the same beneficiary.

Important provisions of the proposed rule include the following:

Streamlining Eligibility Requirements: The criteria for specialty occupation positions would be revised to reduce confusion and clarify that a position may encompass a range of degrees as long as there is a direct connection between the required degree field(s) and the position's duties.

Improving Program Efficiency: The rule would codify that adjudicators should generally defer to a prior determination when no underlying facts have changed in a new filing.

Providing Greater Benefits and Flexibilities: Certain exemptions to the H-1B cap would be expanded for non-profit entities, governmental research organizations, and beneficiaries not directly employed by qualifying organizations. Additionally, students on an F-1 visa seeking to change their status to H-1B would receive extended flexibilities. The rule would also introduce new eligibility requirements for rising entrepreneurs.

Strengthening Integrity Measures: The rule would prohibit related entities from submitting multiple registrations for the same beneficiary, thus reducing misuse and fraud in the registration process. USCIS' authority to conduct site visits would be codified, and non-compliance with site visits could result in the denial or revocation of a petition.

In Karnataka, at least 10 engineering streams that have had little or no demand for the last few years may be removed from the pool of seats available for students to choose from, Deccan Herald reports today.

In alignment with the ongoing trend of low demand for certain streams, the Karnataka state government’s department of higher education is planning to write to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to discontinue such streams, the paper reports.
These subjects include Aeronautics, Polymer Technology, Environmental Engineering, Construction Technology, Ceramics, and Textiles Engineering.

Deccan Herald reports that 60 colleges in the state have not enrolled more than three students in some courses, with some colleges even seeing only one admission in core streams like Civil Engineering, according to data from the Department of Technical Education.

M C Sudhakar, the state’s minister for higher education, has said that the government is collecting college-wise details about low admissions and streams that had no admissions. And this will be communicated to the AICTE, according to the paper.

The AICTE has extended the deadline for admission to engineering colleges to October 30. And the Karnataka government is in collecting details from private engineering colleges, the paper reports.

Computer Science remains the most popular branch of engineering in Maharashtra with preference for allied new-age technology courses such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning and Cyber Security, The Indian Express reported on Sep. 11, citing data from the Maharashtra Common Entrance Test (CET) Cell.

Some 1,17,000 students already having confirmed their preferences, the paper reports. Of the close to 50,000 seats in computer science and the allied new-age courses, nearly 45,000 have already been filled, the paper reports.

Traditional core engineering branches such as mechanical and civil engineering are running 50 percent vacancies this year, according to the Express.

And allied courses of civil engineering such as Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil and Infrastructural Engineering, Civil Engineering and Planning also recorded very low admissions. Out of a combined intake of 341 seats, only 104 seats have been filled so far.

Consider this. Next year, it will be the 10th anniversary of the launch of the ‘Make in India’ campaign.

And as India looks to step up its efforts in areas ranging from electric vehicle battery cells to ships, planes and space rockets, not to mention bridges, ports and smart cities, perhaps it’s time to figure out how to build the talent pool in the core engineering streams that we’ll need in the coming years.

After losing the IPL streaming rights, which has contributed its loss of some 20 million subscribers, Disney Hotstar set a new world record for concurrent viewers on Saturday when 35 million people logged on to the digital platform to watch the India-Pakistan cricket match in the ICC World Cup.

Apple may announce new iPads tomorrow, 9to5Mac reported over the weekend. The iPad Air, iPad mini and the base model iPad are expected to be refreshed with incremental improvements to their specifications, according to 9to5Mac.

One thing today

Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT services company, has concluded an internal investigation into complaints of jobs-for-bribes with respect to hiring contract workers, the company told the stock exchanges in a statement yesterday. TCS has sacked 16 employees and moved three others, based on the findings of the probe, the company said in its statement.

Many of you will remember an investigative piece by Mint Newspaper from June that brought to light a jobs-for-bribes investigation within Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT services company.

And you’ll remember that a week later, at the company’s annual general meeting of shareholders, Tata Group Chairman N Chandrasekaran confirmed that an investigation was on, based on two whistle blower complaints that had been received in February this year – one pertaining to India and the other in the US.

We learned that this was about certain company executives favouring certain firms that supplied ‘business associates’ in return for bribes, which at that point had not been quantified.

We’d also learnt that the staff involved were from a team called the resource allocation group or the resource management group – dealing with some 1,000 staffing firms that provided business associates in 55 markets.

Yesterday, the company reported that its investigation found 19 employees to be involved. Of those 16 employees have been separated from the company for code of conduct violations, and three have been removed from the Resource Management function. TCS hasn’t provided details about the involvement of the three who remain with the company but have been moved to different roles.

And six vendor entities, their owners and affiliates have been debarred from doing any business with TCS. The company is putting in place additional governance measures including regular rotation of personnel holding key roles in the Resource Management function; better analytics on supplier management; periodic declarations by vendors on compliance to the Tata Code of Conduct and a know-your-supplier process to cover additional declarations, and audits of the company’s vendor management process.

In its statement to the stock exchanges yesterday, TCS said again that there’s been no fraud by or against the company and there is no financial impact, reiterating its first statement on the issue, after the Mint newspaper article on June 23.

According to TCS, what happened was a breach of the company’s code of conduct by certain employees and vendors supplying contractors. No key managerial person of the company has been found to be involved.

It’s been something of a bumpy ride for TCS this year. First, Rajesh Gopinathan, Chandrasekaran’s protégé, abruptly resigned from the post of CEO in March, and then this investigation became public.

TCS will be looking to put this chapter firmly behind it. K Krithivasan, who replaced Gopinathan as CEO, is a company veteran of 30 plus years. Previously he led TCS’s biggest business unit – banking, financial services and insurance.

He may now get a chance to look ahead and focus on growth at a time when the crisis in the Middle East has made the outlook for the sector even more uncertain amid a global economic slowdown, while concerns about a US recession seem to be easing.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said he believes an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that surpasses human intelligence in most areas, will arrive within 10 years, Reuters reports.

Google yesterday released its Pixel 8 phones with a camera feature that uses an on-device algorithm to create a blended image to combine the best visuals from a series of shots – like getting the best look of everyone in a picture, for example.

The new phones will get seven years of software updates, according to Google.

One thing today

Now some of you might remember, earlier this year, Apple made a small announcement about partnering Acumen, a New York headquartered non-profit impact venture capital fund, to support social enterprises in India to improve livelihoods through clean energy innovation.

