One Thing Today in Tech

European Union countries and EU lawmakers on Tuesday have reached a ‘provisional agreement’ on a single mobile charging standard for devices in 15 different categories including mobile phones, laptops, tablets and cameras, TechCrunch reports. This will make the USB-C charger the EU standard, and equipment makers will have to comply by 2024. And Infosys has been asked, again, to fix new glitches in the income tax portal it made for India.

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European Union lawmakers on Tuesday have reached a ‘provisional agreement’ on a single mobile charging standard for devices in 15 different categories including mobile phones, laptops, tablets and cameras, TechCrunch reports. This will make the USB-C charger the EU standard, and equipment makers will have to comply by 2024.

The legislation is designed to cut waste and make life easier for consumers who would be able to use one charger for multiple devices. This will likely have a huge impact on Apple, as the company still uses its own Lightning connector to charge iPhones, while it has recently equipped iPads and MacBooks with USB-C ports.

“The common charging solution will not only affect Apple. It will affect a lot of brands producing some of these 15 different types of products when it will come into force in two years,” the parliament’s lead negotiator on the file, Alex Agius Saliba, said in a press conference. He called the provisional agreement “historic” and a “great achievement.”

With the provisional agreement in place, a formal vote is expected to follow in the next few months.

Tata Digital, which launched its all-in-one app in April, Tata Neu, is aiming to clock gross sales of around $2-$2.5 billion in the first year, Economic Times reports. In its first month of operations since launching the app, Tata Neu has clocked gross sales in the range of $120-$150 million. Tata Digital had an internal target of $200 million in gross merchandise value per month, according to ET.

Infosys has been asked to fix more glitches in the income tax portal that the IT services company developed for the central government. It got off to a rough start last year with numerous complaints from users, leading even to the country’s finance minister summoning the company’s CEO multiple times to fix the problems.

The Income Tax Department tweeted on Tuesday that it had asked Infosys to fix the new glitches after complaints from users. This time the problems were related to the search function, according to the tweet.

Some 20 amino acids have been found in the dust that Japan's Hayabusa2 probe returned to Earth from asteroid Ryugu, The Register reports, citing Japanese media. Amino acids help to build proteins, act as neurotransmitters in the brain, and are ubiquitous and essential to life on Earth, the tech news and analysis site points out. Discovering amino acids in space on comets or asteroids, for example, may help scientists get closer to figuring out why life happened on Earth.

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India’s central government is planning to create an appeals body where people can complain against social media posts, instead of having to go to the courts, according to a press release on Monday by the country’s ministry of electronics and information technology.

The appeals body will be called the ‘Grievance Appellate Committee’. Users will have the option to appeal against the grievance redressal process of the intermediaries before this new appellate body, according to the press release. ‘Intermediaries’ refers to companies such as Google, Meta and Twitter, which own and operate platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Apple started its annual worldwide developer conference, or WWDC, yesterday and announced a brand new MacBook Air, new software for the iPhone, iPad and watch, and a new 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop and also a buy-now-pay-later service on Apple Pay.

The laptops run on Apple’s own M-series chips, including the new M2 processor, all of which are said to offer longer battery life than the previous models that used Intel’s chips. The new software includes iOS 16, iPadOS 16, MacOS Ventura and WatchOS 9. iOS 16 will be available around September, for iPhone 8 and higher models.

Zomato’s board will likely meet on June 17 to clear a proposal to acquire the quick delivery startup Blinkit, formerly the online groceries venture Grofers, almost two years after the two first discussed a potential deal, Economic Times reports.

Under the proposal, Blinkit’s shareholders are expected to get about a 10 percent stake in Zomato. Blinkit’s largest investor, SoftBank Vision Fund, will get close to a 4 percent stake in the loss-making food delivery company that went public last year. Blinkit’s investors may have to compulsorily hold Zomato’s shares for at least six months, according to ET.

Solid Power, a US-based battery technologies startup, is a step closer to commercialising its solid-state batteries, TechCrunch reports. The company has opened up a new facility that will turn out what are called ‘B-samples’ of 60Ah and 100Ah cells. B-samples are close-to-commercial products.

Solid Power is aiming to deliver the B-samples in the first half of 2024, and according to the company’s timetable, a commercial solid-state battery that is ready to go into an EV could be available as early as 2028, according to TechCrunch.

