Tech News: August 2022

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Truth Social Android app not approved on Google Play Store

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NASA to make second attempt at debut moon rocket launch on Saturday

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Exclusive | NPCI set to pick up 9-10% stake in government’s e-commerce project ONDC

The government’s National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL) and Bank of India are also expected to acquire stakes in ONDC; network plans B2B entry

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Data gathering by public agencies picks up even as law hangs fire

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Zomato tests new pilot project, launches intercity food delivery service

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Committed to provide all possible support to startups, says MeitY secretary

Addressing an interaction between the IT ministry and the representatives of some of the startups that have been mentored by the ministry’s MeitY startup hub (MSH), Sharma said that the innovation and energy of India startups was commendable.

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Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Meesho to widen logistics network with software; foreign investors cut stakes in IT firms

The solution will also let Meesho work more closely with local and regional players that may not have access to software solutions to service large volumes of ecommerce deliveries.

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Vodafone Idea user data breached claims cyber security firm; telco says no

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Meesho builds logistics SaaS platform to widen its network

While the product is still being developed internally, this would reduce Meesho’s dependence on large third-party logistics players like Ecom Express, Xpressbees and Delhivery over a period of time.

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Noida demolition becomes internet event

Indians closely followed the Noida twin-tower demolition on the Internet Sunday. Soon after an implosion triggered with 3,700 kilograms of explosives brought the towers to ground in the afternoon, feeds on WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms were flooded with photos, videos and memes.

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Digital lending startup EarlySalary raises $110 million at $300m valuation

The Pune-based company said it plans to use the investment to accelerate its loan book, increase its presence to 150 cities, hire more for senior management functions, and grow the scope of its buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) business.

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Monday, August 29, 2022

NASA Artemis I moon mission countdown begins: Watch livestream

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Sunday, August 28, 2022

Why NASA is going back to the Moon

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Instagram refutes claims that users location is shared with followers

According to GSM Arena, a viral post claimed "a recent iOS update" has made it so that "people can now find your exact location from Instagram".

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Perseverance rover unearths clues about Martian geology and water history

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High-end ‘rugged’ watch could the Apple event’s ‘One More Thing’ on Sep 7

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Russia says it would be ready to extend spaceflight sharing deal with U.S.

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Philips Sneaker Cleaner review: A surprisingly useful gadget I didn’t know I needed

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Facebook agrees to settle Cambridge Analytica privacy suit

The deal comes as Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who announced her resignation in June, were due to testify in court in September as part of the scandal.

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Saturday, August 27, 2022

Focus on 4K home projectors now thanks to pandemic: Viewsonic India

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Zerodha crosses 1 crore customer base mark, Aadhaar biggest tipping point: Nithin Kamath

“The plan to rely on word-of-mouth & have a single offering for all customers had benefits that we never thought of at the start. Economies of scale kicked in not just in tech but across support & ops—the team size has remained the same as we went from 20lk to 1cr clients,” Kamath said on Twitter.

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Meta to launch new Virtual Reality headset in October: What we know so far

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Social commerce startup Meesho shutters Superstore grocery business in India, 300 'lose' jobs

Homegrown social commerce platform Meesho has reportedly shut down its grocery business called Superstore in more than 90 per cent of cities in India (except Nagpur and Mysuru), resulting in several job losses.

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Meta’s Facebook agrees to settle data privacy lawsuit

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Twitter’s terrible week

The most explosive allegation, however, was the Indian government forced Twitter to put a government agent on the payroll, and that this agent would have had access to sensitive user data because of Twitter's weak security infrastructure.

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Friday, August 26, 2022

Jack Dorsey says his biggest regret is Twitter became a company

Jack Dorsey said that it should be "a protocol" and that Twitter should not be owned by a state or another company.

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ED raids CoinSwitch Kuber; car makers scramble for EV talent

CoinSwitch, which is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital India, has over 18 million registered users. According to its website, crypto worth over Rs 1 lakh crore has been traded on its platform.