Apple hasn’t disclosed any financial details, but what we do know is that it is supporting the Energy for Livelihoods Accelerator that Acumen operates. And Acumen, last week, announced the first Indian cohort of startups it will train at this accelerator.

Through this accelerator, Acumen’s experts lead a 12-week programme designed to help social entrepreneurs scale and refine their businesses to more efficiently and effectively help the poor that they were trying to reach, while also sharpening the focus of their efforts towards protecting the environment.

Sustainable energy has the potential, over time, to more than double incomes by saving time, improving yields, and enhancing resilience, according to Acumen.

Electricity access among the poorest 20 percent of households increased from 53 percent to 86 percent in the five-year period between the fourth and fifth rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), the Economic Times reported in January this year. The fifth round of the survey concluded in 2021. And in 19 states and union territories, this proportion was more than 95 percent.

That said, we still have millions of poor in India without access to reliable and affordable energy.

The 15 entrepreneurs in the first cohort are working to change that in agriculture, e-mobility, and hydropower, trying to provide the enabling technologies to improve livelihoods through better use of energy.  

“This cohort represents a diverse mix of innovators working at the intersection of sustainable energy and poverty reduction,” Mahesh Yagnaraman, Acumen’s India Director. “We are excited to support them in partnership with Apple to develop their business models with the ultimate aim of scaling their impact.” 

Acumen will also use the accelerator programme to learn directly from the entrepreneurs to refine its own work, Yagnaraman says.

Let me give you three examples. In a category called business facilitators, Nimisha Tiwari, at LinkITBlueCollar, is building a mobile-first tech-enabled platform providing Electric Vehicle (EV) skills and guaranteed jobs for low-income communities of women and youth.

In the agriculture and allied Sector category, Vanya Environmental Services, is helping small farmers to use satellite data, remote sensing and blockchain, to check carbon levels in their soil, farm sustainably, trap carbon, and generate income from selling carbon credits. 

Under business sector category, Nikky Kumar Jha, at Saptkrishi Scientific Private Limited is offering small-marginal farmers and street-hawkers, his Sabjikothi cart and e-cart models, which are microclimate-based storage solutions. The carts maintain freshness and extend the shelf-life of fruits and vegetables up to 30 days without chemicals, preservatives, or refrigerants. This storage solution requires minimal wattage, has battery backup, and can be solar powered.

Users in India can add items to their cart and send a payment using the method of their choice from all supported UPI apps, debit and credit cards, WhatsApp said in a blog post. The Meta Platforms company has partnered India’s Razorpay and PayU to provide these services.

One thing today

Now, as many of you know, Infosys has made several announcements this year around its AI investments, including the launch of Infosys Topaz, a comprehensive suite of services, solutions and platforms around generative AI.

Yesterday, Infosys and NVIDIA said that they are expanding the scope of an existing partnership under which the Indian IT services company helps its customers deploy the semiconductor giant’s AI chips and technologies.

The expanded partnership will see the two companies work on building generative AI solutions for global customers, according to an Infosys press release.

The broadened alliance will bring the NVIDIA AI Enterprise ecosystem of models, tools, runtimes and GPU systems to Infosys Topaz. Through the integration, Infosys will create solutions customers can adopt, to easily integrate generative AI into their businesses, according to the press release.

Infosys also plans to set up an NVIDIA Centre of Excellence, where it will train and certify 50,000 of its employees on NVIDIA’s AI technologies as demand for such skills is expected to skyrocket in the coming years.

“Infosys is transforming into an AI-first company,” co-founder and Chairman Nandan Nilekani said in the release. Clients are looking at complex AI use cases to get more business value across their operations, he said.

Infosys Topaz is complementary to NVIDIA’s core stack, Nilekani said. Combining the IT services company’s strengths, training 50,000 professionals on NVIDIA’s AI technologies, Infosys aims to create end-to-end industry-leading AI solutions for its customers, he said.

“Generative AI will drive the next wave of enterprise productivity gains,” Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, NVIDIA, said in the press release. Huang was in India recently, meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and high-ranking Indian officials.

He announced a slew of investments, including partnerships with India’s Tata Group and Reliance Industries, spanning data centres that will use NVIDIA’s chips to a collaboration on India-specific large language models.

“The NVIDIA AI Enterprise ecosystem is ramping quickly to provide the platform for generative AI. Together, NVIDIA and Infosys will create an expert workforce to help businesses use this platform to build custom applications and solutions,” Huang said in the press release.

Infosys uses the full-stack NVIDIA generative AI platform, including hardware and enterprise-grade software in its own business operations, and it is helping customers create generative AI applications for business operations, sales and marketing.

With NVIDIA AI Enterprise frameworks, pre-trained models and toolkits — including the NVIDIA NeMo LLM framework, NVIDIA Metropolis for computer vision and NVIDIA Riva for speech AI — Infosys has already developed some solutions.

Or take the iPhone 15 Pro models, which have titanium bodies, making them tougher and lighter. I’ll do a deep dive into this in the coming days, and you can of course just check out all the new features on Apple’s website. Oh and the switch to USB-C happened.

What caught my imagination, however, was the iPhone maker’s progress towards its 2030 goal of being carbon neutral across its supply chain.

And yesterday, Apple provided updates on several fronts on its progress – from increased use of recycled materials across its products to energy and water use in its operations to more supply chain partners committing to making their own operations carbon neutral, to the end results – products that don’t leave a carbon footprint or whose carbon footprints are offset by the company’s overall efforts.

For the Apple Watch Series Nine, the aluminium used in the watch cases is 100 percent recycled. The company is also increasing the proportion of recycled metals including gold, tin, copper, tungsten and other materials.

And for the first time, there is 100 percent recycled cobalt in the battery. Apple has also redesigned one of its most popular watch bands, the Sport Loop, to use more recycled materials. It is now made with 82 percent recycled yarn.

Starting this year, all Apple Watch manufacturing is powered by 100 percent clean electricity. For Series Nine, Apple will match 100 percent of your expected electricity use by investing in renewable energy projects around the world.

To cut emissions from transportation, Apple has redesigned Series 9 packaging to be 100 percent fibre based and more compact. It has a new, smaller shape that lets Apple ship up to 25 percent more watches per trip. And more of those trips will be made with low carbon shipping modes like Ocean freight, which emits one 20th of shipping by air.

