Tech News: August 2021

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

PlayGo BH47 review: Not your average ‘budget’ ANC headphones

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Russia's Yandex restructures JV ownership with Uber in $1 billion deal

Under the agreement, Yandex will receive Uber's 33.5% indirect interest in Yandex.Eats, Yandex.Lavka and Yandex.Delivery as well as 18.2% interest in Yandex Self-Driving Group (SDG), giving Yandex 100% ownership in all businesses.

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Satellites spot oceans aglow with trillions of organisms

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Birds of prey face global decline from habitat loss, poisons

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India’s $1 trillion digital loan market is the new battleground for Facebook and Xiaomi

Facebook this month said India would be the first country where it rolls out its small business loan program offering loans via a partner to firms that advertise on its platform. The loans will range from 500,000 rupees ($6,720) to 5 million rupees with interest rates of 17%-20%, potentially without collateral.

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Two-wheeler financing startup OTO Capital raises $6 million from Matrix, others

Founded in 2018, OTO is currently present in Chennai, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad and Mysore. The company claims it has grown 4x in the past 12 months, while keeping non-performing assets below 1%.

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Apple Plans to Add Satellite Features to iPhones for Emergencies

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Russian cosmonauts find new cracks in International Space Station module

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OnePlus is reportedly working on a cheaper set of wireless earbuds with ANC

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OnePlus 9 RT could launch sooner than expected

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Twitter is rolling out ticketed spaces for iOS users: Everything you need to know

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Prosus buys Billdesk for $4.7 billion

Prosus said Billdesk would complement its own PayU business.

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A notch-less iPhone 13 appears on Apple TV+ series ‘Ted Lasso’

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WhatsApp: How to hide last seen and blue ticks

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How to use Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant on your Android smartphone

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Apple buys classical-music service Primephonic, will launch app

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Instagram to require users to share their birthday: Here’s why

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Amazon writes to Sebi on Future-Reliance; CCI meets sellers for ecomm probe

Amazon, which won a huge victory against Future Retail in the Supreme Court in early August, is doing everything in its power to thwart its takeover by Reliance. It has now written to Sebi, asking the regulator to withdraw the conditional approval.

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H-1B denial rates decline: USCIS data

Legal challenges forced US lawmakers to reverse restrictive immigration policies leading to a sharp decline in visa denial rates for initial employment, or new H-1B visas, to7.1% in the first six months of fiscal 2021 compared to 28.6% in the corresponding period of the last year, according to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).

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Big B 1st Indian star to roll out NFT collection

BeyondLife.club will allow collectors to buy NFT using Indian currency through digital payments and credit cards, complying with local laws, while allowing overseas buyers to transact using virtual currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.

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Ola IPO to hit the street early 2022

Investment banks including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Kotak Mahindra Capital, Citigroup and JP Morgan are understood to be working with the company on filing preliminary documents with the market regulator in the next two months.

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Etail probe: CCI chats with third-party sellers for more info

The move follows a Supreme Court order that cleared the way for CCI to restart its probe against the e-tailers, which had tried to stall the probe in Karnataka High Court (HC) as well as the apex court by challenging the HC order.

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Amazon tells Sebi to withdraw conditional nod to Future-RIL deal

Supreme Court ruled the Singapore International Arbitration Centre order staying the deal was valid in India

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Monday, August 30, 2021

Microsoft to no longer support Office apps for Android on Chrome OS

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Apple Watch Series 7 is coming next month; here’s what we know so far

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Fossils seized in police raid demystify a prehistoric flying reptile

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China cuts amount of time minors can spend on online games

Online gaming companies will be barred from providing gaming services to them in any form outside those hours and need to ensure they have put real name verification systems in place.

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How to know if someone has blocked you on Telegram

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Portable monitors are here. Do we actually need them?

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Shopee tests India e-commerce market dominated by Amazon, Flipkart

Singapore-headquartered Sea Ltd's Shopee has launched a recruitment campaign for sellers to sell on "Shopee India" and is ramping up hiring in the country whose e-commerce industry is dominated by Amazon India and Walmart's Flipkart.

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Expedition discovers island believed world’s northernmost

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Google could launch the Pixel 6 series on September 13, says report

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Ola said to pick Kotak Mahindra Bank, Citigroup for $1 billion IPO

Ola could seek a valuation of more than $8 billion in the IPO and could file its draft red herring prospectus by October, Bloomberg reported. Details of Ola IPO—including size and timeline—could still change as deliberations are ongoing.

