One Thing Today in Tech

A coalition of America’s top justice officials—comprising several state attorney generals—is leading a nationwide investigation into how Instagram knowingly harms children. Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, is providing and promoting Instagram to children and young adults despite knowing that such use is associated with physical and mental health harms, according to a statement from Maura Healey, one of the state Attorneys General who is co-leading the investigation.

Led by founder CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, or Meta, remains defiant, tech sites such as The Verge have pointed out. Meta even plans to eventually launch an Instagram for children under the age of 13. The company said it would only “pause” that plan after severe opposition from lawmakers across the US.

Google has released more features on its products and platforms, aimed at making them more accessible to users in India, including additional local language support, and a way for small businesses and merchants to quickly build an online storefront. In Google search, people can now listen to results being read out to them in their language—available in Hinglish, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil.

On the Google Pay app, in what Google says is a first for Google globally, the company has added support for ‘Hinglish’—a conversational hybrid of Hindi and English. And MyShop—a functionality available to merchants using the Google Pay for Business app provides merchants a quick store builder tool, where they can add images, descriptions, and prices within minutes and then share the link, through the Business Profile, across Google products and beyond Google on social media.

Tata Consultancy Services, one of the world’s biggest IT services companies, found that many finance leaders in companies around the world relied more on instinct than on data, in a survey of 750 such senior executives.

Half of the respondents said they are unable to deliver short term forecasts without making significant errors—if they can do it at all, TCS said in a report based on the survey.

More than two thirds of those who took the survey plan to invest in cloud-based systems, and will invest in data and analytics technologies for their financial planning and analysis teams in the next year, according to TCS.

(2:34) Interview: Rahul Nanwani, co-founder and CEO, ImageKit on staying bootstrapped, being profitable and focused on the product

Rahul Nanwani and his two co-founders quit their jobs at a travel company four years ago to build a product that would allow people to quickly make changes to images to suit their needs—like cropping it right for uploading onto to a website. In today’s tech conversation, Rahul gives us a quick update on their bootstrapped company, ImageKit, which is profitably helping customers around world process billions of images.

US President Joe Biden’s administration is offering funding to drug companies including Pfizer and Moderna to expand mRNA Covid-19 vaccine capacity by a billion doses by the second half of 2022, Bloomberg reports. Announced on Wednesday, the plan is also aimed at building the capacity to address any future pandemic, according to Bloomberg.

Oxfam and others have accused the world’s biggest drug companies of profiteering by selling to rich countries as most people in low-income countries around the world haven’t been fully vaccinated.

Arbo Works, a fintech company started by eight former Google executives, has found backing in Sequoia Capital India and 120 angel investors from among some serious practitioners of AI and top tech executives, Caesar Sengupta, who’s leading the startup, said in a blog post on Thursday.

The value of the funding hasn’t been disclosed, but TechCrunch reports that it is an eight-figure investment.

Sengupta previously led payments and the next billion users initiative at Google. His work included launching Google Pay in India. Arbo Works, based in San Francisco and Singapore, will be an AI-led fintech company.

European nations are a step closer to agreeing on the Digital Markets Act. It is aimed at preventing big tech companies from abusing their dominant positions, Financial Times reports. The agreement, reached among the European Parliament’s main political parties, paves the way for a vote on the package next week.

If the act became law, it could apply to companies including Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netherland’s Booking and China’s Alibaba, according to the report.

(2:21) Interview: Sri Satish Ambati, founder and CEO of H2O.ai, on his journey from math olympiads to one of the best known AI cloud platforms

Sri Satish Ambati’s AI journey started in school with math olympiads. It culminated in the founding of one of the world’s best known AI cloud platforms. In today’s interview, Ambati talks about ‘explainability,’ bringing AI to the edge and the next steps at his company H2O.ai.

Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna—three of the world’s biggest Covid vaccine makers—are making an estimated $1000 every second in profits even as the world’s poorest go unvaccinated, according to a press release from Oxfam, a UK-based non-profit development organisation. The estimate is based on a report by the People’s Vaccine Alliance. The Alliance has 80 members including the African Alliance, Global Justice Now, Oxfam, and UNAIDS. Pfizer and BioNTech have delivered less than one percent of their total vaccine supplies to low-income countries, while Moderna has delivered just 0.2 percent. Meanwhile, 98 percent of people in low-income countries have not been fully vaccinated, according to the release.

Britain is moving into phase two of its investigation of Nvidia’s proposed $54 billion takeover of UK chip designer, Arm, after the first phase of the probe by the country’s competition authority revealed concerns of both competition and national security, according to a government statement. This could pose a setback to Arm’s majority owner, SoftBank Group. The deal, when announced in September 2020, was pegged at $40 billion in cash and stock but has since risen in value to $54 billion. UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has found that the acquisition “may result in a substantial lessening of competition” across four key markets: data centres, Internet of Things, automotive, and gaming, according to the statement. The authority now has 24 weeks, plus an additional eight weeks, if needed to conclude its investigations. Arm’s chips go into several devices including Apple’s iPhones. The deal is also under scrutiny in Europe and China.

Infosys and MIT Technology Review's custom publishing division Insights has launched The Cloud Hub—a forum offering insights and learning from successful cloud transformations to help global enterprises accelerate their cloud journey, the Indian IT services company said in a press release. The Cloud Hub aims to create a community of experts from the industry, including practitioners, providers and influencers, to debate key challenges and opportunities surrounding one of the biggest technology disruptions that the world is witnessing.

(03:03) Interview: Hotmail’s co-founder Sabeer Bhatia on his latest venture, ShowReel, to bring ‘purposeful’ short videos to millions

Paradigm, a crypto-focused VC firm, has raised a $2.5 billion fund, the industry’s largest to date. It is bigger than the $2.2 billion crypto fund Andreessen Horowitz announced in June. It cements Paradigm’s position as a leading crypto investor, The Information points out. “We’ve immersed ourselves in the frontier of protocol research and the culture of Web3,” Paradigm’s partners Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang said in a blog post. Ehrsam previously co-founded America’s biggest crypto company Coinbase and Huang is a former Sequoia Capital partner.

Meanwhile, in India, a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the weekend, showed that government departments differed from the Reserve Bank of India in their respective positions on cryptocurrency, Economic Times reported. Most government departments were in favour of regulating cryptocurrencies whereas the RBI is said to have reiterated its preference for a crypto ban, citing concerns over financial stability.

Microsoft will soon update Windows 11 to block redirection of taskbar search results to browsers other than its Edge browser, Engadget reports. The workaround was popularised by EdgeDeflector—an app that allows Windows users to bypass some of the built-in browser restrictions found in Windows 10 and 11. Companies such as Mozilla and Brave had planned to implement similar workarounds to allow users to open Start menu results in their respective browsers, according to Engadget. Now they may not be able to do so. This move “places Microsoft in the same user-hostile and anticompetitive category as Big Tech competitors like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google,” said Paul Thurrot, who runs the technology news and analysis site Thurrot. “This behaviour needs to be examined by antitrust regulators in the United States, EU, and elsewhere,” he wrote.

Roblox will invest $10 million to support the development of educational video games using its platform, David Baszucki, the video gaming platform maker’s founder and CEO, said in a blog post on Monday. According to The Wall Street Journal, the move is a way for Roblox to expand its reach beyond its pre-teens and teens userbase. The company had about 47 million users in the third quarter this year—about half are less than 13 years of age.

(3:24) Interview: Sanjay Nekkanti, founder and CEO, Dhruva Space on making space-grade solar panels in India for the global market

India isn’t known for hi-tech hardware, but a small number of startups are trying to change that by making varied products from computer vision modules to wireless equipment. In today’s interview, Sanjay Nekkanti, founder and CEO of Dhruva Space, talks about manufacturing space-grade solar panels in India for the global market.