Overall, these efforts reduced the carbon footprint on the Apple Watch by 78 percent. The rest is being offset by high quality credits from projects like forests and wetlands that actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. This last step brings the net carbon footprint of Apple Watch Series Nine down to zero, making it Apple’s first ever carbon neutral product.

The iPhone 15, overall, is one of the most durable smartphones that will the market next week. Apple is also making these phone incrementally more repair friendly, allowing people to use them for longer. And as we know, Apple’s software updates support its products for several years.

The iPhone’s enclosure uses 75 percent recycled aluminium for the first time, 100 percent recycled cobalt in the battery and 100 percent recycled copper foil in the main logic board and MagSafe charger.

The entire aluminium substructure is made with 100 percent recycled aluminium, a first for the iPhone.

The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max now use 100 percent recycled gold in the USB‑C connector as well as the gold plating and tin soldering in multiple printed circuit boards. Both models meet Apple’s high standards for energy efficiency and are free of mercury, PVC, and beryllium.

One last point. For the first time, Apple is releasing the iPhones in India at the same time as in the US, starting this Friday, Sep. 15, 5:30 p.m. local time in India. Pricing starts at Rs 1,34,900 for the 128GB version of the iPhone 15 Pro, and Rs. 1,59,900 for the iPhone 15 Pro Max 256GB version.

Apple’s iPhone 15 event, the Wonderlust, is to be held later today, where we might get to see the company’s first smartphone with the standard USB-C charging port. It’s at 10:30 p.m. India time and you can watch the event on Apple’s website.

Tata Consultancy Services is the second Indian IT services company, after Infosys, to join Dassault Systèmes’ Living Heart Project that brings together industry, academia, hospitals and regulators to build ever more accurate digital models of the heart, which will help develop more accurate treatment of heart diseases.

Perfios, which provides a real-time credit-decision platform and data aggregation APIs to financial companies, has raised $229 million in series-D funding from Kedaara Capital, the Bengaluru SaaS company said in a press release yesterday. The new investment is a combination of a primary fund raise and a secondary sale.

One thing today

Global capability centres, as they are now marketed, are offshore centres in India providing work for large multinational parent corporations, mostly in the US, Britain and Western Europe, but also from countries like Korea and Australia.

Many of you interested in India’s tech sector will of course be familiar with some of the history of how Texas Instruments came to Bengaluru, one of the earliest GCCs here – of course the term GCC didn’t even exist back then. Or take the expansion of Robert Bosch’s software and engineering teams in India.

The world’s best-known companies across sectors have such centres in India – from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to GE Aerospace and GE HealthCare and Mercedes Benz to Salesforce and Atlassian. There are close to 1600 GCCs in India, employing about 1.66 million people and accounting for $46 billion in business at the end of FY23, having grown at a CAGR of 11.4 percent from 2015 to 2023, or the year ended March 31, 2023, according to the consultancy Zinnov.

Many of these companies have multiple centres in India – typically in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and the NCR. Zinnov calls these individual centres GCC Units, and there were more than 2,740 GCC Units at the end of FY23.

In the first six months of 2023, 18 new GCCs were added in India including companies like BlackBerry, Truecaller and the Lloyds Banking Group. And several existing GCCs were expanded.

More recently, earlier this month, Zinnov provided a deep dive into two important sectors – Aerospace and Defence, and Automotive.

In Aerospace and Defence, companies that expanded their GCC operations in recent times include Boeing and Bombardier. Other top companies in the sector that have significant presence in India include Lockheed Martin, Rolls Royce, Thales, Collins Aerospace and Airbus.

Their GCCs and workforce are concentrated in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and NCR, which account for 80 percent of their installed talent as Zinnov calls it. Half of these companies are from the US, and 62 percent of their work involves engineering R&D, according to Zinnov.

In the Automotive sector, Daimler Truck, Fisker and Eminox are among the new entrants, and companies with existing GCCs include Ford, BMW, Stellantis, Hyundai and Mercedes Benz. About half of all the auto sector GCCs in India have parent companies coming from the US and Germany.

Pune and Bengaluru have the most GCCs at 52 percent of the units in India. Pune, Bengaluru and Chennai account for 85 percent of the installed GCC talent in the auto sector. And again, engineering R&D accounts for two-thirds of the work being done at these centres.

NVIDIA and Reliance Industries, on Sep. 8, announced a collaboration to develop India’s own foundation large language model trained on the nation’s diverse languages and tailored for generative AI applications to serve the world’s most populous nation, according to a press release from the AI GPU maker.

Apple’s much anticipated iPhone 15 will be unwrapped tomorrow, and it will be nighttime in India. One big change everyone’s expecting is of course the USB-C port that Apple’s been forced to switch to, after the European Union mandated it for most electronics gadgets by next year.

One thing today

So last week, Freshworks organized its first investor day, on Sep. 7. Of course, the company has been providing quarterly updates and holding conference calls with analysts and so on since it was listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange two years ago. But this was a bona fide investor-focused meet where the company provided some granular data on how it’s doing and where it’s headed.

The one takeaway for me, and probably for many others, was that the company’s Freshservice product is growing more than twice as fast as the company’s overall growth rate, and not on a very small base either.

As many of you know Freshworks was founded in 2010. It has headquartered in San Mateo, California, and CEO Girish Mathrubootham told analysts and investors that 85 percent of the company’s 5,000 or so employees are in India. Mostly in Chennai, but also in Hyderabad, Bengaluru and elsewhere.

The company has over 65,000 customers and 19,000 of those pay the SaaS vendor $5,000 or more every year in subscription fees of its software. Among its customers are Coca Cola, Honda, Sotheby’s, Thomas Cook, Klarna, African Bank, PhonePe and Mahindra Group.

This year, as Freshworks pushes to become profitable, it’s delivering 10 percent free cash flow margins, Mathrubootham said.

Freshworks started with a customer support software, Freshdesk, and today the overall customer support software business is at about $300 million ARR, and growing in the low to mid-teens percent annually, Mathrubootham said. But it’s Freshservice, the IT service management software and related products, that’s emerged as the most promising component of the company’s product portfolio.

“Today, that's our fastest growing product with north of $250 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue),” Mathrubootham said. An important reason could be that, especially post Covid, large businesses have been overhauling their IT, moving to the cloud and looking for ways to reduce the complexity of managing a hoard of the technology solutions, including multiple software subscriptions.