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Here’s when you can pre-order Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Buds 2 in India

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PhonePe receives insurance broking licence from IRDAI

PhonePe can now distribute insurance policies from all companies across categories thereby helping the firm diversify its offerings while also being able to offer recommendations.

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What we know about climate change and hurricanes

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Australia considering new laws for Apple, Google, WeChat digital wallets

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Singapore's Shopee changes the game in Brazil's ecommerce sector

Shopee took just two years to become Brazil's most-downloaded shopping app, winning users to its low-cost marketplace with its game-changing approach to e-commerce: in-app mini-games offering coupons to winning users.

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Could GoPro Hero 10 debut next month? Here are all the clues

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Australia considering new laws for Apple Pay, Google Pay

Services such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and China's WeChat Pay, which have grown rapidly in recent years, are not currently designated as payment systems by Australia, putting them outside the scope of regulation.

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IT firms are changing the way they hire freshers

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Persistent Systems and Infogain Corp. are staggering their intake of freshers through the year in order to be more responsive to the changing business environment amid a raging pandemic.

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Apple’s iPhone 13 will support satellite connectivity, says Ming-Chi Kuo

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Covid continues to disrupt hiring

Our first three stories today highlight ways in which the pandemic has changed how companies hire, manage and retain employees.

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Investors make a beeline for HR tech companies

Around $200-250 million have been raised by such companies from investors since January, data compiled by ET shows.

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To push EV adoption, Karnataka eyes sops for companies making retrofit kits

Karnataka was ahead of other states when it came up with an electric vehicles and battery storage policy in 2017. The government, however, has not been satisfied with the speed of EV adoption by stakeholders, and it is in this context that the government is examining a policy nudge.

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Scaler Academy acquires online coding platform Coding Elements

The Bengaluru-headquartered company had been in talks with Coding Elements for about a month as it was looking to offer a data science course to its users.

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Sunday, August 29, 2021

iPhone SE to iPhone 12: All the iPhones you can buy right now in India

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Apple Watch Series 7 clones hint at new design ahead of launch

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Researchers, cybersecurity agency urge action by Microsoft cloud database users

Researchers at a cloud security company called Wiz discovered this month they could have gained access to the primary digital keys for most users of the Cosmos DB database system, allowing them to steal, change or delete millions of records.

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Baring Asia set to accept $3 billion Carlyle offer for Hexaware

If the deal is materialised it will be the biggest deal in the domestic software services space.

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Google Play app store revenue hit $11.2 billion in 2019, lawsuit says

Attorneys general for Utah and 36 other U.S. states or districts suing Google over alleged antitrust violations with the app store also said in the newly unredacted filing that the business in 2019 had $8.5 billion in gross profit and $7 billion in operating income, for an operating margin of over 62%.

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Indian mapmaker powering Apple Maps, Amazon Alexa looks to IPO

The firm, backed by Qualcomm Inc. and Walmart Inc.-owned payments startup PhonePe, is targeting an IPO size around $175 million at a valuation of about $825 million

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IT companies stagger fresher hiring through the year

Tata Consultancy Services has been selecting trainees through its National Qualifier Test (NQT) for the last few years. “While we continue to induct majority of talent from campuses at the beginning of the year, now that we have NQT being conducted every quarter, we do have the opportunity to hire campus talent during the year as well,” said Girish Nandimath, global head-talent acquisition at TCS.

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PM Narendra Modi at Mann ki Baat: Startup culture now vibrant in India

Asserting the young population's mindset has undergone a sweeping change, he said it is now keen on new destinations and new goals by taking new paths and having new aspirations.

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Apple’s next iPhone 13 is coming soon: Here’s what to expect

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SpaceX launches ants, avocados, robot to space station

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JioPhone Next: All you need to know about the ‘affordable’ Android smartphone

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Samsung Galaxy S21 FE could launch on September 8, says report

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Designing Happiest Minds to exist in perpetuity

Executive Chairman Ashok Soota quest of designing Happiest Minds for perpetuity lies in three dimensions — ownership, leadership and business strategy.

