One Thing Today in Tech

Microsoft will likely announce thousands of job cuts soon resulting from a decision to cut 5 percent of its global workforce, Sky News reported yesterday. With more than 220,000 employees at Microsoft, that could mean more than 10,000 layoffs, The Verge pointed out. Also in this brief, Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops with the M2 chips, Google’s plan for an Airtag-like tracker, and investors take IBM to court for alleged misleading information on its cloud and AI revenue.

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Microsoft will likely announce thousands of job cuts soon resulting from a decision to cut 5 percent of its global workforce, Sky News reported yesterday. With more than 220,000 employees at Microsoft, that could mean more than 10,000 layoffs, The Verge pointed out.

While Sky News doesn’t give an exact date for the expected cuts, The Verge reports that the company could make the announcement as early as today, ahead of its quarterly earnings results next week, citing a source familiar with the plans.

Apple yesterday announced new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro running on its M2 Pro and M2 Max processors, which as the names suggest, are aimed at professional users requiring serious juice. Apple says tasks like effects rendering can be up to six times faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro, and colour grading, up to 2x faster.

The 14-inch Macbook Pro starts at just under 2.5 lakh rupees in India. The 16-inch version will set you back by about Rs. 3,10,000.

Apple also unveiled a new Mac Mini with the M2 processors.

Google will be the latest Big-Tech company to make a Bluetooth tracker, following in the footsteps of Tile, Apple, and Samsung, Ars Technica reports. Android researcher Kuba Wojciechowski has spotted code for a Google first-party Bluetooth tracker codenamed—just in time for The Mandalorian season 3—"Grogu," according to Ars Technica.

IBM, along with 13 of its current and former executives, has been sued by investors who claim the IT giant used mainframe sales to fraudulently prop up newer, more trendy parts of its business, like cloud and Watson, the AI solution, The Register reported yesterday.

In effect, IBM deceived the market about its progress in developing Watson, cloud technologies, and other new sources of revenue, by deliberately misclassifying the money it was making from mainframe deals, assigning that money instead to other products, it is alleged, according to The Register.

The accusations emerged in a lawsuit filed late last week against IBM in New York on behalf of the June E Adams Irrevocable Trust, according to The Register.

Mad Street Den, an enterprise AI software provider, has raised $30 million in series C funding, led by Avatar Growth Capital, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Alpha Wave Global. The money will help Mad Street Den – known for its solutions for the retail industry – to expand its products to several other verticals.

Founded in 2016 by Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran, Mad Street Den, a Silicon Valley and Chennai company, has seen strong demand for its AI platform in the last two years, as businesses around the world have stepped up their cloud and digital tech initiatives after the Covid pandemic.

ShareChat, yesterday, joined a growing list of Indian startup unicorns that have laid off employees amid a funding winter. The company has laid off 20 percent of its workforce to conserve cash, as the current global economic slowdown has made it harder to raise funding, according to multiple reports. The desi social media venture is among the most funded startups in India. Also in this brief, a Swiss entrepreneur is launching a privacy-first smartphone operating system based on a version of Android, and a Chinese company has built the world’s biggest wind turbine.

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ShareChat, yesterday, joined the growing list of Indian startup unicorns that have laid off employees amid a funding winter. The company has laid off 20 percent of its workforce to conserve cash, and as the current global economic slowdown has made it harder to raise funding, The Hindu reported on Jan. 16, citing the company.

As many as 500-600 people may have been laid off, according to a report from Mint on Jan. 16. In December, ShareChat shut its fantasy gaming platform Jeet11, resulting in about 100 employees being laid off, according to Mint.

Mohalla Tech, ShareChat’s parent company, announced $520 million in funding led by Google, in June 2022, which privately valued the desi social media venture at $5 billion.

ShareChat will provide employees total salary for notice periods, and two weeks’ pay for every year served while allowing employees to retain their work assets.

