One Thing Today in Tech

Microsoft to buy Activision for $68.7 billion

Microsoft is acquiring Activision Blizzard in an all-cash deal valued at $68.7 billion, to “become the third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony,” the maker of Windows and Azure software said in an investor release.

“Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms,” Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said in the announcement.

With the acquisition Microsoft can add Activision’s games such as Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Call of Duty and Candy Crush to its Game Pass for Xbox and PCs, which has 25 million subscribers. Activision has nearly 400 million monthly active players in 190 countries and three billion-dollar franchises.

US lawmakers introduce bill curtailing ‘surveillance advertising’

US lawmakers have introduced a new bill seeking to ban targeted advertisements based on personal data that will affect companies like Facebook, Google and data brokers that exploit deep stores of personal information to make money from targeted ads, TechCrunch reports.

The bill, Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, introduced by representatives Anna Eshoo and Jan Schakowsky in the US congress and Cory Booker in the Senate, would dramatically limit the ways that tech companies serve ads to their users, banning the use of personal data altogether, according to TechCrunch.

US airline CEOs warn of ‘catastrophic’ crisis from 5G deployment

CEOs from major US airlines including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and Southwest Airlines have warned in a letter to the American government that the impending deployment of new 5G spectrum in the US could cause “catastrophic” disruption of flights across the country, Reuters reports.

America’s federal aviation administration has previously said that 5G waves could interfere with the aircraft’s onboard systems, such as altimeters, that help them land in poor visibility.

Recruitment automation startup Kula raises money from Together Fund

Kula, a Silicon Valley startup building a recruitment automation platform, has raised $2.7 million funding from Venture Highway, Together Fund, and Global Founders Capital. Kula describes itself as a proactive recruitment platform that widens the talent pool by unifying all candidate sources and automating the candidate outreach and engagement.

Kula’s co-founders are Achuthanand Ravi, who’s previously worked at Stripe, Sathappan and Suman Kumar Dey, former Freshworks and Grab engineers.

In more funding news, Scripbox, which helps people easily make mutual fund investments through a mobile app, has raised $21 million from existing investor Accel, Economic Times reports. Scripbox will use the money to accelerate its growth as a broader wealth-management platform.

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Ed-tech startups, institutes warned against outsourcing arrangement 

The Universities Grants Commission and the All India Council for Technical Education, have warned higher education institutes in the country that outsourcing of various programmes to ed-tech startups is not permitted, and said that action could be taken against them.

The Regulations governing higher education institutes in India mandate that they shall not offer open and distance learning and/or online programmes under any franchise arrangement and the institutes themselves are completely responsible for the programmes, according to a notice by the UGC.

However, some ed-tech companies are taking out advertisements that they are offering degree and diploma programmes in association with some universities and institutions recognised by the UGC, the commission said.

Such a franchisee arrangement is not permissible and action will be taken against defaulting ed-tech companies and institutes, and students should check the recognition status of any programme before enrolling them, UGC said. The AICTE has issued a similar warning.

Walmart preparing to get into the metaverse

Walmart appears to be venturing into the metaverse with plans to create its own cryptocurrency and collection of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, CNBC reports. The big-box retailer filed several new trademarks late last month that indicate its intent to make and sell virtual goods, including electronics, home decorations, toys, sporting goods and personal care products, and, in a separate filing, the company said it would offer users a virtual currency, as well as NFTs, according to CNBC.

DeHaat acquires Helicrofter to expand operations in Maharashtra

DeHaat, an agri-tech company, has acquired a B2B agri-input marketplace startup, Helicrofter, adding more than 2000 agri-input retailers and 30 sellers in the state of Maharashtra. DeHaat today reaches more than 700,000 farmers in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Founded in 2020 by Siddhartha Choudhary, Helicrofter is a farm input e-commerce platform designed to do away with supply chain inefficiencies in the rural ecosystem. Despite the pandemic, Helicrofter has been generating revenue since the very first month of its inception and has achieved annual revenue of more than Rs. 50 crore, according to a press release from DeHaat.

Sony enters Tamil Cinema in partnership with Kamal Haasan

Sony Pictures Films India, the Indian production arm of Sony Pictures International Productions, has struck a deal with Kamal Haasan, Tamil megastar and filmmaker, to produce Sony’s debut Tamil feature, Deadline reports. Currently untitled, the film will star Sivakarthikeyan and will be written and directed by Rajkumar Periasamy.