Technology is not just an enabler, it has become central and strategic to banking. New financial products, such as buy now pay later, are becoming all the rage. The idea of open banking is also catching up, with pieces of software called open application program interfaces allowing third-party fintech startups to provide innovative financial products and services built around established banks. In this conversation, Sanat Rao, CEO of Infosys Finacle, unpacks some of these emerging trends

SoftBank Group may invest as much as $10 billion in India next year, chief executive Rajeev Misra said in a virtual conference on Thursday, TechCrunch reports. SoftBank, which returned to Flipkart with a fresh investment this year, has already invested $3 billion in Indian companies this year. In India, the group will look for the right companies at the right valuations to invest between $5 billion and $10 billion in 2022.

US President Joe Biden on Thursday signed into law, the Secure Equipment Act, to prevent Chinese companies that are seen as security threats from receiving new equipment licenses from US regulators. According to the Reuters report, this will affect companies such as like Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp.

The signing comes days before Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to hold a virtual summit. The new law requires the Federal Communications Commission to no longer review or approve any authorisation application for equipment that poses an unacceptable risk to America’s national security, according to the report.

Spotify Technology has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Findaway, a digital audiobooks distribution company, as Spotify expands its business beyond music and podcasts.

Findaway’s technology infrastructure will enable Spotify to quickly scale its audiobook catalogue and innovate on the experience for consumers; simultaneously providing new avenues for publishers, authors, and independent creators to reach new audiences around the globe.

A91 Partners, a Mumbai VC firm has closed its fund II at $550 million as it seeks to invest in the next generation of emerging Indian startups, general partner Gautam Mago said on Twitter. While it was started only in 2018, the young VC firm is an investor in well known Indian startups such as Oyo, Ola, Freshworks, CarDekho, Sugar, Capital Float, and CueMath. 

Wipro, India’s fourth-biggest IT services company, has launched Click-Shift-Drive—a contactless car-buying solution that addresses the complete automobile buying journey. Scalable, flexible, and rapidly deployed, the end-to-end solution enables automakers and dealers to offer everything from research and loan approval to purchase and delivery, the company said in a press release.

Click-Shift-Drive incorporates a range of Salesforce technologies. Wipro also partnered with ThreeKit 3D & Augmented Reality to provide an augmented reality component so buyers can visualise a virtual rendering of the automobile in their own driveway.

(3:42) Interview: Shashank Kumar, co-founder and CEO of DeHaat, on India’s biggest agri startup funding so far, and plans ahead

Perseverance is finally paying off for some of India's agri-tech startups, where founders patiently toiled away, having started their businesses long before the idea of a startup was fashionable in India. Last month, when DeHaat announced a $115 million funding round, it was the biggest fundraise by an agri startup in India so far. In today's interview, Shashank Kumar, co-founder and CEO of DeHaat, returns to this podcast to talk about the ongoing change in the Indian agri startup scene and plans ahead at his company.

The US and China made a surprise joint announcement on Wednesday at the ongoing COP26 UN climate summit, pledging to work together to find concrete measures to combat climate change, Bloomberg reports.

The two sides agreed to accelerate their efforts to cut emissions—including methane gas—and curb illegal deforestation, China’s special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua told reporters, according to Bloomberg. 

Rivian Automotive, an electric pick-up truck and SUV maker backed by Amazon and Ford Motors, raised $11.9 billion in the biggest US IPO this year. The strong listing also valued the company at about $100 billion, taking its market capital higher than Ford.

The company, started in 2009 by RJ Scaringe, has beaten rivals including Ford and General Motors to design and make a pick-up truck, and is due to start rolling out its SUV in December and a delivery van in 2023, BBC reports. Amazon will be the first to buy the delivery vans.

In more IPO news, FSN E-Commerce Ventures, more popularly known for its online beauty and fashion brand, Nykaa, made a spectacular debut in Mumbai on Wednesday, making its founder Falguni Nayar the wealthiest self-made billionaire woman in the country.

Nykaa’s shares opened at Rs. 2001 on the Bombay Stock Exchange, which was a 79 percent premium on the issue price of Rs. 1125, MoneyControl reports. The listing valued the online beauty and fashion business at more than Rs. 1 trillion, or about $13.4 billion.