Employees will also receive health coverage until June 2023, with the ability to encash their leave balances of up to 45 days as per their gross salary. Employees’ stock options will also continue to vest up till April 2023.

The tech job scene continues to worsen globally as we head into 2023. For example, “the hiring party is over at Amazon,” Slashdot reported yesterday, citing the low number of open jobs in the Software Development category at Amazon.

The number has declined to 299 in January 2023 from 32,692 in May 2022, according to Amazon's Jobs site, Slashdot reports.

Apostrophy AG, a Swiss software startup, is set to unveil a smartphone operating system that puts privacy first, according to a Bloomberg report that appeared in SwissInfo on Jan. 16.

Founder Petter Neby, who already has one company selling high-design, low-tech mobile phones, has put together more than 50 employees globally and is raising 10 million euros ($11 million) this year, according to the report.

The company’s software, named AphyOS, is built on an open-source version of Android called GrapheneOS.

China’s MingYang is launching its latest wind turbine with blades that span 140 meters, or about as tall as a 70-storey building, NewAtlas reports. The MySE 18X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built, and it is meant to be deployed in offshore wind farms, according to the report.

The number of science and technology research papers published has soared over the past few decades, but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature, Nature reports.

The researchers, Michael Park and Russell J Funk, from the University of Minnesota, and Erin Leahy from the University of Arizona, looked at data from millions of manuscripts. They published their findings in Nature on Jan. 4.

Infosys yesterday raised its revenue outlook for FY23 citing strong growth momentum from the first nine of the fiscal year and a record order book, even as a recession looms large in its biggest markets. The company’s numbers beat street expectations and CEO Salil Parekh said its strong capabilities in cloud technologies and automation had helped Infosys win the highest number of large contracts in a quarter in the company’s history. He also flagged signs of an economic slowdown and delays in decision-making among clients in investment banking, telecom, hi-tech and retail.

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Infosys yesterday raised its revenue outlook citing strong growth momentum from the first nine months of the current fiscal year and a record order book, even as a recession looms large in its biggest markets.

The company beat analysts’ expectations for its fiscal third-quarter revenues and profit. Revenue for the three months ended December 31, rose 2.4 percent from the previous quarter in constant-currency terms, which eliminates the effect of currency rate variations.

Sales rose 13.7 percent to $4.66 billion for the December quarter versus $4.25 billion for the same quarter a year ago, Infosys said in a statement.

In comparison, analysts at Kotak Securities, for example, were expecting Infosys to turn in sequential growth of 1.1 percent and a year-on-year increase of 11.6 percent in constant currency terms.

“This is a seasonally weak quarter for us and amid a changing global economy,” CEO Salil Parekh told reporters in a conference in Bengaluru on Jan. 12. “We continue to take market share. We continue to benefit from consolidation.” Growth was broad-based with most industries and geographies growing in double digits in constant currency terms, Parekh added.

The company reported its large-deals order book at $3.3 billion, the highest in eight quarters, with 32 large deals. “This is the largest number of large deals in a quarter in our history,” CEO Parekh said. More than a third of the large deals won were “net new,” at 36 percent, he said.

“Driven by the growth of 17.8 percent in constant currency for the first nine months of FY23 and the strong large deal value for Q3,” the company is increasing its revenue growth guidance from the October range of 15-16 percent to 16-16.5 percent for the full financial year.

“This is despite the changing global conditions,” Parekh said. The company is retaining its operating margin guidance for FY 23 at 21-22 percent. For Q3, Infosys reported operating margins at 21.5, which was within the range CFO Nilanjan Roy had projected in October, but slightly below street expectations. He reiterated his expectation that Infosys will end the year with margins closer to the lower end of its estimate.

Staff churn, an important metric in the services business, came down strongly during the quarter. Voluntary quarterly annualized attrition continues to decline. It was reduced by six percentage points sequentially to well below 20 percent for this quarter, CEO Parekh said.