Freshservice clocked $260 million in ARR as at the end of the June quarter, which is Freshworks’s fiscal Q2. It was growing at more than 40 percent at the time, compared with the company’s overall growth rate of about 20 percent. The business has a total addressable market of some $20 billion, growing at 12 percent, according to market researcher and consultancy Gartner, including the areas of IT Service Management, IT Asset Management & Software Asset Management, IT Infrastructure Monitoring, AIOps, Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms.

In this segment, “our customer is the CIO, or a senior IT leader, and we have a lot of traction in mid-market and in enterprise,” Freshworks’s president Dennis Woodside said. The company has some 8,500 customers paying more than $5,000 in annual Freshservice subscription fees, he said.

In the coming months and quarters, Freshworks will launch more features to capture adjacent opportunities, Dennis said, with industry specific solutions, such as government agencies, security, operations, governance, risk and compliance.

HeromotoCorp will invest up to Rs. 550 crore in a rights issue of Ather Energy Private Limited, the Indian two-wheeler giant told stock exchanges on Sep. 4 in a statement.

Atomicwork, a cloud software provider of productivity software, has raised $11 million in seed funding led by Blume Ventures and Matrix Partners, TechCrunch reports.

Richard Lobo, an executive vice president and former head of human resources at Infosys, has resigned, marking the latest in a series of top-level exits at the company, Moneycontrol reports.

One thing today

Zoho, India’s biggest cloud software company, has surpassed 100 million, the Chennai-to-California company said in a press release. Zoho says it is the first bootstrapped SaaS company to reach this milestone. Last year the company hit $1 billion in revenues, and Zoho is one of a handful of SaaS companies in India that are profitable.

Started more than 25 years ago, the company’s growth over the last 15 years, with the rise of the cloud computing model, has taken it from 1 million users in 2008 to 100 million today. The latest 50 million users were added within the past five years. And the company sells more than 55 products to over 700,000 businesses in some 150 countries, according to its press release.

“We are not done yet,” co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu said in the release. The company has an innovation pipeline covering the next 10 years and it is investing in deep technologies to serve billions of users around the world, he said.

Zoho defines midmarket customers as companies with 250 employees each and those with a thousand or more workers as classic enterprise, or the upmarket segment. India shows a significant presence of enterprise customers adopting Zoho, CMO Praval Singh had said in an interview with Forbes India in June this year.

In the SaaS business, larger customers mean more users and increased complexity, resulting in higher revenue per customer. The upmarket segment contributes over half of Zoho’s business in India, and a third of its entire business.

As its products matured, larger businesses adopted its solutions. This led Zoho to establish dedicated teams with expertise in serving large companies. “We also developed an interoperable ecosystem, enabling easy integration with third-party applications through APIs, connectors, and partnerships,” Praval said in that interview.

To cater to larger enterprises, the company launched the Zoho Marketplace, which has more than 1,800 extensions and garners 30,000 monthly installations. In 2018, Zoho introduced an enterprise business solutions team as trusted partners, offering assistance in digital transformation projects, from consulting to implementation and training.

Zoho has focused on helping large enterprises streamline and optimise their technology stacks, addressing challenges such as integration, data silos, scalability, and flexibility. By helping customers overcome these obstacles, Zoho has played a meaningful role in supporting their growth and progress over the years, Praval says.

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for Zoho, where the company has witnessed three year compounded annual growth of 65 percent in its upmarket segment. Customers in India include IIFL, Bigbasket and Tata Play Fiber.

Zoho's upmarket growth in India is led by sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, retail, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharmaceuticals, and IT. The company has collaborated with government departments and public sector units (PSUs) to support their digitalisation efforts and contribute to the modernisation of the public sector.

Telecom operators in India want internet companies to compensate them for using their telecom networks, a recommendation they’ve made to the local regulatory body, echoing a viewpoint that is gaining some momentum in other parts of the world, TechCrunch reports.

Pentathlon Ventures, an early-stage B2B SaaS-focused venture capital firm, has announced the launch of its second fund with a target corpus of Rs 450 Crore. The fund aims to invest in 25 B2B SaaS start-ups, the VC firm said in a press release.

One thing today

Now, after all the problems BYJU’s has faced, it might not surprise you that India’s edtech startups haven’t done very well this year, by way of funding, even though they were among the top three most funded geographies in this space, worldwide, in the first seven months or so of 2023, according to Tracxn, a leading provider of private markets intelligence in India.

India’s ed-tech startups sector has experienced a declining trend in funding, similar to its global counterparts, according to Tracxn’s latest Feed-Geo report on the ed-tech startups landscape in India.

Most of the funding into Indian ed-tech startups in 2023 so far was secured in the second quarter of the calendar year. Companies raised funding worth $713 million in Q2 2023, accounting for 73.43 percent of the total funding raised this year. This is also an increase of 37 percent compared with the same period last year. 

That said, total funding into the Indian ed-tech space plunged 48 percent to $971 million in 2023 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 7, the period for which Tracxn has compiled data for its report. edtech startups had raised $1.87 billion in the same period in 2022.

The 2023 YTD funding is also 50 percent lower than the money the sector raised in the same period in 2021, according to Tracxn. The number of funding rounds in 2023 fell 77 percent and 82 percent compared with the same periods in 2022 and 2021 respectively.

Late-stage investments worth $879 million have been recorded in 2023 so far, contributing to more than 90 percent of the total funding, which is also a drop of 23 percent compared with $1.14 billion raised in the same period in 2022 and a drop of 39 percent from $1.44 billion raised in the same period in 2021.

Early-stage investments worth $75.7 million were recorded in 2023 YTD, an 88 percent drop from $618 million raised in the same period last year and an 82 percent drop compared with $414 million raised in the same period in 2021.

Edtech startups raised $15.7 million through seed-stage rounds in 2023 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 7, a drop of 85 percent from $105 million raised in the same period in 2022 and an 83 percent drop from the same period in 2021.

No new Unicorns have so far emerged in this sector this year, as against two in the same period last year. 2023 saw seven acquisitions, a 70 percent decline compared with 23 acquisitions in the same period in 2022 and 19 acquisitions in the same period in 2021.

Among Indian cities, Bengaluru, far and away, takes the lead in terms of total funds raised till date, followed by Mumbai and Gurgaon. edtech startups in Bangalore have raised a total of over $8 billion as of Aug. 7, 2023, followed by Mumbai ($2.5 billion) and Gurgaon ($497 million).