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Bengaluru ranked second in APAC top tech hub list

India added more than 5 lakh IT jobs over the past fin year: Cushman and Wakefield study.

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ED searches Coinswitch Kuber’s five locations under money laundering probe

This is the third exchange under the scanner of the federal agency for allegedly diverting proceeds of crime raised by 365 instant loan apps by offering loans at exorbitant rates of interest and then using tele-callers to recover them.

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Google removes over 2,000 loan apps from India Play Store since January

Saikat Mitra, Senior Director and Head of Trust and Safety, Google APAC (Asia Pacific region) said the company is commited to complying with regulations in all jurisdictions it operates in, and termed online harm as a "global phenomenon".

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Thursday, August 25, 2022

Nasscom Foundation on track to expand digital skilling programs across India

With the top goal to enable women’s entrepreneurship, the foundation expects to impact over 25 lakh lives across 15 states by the end of this year itself, chief executive Nidhi Bhasin told ET. While the foundation is currently focused on urban areas it is rapidly expanding programs to rural India. These initiatives are part of Nasscom’s stated Tech For Good goals for the next decade.

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Men’s innerwear brand XYXX raises $11 million in funding

Founded in 2017 by Yogesh Kabra, XYXX is a new-age menswear brand which produces and retails products across innerwear, comfortwear, loungewear, active wear and winter wear.

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Whistleblower complaint: House panel summons Twitter executives

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Swiggy’s Instamart logs nine million users in 25 cities within two years

Instamart aims to deliver groceries in 15-30 minutes through a network of seller-owned dark stores that emerged from the learnings of Swiggy Stores.

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Hyper-scaler slowdown could dent cloud revenue for IT companies

Chinese cloud service providers have already said that growth had slowed due to market regulations, while AWS, Azure and Google Cloud reported a 7% lower incremental revenue in the first half of this year compared to the previous year.

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Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Apple confirms iPadOS 16 will get a delayed release this year

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Twitter negligent on cybersecurity: Whistleblower

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Payment aggregators to approach RBI; IT firms cut variable pay; and ED's loan app probe finds Rs 800 cr crime proceeds

Payment aggregators which are already on the tenterhooks with the Reserve Bank of India’s diktat on lending rules are set to lobby the central bank to ease the guidelines.

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15 companies in fray to buy gaming firm SMAAASH

Nazara Technologies, which is backed by late billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala’s Rare Enterprises, and the Malpani Group that recently acquired Manmohan Shetty-owned theme park operator Adlabs Entertainment, are the two prominent applicants.

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ED finds 800 crore crime proceeds in fintech, NBFC probe

These lending apps flourished amid the Covid-19 pandemic when many in the blue-collar workforce lost their jobs as the country went into a lockdown. These firms have been under the scanner for more than a year.

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Privacy red flags as Digi Yatra app takes off in beta

A beta version of the project – which intends to reduce wait time at airports - has been launched at the Delhi and Bengaluru airports.

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Payment aggregators to approach RBI seeking relief

The aggregators and their lobby group Fintech Association for Consumer Empowerment (FACE) are seeking a relaxation of these norms, which jeopardise the business model, according to them.

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Tuesday, August 23, 2022

ETtech Opinion: Alpha Founders, VC Greed

In India, where the technology startup ecosystem is really only a decade old, with the big slug of VC capital coming post-2014, the lure of repeat entrepreneurs is already starting to be lapped up by Indian VCs.

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Railway passengers can “opt out” of IRCTC’s digital data monetisation plan

They also said the activity will strictly stay within “the confines of the law.”

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James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning new images of Jupiter

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Unicorn India Ventures to exit from six startups by selling its stakes to US-based fund

The companies include robotics startup Genrobotics, cybersecurity firm Sequretek, customer experience analytics startup Clootrack, digital business publication Inc42, digital media startup Inntot, and healthcare startup NeuroEquilibrium.

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Inter ministerial group drawing up rules for gaming

The draft regulations are likely to be finalised over the next month and will then be brought out for public consultation, they said.