CEO Salil Parekh also pointed out that the coming quarters will be tough. “While we are encouraged by the immense confidence and trust our clients have in us, the signs around are showing a slowing global economy,” he said.

Some areas, such as mortgages and investment banking in the financial services industry, telecom, hi-tech and retail are more impacted and that is leading to delays in decision-making and uncertainty in spending in these areas, he said.

Normal air traffic operations are slowly resuming in the US after flights were halted across the country on Wednesday, due to a software glitch in the Federal Aviation Administration’s computer systems, BBC reports. Also in this brief, Jio crosses 100 cities with its 5G services; and Maruti Suzuki India expects to launch the eVX, an electric SUV, by 2025 with a range of 550km per charge, the Japanese carmaker said at India’s auto show, according to Reuters.

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Reliance Jio Infocomm said yesterday it had crossed the 100-city mark, in rolling out its 5G services. Reliance Jio added six cities in Tamil Nadu, bringing its nationwide total to 101, the company said in a press release. By the end of this year, Reliance expects to be offering its 5G services across the country.

Normal air traffic operations are slowly resuming in the US after flights were halted across the country on Wednesday, due to a software glitch in the Federal Aviation Administration’s computer systems, BBC reports.

Preliminary investigations traced the disruption to a “damaged database file,” the FAA said, adding that “at this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack,” in a statement on its website.

Moderna is considering raising the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by over 400 percent in the US — from $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose — Ars Technica reports, citing a The Wall Street Journal report that is behind a paywall.

This is similar to the price hike announced by Pfizer for its vaccine developed with BioNTech.

Apple supplier, BOE Technology Group, a display maker, plans to invest a substantial sum to build two factories in Vietnam, Reuters reports, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The investment may total up to $400 million, according to Reuters.

OpenAI will soon begin charging for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot, TechCrunch reports. 

OpenAI said on its official Discord server that it’s “starting to think about how to monetize ChatGPT” as one of the ways to “ensure long-term viability.”

The monetized version of ChatGPT will likely be called ChatGPT Professional according to a waitlist link OpenAI posted in the Discord server, TechCrunch reports.

Some of the benefits of the paid version of ChatGPT include no “blackout” windows, no throttling and an unlimited number of messages with ChatGPT — “at least 2x the regular daily limit.” OpenAI says that those who fill out the waitlist form may be selected to pilot ChatGPT Professional, but that the program is in the experimental stages and won’t be made widely available “at this time,” according to TechCrunch.

And finally, at India’s biennial auto show, Suzuki Motor Corp's Indian unit showcased a concept electric sport utility vehicle (SUV) on Wednesday, with the Japanese car maker's president saying the car would be launched in 2025, Reuters reports.

"I'm delighted to unveil the eVX, a concept SUV of our first global strategic EV (electric vehicle). We plan to bring it to market by 2025," said Suzuki Motor President Toshihiro Suzuki, speaking at an auto show event near New Delhi.

The eVX, an amid-sized vehicle, will be powered by a 60 kWh battery pack offering up to 550 kilometres of driving range, Maruti Suzuki India says, according to Reuters.

Microsoft is in talks to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, the AI app that has gone ultra-viral, Semafor reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the matter. OneWeb yesterday confirmed the successful deployment of 40 satellites launched by SpaceX, taking it to a total of 542 low-earth-orbit satellites and a step closer to offering “global” connectivity. Also in this briefing, Infosys Foundation is seeking submissions for its Aarohan Social Innovation Awards 2023.

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Microsoft is in talks to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, the AI app that has gone ultra-viral, Semafor reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The funding, which would also include other venture firms, would value OpenAI at $29 billion, including the new investment, according to Semafor.

OneWeb yesterday confirmed the successful deployment of 40 satellites launched by SpaceX from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This launch is OneWeb’s 16th to date, with only two more launches remaining to complete its first-generation constellation for global connectivity in 2023, the company said in a press release.

With 542 satellites now in orbit, OneWeb, backed by investors including India’s Bharti Enterprises, has more than 80 percent of its first-generation constellation launched.