The European General Court upheld a €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion) antitrust fine against Google’s parent company Alphabet for anti-competitive behaviour, rejecting the internet giant’s appeal against the 2017 fine.

The court ruled that Google abused its dominance in online search to illegally promote its own shopping comparison service over rivals and upheld the EU’s fine, Courthouse News Service reports.

Twitter is putting together a team to build crypto, blockchain, and other decentralized technologies, Tess Rinearson, the engineer who’s joined the company to lead the team, tweeted.

Twitter Crypto will serve as a centre of excellence for all things blockchain, Rinearson said. To start with, the team will look into how Twitter can support the growing interest among creators to use decentralised apps and virtual goods and currencies. Twitter is hiring for roles in engineering and product development in this team.

(4:00) Interview: Prateep Basu, co-founder and CEO of SatSure on plans ahead at the space tech startup in Bengaluru

Prateep Basu was an ISRO engineer for a few years before turning entrepreneur with SatSure, the satellite services company he co-founded. In today's interview, Prateep gives us a quick update on the company's efforts thus far, in building a decision intelligence platform for multiple sectors that uses satellite data.

DoorDash, a US food delivery giant, is acquiring Finland based Wolt in an all-stock deal worth €7 billion, or $8.1 billion, the company said in a press release. The acquisition “will accelerate our product development, bring greater focus to each of our markets and improve the value we provide to consumers, merchants, as well as Dashers and couriers around the world,” Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash said in the release.

Wolt was founded in 2014 by Miki Kuusi, who will run DoorDash International and report to Xu. The Finnish company has over 4,000 employees across 23 countries.

Facebook, for the first time, disclosed the prevalence of bullying and harassment on its platform, saying such content was seen between 14 and 15 times per every 10,000 views on its site in the third quarter this year, meaning the July to September period. The company said in its quarterly content moderation report that bullying and harassment content was seen between 5 and 6 times per 10,000 views of content on Instagram.

Apple must comply with an order to let developers add external payment options, judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled denying the company’s motion for a stay, The Verge reported. Gonzalez had made this ruling in September in a case between Epic Games and Apple related to the iPhone maker’s App Store policies.

NASA is pushing back its target date for its next crewed lunar landing to 2025 instead of 2024 as originally planned, the US space agency said in a press release. NASA blames the delay on recent lawsuits over contracts for the agency’s lunar lander, as well as various delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The human lunar return is being planned under a programme called Artemis. NASA hopes to land the first woman and the first person of colour on the Moon this decade while working to figure out sustainable ways to live and work on the lunar surface. The programme involves the Space Launch System, a massive new rocket NASA has been developing for the past decade to send people into deep space and near the Moon in a new crew capsule called Orion, according to The Verge.

(3:44) Interview: Kartikeya Bhardwaj, founder of SpoofSense on live face detection technology and beyond

Face biometrics is increasingly being adopted as a means of authentication, be it just to mark attendance, or to authorise access to sensitive data. Correspondingly, spoofs are also increasing. In today's interview, Kartikeya Bhardwaj tells Forbes India about his company SpoofSense, which offers a technology to detect if a camera is seeing a real live person or if someone is trying to use an image of another person to trick the camera. 

Kartikeya has recently been backed by 100x.VC and has raised some additional angel funding to build out his team. Eventually, SpoofSense, as the product is also called, can be expanded to include voice biometrics as well, he says.

America and Japan have reopened their borders, easing entry bans imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The US has reopened its borders to fully vaccinated travellers, ending restrictions imposed by former President Donald Trump in March 2020 that had affected non-US citizens from over 30 countries, BBC reported on Monday.

Ending a de facto ban on foreign visitors due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Japan will allow business visitors, international students, and technical trainees to enter the country, Nikkei reported on Monday. The mandatory self-isolation for fully vaccinated business travellers could be as few as three days, according to the report.

Daniel Ek, the Swedish entrepreneur founder of Spotify, who is now also famous for taking on Apple and Google for the way they run their app stores, has made the first investment from the € 1 billion ($1.16 billion) fund he started last year.

