One Thing Today in Tech

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. In this episode, we focus on AI and machine learning, which experts around the world expect will go mainstream and impact multiple industries much more significantly. From manufacturing to human language, in 2022, everything will begin to change in ways that might help us, but also challenge us.

Prediction 1: AI and deep learning will go mainstream and physical

In 2022, AI will also likely play a pivotal role in helping us solve real-world challenges—in manufacturing, supply chain and logistics, for example—The Next Web reports. AI will begin to make greater impact in areas including, healthcare, automotive and gaming, according to a blogpost by semiconductor giant Nvidia.

Prediction 2: AI for human language will surge

Prediction 3: Embedded AI—one in five organisations will invest in ‘AI inside’

In 2022, they expect traditional businesses to adopt this AI-first approach to platform and digital transformation. The more ‘AI inside,’ the more enterprises can shrink the latency between insights, decisions, and results, she says.

Prediction 4: AI for Science will take off

Prediction 5: Responsible AI—the market for responsible AI solutions will double.

India is offering a Rs. 76,000 crore ($10 billion) package to global semiconductor companies to create a comprehensive ecosystem for chip design, packaging and manufacturing, Economic Times reports. The funding, which will be provided over six years, is expected to bring in investments of up to Rs 1.7 lakh crore ($22 billion), India’s Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw told ET.

The minister hopes that India’s strong software and chip design ecosystem will attract global semiconductor companies. The government will not just provide infrastructure support, but also fast track clearances. Approvals are expected for a large chip manufacturing facility in the next four to six months, according to ET.

Tiger Global is backing fintech startup CreditBook. It marks the New York-headquartered hedge fund and VC firm’s first investment in Pakistan, TechCrunch reports. Among two-year-old CreditBook’s founders is Imam Jamall, one of the few women founders in Pakistan.

Other investors include Firstminute Capital, Banana Capital, VentureSouq, Ratio Ventures, i2i Ventures. Angel investors Sriram Krishnan and Julian Shapiro have also joined the $11 million pre-Series A round.

The software vulnerability discovered last week in Log4J, a popular open-source library, could be one of the worst, Wired reports, citing cybersecurity experts. The combination of severity, simplicity, and pervasiveness of the Log4J library has the security community rattled, Wired says in its report.

“It is by far the single biggest, most critical vulnerability ever,” Amit Yoran, CEO of cybersecurity firm Tenable and founding director of US-CERT—the organisation responsible for coordinating the public-private response to digital threats in the US—told Wired in an interview.

Expect Log4J exploits, which have so far been limited to crypto miners and some malware, to escalate into the realms of serious ransomware attacks, the Wired warns.

Facebook’s parent company Meta has alerted 50,000 users of Facebook and Instagram that their accounts were spied on by commercial “surveillance-for-hire” schemes around the globe, The Verge reports. The users, located in more than 100 countries, were targeted by seven entities, according to an update posted on Meta’s news page on Thursday.

Targets included journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition, and human rights activists. The surveillance was uncovered in a months-long investigation in which Meta identified spying groups and removed them from the platform.

Spotify has acquired another podcast technology company, Whooshkaa, an Australia-based all-in-one platform for hosting, managing, distributing, promoting, monetising and measuring podcasts, the world’s largest music streaming company said in a blogpost.

Whooshkaa offers radio broadcasters a specialised tool that makes it simple to turn their existing audio content into on-demand podcast content. Spotify plans to soon integrate this technology into its Megaphone suite.

TranZact, a startup offering a SaaS-based digital transformation tool for SMEs has raised $7 million in Series A funding, the company said in a press release. The funding was led by San Francisco-based Tribe Capital with participation from Prime Venture Partners, Gemba Capital and existing investor Kae Capital. Several noted angel investors also participated.

Investment in climate tech is continuing to show strong growth as an emerging asset class, with a total of $87.5 billion invested in the second half of 2020 and the first half of 2021, accounting and consultancy firm PwC says in a new report, State of Climate Tech 2021. H1 2021 saw record investments, over $60 billion. This represents a 210 percent increase from the $28.4 billion invested in the previous 12 months. Climate tech now accounts for 14 cents of every venture capital dollar, PwC says.

However, there’s an opportunity to shift capital towards solutions with untapped climate impact potential. Of the 15 technology areas analysed in the PwC report, the top five—which represent over 80 percent of future emissions reduction potential—received only 25 percent of climate tech investments between 2013 and H1 2021.