ReNew Power, yesterday announced the installations of India’s first-ever 3x platform Wind Turbine Generators in Gadag, Karnataka. The WTGs have what is called a “nameplate capacity” of 3.3-3.465 MW and are 128-140m in height. They offer significantly improved capacity over models installed in India to date, which typically have a nameplate capacity of 2-3 MW, the Nasdaq-listed company said in a press release.

The new wind turbine generators will be a part of the country’s first ‘Round The Clock’ renewable energy project, combining wind, solar and a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). This project will produce enough energy to power more than 1 million households in India annually, according to the release.

Toddle, a teaching and learning platform provider for schools worldwide, has raised $17 million in Series A led by Sequoia Capital India. The round also saw participation from Tenacity Ventures and Trifecta Capital along with existing investors Matrix Partners, Beenext, and Better Capital, according to a press release.

Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic and CSR arm of Infosys, yesterday announced the launch of the third edition of its Aarohan Social Innovation Awards. The Foundation is inviting innovators and social entrepreneurs from across the country to participate in the awards.

The awards are open to individuals, teams and NGOs developing unique technology-based solutions that have the potential to bring about a significant difference to the underprivileged across India, at scale. The Infosys Foundation will commit up to Rs. 50 lakh per winner, with a total award purse of Rs. 2 crore.

The Aarohan Social Innovation Awards 2023 will accept submissions in the categories of education, healthcare and women empowerment. The awards opened for submission yesterday, and the last date for submissions is March 12, 2023.

Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT services company, said its quarterly revenue has crossed the $7 billion mark, with sales for its fiscal third quarter, the October-December period, coming in at $7.075 billion. A near-term slowdown in demand is apparent in the staff addition numbers. TCS saw a net reduction in its workforce, for the first time since the Covid pandemic began to fan out across the world. For the rest of the current fiscal year, TCS doesn’t expect to add many more people. Infosys, HCL Tech and Wipro will report their Q3 earnings this week.

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Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT services company, said its quarterly revenue has crossed the $7 billion mark, with sales for its fiscal third quarter, the October-December period, coming in at $7.075 billion. That represents a 13.5 percent increase from the year-earlier period in constant-currency terms, which eliminates exchange-rate variations, according to a press release.

The company saw “strong growth in a seasonally weak quarter, driven by cloud services, market share gains through vendor consolidation, and continued momentum in North America and the UK,” CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said in the press release.

“Looking ahead, and beyond current uncertainties, our longer-term growth outlook remains robust,” he added.

TCS doesn’t provide a formal projection, but its staff additions and churn are among the numbers that are keenly watched, as proxies for both near-term demand and the state of the industry. TCS saw a net reduction of close to 2,200 employees in its staff strength at the end of the December quarter, bringing the total to about 614,000.

The last time TCS saw a reduction in its workforce was around the time the world was beginning to be swept by the Covid pandemic. The company saw its staff numbers reduce by about 4,800 employees during the April-June period of the year 2020.

And while attrition, or staff churn, remains high at more than 21 percent on a leading-12-months basis, compared with about 15 percent a year earlier, the trend has stabilised and is on a downward trajectory Milind Lakkad, TCS’s chief human resources officer told reporters in a conference yesterday in Mumbai.

Overall, a slowdown is apparent, amid fears of a recession in the world’s richest economies. TCS added about 21,800 employees in the first three quarters of the current fiscal year. In comparison, the company added more than 103,500 staff in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2022, as demand soared for IT following the Covid pandemic.

For the rest of the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2023, Lakkad does not expect to add much more staff.

Cropin, an agritech venture in Bengaluru that offers an industry cloud for agriculture, has raised Rs. 113 crore ($14 million) as part of its Series-C funding from new investors Google and JSR Corporation. This brings its total funding to $65.4 million, according to private markets intelligence provider Tracxn.