In the last two years, We Founder Circle, Peak XV Partners, formerly Sequoia India, and MMPL Trust, were the most active investors in this space. We Founder Circle, IPV, and LetsVenture were the top seed investors, while Peak XV Partners, Better Capital, and AngelList were the top early-stage investors. MMPL Trust, WestBridge Capital, and The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative were the top late-stage investors.

India’s Aditya-L1 satellite, our first space-based solar observatory, was launched successfully on Sep. 2 at 11:50 a.m. local time, Isro said in an update.

Microsoft is ending WordPad, the basic word processor that’s been included with Windows since 1995, Thurrot reported over the weekend, citing a support page from the Windows maker.

Infosys has completed the acquisition of Denmark’s Danske Bank’s 1,400-person IT centre in India, the Bengaluru IT services company said in a press release on Sep. 1.

One thing today

There are optimistic projections about how India’s SaaS companies will become a $50 billion sector by 2030 and so on. But what are some of the obstacles they will have to overcome. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Arun Raghavan, founding partner at Arali Ventures in Bengaluru, and this was one of the topics we discussed for a bit.

Here are some quick takeaways from Arun’s experience, which includes successfully backing multiple SaaS startups very early on in their journey and even some good exits.

1. The go-to-market playbook is heftier than five years ago. So how does one create a sales engine that can have people sit in India and develop relationships with enterprise customers in the US and Europe. You can only do that to a limited extent if you’re only trying from India. And if you really want to go after large customers, you need feet on street. More companies doing this much better today, but there’s ways to go.

2. How do you scale a company sitting in India to become a $100 million dollar business, especially if you're selling into the US? This is work in progress. Typically, a company that starts in the US, which gets good talent, is off to the races, but the pool of people who have the experience of playing the cross-border game is still limited. The numbers are big in tech services, but not yet in the products startup ecosystem.

3. You may disagree, but the real cutting-edge stuff is still mostly coming from Silicon Valley or Israel and such hubs. That proportion is still 80-90 percent, Arun says. Of course, there are very interesting companies coming out of India, but it's not widespread yet.

Can a startup find a critical mass of generative AI experts quickly in India, for example? Not really, says Arun. And the more deeper tech players from India, more often than not, while they may have centres in India, they will also tap talent in Eastern Europe, for example, or Israel or the US or all of the above.

4. We need to go way deeper than the application layer. Traditionally, we’ve been great at application software. We’ve got a $200 billion tech services industry to show for it. But anything that's at a more infrastructure level, or tooling level is something that we don't have a lot of experience in, Arun says.

He expects these are areas where we will develop some knowhow over the next four or five years. Why is this important? Well, the infra players are relevant to customers around the world. For example, can we think of a Snowflake emerging from India in the next ten years, asks Arun? Or a Databricks?

5. The money is there now. To end on a more optimistic note, funding isn’t a challenge anymore, Arun says, the current slowdown notwithstanding. Over the last five years, large investors from the US have taken note of the potential for software product companies to come out of India and they have been investing in this ecosystem. This will only increase.

India's first indigenously developed nuclear power plant unit has started operations at full capacity, Business Today reports. The plant, in Kakrapar, Gujarat, had two existing 200 MWe units. This third unit, and a fourth one that is expected to go online in March 2024, are India's first pair of indigenously designed Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors of 700 MW size with enhanced safety features, according to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India.

Elon Musk said yesterday that video and audio calls will be coming to X, formerly Twitter. The features will work on iOS, Android, Mac and PC, Musk wrote in a post on the microblogging site. No phone number is needed because X is effectively a global address book, he added.

Google has announced Oct. 4 as the date for its annual Pixel hardware event, 9To5Google reports. Like last year, the event is taking place in New York City. The “Made by Google” event and keynote will be at 10 am ET. You can catch the livestream on YouTube and the Google Store website. Two of the devices expected are the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, according to 9To5Google.

IBM last month signed a $69.8 million (£54.7 million) contract with the British government to develop a national biometrics platform that will offer a facial recognition function to immigration and law enforcement officials, The Verge reports, citing documents reviewed by it and Liberty Investigates, an investigative journalism organisation in the UK. Some human rights activists have now accused IBM CEO Arvind Krishna of reneging on a promise he made three years ago to not build general purpose facial recognition technology for surveillance. IBM says this UK contract, meant to help police track suspects, doesn’t violate that promise, according to The Verge.

One thing today

Now, robot sales fell for the second quarter in a row in the US, the world’s biggest tech market. A slow US economy and high interest rates have taken a toll on robot orders in North America, resulting in a decline for the second quarter in a row after record purchases in 2021 and 2022, the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), said in a press release yesterday.

Companies ordered 7,697 robots valued at $457 million from April to July 2023, a 37 percent decline in robot orders and 20 percent drop in value over the same period in 2022.

When combined with first quarter results, the robotics market in North America is down 29 percent compared to the first half of last year with a total of 16,865 robots ordered. This drop comes after a record 2022, where North American companies ordered 44,196 robots, up 11 percent over 2021, the previous record.

The ongoing labour shortage in the US, especially in manufacturing (down another 2000 jobs in July, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics) remains a key driver of automation. An increasing trend towards reshoring tasks back to the US is another factor.

Non-automotive customers ordered more robots in the second quarter of 2023 than automotive customers, with 52 percent of units going to non-automotive industries and 48 percent going to automotive OEMs and component suppliers.

Both categories were down compared to the second quarter of last year, however, with non-automotive orders down 21 percent and automotive orders down 49 percent. The strongest demand in Q2 came from the semiconductor and electronics industries, followed by life sciences/pharma and biomedical, plastics and rubber and metals, with automotive components, food and consumer goods and automotive OEMs showing the biggest drops.

Google is expanding its generative AI search experience to markets outside the US, starting with India and Japan, TechCrunch reports. The new AI-powered search feature, also known as SGE (Search Generative Experience), will be available through Google’s Search Labs.

Meanwhile, Chinese tech giant Baidu said that its ChatGPT-like Ernie bot was now open to the public at large, signalling a green light from Beijing, and another indication of a more relaxed policy stance on artificial intelligence, CNBC reports.

In some cheer for the SaaS sector, Salesforce, cloud software bellwether, yesterday announced quarterly results and guidance that beat Wall Street’s expectations, CNBC reports. As many of you might remember, India’s Freshworks beat expectations with its June quarter earnings results on Aug. 2.