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India’s digital payments industry will triple to touch $10 trillion in total transaction value by 2026, according to a report by PhonePe, Walmart’s Indian fintech unit, and BCG. Coinbase is extending its hiring freeze indefinitely. NASA is outsourcing its Lunar spacesuit development to two companies including Axiom Space, which is backed by investors including India’s Sanjay Mehta.

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India’s digital payments industry will triple to touch $10 trillion in total transaction value by 2026, according to a report by Walmart’s Indian fintech unit PhonePe and BCG, a consultancy.

Non-cash payments will constitute nearly 65 percent of all payments by 2026, up from 40 percent today, the companies said in a press release. UPI adoption will surge from 35 percent in FY 21 to 75 percent in the next five years. And merchant payments via digital modes will grow from $0.3-0.4 trillion today to $2.5-2.7 trillion by 2026, according to the release.

Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges, plans to extend a hiring freeze that it announced two weeks ago into the “foreseeable future.” The company will also be pulling some job offers, CNBC reports.

Coinbase said it was informing prospects of the rescinded offers by email on Thursday. The company also said it was extending its severance policy to those individuals and will help them with job placements and resume reviews.

“After assessing our business priorities, current headcount, and open roles, we have decided to pause hiring for as long as this macro environment requires,” LJ Brock, Coinbase’s chief people officer, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “The extended hiring pause will include backfills, except for roles that are necessary … for security and compliance, or to support other mission-critical work,” Brock wrote.

Oracle Corp has secured unconditional EU antitrust clearance for its $28.3 billion acquisition of US healthcare IT company Cerner Corp, the EU competition authority said on Thursday, Reuters reports.

The acquisition, Oracle's biggest, would give the company access to a large volume of data and could bring more healthcare clients to its cloud platform.

NASA announced that two private companies — Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace — will develop the next-generation spacesuits that future astronauts will wear on the Moon, The Verge reports.

These new spacesuits will play a critical role in NASA’s Artemis programme, the agency’s flagship initiative to send humans back to the lunar surface. Currently, NASA is aiming to land the first Artemis astronauts on the Moon by 2025.

Among Axiom Space’s backers is well-known Indian VC investor Sanjay Mehta, founder of the firm 100x VC.

3DBio Therapeutics (3DBio), a clinical-stage regenerative medicine company, and the Microtia-Congenital Ear Deformity Institute announced yesterday that they have conducted a human ear reconstruction using the AuriNovo implant, an investigational, patient-matched, 3D-bioprinted living tissue ear implant.

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Sheryl Sandberg said in a post yesterday that she is stepping down from her role as Chief Operating Officer at Meta, formerly known as Facebook, after 14 years at the company. Javier Olivan, the company’s chief growth officer, will take over as COO. Sandberg will remain on Meta’s board of directors. And some startups continue to find funding amid the current slowdown.

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Sheryl Sandberg said in a post yesterday that she is stepping down from her role as Chief Operating Officer at Meta, formerly known as Facebook, 14 years after she joined the company as a startup that she helped turn into one of the biggest tech companies in the world, which at one point was valued at over $1 trillion.

Javier Olivan, the company’s chief growth officer, will take over as COO around September. Sandberg will continue to serve on Meta’s board of directors, according to her post.

Coralogix, which offers a streaming analytics solution for data observability, has raised a $142 million Series D funding round, bringing the Israeli startup’s total funding to $238 million, the company said in a press release. Coralogix will use the money to expand its operations, including in India and APAC.

Additionally, the funds will also be used to accelerate the build-out and go-to-market of Snowbit, its recently announced cybersecurity venture being built out of India and Israel.

MoEngage, a customer engagement platform provider, has raised $77 million in Series E funding led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and B Capital, with participation from the company’s existing investors.

This is Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s first investment in an Indian SaaS company, MoEngage said in a press release. This is the third round of funding raised by the company in the last 12 months, with $32.5 million in July and $30 million in December 2021.

The company will use the money to expand its operations overseas and for acquisitions.

Slice, a credit card and payments tech startup has raised $50 million as part of its larger series C round led by Tiger Global, along with participation from its existing investors, Moore Strategic Ventures and Insight Partners, and a new investor, GMO VenturePartners.

Slice will use the money to expand its new UPI product. The company expects its main credit business to become profitable in the coming months.

BetterPlace, a tech platform for frontline workforce management, has acquired OkayGo, an on-demand blue-collar gig workforce management platform for enterprises, for an undisclosed amount. This acquisition aims to reduce the cost of hiring blue-collared workers for enterprises by 15-20 percent by providing them with a pool of pre-skilled and pre-verified workers ready to be deployed for short-term tasks.