Virohan, a healthcare edtech startup near Delhi, has raised $7 million in funding led by Blume Ventures with participation from Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund, Rebright Partners, Lesing Artha Limited and others. This brings its total funding to $11 million.

Virohan, through its online and offline courses, trains students in allied healthcare programs for technicians in the healthcare industry, the company said in a press release.

Apple may not be releasing a new iPhone SE in 2024, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who bases his predictions on sources in the supply chain, The Verge reported on Jan. 7. The Infosys Prize for 2022 was announced on Jan. 7, by Infosys Science Foundation. The Prize carries a pure gold medal, a citation, and a cash purse of $100,000 each in categories including science, engineering and humanities. Also in this brief, the US Federal Trade Commission is seeking to eliminate non-compete clauses, which it termed as exploitative.

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Google has gone to the Supreme Court after its appeal at the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal was rejected over an order from the Competition Commission of India that fined the internet search giant for its market practices in the android ecosystem.

The Competition Commission, in October, fined Google $161 million for exploiting its dominant position in the market for Android, which runs 97 percent of smartphones in India, Economic Times reported on Jan. 7.

Apple may not be releasing a new iPhone SE in 2024, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who bases his predictions on sources in the supply chain, The Verge reported on Jan. 7.

On Friday, last week, Kuo wrote in a blog post that Apple had cancelled production and shipment plans for the phone.

The US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday, last week, moved to kill the practice of imposing non-compete agreements by businesses in the country.

If the proposal becomes law, it could shift the balance of power from companies to workers, NPR notes in a report on Jan. 5. It could also set a powerful example for countries around the world.

The FTC has proposed a new rule that would prohibit employers from imposing noncompete agreements on their workers, a practice it called exploitative and widespread, affecting some 30 million American workers.

ChrysCapital, an India-focused private equity company, has acquired Xoriant, a software engineering and digital IT services provider to some of the biggest corporations in the world. The PE firm didn’t provide financial details.

KreditBee, a fintech company offering an instant personal loan platform, has raised $100 million from private equity company Advent international. This brings the four-year-old Bengaluru venture’s total funding to $384 million, according to private markets intelligence provider Tracxn.

The Infosys Prize for 2022 was announced on Jan. 7, by the Infosys Science Foundation. The Prize carries a pure gold medal, a citation, and a cash purse of $100,000 each in categories including science, engineering and humanities.

In Engineering and Computer Science, the prize went to Suman Chakraborty, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

In Humanities, the prize went to Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Vice Chancellor of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru.

In Life Sciences, the prize went to Vidita Vaidya, Professor and Chairperson, Department of Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

In Mathematical Sciences, the prize went to Mahesh Kakde, Professor of Mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

In Physical Sciences, the prize went to Nissim Kanekar, Professor, National Centre for Radio Astronomy, Pune.

In Social Sciences, the prize went to Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director, Economic Growth Center, Yale University.

Indian Space Research Organisation and Microsoft yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding to together help space-tech startups in India. They will offer technology tools and platforms, go-to-market support and mentoring to help Indian space startups scale and become enterprise ready. Amazon’s layoffs are bigger than originally rumoured. And also in today’s briefing, scientists in the US make a small breakthrough in harnessing live cancer cells to fight cancer and prevent its return

Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms was fined 390 million euros or $414 million in the EU’s latest fine against the social network apps provider, Wall Street Journal reports. In India, Google’s appeal seeking an immediate stay against a Competition Commission fine has been declined by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal, Tech Circle reports. Cloud CRM giant is the latest big tech company to initiate layoffs amid economic gloom. And Infosys has won an order from Singapore’s Starhub

India currently doesn’t plan to put restrictions on how much time individuals, including youngsters, spend playing games online, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology, told the lower house of the country’s parliament on Dec. 14, according to a government statement. Also in today’s brief, Moneycontrol reports that SaaS company Freshworks has laid off about 2 percent of its 5,200-strong workforce, amid the global economic slowdown.