One Thing Today in Tech

In today’s episode, we bring you an update from Nakul Aggarwal, co-founder and CTO of BrowserStack, a leading SaaS company from India, providing software app and browser testing infrastructure and products. Aggarwal talks about the rationale behind the acquisition of Bird Eats Bug, in Berlin, which BrowserStack announced yesterday. He also talks about evaluating building BrowserStack’s own large language model, as the SaaS company progresses on its journey of transforming from a test infrastructure provider to a testing platform.

Ahead of Nvidia’s fiscal Q2 earnings results, on Aug. 28 (Aug. 29, 2:30 a.m. local time in India) we look at the stunning rise of the $2 trillion chip maker as the tech backbone for the explosion of generative AI over the last two years. Alvin Nguyen, senior analyst at Forrester Research, and Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, explain Nvidia’s dominance and the growing complexities in the broader ecosystem.

Apple, as widely anticipated leading up to its annual Worldwide Developer Conference, announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to the iPhone, iPad and MacBooks. The tie up evoked strident criticism from Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, in particular around data privacy. In this episode, Jaspreet Bindra, an independent AI and ethics researcher and former chief digital officer of the Mahindra Group, and Dipanjan Chatterjee, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research unpack the significance of this deal.

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC, kicks off later today, and anticipation is high with respect to the iPhone maker’s AI roadmap, as it is generally considered to lag Android rivals such as Samsung and Google – especially in the era of generative AI. Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, and Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC India, unpack what they are expecting to see today from Apple’s conference.

Access to talent, value and innovation – these are all reasons that multinational companies are either setting up IT and software-driven R&D centres in India or expanding existing facilities. Some, however, are reducing the workforce in such centres and there’s also a set of companies considering exiting their GCCs altogether. To understand what’s going on, I spoke with Stanton Jones, Distinguished Analyst at ISG, a technology research and advisory firm that tracks outsourcing deals around the world, about their recent survey of GCC activity. Here’s what he said.

In this episode, Megha Chawla, senior partner at the multinational consultancy Bain & Company, talks about why India’s tech talent has become a non-negotiable part of the global CEO’s strategy, discussing the prospects for the nation’s tech landscape, as India returns to a coalition government at the centre after a decade. In the age of AI, India’s IT services companies have become important partners to global businesses, she says.

Indian voters have denied a majority to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP. However, as Modi is set to remain in power for a historic third term, leading the coalition NDA, three well-known VC investors unpack what this means for India’s tech and startup ecosystem. Ninad Karpe, founding partner at 100X.VC, in Mumbai, Abhishek Goyal, co-founder of Tracxn and angel investor, in Bengaluru, and Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner at Speciale Invest, argue that India’s economic fundamentals still make it a top destination for global investments.

Agnikul Cosmos, a space launch vehicle startup in Chennai, yesterday successfully tested its first technology demonstrator rocket, Agnibaan, that showed its one-piece 3D-printed engine worked as intended, in a sub-orbital mission. To understand the significance of this success, Forbes India spoke with Narayan Prasad, chief operations officer at Satsearch, a Netherlands headquartered marketplace for the space industry, and co-founder and director of research and operations at Spaceport SARABHAI, a space economy think tank in India.

A year after it first announced the plan, the Reserve Bank of India yesterday launched a Fintech Repository that the regulator hopes will foster innovation by allowing it to stay abreast of the cutting edge of tech in the industry. To get a sense of why fintech entrepreneurs are welcoming this move, Forbes India spoke with Manish Kumar, co-founder and CEO of KredX, a startup specializing in supply chain finance.

The demand for data centres in India is surging, driven by everything from the expansion of the so-called global capability centres to the rise of our digital economy and the laws around localization of data as required under the data protection rules. In this episode, Arjun P Gupta, founder and CEO of Smart Joules, in New Delhi, which provides HVAC management and energy efficiency solutions, offers a quick overview of some of the practical challenges we face in powering India’s data centres with green energy.