WhatsApp is running a pilot programme to bring digital payments to rural India, the Meta company said in a press release on Wedesday. Under the pilot programme, WhatsApp has adopted 500 villages in the Indian states of Karnataka and Maharashtra, where it will bring its ‘payments on WhatsApp’ feature to villagers—the feature uses India’s popular Unified Payments Interface.

The pilot called ‘Digital Payments Utsav’, started on the 15th of Oct, 2021 in Kyathanahalli village in Mandya district of Karnataka, where on-ground facilitators familiarised villagers with various aspects of digital payments including signing up for UPI, setting up a UPI account and safety best practices of using digital payments, the company said in a press release.

Google has told its employees they will lose pay—and will eventually be fired—if they don’t comply with the company’s Covid-19 vaccination policy, according to internal documents, CNBC, which reviewed the documents, reports.

Employees had until Dec. 3 to declare their vaccination status and upload documentation showing proof, or to apply for a medical or religious exemption, according to a memo circulated by Google’s leadership, CNBC reports. After that date, Google would start contacting employees who hadn’t uploaded their status or were unvaccinated, as well as those whose exemption requests weren’t approved.

Employees who haven’t complied with the vaccination rules by the Jan. 18 deadline will be placed on “paid administrative leave” for 30 days. After that, the company will put them on “unpaid personal leave” for up to six months, followed by termination, according to CNBC.

New criminal offences and major changes have been proposed in the UK's landmark Online Safety Bill, which seeks to regulate social media and big tech companies, BBC reports. A new parliamentary report calls for adding scams and offences, like sending unwanted sexual images and promoting violence against women and girls.

A named senior manager at the big tech companies should also be made personally liable in court for failures, it said, according to BBC. The draft bill and this report both lay out exemptions for journalism, public interest, and free speech, but critics — such as Adam Smith Institute, a think tank — fear that may not be enough, according to the BBC report.

Minecraft, a platform that started as a simple video game that became a canvas for millions of players to create their own content, got its one-trillionth view, The Verge reports. YouTube, in collaboration with Minecraft developer Mojang, is celebrating an unprecedented trillionth view with a snapshot of the game’s unique and transformative history on the platform, according to The Verge.

Elon Musk is Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ for 2021. Musk’s startup rocket company, SpaceX, has blasted past Boeing and others to own America’s spacefaring future. His electric car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered. It is valued at $1 trillion, the magazine points out.

That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history. His interests include robots, solar power, cryptocurrency, climate tech, brain-computer implants and underground tunnels to move people and freight at high speeds.

In the future Musk envisions, robots perform all the labour, and goods and services are abundant, so people work on what they love. “There’s, like, plenty for everyone, essentially,” he says in Time’s profile of him. “There’s not necessarily anyone who’s the boss of you. I don’t mean to suggest chaos, but rather that you’re not under anyone’s thumb. So you have the freedom to do whatever you’d like to do, provided it does not cause harm to others.” 

NSO Group, the Israeli spyware company—whose software was used to target human rights activists, journalists, government officials and others, around the world—is in danger of defaulting on its debts. It is exploring options that include shutting its controversial Pegasus unit and selling the entire company, Bloomberg reports.

NSO has held talks with several investment funds about refinancing or outright sale. The prospective new owners include two American funds that have discussed taking control and closing the Pegasus spyware unit.

Under that scenario, the funds would then invest about $200 million in fresh capital to turn the know-how behind Pegasus into strictly defensive cyber security services and perhaps develop the Israeli company’s drone technology, according to Bloomberg.

Apple is being investigated by the US Department of Labor over claims that it retaliated against an employee who complained of workplace harassment and unsafe working conditions, according to a Reuters news digest of the FT report, which is behind a paywall.

Ninjacart, a supply chain company for fresh produce, has raised $145 million from Flipkart and its US-based parent, Walmart, in what could be the biggest funding round for an Indian agri-tech startup, Economic Times reports.

This is Flipkart’s third investment in Ninjakart, according to ET. It first invested an undisclosed amount in the Bengaluru-based startup in 2019 and then added around $30 million late last year, with Walmart.