The project will be produced by Sony, Kamal Haasan and R Mahendran, and co-produced by God Bless Entertainment, according to Deadline.

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India has its own National Startup Day now. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in online interaction with several startups over the weekend, designated January 16 as the country’s startup day. He called on entrepreneurs to “innovate for India and innovate from India.” The government is focused on institutionalising innovation, reducing silos, and assisting innovators, he tweeted later.

India gets National Startup Day

India has its own National Startup Day now. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in online interaction with several startups over the weekend, designated January 16 as the country’s startup day. Later, in a series of tweets, Modi said that “this is India’s techade,” and the government would focus on institutionalising innovation, reducing silos and assisting innovators.

India’s startups are changing the rules of the game. They are the economic backbone of the new India, he said, and called on entrepreneurs to “innovate for India and innovate from India.”

Facebook could face a $3 billion class-action suit in the UK

Facebook will face a £2.3 billion ($3.14 billion) class-action suit in Britain on behalf of the 44 million users of the social networking platform from Meta—previously called Facebook—BBC reports.

Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, the competition expert seeking to sue Facebook, alleges that Meta accessing UK users personal data in return for the free use of Facebook is an unfair price. She intends to bring the case to the country’s Competition Appeal Tribunal.

Facebook "abused its market dominance to impose unfair terms and conditions on ordinary Britons, giving it the power to exploit their personal data”, Lovdahl Gormsen tells BBC.

FTX sets up a $2 billion venture fund to invest in crypto startups

FTX, a crypto derivatives exchange, has set up a $2 billion fund to invest in crypto-industry startups, Amy Wu, who heads the fund, said in a tweet. FTX Ventures is one of the industry's largest funds and the full funding came from FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, CoinDesk reported, citing Wall Street Journal, which broke the news.

Investments from the fund could be as low as $100,000 and as high as hundreds of millions of dollars. Wu, who joined FTX this month from Lightspeed Venture Partners, said the fund could deploy all of the money by next year, depending on whether it gets the right opportunities. In October, FTX raised $420.7 million and was valued at $25 billion, according to CoinDesk.

Wordle’s un-intended consequence leads to money for charity

Even as Apple cracks down on fakes of the suddenly popular browser-only free word puzzle game, Wordle, a developer who had created an unrelated app five years ago, with the same name, started seeing a spike in downloads, which he attributed to the popularity of the browser-based one, Gamespot reports.

Since his app was monetised, developer Steven Cravotta—who had stopped working on it—contacted the developer of the popular browser-based game, Josh Wardle, and they decided on giving away the money from the older app to charity. And Boost! West Oakland, a charity focused on after-school tutoring and mentoring for kids in the area, is the beneficiary, according to Gamespot.

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After a revised filing by the US FTC, Facebook, now Meta Platforms, must face the US government’s monopoly lawsuit alleging that the company abused its dominance and should be broken up, a judge ruled, Bloomberg reports. Japanese scientists have made a mask that glows if the coronavirus is detected. China’s experimental nuclear fusion reactor sets a new record.

Facebook to face US antitrust lawsuit

Facebook, now Meta Platforms, must face the US government’s monopoly lawsuit alleging that the company abused its dominance and should be broken up, a judge ruled, Bloomberg reports. US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington on Tuesday denied Facebook’s motion to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission’s revised antitrust complaint, which the agency refiled after the judge in June dismissed the case.

Boasberg, who started his opinion by writing, “Second time lucky?,” said the FTC’s allegations are “far more robust and detailed than before.” “The FTC has now alleged enough facts to plausibly establish that Facebook exercises monopoly power,” the judge wrote, according to the Bloomberg report.

A Covid-19 mask with ostrich cells that glows when the virus is present

Scientists from Kyoto University have developed a face mask made with ostrich antibodies that glow under ultraviolet light when coronavirus is present, Dezeen magazine reports.

A removable filter placed in the mask glows when exposed to coronavirus after being sprayed with a chemical liquid and exposed to ultraviolet lights. The efficiency of the filter's detection was confirmed in a clinical trial where test subjects wore the masks for eight hours.