One thing today

Now, speaking of India’s tech talent, that workforce is making it a destination for the next wave of foreign companies looking to establish centres for R&D, software development and engineering. And there is an opportunity to expand the ecosystem to tier-2 cities, Nasscom, the country’s biggest tech lobby, and accounting consultancy firm Deloitte, say in a new report.

The report examines talent, infrastructure, risk and regulatory environment, start-up ecosystem, and social and living environment, which are vital for establishing a flourishing technological landscape.

And it spolights the potential of 26 cities in the country – from Chandigarh to Indore to Mysuru and Vishakapatnam – which could become an integrated part of India’s tech ecosystem, Nasscom and Deloitte said in a press release on Aug. 29. Helped by rapid infrastructure growth, diverse skills, burgeoning start-ups, and governmental initiatives, these emerging hubs are gearing to achieve tier-1 status, according to the press release.

“While big cities were the focus in the past, the post-pandemic era witnesses a remarkable decentralisation of work across the nation,” Sumeet Salwan, a partner at Deloitte India, said the press release. 

Today, about 60 percent of India’s graduates in engineering, arts, and science come from smaller towns and 30 percent of total graduates relocate to tier-1 cities seeking employment, he said.

The 26 promising locations identified in the report have the potential to become the epicentre of innovation and growth, according to the report. This trend is supported by a workforce skilled in cutting-edge digital technologies, with about 800,000 individuals located in these emerging hubs. And these cities are seeing strong additions to the number of people skilled in digital technologies.

These locations currently account for 10-15 percent of India’s tech talent. They provide promising growth potential when supported by the governments’ commitment to world-class infrastructure, Salwan says. Take the “if you build it, they will come” approach, he says.

Startups in these locations grew 50 percent from 2014-2018, with expectations of 2.2X growth by 2025, according to the report.

These tier-2 locations also offer a cost advantage, including a 25-30 percent lower cost of talent and a 50 percent lower cost of real estate rentals compared with the large cities. So far, some 140 global capability centres have found a home in these locations, highlighting the growing interest of foreign companies in these emerging hubs, according to the report.

“As companies worldwide revisit ways of working with an eye on optimising outcomes, costs, and talent, alternative tech hubs are becoming essential” Sukanya Roy, head, GCC and BPM, at Nasscom, says in the release.

About 39 percent of the country’s 7,000 or so startups operate in emerging hubs spanning industries from Deep Tech to Business Process Management (BPM), according to the report.

Toyota will restart operations at its assembly plants in Japan today, after a software glitch in its production systems brought domestic output to a halt, Reuters reports.

WhatsApp has updated its desktop app for Apple’s Mac computers featuring group calls, connecting with up to eight people on video calls and up to 32 people on audio calls.

India’s next space mission, Aditya-L1, the country’s first space-based solar observatory, is set to launch on Sep. 2, Isro said in a tweet yesterday. The satellite will be launched on Isro’s PSLV-C57 rocket.

One thing today

Apple yesterday announced Sep. 12 as the date for its annual press event, where usually the company launches its next iPhones, tagging invites with a made-up word ‘Wonderlust.’ The event will be held Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, and it is widely expected that the iPhone 15 series and new Apple Watch models will be launched.

The event will be streamed on Apple’s website at 1 p.m. ET in the US, which would be 10:30 p.m. in India. CNBC notes that Apple has used pre-recorded videos to launch its iPhones since 2020.

First among the big changes and upgrades expected in the new iPhone models is the USB-C charging port, after the European Union passed a landmark law in October last year requiring all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU to use this standard port for wired charging, by the end of 2024.

Other recent leaks about the new iPhones include titanium bodies, which would make the phones lighter, and a sharper periscopic camera.

Apple will be making fewer iPhone 15 smartphones at launch, due to some supply chain issues, 9to5Mac reported earlier this week, citing an industry analyst.

In India, the year 2023 marked a milestone for Apple, with the opening of its first physical retail stores – in Mumbai and Delhi. These stores exceeded initial expectations, CEO Tim Cook had said on Aug. 3, with another quarterly record.

As many of you know, Apple’s been stepping up local assembly in India in recent years and the gap between the launch of a new iPhone in the US and its availability in India is now mere weeks. Foxconn, one of Apple’s biggest contract manufacturers, is said to be preparing to roll out the new iPhone 15 models from its Sriperumbudur factory near Chennai.

India’s premium smartphone segment, defined as phones priced at Rs. 30,000 rupees or higher, now contributes a record 17 percent to its overall shipments, according to data from Counterpoint Technology Market Research as of July 31.

With an 18 percent share, Samsung led India’s smartphone market for the third consecutive quarter. The South Korean electronics giant also led the premium segment with a 34 percent share at the end of the April-June quarter this year, according to Counterpoint.

One last point. While India remains an Android smartphone market, Apple dominates the so-called “ultra-premium” segment, with a 59 percent market share. Counterpoint defines ultra-premium as phones priced at Rs. 45,000 or higher. India is also now Apple’s fifth biggest market, according to the market research provider.

Intel plans to release a new data centre chip next year, brand named Sierra Forrest, that will handle more than double the amount of computing work that can be done for each watt of power used, Reuters reports. 

Asus yesterday refuted a report from earlier this week out of Taiwan that it would pull the plug on its Zenfone series of Android smartphones, 9To5Google reports.

Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn Technology Group, one of Apple’s biggest contract manufacturers, which is also expanding its operations in India, is entering the contest to be Taiwan’s next president as an independent candidate, with elections due in 2024.

While the pundits don’t expect the 73-year-old entrepreneur to win, with the current Vice President William Lai of the Democratic Progressive Party seen as the popular candidate, Gou’s entry is significant due to his more conciliatory approach towards China.

“The era of entrepreneur’s rule” has begun, CNBC quoted him as saying at one of the election rally style gatherings he’s been addressing lately.

“I will definitely not allow Taiwan to become the next Ukraine,” he said at a press conference, Associated Press reported yesterday.

Gou founded Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, in 1974 in Taipei, Taiwan. From making electrical components and parts for television sets, the company has grown to become one of the world's largest and most influential electronics manufacturers for customers including Apple, Microsoft and Sony.

In 2022 about 70 percent of $215 billion equivalent of Foxconn’s revenue came from China, according to the Wall Street Journal. In an opinion for Washington Post in July, Gou disagreed with what he described as the policy of the current Taiwanese government, under President Tsai Ing-Wen, to walk away from the One-China framework.