Manish Maheshwari, a former Twitter India boss, is leaving Twitter to start an ed-tech venture, TechCrunch reports. Maheshwari had recently moved to San Francisco to work at a different division within the company. He is in talks with potential investors to raise funds for a new Bangalore-headquartered ed-tech startup that promises to deliver MBA courses in four months, according to some of the investors to whom he has pitched the new startup.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Twitter account was “briefly compromised” on Sunday, according to a statement from his office. Modi, whose handle @narendramodi has more than 73 million followers on Twitter, is among the most followed figures on the microblogging social media platform.

Suspicions of a hack were prompted after a tweet was posted from his handle that claimed India had adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. India is set to introduce proposals in the parliament this month to ban private cryptos in the country and start a central bank digital currency.

“The matter was escalated to Twitter and the account has been immediately secured. In the brief period that the account was compromised, any Tweet shared must be ignored,” the prime minister’s office tweeted from its handle @PMOIndia on Sunday.

Prime Minister Modi’s account was "not compromised due to any breach of Twitter’s systems,” the company said, according to Economic Times. "There are no signs of any other impacted accounts at this time,” Twitter said, according to ET.

A widely accessible software vulnerability was reported four days ago by researchers at Lunasec, an open-source data security company. The researchers are calling it Log4Shell, and they describe it as a ‘zero-day’ vulnerability found in software code called Log4j 2 that was “ubiquitous.” The piece of software is written in the hugely popular programming language Java that is used by businesses and organisations around the world.

A zero-day exploit is one that people don’t know about but is known to the hackers who discovered it, so there are literally zero days to fix it, cybersecurity company Norton says on its website.

As to Log4Shell, “Many, many services are vulnerable to this exploit. Cloud services like Steam, Apple iCloud, and apps like Minecraft have already been found to be vulnerable,” according to Lunasec’s blogpost.

Computer emergency response teams in New Zealand, at Deutsche Telekom, and the Greynoise web monitoring service have all warned that attackers are actively looking for servers vulnerable to Log4Shell attacks, TechCrunch reports. Security patches are available for this vulnerability, but the Log4j’s popularity makes the flaw a serious problem.

Meanwhile, a Microsoft Teams bug on Android phones prevented some users from making emergency calls in the US, according to a BBC report over the weekend. One user posted online that he was prevented from calling 911 — the emergency number in the US — when his grandmother may have been having a stroke, according to the report.

Google was able to verify the bug itself and is working on a fix. "We believe the issue is only present on a small number of devices with the Microsoft Teams app installed when the user is not logged in, and we are currently only aware of one user report related to the occurrence of this bug," Google said.

The rare glitch was caused by an "unintended interaction" between the Teams app and the Android operating system, according to the report.

In more Microsoft news, the Windows software maker will get unconditional anti-trust regulatory approval in Europe for its $16 billion bid for artificial intelligence and speech technology company Nuance Communications, Reuters reports. This would be Microsoft’s second biggest purchase after its $26.2 billion LinkedIn purchase in 2016.

The Nuance deal would boost Microsoft’s presence in cloud services for healthcare and it has already secured regulatory go ahead in the US and Australia, according to the news agency. Nuance is known for its pioneering speech technology and helping launch Apple's Siri virtual assistant. Its software is used by 77 percent of US hospitals, according to Reuters.

US President Joe Biden signed an executive order on December 8 outlining a multi-billion-dollar plan for the federal government to achieve ‘net zero’ by 2050, The Verge reports. Under the plan, the US government will switch to electric vehicles, upgrade federal buildings, and use the power of the government to shift to cleaner forms of electricity.

The government will stop purchasing petrol-powered passenger cars in 2027 but would only achieve 100 percent electric vehicle purchases by 2035. Biden’s order will direct the government to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent by the end of the decade before reaching full carbon neutrality by 2050.

Amazon has been fined € 1.13 billion ($1.28 billion) by Italy's anti-trust regulator, CNBC reports. The Italian competition regulator, AGCM, has found that Amazon abused its market dominance by promoting its own logistics service, called Fulfilment Amazon. It claimed businesses had to use the FBA service to access benefits such as selling products with Prime delivery and participation in Black Friday sales. Amazon said, it "strongly disagrees" with the decision, and would appeal.

Instagram's chief Adam Mosseri has called on US lawmakers to help regulate the platform, at a Senate hearing on December 8, which examined the harmful impact of social media on the mental health of teen users, BBC reports. Mosseri argued that Instagram is actively working to address the app's negative effects. However, he called for the creation of industry-wide regulations to police how social media platforms can operate.