Yasuhiro Tsukamoto, leader of the Kyoto University research group, told Dezeen that he came up with the idea after realising that ostriches are highly resistant to disease thanks to their strong immune system.

Bolt raises $709 million in funding

Bolt, a startup that operates on-demand ride-hailing, shared cars and scooters; and restaurant and grocery deliveries—has raised €628 million ($709 million), at a valuation of €7.4 billion ($8.4 billion), TechCrunch reports. The company will use the money to continue expanding to new geographies and to bring more consumers and partners to its ‘super app,’ according to the report.

China’s experimental nuclear fusion reactor sets record

China's ‘artificial sun,’ a nuclear fusion reactor, has set a new world record after superheating a loop of plasma to temperatures five times hotter than the sun for more than 17 minutes, according to Space.com, which cites Chinese state media.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, or EAST, nuclear fusion reactor maintained a temperature of 158 million degrees Fahrenheit (70 million degrees Celsius) for 1,056 seconds, according to Xinhua News Agency, space.com reports. The core of the real sun, by contrast, reaches temperatures of around 27 million F (15 million C).

The achievement brings scientists a small yet significant step closer to the creation of a source of near-unlimited clean energy.

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Messaging wars — Google’s RCS versus Apple’s iMessage

A recent Wall Street Journal feature on how teens in the US are using Apple’s iMessage as a status symbol spotlighted another front on which the iPhone maker is at loggerheads with Google—messaging. Hiroshi Lockheimer, senior vice president of Android, tweeted that Apple is deliberately holding back from supporting the RCS, or rich communication services, on its walled-in iMessage platform.

RCS was originally developed by GSMA, the telecom operators’ global industry group, but Google bought an RCS provider in 2015 and developed and popularised it as the next generation phone-number based messaging platform that would replace the SMS. Emails that became public in the Apple versus Epic Games lawsuit also showed that Apple’s strategy of not supporting RCS was a deliberate one, The Verge points out.

Starlink’s satellite dishes have turned cat warmers

Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet company is benefitting an unexpected set of users, of the feline variety. In cold weather, cats have found a comforting resting place atop the satellite dishes that Starlink consumers have on their roofs, one customer Aaron Taylor pointed out in a tweet on new years day, with a photograph of five cats huddled up on his dish.

‘Cat on a hot satellite dish,’ The Guardian quipped, in its headline, inspired by the Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that became a famous movie as well. What’s happening, apparently, is that the Starlink dishes are engineered to give out a bit of heat to melt the snow that collects on them, and cats are known to take comfort wherever they find it.

Gameto—a startup that wants to defeat menopause

Gameto, a biotech startup solving the problem of accelerated ovarian ageing, has raised $20 million in series A funding led by Future Ventures, and participation from several other firms and angel investors, the company said in a press release.

New York and Boston based Gameto was founded a year ago by Dina Radenkovic, a Serbian medical doctor turned entrepreneur, who has trained in the UK and the US. The startup is building a platform for ovarian therapeutics to initially address menopause and improve assisted fertility, and then initiate drug discovery and a computational platform to study ovarian ageing.

Eventually, Gameto wants to make menopause optional.

Take-Two buys Zynga in $12.7 billion deal

Take-Two Interactive, the maker of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, is buying Zynga, maker of FarmVille and Words With Friends, in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $12.7 billion, CBS News reports.

Zynga shareholders will receive $3.50 in cash and $6.36 in shares of Take-Two common stock for each share of Zynga outstanding stock at closing. Take-Two said on Monday it anticipates $100 million in annual cost savings, according to CBS.

CCI seeks feedback on Google’s payments policies

The Competition Commission of India will seek a detailed report from app developers explaining the impact of Google’s payment policies on their balance sheet and also suggest an alternative payment mechanism if possible, Economic Times reports.

Google is seeking to enforce its policy of limiting developers to solely use its billing system for in-app sales of digital goods, on which it charges up to 30 percent commission. It has, however, pushed the deadline for Indian app developers to integrate with Google Play’s billing system to Oct. 31 from March 31, 2022, according to ET.

India’s Competition Commission is also looking into similar practices by Apple on its App Store. Last year, South Korea became the first country to ban these practices.

TCS, Infosys to report Q3 results on Jan. 12

Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, India’s top two software services companies, will announce their fiscal third-quarter earnings results on Jan. 12, for the three months ended Dec. 31, 2021, according to press releases by the companies. India’s top IT companies are expecting the accelerated investments into digital technologies and cloud computing, following the Covid pandemic, to continue.