Udayy, an edtech startup has shut its business as demand for its online classes fell following schools opening up in India, Economic Times reports. The Gurugram company, founded in 2019, was offering its products to children from kindergarten to class eight. The company told Economic Times that all its 120 or so employees had been offered severance packages and most had been placed elsewhere.

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Tata Digital has partnered with Mad Street Den, an AI platform provider, to make Tata Neu, the so-called ‘super app’ it is developing for retail consumers, a more personalised and connected experience for users. Apple supplier Foxconn says the impact of March Covid lockdowns in China is lower than expected on production. And crypto startup Liminal raises more funding.

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Tata Digital has partnered with Mad Street Den, an AI platform provider, to make Tata Neu, the so-called ‘super app’ it is developing for retail consumers, a more personalised and connected experience for users. Tata Digital has selected Mad Street Den as its AI partner of choice, the company said in a press release yesterday.

Tata Neu will use Mad Street Den’s Blox AI platform to personalise its app from fashion to finance, gadgets to groceries, hotels to health and tech to travel, bringing together the Tata Group’s multiple consumer brands into one online commerce destination for users. The app, launched in April, has seen some 7 million downloads so far.

Mad Street Den, founded in 2013, is a Chennai and Silicon Valley company, founded by Ashwini Asokan, Anand Chandrasekaran and Costa Colbert. The startup is backed by investors including Falcon Edge, Sequoia Capital, and Exfinity Ventures.

“The Tata Group touches over a hundred million consumers in India” Sauvik Banerjjee, CTO of Tata Digital, said in the press release. “We’ve been working with Anand and Ashwini at Mad Street Den to fulfil this proposition of personalised customer experiences across our brands. I have seen this platform grow from just retail, to unleash its true value of powering any use case across industries, data types, images, videos, text and so much more,” he said.

Blox works with large enterprises to help them become ‘AI-native,’ the company said in its press release. “What makes blox.ai different is that we are not in the business of selling point solutions that don’t address the business problem. Our AI solutions absorb multi-dimensional data, real-time, responding to customers and users dynamically to deliver value across the value chain,” CEO Asokan said.

“Once you are live with the platform, what you get is a singular view of your business, customers, inventory, content, process, all speaking to each other,” Chandrasekaran, the CTO, said. Working with the Tata Neu app is also the ultimate case study on what Blox can do with multiple business verticals in a single app,” he said.

One of Apple’s biggest contract manufacturing partners, Foxconn, said the impact of China’s Covid lockdowns on its operations wasn’t as bad as expected, CNBC reports, citing a Nikkei Asia report on Tuesday that is behind a paywall.

Foxconn Chairman Liu Young-way said the company has seen a more limited impact from the lockdowns than it anticipated, and it raised its outlook for the current quarter and the full year as a result. Key manufacturing facilities have been operating at normal levels and product development is ongoing, the company said, according to Nikkei, CNBC reports.

The Wall Street Journal reported on May 21 that Apple is looking to expand production in countries including India and Vietnam.

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Amid a funding slowdown, Sharechat’s parent Mohalla Tech is expected to announce a $300 million funding round led by Google, India’s Times Group and Singapore’s Temasek, Reuters reports. Airbus has set up an R&D facility in the UK for cryogenic fuel technologies for its proposed hydrogen planes. One AI, an Israel and Silicon Valley NLP company has come out of stealth mode, raising $8 million in seed funding.

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Google, India’s Times Group and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings have invested nearly $300 million in Mohalla Tech, which runs the Indian social media platform Sharechat and short video app Moj, Reuters reports. The deal values Mohalla Tech at nearly $5 billion, two sources involved in the deal discussions told Reuters.

The deal is set to be announced as early as next week, according to Reuters. It comes at a time when Indian startups are cutting costs and laying off staff as funding is drying up due to a global economic downturn.

India’s government is ready with a consultation paper on cryptocurrencies, economic affairs secretary Ajay Seth told reporters on the sidelines of an event on Monday, Reuters reports. Seth said there needed to be a global consensus on cryptocurrencies and India would look at regulations enforced in other countries before deciding how it would regulate them.

Uncertainty over crypto regulation in India has led some crypto startups to move their base from the country to locations such as Dubai.

Former Disney CEO Bob Iger has acquired a stake in the Australian design company Canva and agreed to be an advisor to the privately held company, CNBC reports. Iger and Canva didn’t reveal the size of the investment. Canva raised money in September, valuing the company at $40 billion, according to CNBC.