Inrupt, a startup co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee—widely credited as the leading figure in the creation of the internet—has raised about $30 million in Series A funding, TechCrunch reports.

Forte Ventures led Inrupt’s new round, the two said on Thursday, but both declined to disclose the size of the deal. The round saw participation from all existing investors, including Akamai Technologies and Glasswing Ventures, as well as new investors Allstate and the Minderoo Foundation’s Frontier Technology Initiative.

At Inrupt, Berners-Lee, the creator of the standards of the world wide web, and co-founder John Bruce are attempting to “reshape the internet” by building a platform that gives users control of their data.

Miro, a visuals-based collaboration software maker, is seeking $17 billion in a new round of venture capital funding, Financial Times reports. The 10-year old startup describes itself as an online whiteboard platform for team collaboration. Miro’s ‘infinite canvas’ enables teams to lead engaging workshops and meetings, design products, and brainstorm ideas.

Miro claims 25 million users worldwide, including more than 100,000 enterprise customers and 95 percent of the world’s 100 biggest companies. Miro was founded by Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin in 2011.

Meanwhile, Pleo, a Danish startup that makes expense management tools aimed at SMBs, has raised $200 million in fresh funding that doubles its value to $4.7 billion, TechCrunch reports. Jeppe Rindom, Pleo’s co-founder and CEO, said it will use the money for acquisitions, accelerating expansion to new markets, adding more functionality to its product. Pleo helps SMBs issue company cards and better manage how employees spend money.

Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi has been awarded the Royal Institute of British Architects' Royal Gold Medal for 2022, Dezeen magazine reports. Awarded annually by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and personally approved by the Queen, the Royal Gold Medal celebrates those who have shaped the "advancement of architecture”. Doshi was selected in recognition of his 70-year career and his influence on the direction of architecture in India.

General Bipin Rawat (63), India's first Chief of Defence Staff, his wife Madhulika, and 11 other military personnel were killed in a helicopter crash on Wednesday. The Russian-made Mi-17V5 helicopter crashed near Coonoor municipality, in the Nilgiri Hills, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The exact cause of the crash, which happened in foggy weather around noon, isn't clear yet, and an investigation is on.

After taking off from the Sulur air force base in Coimbatore, where the General had arrived from Delhi, the chopper was on its way to the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington, where he was scheduled to deliver a lecture. The crash happened only 10 minutes from the destination, according to news reports.

Air Force officer Group Captain Varun Singh is reported to be the sole survivor of the crash.

The heavily wooded hilly terrain of the crash site made rescue operations difficult, with the nearest road several kilometres away. Rescuers had to trek to the site, and there was no access to fire engines or even piped water. Locals helped, carrying water in buckets and pots, according to various news reports.

The Indian Army confirmed that Brigadier LS Lidder, Lieutenant Colonel H Singh, Wing Commander PS Chauhan, Squadron Leader K Singh, Junior Warrant Officers Das and Pradeep A, Havildar Satpal, Naik Gursewak Singh, Naik Jitender, Lance Naik Vivek, and Lance Naik S Teja were the other defence personnel killed in the crash, according to The Hindu.

Wing Commander PS Chauhan, Commanding Officer of the 109 Helicopter Unit (the Knights) at Air Force Station, Sulur, and Squadron Leader Kuldeep, piloted the crashed chopper, according to The Hindu.

“I am deeply anguished,” India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Twitter. “Gen. Bipin Rawat was an outstanding soldier. A true patriot, he greatly contributed to modernising our armed forces and security apparatus. His insights and perspectives on strategic matters were exceptional. His passing away has saddened me deeply. Om Shanti,” the prime minister said.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is expected to make a statement in the parliament on Thursday. Condolences have come in from around the world. In a Pentagon statement, US Secretary of Defence Lloyd J Austin III, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley and Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said they were “deeply saddened” by the general’s death. “As India's first chief of defence, he made a lasting impact on the Indian military and reinforced our strong military-to-military relationship between the US and India," they said.

General Bipin Laxman Singh Rawat (63) was born in a family of military officers. His father, Laxman Rawat, was a lieutenant general in the Indian Army. Bipin Rawat attended the National Defence Academy and the Indian Military Academy, where he received the ‘sword of honour.’ He was commissioned into the Indian Army as a second lieutenant in 1978.

