Praveen chintu

Shunning the current non-committal nods towards new powertrains, next year is when automotive will go fully electric from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/35cBVf8

WeWork launches a meal-sharing firm, Bezos achieves immortality and Tesla's robo-trike goes rogue from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2rKlIQB

Giving up animal products for a month can be tricky for first-time vegans. But there are a few psychological tricks you can use to get the most out of Veganuary from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2sACDFu

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Vodafone Idea added 1.9 lakh new subscribers while Airtel added 81,974 subscribers, TRAI said. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/39u0Qy4

Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies said Tuesday that its sales rose about 18% in 2019 despite U.S.moves to restrict its business. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/35aVOmz

Brazil's Ministry of Justice and Public Security has imposed a fine of 6.6 million reais (about $1.6 million) on Facebook for the sharing of data belonging to 4,43,000 Brazilian users in relation to the Cambridge Analytica case. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2SMAL7c

The Indian government has allowed Chinese telecom company Huawei Technologies Co to participate in trials for 5G networks, a company spokesman said on Monday. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2ZCCcGZ

In a departure from the past, industry body Nasscom discontinued providing its annual growth forecast for the industry -- an important tool to gauge the sentiment of the sector. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2ZB7H4f

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Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Monday said the government will allocate airwaves to all telecom service providers for conducting trials of super-fast speed 5G networks. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/39qGtSj

Thousands of holidaymakers and locals were forced to flee to beaches in fire-ravaged southeast Australia Tuesday, as blazes ripped through popular tourist areas leaving no escape by land. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2QF4b4S

In a humming factory in Kenya's highlands, tea is hand-plucked from the fields, cured and shredded into the fine leaves that have sated drinkers from London to Lahore for generations. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2MDnt9t

The nondescript building on an industrial site near Kyoto gives little hint to the productivity inside: 30,000 heads of lettuce grow here daily, under artificial light and with barely any human intervention. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2F8xUgZ

The number of people killed by a powerful storm that pummeled the central Philippines over Christmas has risen to 50, authorities said Tuesday, making it the nation's deadliest storm of 2019. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2ZL0GOo

Smoke-choked Sydney was gearing up Tuesday for a huge fireworks display, kicking off a wave of New Year celebrations for billions around the world and ringing in the new decade. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/37oUHRI

Panama on Tuesday marks two decades of control over the vital interoceanic Canal following its return by the United States, but worries over weak traffic and climate change loom. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/39qKJkB

There has been no shortage of big news over the last decade. Spanning the globe, some stories were expected while others caught the world off guard. Some were so massive they were visible from space, captured through state-of-the-art imaging satellites belonging to technology company and imagery provider Maxar Technologies. Together, The Associated Press and Maxar assembled a selection of the most striking images. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2u88he7

As Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart spend billions to make a dent in India’s retail market, the two companies have stumbled upon a new challenge: Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man. Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio, two subsidiaries of Ambani’s Reliance Industries, said they have soft launched JioMart , their e-commerce venture, in parts of the state of Maharashtra — Mumbai, Kalyan and Thane. The e-commerce venture, which is being marketed as “Desh Ki Nayi Dukaan” (Hindi for new store for the country), currently offers a catalog of 50,000 grocery items and promises “free and express delivery.” In an email to employees, accessed by TechCrunch, the two aforementioned subsidiaries that are working together on the e-commerce venture, said they plan to expand the service to many parts of India in coming months. A Reliance spokesperson declined to comment. The soft launch this week comes months after Ambani, who runs Reliance Industries — India’s largest industrial house — said that he ...

When anything may be real or fake, will we still care to find out the difference, or will we just see what we want to believe? from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2QzJqHr

From the Moon's far side to highly accurate gene editing technique, there's been plenty for science to celebrate in 2019 from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2ZJfRaH

Here's our pick of some of the best fiction and non-fiction books of the decade from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2SHE93k

“The whole television system isn’t designed to deal with something moving so fast” from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2FbnFZa

Postmates and Uber have filed a complaint in California federal district court, alleging that a bill limiting how companies can label workers as independent contractors is unconstitutional. The complaint, which includes two gig workers as co-plaintiffs, was filed in U.S. District Court on Monday, days before Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5) is due to go into effect on Jan. 1. It asks for a preliminary injunction against AB-5 while the lawsuit is under consideration. The complaint argues that AB-5 violates several clauses in the U.S. and California constitutions, including equal protection because of how it classifies gig workers for ride-sharing and on-demand delivery companies compared to the exemptions it grants to workers who do “substantively identical work” in more than twenty other industries. AB-5 was authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a Democrat representing the 80th Assembly District in southern California and signed into law in September by Governor Gavin Newsom. It is int...