In his view, Taiwan’s long-term future rests with the Chinese. A more pro-China government in Taiwan has significance for India, from giving China greater ability to project its geopolitical power in the Indo-Pacific region to the potential impact on India’s electronics supply chain.

Foxconn entered India in 2006 and set up its first factory in the country at Sriperumbudur, near Chennai. Today the company’s operations range from assembling the latest iPhones to supplying parts for India’s electric vehicle startups such as Ather Energy in Bengaluru.

The company is investing billions of dollars in India, which is looking to establish its own semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem. Foxconn pulled out of a semiconductor fab partnership with India’s Vedanta Group recently, citing delays, which is seen as a bit of a setback for India’s ambitions in this sector, but the Taiwanese company has said it remains committed to growth in India.

Zepto, a super quick grocery delivery startup, has raised $200 million in a new funding round at a valuation of $1.4 billion, becoming the first Indian startup unicorn of 2023, TechCrunch reports.

Apple will be making fewer iPhone 15 smartphones at launch, next month, due to some supply chain issues, 9to5Mac reports, citing an industry analyst.

Separately, Bloomberg’s Apple watcher Mark Gurman writes in his newsletter that next year, Apple will launch a new souped-up version of the iPad Pro.

Britian’s first lady Akshata Murty’s ownership of Infosys is in focus again, ahead of a free trade agreement that her husband, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, is negotiating with India.

Sunak is expected in New Delhi in two weeks, to participate in the G20 Summit, on Sep. 9. Meanwhile, news reports in the UK have once again raised Akshata Murty’s shareholding in Infosys, the Mumbai and New York listed Indian IT services giant, as a conflict of interest. They contend that Infosys, which sees the UK as one of its biggest markets, with customers including the British government, stands to benefit from the trade agreement, which in turn benefits Murty’s family.

Akshata’s father NR Narayana Murthy founded Infosys in 1981 with six other co-founders. Her current minority shareholding in Infosys, a tad under 1 percent, is valued at about half a billion dollars.

Newspapers in the UK such as The Guardian and Observer reported over the weekend that some members of the British parliament have called for Sunak to be more transparent about his wife’s financial holdings. At least one “expert” has even called for Sunak to recuse himself from leading the UK’s talks with India to finalise a free trade deal, according to The Guardian.

Sunak was recently censured by a UK parliament’s standards watchdog for “inadvertently” failing to properly declare his wife’s separate shareholding in a childcare company that stood to benefit from new government policy, according to The Guardian.

During his visit to attend the G20 Summit, the British PM is expected to discuss the India-UK free trade agreement in a separate bilateral meeting with his Indian counterpart, Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

One last point. The UK-India FTA negotiations have been going on for 19 months and they are in their final stages, Business Standard reported last week, citing Britain’s minister of state for trade and business, Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch. She was in India attending the G20 trade and investment ministerial in Jaipur last week.

While the British newspapers have cited experts to say that India will be pushing for a more liberalized visa and immigration regime in the UK to help its IT sector, Badenoch has clarified that visa and visa liberalisation were not part of the FTA discussions, which are focused on business mobility.

European lawmakers took a significant step towards regulating artificial intelligence (AI) with the advancement of new draft legislation, Reuters reports. The legislation aims to ensure that AI serves people, society, and the environment, emphasising the importance of protecting fundamental rights.

The European Union's AI Act is expected to become the world's first comprehensive legislation governing AI, encompassing regulations on facial recognition, biometric surveillance, and other AI applications.

The bill, after two years of negotiations, is now set to proceed to the next stage of the process, involving the finalisation of its details with the European Commission and individual member states. The proposals classify AI tools based on perceived risk levels and impose different obligations on governments and companies accordingly.

Following a plenary vote in June, the bill will be subject to "trilogue" talks involving representatives of the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission. The final terms are expected to be agreed upon before a grace period of approximately two years for compliance with the regulations.

Zoho, India's biggest software products company, yesterday announced investments to step up what it calls its upmarket growth in India – meaning sales to the larger companies rather than the SMB segment.

The SaaS company saw a 65 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within the mid-market and enterprise segment over the past three years, accounting for more than 50 percent of its ARR in India, Chennai-based Zoho said in a press release.

Zoho made a similar announcement in early May, and the company didn't give any financial details of its investments.

IBM yesterday said it had acquired Agyla SAS, a prominent cloud professional services provider based in France. This move aims to enhance IBM Consulting's localised cloud expertise for French clients and expand its hybrid multi-cloud services portfolio, the company said in a press release.

With this acquisition, IBM further strengthens its hybrid cloud and AI strategy in the region. This marks IBM's sixth acquisition of 2023, as the company continues to bolster its hybrid cloud and AI capabilities.

Uber has invested $20 million in Mumbai-based fleet management company Everest Fleet to support its transition to electric vehicles (EVs), TechCrunch reports. Everest Fleet manages over 10,000 vehicles operating on ride-sharing platforms Uber and Ola in India.

The funds will be used to accelerate the adoption of EVs, with a target of having 10,000 EVs in its fleet by 2026. Uber sees fleets like Everest as crucial in overcoming challenges related to charging infrastructure and the affordability of EVs for Indian drivers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage yesterday, affecting numerous major websites in the US, including The Boston Globe and the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City. The outage disrupted the ability of news organizations to publish coverage of former President Donald Trump's court appearance in Miami. The outage has been resolved.

Accenture has announced a $3 billion investment over three years in its Data & AI practice, joining the list of global tech services and consulting giants investing heavily in generative AI, including Indian rivals Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.

Accenture also plans to double its AI workforce to 80,000 professionals through hiring, acquisitions, and training, according to a press release yesterday. This announcement comes three months after the company announced 19,000 job cuts to reduce costs.

As part of the investment, Accenture has launched a platform called AI Navigator for Enterprise. The company will also establish a Center for Advanced AI to maximize the value of generative AI and other emerging AI capabilities.

Infosys Finacle, the core banking software subsidiary of Infosys, has won a contract from Belgium's Keytrade Bank to modernize its core banking system to make the bank's operations more efficient and provide a better customer experience.

This implementation will replace the bank's legacy banking systems, Infosys said in a press release. The bank is subscribing to Finacle via a software-as-a-service model on Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Hyderabad is set to host the Second India Data Observability Conference this Friday, June 16, organized by Unravel Data, a data observability platform provider.