One AI, an NLP-as-a-service startup that helps developers to embed Language AI in their products, officially launched yesterday, with $8 million in seed funding, the Israel and Silicon Valley company said in a press release. Angel investors and VCs, including Ariel Maislos, Tech Aviv, and Tomer Wiengarten, CEO of Sentinel One, invested in the company.

Airbus has launched a hydrogen technologies facility in the UK, in its latest move to support the design of its next generation of aircraft, CNBC reports.

Airbus said in a statement last week that the Zero Emission Development Centre in Filton, Bristol, had already begun working on the development of the tech. One of the site’s main goals will centre around work on what Airbus called a “cost-competitive cryogenic fuel system” that its ZEROe aircraft will need.

Details of three zero-emission, “hybrid-hydrogen” concept planes under the ZEROe moniker were released back in September 2020. Airbus has said it wants to develop “zero-emission commercial aircraft” by the year 2035, according to CNBC.

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Broadcom has agreed to pay $61 billion for VMware, as the semiconductor giant looks to expand into cloud software for enterprises, making it the biggest tech deal this year after Microsoft’s $68 billion deal to buy games maker Activision Blizzard in January. Facebook parent Meta is updating its privacy policies. And Google is exploring ways to join India’s open network for digital commerce, Economic Times reports.

Notes:

Broadcom has agreed to pay $61 billion for VMware, as the semiconductor giant looks to expand into cloud software for enterprises. This will be the biggest tech deal this year after Microsoft’s $68 billion deal to buy games maker Activision Blizzard in January.

The 50:50 cash-and-stock deal is at a 44 percent premium to VMware’s closing price on May 25, and the transaction is expected to close in Broadcom’s fiscal year 2023, the company said in a press release.

Facebook’s parent Meta is updating its privacy policy, which willcome into effect from July 26, the company said in a blogpost yesterday. Users will be getting in-app notifications right away, though.

These updates don’t allow Meta to collect, use or share your data in new ways, Michel Protti, chief privacy officer, product at Meta, said in the blog post.

The updates include more detailed explanations of Meta’s privacy policy including how it uses and shares information with third parties. “And we’ve paired it with the Privacy Center and new controls to manage your experience, like who sees your posts and the topics you want to see ads about,” Protti writes.

Google is in talks to find ways in which it could join India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce, Economic Times reports, citing sources familiar with the developments. This new network, ONDC, is being presented as a first-of-its-kind platform worldwide. It will make it easy for millions of small sellers in the country to go online and for consumers to find them irrespective of which app or site they use to shop.

The network started with a pilot via Paytm’s buyer app, and Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart unit may also be joining it, according to ET.

In more Google news, the company is highlighting how its Chromebook laptops can work in ‘zero trust’ corporate environments with its new Chrome Enterprise Connectors Framework, The Verge reports, citing a blog post from John Solomon, VP for Chrome OS at Google.

The new integration system is designed to make the Chrome browser and Chrome OS devices easier for IT departments to implement with existing security, endpoint, and authentication solutions as well as other management tools.

Solomon describes the new tools as a “plug and play” solution that lets other companies access Chrome OS management functions like remote-wiping a Chromebook using BlackBerry Unified Endpoint Management or flagging malware downloads with Splunk, according to The Verge.

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Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s best-known venture capital firms, has warned founders of its portfolio companies that the flow of cheap money is over, and investors now have a distinct preference for ventures that can generate cash today.

In a 52-slide presentation, the company advises startups to conserve cash, cut any flab, and prepare for the long haul, because it doesn’t expect a quick recovery in the global economic conditions, unlike what happened after the Covid pandemic.

“With the cost of capital (both debt and equity) rising, the market is signalling a strong preference for companies who can generate cash today,” Tech Crunch reports, citing Sequoia’s presentation.

“We expect the market downturn to impact consumer behaviour, labour markets, supply chains and more. It will be a longer recovery and while we can’t predict how long, we can advise you on ways to prepare and get through to the other side,” the VC firm says, according to Tech Crunch.

Meanwhile, another famous VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz yesterday announced it was going big on crypto and web 3, with a $4.5 billion fund to benefit from what it sees as the beginning of a “golden era” of Web3, brushing aside the recent crypto crash.

Such periods are characterised by the right mix of new talent, viable infrastructure, and community knowledge. It’s “when legendary teams are formed, big ideas are hatched, and great products get built,” Chris Dixon, a general partner at the firm wrote in a blog post yesterday.