Tata Consultancy will also consider a share buyback, when its board of directors meet on Jan. 12, according to the company.

Avataar, Rupifi raise funding from Tiger Global

Avataar, a computer vision tech provider, focused on the spatial visual discovery, has raised $45 million in series B funding led by Tiger Global. Existing investor Sequoia Capital India joined in. The money will help the startup develop its product further in the direction of a metaverse experience.

Separately, Rupifi, which offers a buy-now-pay-later product to businesses, has raised $25 million in Series-A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Tiger Global. Existing Investors Quona Capital and Ankur Capital joined in, along with Better Capital.

Rupifi was started in 2020 by Anubhav Jain, Ankit Singh and Jawaid Iqbal. With this latest round, Rupifi will expand its operations to build a complete B2B checkout product for marketplaces and omnichannel mobile-first B2B payments solutions for merchants, distributors and sellers.

BMW says it’s developing a digital ink to make colour-changing cars

BMW is developing a digital ink technology that will allow owners to change the colour of their cars at the touch of a button, the German carmaker announced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show that ended on Saturday.

BMW is calling the technology iX Flow. It features an E Ink, which offers the prospect of a future technology that uses digitalisation to adapt the exterior of a vehicle to different situations and individual preferences, environmental conditions and even functional requirements, the company said.

At the start of 2022, we bring you a series of episodes pulling together the five most interesting predictions we found in multiple areas of tech. Today, we look at life sciences tech, where Covid-19 has changed everything. Pushed by the pandemic, the application of digital technologies and AI to life sciences research has accelerated big time, and that will continue into 2022 and more broadly as well.

1. We will likely move to the endemic phase of Covid-19

Although there are many concerns about new variants, especially Omicron, at this stage it seems like those who are vaccinated and “boostered" are not likely to become very sick after being exposed to the virus. The greatest risk remains for those who choose to avoid vaccination, she says.

2. New and refined methods focusing on the immune system

3. Epigenetics research will become more popular

4. Increased interest in research into superbugs

Drug-resistant diseases could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050 and damage to the global economy will be as catastrophic as the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, according to the United Nations. By 2030, antimicrobial resistance could force up to 24 million people into extreme poverty.

5. Life Sciences R&D to become more efficient

At the start of 2022, we bring you a series of episodes that pull together the five most interesting predictions we found in multiple areas in tech. Today we look at high-performance computing, in which the processing power of a billion-billion calculations per second is close to reality. As to quantum computing, real-world problem solving is still far away, experts say.

1. High-performance computing on the cloud will go mainstream

IBM, Microsoft, Google, Dell, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Penguin Computing, Sabalcore Computing, Adaptive Computing, Gompute, & Univa Corporation are among the companies leading the market.

2. And so HPC-as-a-service will find traction

HPCaaS can be a compelling option for end-users as it puts intense data processing & workloads that require high-performance within reach of companies that lack the necessary capital to hire skilled staff & invest in hardware. HPCaaS brings HPC capabilities to those companies that cannot afford to develop HPC knowledge & infrastructure in-house.

3. Exascale HPC will arrive

In the US, the first of three planned exascale systems—Frontier, which will be powered by AMD Epyc processors & Radeon Instinct MI200 GPUs—is being assembled at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory & is expected to deliver a performance of 1.5 exaflops. On the heels of that will come Aurora, which will run on Intel’s new 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids CPUs & Xe-HPC Ponte Vecchio GPUs. It’s expected to be completed later in 2022 at the Argonne National Lab.

4. Quantum computing will continue baby steps

5. Investments in QC will likely remain strong

At the start of 2022, we bring you a series of episodes that pull together the five most interesting predictions we found in multiple areas in tech. Today we look at robotics, where vital technologies, such as simulation, are advancing and investments in others, such as tactile sensors, are set to increase. Most commentary suggests adoption will continue to be driven by industrial use cases, but robots will move well beyond factory floors.

1. A new wave of adoption of robotics will begin

Multiple technologies have matured and are just starting to work together to make the adoption of robots easier in more industry verticals than ever before. “With the growing maturation of the collaborative robotics world, there's a logical inflexion point with end users that I'm beginning to see more frequently,” Brian Gerkey, co-founder and CEO of Open Robotics says, in a report by ZDNet.