Researchers from Macquarie University, in collaboration with teams from Japan, the Netherlands, and Italy, have achieved a new speed record for an industry-standard optical fibre. The breakthrough was made possible by a compact glass chip developed by Macquarie University, which allows signals to be fed into the fibre's cores simultaneously with low levels of losses.

The ministry stated that the portal is safe and has adequate safeguards for data privacy. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has been asked to investigate the issue and provide a report.

Electronics and Technology Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar clarified on Twitter that the CoWIN app or database was not directly breached, but rather data accessed by a Telegram bot seemed to be previously breached or stolen data from another source.

Concerns have been raised about the integration of CoWIN with other apps such as Aarogya Setu and UMANG, which provide services for registration, appointment scheduling, and certification of COVID vaccinations. The current data breach appears to be possible by entering a person's mobile number, which would reveal sensitive information like identification numbers, gender, date of birth, and vaccination center details, according to The Hindu.

Reddit experienced a widespread outage as thousands of its communities went dark to protest the company's new API policy, TechCrunch reports. The planned protest, aimed at challenging a policy that would eliminate third-party apps, caused Reddit's website to go down.

The protest was in response to Reddit's new API pricing policy, which would significantly increase costs for developers, leading to the closure of many third-party Reddit apps.

Salesforce has introduced its own AI Cloud, a suite of capabilities designed to improve customer experiences and company productivity through generative artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise applications.

The AI Cloud helps sales reps to auto-generate personalized emails, service teams to create tailored chat replies and case summaries, marketers to engage customers with personalized content, commerce teams to provide customized recommendations, and developers to auto-generate code and predict potential bugs.

The AI Cloud Starter pack is available for $360,000 annually and includes essential components and an AI-readiness assessment from Salesforce Professional Services.

Stellaris Venture Partners and Entrepreneur First organized a Generative AI Hackathon in Bengaluru focused on the theme "AI for India."

More than 150 participants formed 60 teams to develop innovative AI solutions for India-specific challenges. Notable projects included an emergency response application, a generative video solution, and a platform for rural India to access government schemes.

Uber has announced a new integration of Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa, with its Uber Eats app, developed by the company's engineers in India. The integration allows Uber Eats users in the US to track their food orders using their Amazon Echo devices.

India’s OTT businesses are pushing back against a government mandate to curtail the glorification of cigarette use online. The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has flagged “fundamental concerns” and “practical difficulties” in complying with the new rules that the government issued last month to include anti-tobacco warnings on video streaming platforms, Economic Times reports.

On May 31, the health ministry notified amendments in the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act, 2004, which mandate over-the-top (OTT) video streaming platforms to display anti-tobacco warnings and disclaimers on the lines of such warnings displayed in movies in theatres.

Disney+ Hotstar has decided to offer free streaming of cricket tournaments to mobile users in India, following the success of Reliance's JioCinema, which has attracted millions of viewers, TechCrunch reports.

The move comes after JioCinema surpassed Hotstar's record for concurrent views during the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament.

WhatsApp last week announced the launch of WhatsApp Channels, a feature that allows users to follow people and organizations within the app. Initially rolling out in Singapore and Colombia, Channels will offer a private way to communicate, with phone numbers and personal information of both admins and followers kept confidential, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post. The one-way broadcast tool enables admins to share text, photos, videos, stickers, and polls with their followers.

Channel updates will only be stored for 30 days, and admins can even choose to block screenshots and forwards. While Channels are not end-to-end encrypted by default, WhatsApp is considering encrypted channels for specific audiences in the future. The company also plans to support admins in building businesses around their channels through payment services and promotional opportunities in the directory.

Tiki, a short-form video app, is shutting down its operations in India on June 27, joining a roster of ventures that failed to fill the void left by the ban on TikTok in India, TechCrunch reports. Despite having around 35 million monthly active users in India, Tiki announced its closure in a social media post.

QNu Labs, backed by investors including early-stage deep-tech VC firm Speciale Invest, has won a contract with the Indian Navy to deploy its Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) based systems. The Indian Navy aims to enhance its cybersecurity capabilities by using large-scale quantum-based encryption systems, making it the first agency in the country to do so.

Capillary Technologies, a customer loyalty and engagement solutions provider, has acquired Tenerity's Digital Connect Assets, expanding its presence in the US and Europe. The acquisition adds a rewards ecosystem to Capillary's portfolio and will be rebranded as Rewards+.

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, has launched its verification program, Meta Verified, in India, replacing its earlier verified badge system on Facebook and Instagram, TechCrunch reports. Meta Verified aims to provide a mark of authenticity and credibility to prominent individuals, ensuring that users can trust their accounts.

The program will allow eligible users to apply for verification, which will be evaluated based on various criteria such as account completeness, adherence to community guidelines, and authenticity.

Germany’s Defence Minister Boris Pistorius announced on June 6 in New Delhi that the German company Thyssenkrupp AG is likely to bid for a project to supply six submarines to the Indian Navy, Reuters reports. The move comes as India seeks to bolster its domestic defence manufacturing to counter China's increasing presence in the Indian Ocean, Reuters notes.

In a separate report, Bloomberg pegged the value of the deal – seen as a move by Germany to help India reduce its dependence on Russia – at $5.2 billion.

Thyssenkrupp's marine arm is expected to sign the deal with India's Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders, with the agreement's value estimated at around 7 billion euros. India's navy, which currently has 16 conventional submarines, approved a budget of $6.8 billion in March to replace its aging fleet.

Infosys expects to achieve its revenue growth target of 4-7 percent in constant currency terms for the financial year 2024, company executives told investors in a conference with Morgan Stanley yesterday in Mumbai, CNBC TV18 reports.

However, reaching the upper end of the range will depend on closing mega deals at a faster pace. Improving margins would be a tall task, company executives said in the conference. The external environment has remained unchanged since Infosys' last earnings announcement, and the lower end of the revenue growth guidance has already accounted for macro uncertainty, they said.

Meanwhile, Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy's investment firm, Catamaran Ventures, is reportedly in advanced discussions to invest between $100 million and $150 million in Ola Electric, the electric vehicle arm of ride-hailing services provider Ola, Economic Times reports.

The potential investment is part of Ola Electric's ongoing funding round, which aims to raise $300-500 million to support its expansion plans. Ola Electric has emerged as the top electric scooter seller in India, selling 35,000 units in May, Business Standard reported on June 4.

Digibee, a low code software application integration platform provider, has raised $60 million in a recent funding round, TechCrunch reports. The investment was led by VC firm Felicis Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Wing Venture Capital and GFC.