In 2016, he was appointed India’s 27th Chief of Army Staff. He was the third officer from the Gorkha Brigade to become the chief of the Army Staff, after Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw and General Dalbir Singh Suhag. In January 2019, he was named India’s first Chief of Defence Staff. That same year, during a visit to America, General Rawat was inducted to the United States Army Command and General Staff College International Hall of Fame.

The general’s highly decorated distinguished service included several strategic military initiatives in India, along our borders, and on international peace-keeping missions in Africa. The mortal remains of the General and his wife are to be brought to New Delhi today, and the funeral is to take place on Friday. They are survived by two daughters.

Facebook, now called Meta, is being sued for more than $150 billion by dozens of Rohingya refugees in the UK and US, accusing the social media giant of allowing hate speech against them to spread, BBC reports.

They are demanding this compensation, claiming Facebook's platforms promoted violence against the persecuted minority in Myanmar and that the internet company didn’t do enough to safeguard against being used as a platform for spreading hate in the country. An estimated 10,000 Rohingya Muslims were killed during a military crackdown in Buddhist-majority Myanmar in 2017, according to BBC.

Amazon Web Services, the world’s biggest cloud services provider, had an outage on Tuesday centred around its US-East-1 region (data centre), taking down Netflix, Disney+, some news sites, and affecting businesses and services around the world. The company’s status page reported increased error rates across multiple services that have now mostly all been resolved. Outside the US, AWS’s management console and support centre were affected.

5G is being touted as a game-changer around the world, but one of the first potentially serious problems with 5G has already surfaced in the aviation industry.

Aeroplanes rely on radio altimeters to tell how high they are above the ground to safely land when pilots can’t see. The US Federal Aviation Administration is instructing 6,834 of them to not do that at certain airports because of 5G interference, The Verge reports.

The FAA ruled that those thousands of US planes (and some helicopters) won’t be able to use many of the guided and automatic landing systems—that are designed to work in poor visibility conditions—if they are landing at an airport where there’s deemed to be enough 5G interference that their altimeters aren’t reliable, according to The Verge.

Microsoft is rolling out a dark mode for its Notepad app, the company said in a blogpost. The feature is being rolled out to Windows Insiders in the Dev channel. Other additions include a redesigned find and replace experience and support for multi-level undo—another top community feature request, Dave Grochocki, Principal Program Manager Lead – Windows Inbox Apps, said in the blog post.

In more Microsoft news, the company has launched a cybersecurity skilling programme in India that aims to skill over 100,000 people in 2022. The programme is designed to provide hands-on experience in the fundamentals of security, compliance, and identity, and includes certification. Microsoft will conduct these courses with its partners, including Cloudthat, Koenig, RPS, and Synergetics Learning. The course modules are designed to support all levels of learners.

Grip Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup that helps companies protect their data in SaaS applications, has raised a $19 million Series A funding round led by Intel Capital, TechCrunch reports. YL Ventures, which led the company’s $6 million seed round earlier this year, also participated in this round, which brings Grip's total funding to $25 million.

MoEngage, a customer engagement platform provider, has raised Series D funding of $30 million led by Steadview Capital, with participation from the company’s existing investors Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Eight Roads Ventures, F-Prime Capital and Matrix Partners India, according to a press release. MoEngage will use the money to continue to invest in AI-powered and insights-driven cross-channel engagement solutions.

A BBC investigation based on interviews with former Byju employees and customers has revealed several allegations against India’s most valuable startup, according to a report by the BBC. Byju’s has denied the allegations.

Disgruntled parents allege they were misled by sales agents. They said they were lured into contracts by agents who convinced them of an urgent need only to go incommunicado a few months after the sale, making it difficult to get a refund, according to BBC.

Former employees complained of "pushy managers", claiming there was a high-pressure sales culture that emphasised aggressive targets. Sales staff have been marked absent and seen their salaries docked for not meeting targets. The aggressive culture has also affected both the physical and mental health of some staff, the report says. There are also hundreds of complaints in online consumer and employee forums against the company, according to BBC.

Byju’s has said its products are only sold to parents interested in them, and that it has a strong set of employee welfare policies, according to the BBC report.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said $443 million will be spent on land conservation and restoration and efforts to reduce environmental burdens on marginalised communities via his Earth Fund’s next round of grants, The Verge reports.