“Industries such as healthcare, e-commerce, logistics, manufacturing, and others are all adopting a second or third wave of robots,” and interoperability will be the next big challenge, he says.

2. Autonomous Mobile Robots will rise

Autonomous mobile robots will go beyond factory floors—where they help move goods—into hospitals, services and ecommerce, says Shermine Gotfredsen, global sales director at ROEQ, in The Robot Report. “We also predict more AMRs not restricted to indoor movements, featuring more rugged, outdoor manoeuvrability,” she says.

The market for autonomous mobile robots was worth just $1 billion in 2017 but is forecast to hit $7 billion in 2022, driven by increasing manufacturing automation, the growing ecommerce sector, mass personalisation of goods and a shortage of low-cost labour, according to Interact Analysis.

3. Drone delivery will take off

“2022 will be the year robot delivery finally takes off,” professor Robin R. Murphy at Texas A&M University tells ZDNet. Analysis by Murphy’s team showed that during the first year of the pandemic, drones were used for medical applications in cities delivering samples and reagents from hospitals to laboratories faster than vehicles could drive across town, according to the ZDNet report.

Drone deliveries will pick up around the world in 2022, going beyond medicines into deliveries of online purchases.

4. Robotics related tech will advance significantly

Simulation is crucial to the design and development side of things and “a million times more robots will be built in the virtual world relative to the physical world,” Deepu Talla, VP & GM of embedded and edge computing, NVIDIA, tells The Robot Report.

2022 will see the coming together of simulation, the latest AI technologies, graphics and accurate high-performance physics modelling to accelerate robot development, Talla says.

And Facebook, now called Meta, is investing in developing tactile sensors that could be driven by AI and find applications in robots. Meta AI has also partnered GelSight, a tactile imaging and sensing technology company, to commercially manufacture a sensor using tech that was designed and open-sourced by it in 2020.

5. Many more robotics startups

In 2022, venture capital investments into robotics startups will increase, says Adam Rodnitzky, co-founder and COO of Tangram Vision, in The Robot Report. He also predicts that robotics startups will emerge without having any robotics specialists on the team. This will be due to the level of maturity and completeness of the tools available for creating a robotics company from scratch.

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At the start of 2022, we bring you a series of episodes that pull together the five most interesting predictions we found in multiple areas in tech. Today, we look at blockchains, crypto and Web3, after a year in which these all saw unprecedented advancement. Experts can’t agree on whether Bitcoin will nosedive or surge to never before highs in 2022. On the whole, though, all things digitally decentralised will get a lot more attention this year.

1. Bitcoin could crash to $10,000 or pop to $100,000

Currently, at around $50,000, it could plummet to as low as $10,000 in 2022, Alexander told CNBC. Crypto believers disagree. Antoni Trenchev, a managing partner of crypto lender Nexo, expects volatility to stay but also that Bitcoin will surge to $100,000, according to Bloomberg.

2. The metaverse will grow and an NFT economy with it

“The possibilities of NFTs are endless since they can be used to log ownership of any unique asset,” Alex Atallah, co-founder of OpenSea, says in a Cnet report. “We're already seeing early use-cases of NFTs being used as event tickets, software licenses, fan club memberships, or otherwise tied to interactive experiences,” he says.

3. Stablecoins will gain ground

In the US, “stablecoins will become increasingly regulated, only allowed to hold nominally risk-free assets, if they want to connect to regulated, legal institutions,” Lyn Alden, an investment strategy advisor, said on Twitter, which was picked up in a blogpost by crypto company Coindesk.

4. A Web3 app store will happen

And with Web3, will come the need for a Web3 app marketplace. “The race is on to be the app store for crypto,” Philip Gradwell, chief economist at Chainalysis, says in the Bloomberg report mentioned above. Just as people love online platforms on today’s internet, Web3 will see its own platforms, Gradwell says in the report.

5. DAOs will get more attention

DAOs are now blooming far outside the crypto world, according to Coindesk. In the US, they include a DAO intent on buying a National Basketball Association basketball team, one that wants to restore ocean health to one dedicated to increasing the wealth of women, and even one that wanted to buy a copy of the US Constitution. 2022 will see more of them, and around the world.

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