Ek’s funding vehicle, Prima Materia, has invested € 100 million in Helsing, a defence tech startup that produces live maps of battlefields, Financial Times reported. Helsing’s AI software will integrate data from infrared, video, sonar and radio frequencies data from sensors on military vehicles, to create a real-time picture of battlefields, according to the report.

IBM has opened a client innovation centre in Mysuru, the eighth such facility in India, the company said in a press release. The innovation centre is part of IBM Consulting and specialises in design, software engineering, and analytics. IBM aims to hire more than 10,000 staff for its innovation centres, in the current quarter globally.

H2O.ai, the AI cloud provider in Silicon Valley, has closed $100 million in Series E funding led by Australia’s largest bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) with participation from Pivot Investment Partners. Founded by Indian American entrepreneur Sri Ambati, H2O.ai has now raised about $250 million. The latest investment values the company at $1.7 billion, H2O said in a press release. Existing investors include Nexus Venture Partners, Crane Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs and NVIDIA.

The company’s AI cloud is used by enterprise customers around the world, and it will use the latest funding to expand its operations.

(3:21) Interview: Abhishek Bansal, founder and CEO of Shadowfax on his vision for a comprehensive gig economy platform

Last-mile delivery is a rapidly growing segment of the logistics and supply chain industry, around the world. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the demand for quick deliveries of online purchases, food and medicines. Today 30-minute deliveries are not uncommon and some startups are looking at even quicker fulfilment of orders.

That said, Abhishek Bansal, founder and CEO of Shadowfax, a fast-growing third-party logistics startup, thinks that the picture is much bigger than just deliveries. And to that end, Shadowfax has overhauled its app, used by delivery personnel across the country to find their next gig. In today's interview, Abhishek talks about his vision for a gig economy platform where people can find short term work ranging from delivery jobs to even software development.

Apple has recruited another former Tesla engineer to build its electric car team, Bloomberg reported on Sunday. The latest hire is Christopher Moore, a software engineer, who will report to Stuart Bowers, another former Tesla executive who joined Apple last year. Bowers had led Tesla’s Autopilot team before leaving Tesla in mid-2019, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s founder and the world’s richest person Elon Musk, polled his Twitter followers on whether he should sell 10 percent of his stock ostensibly to pay taxes. Some critics tweeted back that wealth shouldn’t be a way to avoid taxes and that Musk’s reason that unrealised gains didn’t hold water is that he’s able to take out bank loans on the stock.

Google’s parent company Alphabet has set up a new company to use artificial intelligence to find new drugs. The new company, Isomorphic Labs, will be based in Britain and use the AI developed at DeepMind—the UK AI company that Google acquired in 2014.

Isomorphic Labs is “a commercial venture with the mission to reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach and, ultimately, to model and understand some of the fundamental mechanisms of life,” Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, said in a blog post on Thursday last week. Hassabis is also the founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs.

While the new company was announced last week, it was incorporated in February, according to a filing with Companies House, Britain’s company registry, CNBC reported.

WhatsApp could be developing a ‘Communities’ feature, WABetaInfo reports. The feature could give group admins more control over the groups, including creating groups within groups. WABetaInfo also posted some screenshots to show that currently, the feature looks like group chats and that it also seems to be end-to-end encrypted.

Admins can invite other people to join the community. Users can be manually added or they can join using a ‘Community Invite Link,’ if the admin has shared it privately or publicly, according to the report.

(2:54) Interview: Raghunandan G, founder and CEO of Zolve, on plans after a $40 million Series A funding

In February, the entrepreneur turned investor Raghunandan G had announced that he was starting a new venture—this time a fintech startup that would offer cross-border services to Indians going abroad to study and work. Recently, Raghu, as he’s known to everyone, raised a $40 million Series A round with big names like DST Global and Tiger Global backing his company, called Zolve, which already had marquee early-stage investors like Accel and Lightspeed, from its seed round.

Response to Zolve has been beyond expectations and having started with Indians moving to the US, the company is quickly gaining traction as an operation that could tap other corridors around the world as well, he told Forbes India in a recent conversation.