Since the advent of computing in the 1940s, there has been a major computing cycle every 10-15 years, including PCs in the 80s, the internet in the 90s, and mobile computing in the 2000s, Dixon points out. “We believe blockchains will power the next major computing cycle,” he writes.

Of the $4.5 billion, approximately $1.5 billion will be dedicated to seed investments, and $3 billion to venture investments. This brings the firm’s total crypto/Web3 funds to more than $7.6 billion, according to the blog post.

Snowflake yesterday joined the list of technology companies warning of a slowdown, sending its shares down as much as 16 percent in extended trading, CNBC reports. The company’s shares ended lower by about 14 percent.

The data management and analytics software maker disappointed analysts by saying it doesn’t expect a positive adjusted operating margin for the current quarter, according to CNBC.

While the company is still growing revenue strongly at upwards of 70 percent, Snowflake’s CFO Mike Scarpelli told analysts at a conference yesterday that the company was seeing the impact of the macroeconomic situation on its customers’ businesses, which in turn was likely to reduce their consumption of its software products.

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42 US lawmakers from the Democratic party have urged Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an open letter on Tuesday to stop collecting and keeping unnecessary or non-aggregated location data that could be used to identify people seeking abortions, CNBC reports.

The letter comes ahead of the anticipated reversal of a US Supreme Court decision in a case, widely known in the US as Roe v. Wade, that protected people’s right to an abortion. News of the imminent reversal became public after political news and analysis site Politico published a draft opinion by the court that was confirmed by the US Chief Justice to be authentic.

The prospect has raised fears that location data or search histories could be used against people seeking abortions or those who offer them in American states where they are illegal to obtain, according to CNBC.

Clearview AI, which has amassed a database of 20 billion images of people’s faces around the world, was fined close to $10 million by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, the country’s information and privacy regulator, said in a statement on Monday.

The British government agency slapped this fine on Clearview for using images of people in the country and elsewhere that were collected without any consent from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition.

John Edwards, the UK’s information commissioner, said in the ICO’s statement: “The company not only enables identification of those people but effectively monitors their behaviour and offers it as a commercial service. That is unacceptable.”

Arcadia, an energy data technology company, has acquired Urjanet, the largest utility data provider in the world. Urjanet's global data access tech will integrate with Arcadia's data and API platform, called Arc, the US-based company said in a press release yesterday. Urjanet has a strong presence in Chennai, India. The two companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.

“Without data access, it will be impossible to meet the urgency and size of the climate crisis,” Kiran Bhatraju, CEO of Arcadia, said in the release. “Urjanet has built a fantastic business capturing utility data across 30 percent of the Fortune 500. With Urjanet joining Arcadia, we will be able to serve customers globally with the most comprehensive software solution in climate tech.”

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Broadcom is in talks to pay around $60 billion for VMware as the semiconductor giant looks to expand into cloud software for enterprises, Wall Street Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter. This would be one of the biggest takeover deals of the year.

The two technology companies are aiming to announce a cash-and-stock deal worth about $140 a share on Thursday, assuming the talks don’t fall apart, according to the Journal. A final price hasn’t yet been decided.

Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, backed by investors including SoftBank Group, is laying off 10 percent of its workforce, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told staff via a pre-recorded video call Monday, Protocol reports.

“When we set our business plans for 2022 in the autumn of last year, it was a very different world than the one we are in today,” Siemiatkowski said in the announcement, which is also available as a blog post on the company’s website.

"The war in Ukraine, a shift in consumer sentiment, a steep increase in inflation, a highly volatile stock market and a likely recession,” are among the reasons for the layoff, according to the post.

The company currently has about 7,000 employees, and a 10 percent cutback puts the number of affected workers at about 700, according to The Verge.

The company is also looking for funding, at a valuation of around $30 billion, compared with its previous private valuation of $46 billion, Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Infosys has been selected by Backcountry, an online retailer of outdoor gear and apparel, to deliver improved and secure digital experiences to customers, India’s second-biggest IT services company said in a press release yesterday.

1K Kirana, a startup that provides technology to grocery stores, has raised $25 million in its Series B round, led by Alpha Wave Ventures, Economic Times reports. Info Edge Ventures, Kae Capital, and entrepreneurs including the founders of Zetwerk and GoMechanic have also invested in the funding round.

Founded in late 2018 by Kumar Sangeetesh, Sachin Sharma and Abhishek Halder, 1K Kirana provides a technology platform for grocery stores in India's smaller cities and towns, according to ET.

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