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Troubled logistics tech unicorn Rivigo held talks with Flipkart, FirstCry for a sale

The discussions around Rivigo’s acquisition are still preliminary and may or may not result in a deal, said these people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Rivigo, they said, had evaluated merging its operations with Flipkart's logistics arm e-Kart, and FirstCry's e-commerce focussed logistics unicorn Xpressbees.

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Monday, August 22, 2022

Institutional investors oppose liberal stock options, payouts to startup executives

Late last month, 82% of investors voted against an Employee Stock Options (ESOP) scheme proposed by Zomato. Similarly, 72% of institutions voted against the ESOP proposal of Delhivery.

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Apple CFO Luca Maestri sells stock worth $16.9 million

According to the US SEC filing, Maestri still holds around 110,000 shares of Apple stock following the sale.

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Stock price not in our control, focus is on profits: Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Speaking at the company’s first annual general meeting as a listed company, held virtually, he also said Paytm was on track to turn operationally profitable by September next year.

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No consideration to levy any charges for UPI services: Finance Ministry

"UPI is a digital public good with immense convenience for the public & productivity gains for the economy. There is no consideration in Govt to levy any charges for UPI services. The concerns of the service providers for cost recovery have to be met through other means," the Finance Ministry said in a tweet.

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Sunday, August 21, 2022

UP tops list as e-commerce complaints record 300% spike in last 5 years

A close look at the data disclosed that Uttar Pradesh topped the list of states having a maximum of 25,484 complaints in the e-commerce sector, followed by Maharashtra at 18,799 and Rajasthan at 15,620 in 2021-22.

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Hawaii seeks end to strife over astronomy on sacred mountain

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How to listen to FM stations on your ‘radio-silent’ iPhone

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SUGAR Cosmetics journey a part of IIM-A's case study, founders Kaushik Mukherjee & Vineeta Singh over the moon

The duo met at IIM-A for their MBA degree 16 years ago.

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View: Steward leadership key to holistic ESG approach

Corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals need a more holistic approach to ensure that companies not only reduce their carbon footprint but also increase their social stewardship and good governance.

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View: Steward leadership key to holistic ESG approach

Saturday, August 20, 2022

Ecommerce company Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah lays off 870 people

Wayfair is also in the process of making substantial reductions in its third-party labour costs.

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Twitter tells employees they might get only half their annual bonus

Like other social media companies, Twitter has recently cut costs to deal with the sluggish economy.

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The biggest crypto event of 2022

The ‘Merge’, as it has been dubbed, will see Ethereum – the blockchain on which the majority of smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFT) live – transition from a ‘proof-of-work’ to a ‘proof-of-stake’ protocol.

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Fintech startup Uni temporarily stops servicing existing card users

This comes after the company had stopped issuing new cards in June, after Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) communication to industry stakeholders, which barred the loading of prepaid payment instruments (PPis) through credit lines.

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Sunstone raises $35 mn in fresh round led by WestBridge Capital

The round, which also saw participation from Alteria Capital, comes within a year of the Gurgaon-based company raising $28 million from investors led by WestBridge Capital.

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Delhi govt issues draft policy paper for launching ‘Uber of buses’ in capital

The draft paper comes at a time when multiple technology companies have shown interest in starting bus services. ET reported on May 12 that Uber has been piloting a bus service in the Delhi National Capital Region and Egypt's capital of Cairo.

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VLC clueless about app ban; govt denies role

Kühne claimed that the company never received any communication from Indian authorities.

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TCS delays June quarter variable pay for selected bands of employees

The Tata Group company has delayed the variable payout for C3A, C3B, C4, and equivalent grades by a month.

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Railways floats tender for consultant to monetise customer data, may withdraw it over privacy concerns

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Friday, August 19, 2022

Chartered accountants face probe for alleged role in aiding Chinese loan apps

Some CAs are alleged to have signed various statutory documents of these app companies such as incorporation forms, and annual returns among others without conducting proper due diligence, people aware of the matter said.

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