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Saturday, August 28, 2021

All systems stable, UIDAI says after reports of Aadhaar-linking outages

There have been no outages in UIDAI’s Aadhaar-linking facility with Permanent Account Number (PAN) and the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), which is an authentication-based facility.

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Grofers founder responds to criticism of 10-minute grocery delivery

Grofers cofounder Albinder Dhindsa has defended his company’s decision to offer online grocery delivery within 10 minutes, with a point-by-point clarification issued on Twitter.

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Windows 11: Microsoft updates minimum system requirements

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Microsoft discontinuing Office apps for Chromebook users: Report

Microsoft is not abandoning Chromebooks altogether, but instead of downloading an app, it is encouraging users to go to the web instead to use the Office suite, according to a TechCrunch report.

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Chinese social media platforms to ‘rectify’ financial self-media accounts

This follows an announcement by Cyberspace Administration of China that it would look into accounts that have repeatedly released financial news illegally, distorted economic policy interpretation, and disrupted network communications.

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beyerdynamic PHONUM speakerphone review: Be heard, loud and clear

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Chinese tech’s brief revival is already showing signs of fatigue

The rally in the Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks Chinese tech stocks listed in Hong Kong, fizzled out toward the end of this week amid headlines of fresh China tech crackdown, trimming its weekly gain to 7.3%.

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Spotify unimpressed by Apple’s deal to ease App Store restrictions

Apple Inc.'s agreement to ease App Store restrictions for small developers does not address the basic aspects of their "anti-competitive and unfair practices", Spotify says in a tweet.

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Geely's EV brand Zeekr raises $500 million in first external funding

Investors would jointly hold 5.6% stake in Zeekr, valuing the Chinese electric car maker at around $9 billion. The company doesn’t currently have a clear plan for its initial public offering.

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WhatsApp tricks: How to read messages without opening the chat

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‘We want to appeal to the widest group of consumers with Legion laptops’: Lenovo Asia Pacific Gaming lead

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Affirm Holdings soars on buy now, pay later pact with Amazon

Affirm's tie-up will allow select Amazon customers to split the total cost of purchases of $50 or more into simple monthly payments using its service. The feature will roll out to more customers in the coming months.

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Buy or wait? Here’s a guide to phone upgrades

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Apple will repair iPhone 12 models that have audio problems

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YouTube Premium users can now use picture-in-picture mode on iPhone

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SaaS startup Freshworks files for US IPO with losses shrinking

Freshworks listed the size of the IPO as $100 million, a placeholder that will change when terms of the share sale are set. The potential competitor to far larger Salesforce.com Inc. was valued at $3.5 billion in a 2019 funding round.

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India’s new drone rules distilled

The Drone Rules, 2021, as they will be known, replace the Unmanned Aircraft System Rules, 2021, which only came into effect in March. We’ve distilled the 15-page document into a five-minute read.

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Govt readies RFP seeking proposals from companies to set up semiconductor plants

The officials said several companies showed interest earlier this year to set up such fabs (fabrication units) and that the government would decide on the quantum of subsidy only after it receives specific proposals.

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India Covid Crypto Relief Fund to donate $15 million to UNICEF

The relief fund has also partnered with the Ministry of Health to speed up the deployment of vaccines in the country

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Friday, August 27, 2021

JioPhone Next to be up for pre-order in India starting next week: Report

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Waymo to stop selling lidar self-driving car sensors

Most self-driving car firms, including Waymo, say lidars are key to achieving full autonomy. Tesla CEO Elon Musk says companies that rely on the expensive sensors are "doomed".

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China plans to ban US IPOs for its data-heavy tech companies: Report

Officials from China's stock regulator have told some companies and international investors that the new rules would prohibit overseas listing of internet firms, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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China widens tech crackdown to include internet algorithms

Internet service providers must abide by business ethics and principles of fairness and should not set up algorithm models that entice users to spend more money, Cyberspace Administration of China says.

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Novel AI tool to help predict Arctic sea ice loss

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Microsoft warns of vulnerability in central database of Azure

Microsoft has warned thousands of its cloud-computing customers — including some of the world's largest companies — that intruders could have the ability to read, change or even delete their main databases.

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Indiagold gets $12-million funding from PayU, Alpha Wave, others

Founded by Nitin Misra and Deepak Abbot, Indiagold gives customers the option to store gold in lockers at much cheaper rates than traditional banks. The company also offers a credit line for the deposited gold.

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