This year, the fund has pledged more than $3 billion for similar initiatives. In 2020, Bezos promised $10 billion — about 5 percent of his current net worth — towards tackling climate change this decade.

The grants include $130 million to advance the Justice40 initiative in the U.S.; $261 million to further the 30x30 initiative to protect 30 percent of land and sea by 2030, with a focus on the Congo Basin and Tropical Andes; and $51 million to support land restoration in the U.S. and Africa, the Earth Fund said in a press release.

Pinterest is further investing in creator tools and video. The company has acquired a video creation and editing app Vochi for an undisclosed sum. The company will be bringing in both the IP at Vochi and its 40-person team, including its founders, to expand Pinterest’s set of video creation tools and to help its creators make more dynamic videos, according to TechCrunch.

“The Vochi app gives creators the ability to apply high-quality effects based on computer vision on objects in a video instantly,” Ilya Lesun, CEO & Co-founder at Vochi, said in a press release. “These technologies are unique in the industry, and we’re excited to bring them to an even larger audience as a part of the Pinterest team.”

WhatsApp is adding new functionality to its disappearing messages feature, which lets users set messages in a chat to automatically be deleted after a set period of time, the company said in a blogpost. WhatsApp says users will now have the option to turn on disappearing messages automatically for all their new one-on-one chats so that all future messages will be automatically deleted from the service. WhatsApp also says it’s giving users more options for how long before a message is deleted.

Epic Games has created The Matrix Awakens, an interactive tech demo built in Unreal Engine 5. A teaser for the interactive Matrix experience appeared yesterday, and the tech demo will be available on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles, The Verge reports. You can pre-install the demo right now (29GB) on PS5 or Xbox Series X / S, and it will launch during The Game Awards on December 9th.

Members of the original movie team, including Lana Wachowski, have worked with Epic Games to create The Matrix Awakens. The Xbox store listing promises “a wild ride into the reality-bending universe of The Matrix that features performances by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss.”

Elon Muskis being allowed to “make the rules” himself for the world’s space tech industry, Josef Aschbacher, European Space Agency’s new chief, warns in an interview with Financial Times. Musk’s private space company SpaceX and the satellites unit Starlink have won regulatory approval in the US to send up tens of thousands of satellites into low-earth orbits, to provide satellite-based internet connections around the world.

“Space will be much more restrictive [in terms of] frequencies and orbital slots,” Aschbacher said according to the Financial Times report, which is behind a paywall, but was also cited by other news sites. “You have one person owning half of the active satellites in the world. That’s quite amazing. De facto, he is making the rules. The rest of the world including Europe … is just not responding quick enough,” Aschbacher warned.

Clearview AI is just certain administrative fees away from getting a US federal patent for its controversial facial recognition technology, Politico reports. The patent would be the first to cover a so-called ‘search engine for faces’ that crawls the internet to find matches, according to the report.

Clearview’s software has already scraped billions of public images from social media to help law enforcement match images in government databases or surveillance footage. Critics say the company is doing this without the knowledge of consent of anyone.

Now, some of those critics also fear that codifying Clearview’s work with a patent will accelerate the growth of these technologies before legislators or regulators have fully addressed the potential dangers, according to Politico.

Curefit Healthcare, which operates the fitness platform Cultfit, has raised $145 million in a funding round led by food delivery company Zomato, Economic Times reports.

Accel, South Park Commons, Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and Curefit's co-founder Mukesh Bansal also participated in the round, according to ET.

Curefit is now valued at about $1.5 billion, up from $800 million in March 2020, according to ET.

Sense, an HR tech startup that helps some of the world’s largest staffing and recruitment agencies fill blue-collar vacancies quickly, has raised $50 million in series D funding, led by SoftBank, TechCrunch reports. The Silicon Valley startup, founded by Indian American entrepreneur Anil Dharni, has raised its valuation to $500 million in the process, according to TechCrunch.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One), is the title of the highly anticipated sequel to the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. This was revealed in the first trailer for the sequel that is out now from Sony Pictures. The surprise is that the upcoming adventures of Miles Morales will actually be a two-part affair, The Verge points out.

According to the official description, the upcoming sequel will “transport Brooklyn’s full-time, friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man across the Multiverse to join forces with Gwen Stacy and a new team of Spider-People to face off with a villain more powerful than anything they have ever encountered.”