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Huawei reported resilient revenue for 2019 on Tuesday as the embattled Chinese technology group continues to grow despite prolonged American campaign against its business, but cautioned that growth next year could prove more challenging. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, wrote in a New Year’s message to employees that the company’s revenue has topped 850 billion Chinese yuan ($122 billion), a new record high for the Chinese group and an 18% increase over the previous year. Xu said Huawei, the second largest smartphone maker globally, sold 240 million handsets this year, also up 17% since 2018. “These figures are lower than our initial projections, yet business remains solid and we stand strong in the face of adversity,” he wrote. He acknowledged that Huawei is confronting a “strategic and long-term” campaign against it by the U.S. government . If the campaign persists for long, it would create a challenging environment for Huawei to “survive and thrive,” he said. Survival woul...

Funding for tech startups has been on an inevitable upswing for years, a result of a virtuous circle where wildly successful tech companies on the public markets whet the appetites of investors and investors’ backers to find more diamonds, a push met by a pull from the rush of talent with entrepreneurial aspirations out to put that money to work. 2019 has felt a bumper year in that longer trend, with 9-figure rounds ($100 million or more) and “unicorn” statuses so prevalent that the numbers have started to cease to be news items in themselves. With 2020 now just days away, a look at the 50 biggest funding rounds for start-ups in the past year draw out some trends. We’re pulling out the top five below for a closer look, but it’s interesting too to see some of the other trends emerging across the rest of the pack. Automotive remains a huge pull when it comes to raising big bucks: part of the reason is because the space is capital intensive, as it straddles both software and hardware (t...

A tweet from U.S. President Donald Trump that identified an intelligence analyst as the alleged whistleblower who helped spark his impeachment was temporarily blocked at the weekend, with Twitter blaming an outage that affected a number of user accounts. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2Q99wlB

New York is the fifth largest producer of onion bulbs in the United States, producing over 110,000 metric tons from over 2,800 hectares. Most of these onions are grown on high organic matter soils, where foliar disease management is crucial to productivity and profitability. These foliar diseases include Botrytis leaf blight, purple blotch, downy mildew, and Stemphylium leaf blight. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2QAp3tV

It’s the slowest week of the year for gadget news. Christmas is in the rearview, and it’s a few days until the new year. After that, it’s a straight shot to CES and then MWC. Meantime, best we’ve got going for us are a handful of rumors, including a peek at what Google’s next budget might could potentially possibly conceivably look like. Per renders from OnLeaks and 91Mobiles , a vision of the Pixel   4A has appeared — or, a render, rather. The handset will no doubt be an important one for Google. After all, the 3A (pictured at top) helped the company recover from some lackluster sales last year. A couple of pieces jump out at first glance. The display appears to finally buck the company’s longtime notch dependency, in favor of a hole punch camera on the front. Perhaps even more compelling, the device seems to hold the torch for the headphone jack. In 2020, that could well be a standout feature even among mid-range handsets. As the company eloquently put it around the time of...

VMware is closing the year with a significant new component in its arsenal. Today it announced it has closed the $2.7 billion Pivotal acquisition it originally announced in August . The acquisition gives VMware another component in its march to transform from a pure virtual machine company into a cloud native vendor that can manage infrastructure wherever it lives. It fits alongside other recent deals like buying Heptio and Bitnami , two other deals that closed this year. They hope this all fits neatly into VMware Tanzu , which is designed to bring Kubernetes containers and VMware virtual machines together in a single management platform. “VMware Tanzu is built upon our recognized infrastructure products and further expanded with the technologies that Pivotal, Heptio, Bitnami and many other VMware teams bring to this new portfolio of products and services,” Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager of the Modern Application Platforms Business Unit at VMware, w...

Nematocysts are stinging organelles of cnidarians that have remarkable mechanical properties to undergo 50 percent volume changes during explosive exocytosis (process by which cells excrete waste and large molecules), while withstanding osmotic pressures beyond 100 bar. Researchers had recently identified two novel protein components that built up the nematocyst wall in Hydra to include (1) a cnidarian proline-rich protein-1 (CPP-1) with a rigid polyproline motif, and (2) an elastic Cnidoin possessing a silk-like domain. In a new study, now on Scientific Reports, Theresa Bentele and a team of researchers in the departments of Medicine, Molecular Evolution and Genomics and the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Germany, Australia and Japan, expressed recombinant Cnidoin and CPP-1 proteins in Escherichia coli. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2FbNJDv

Satellite industry giant Maxar is selling MDA, its subsidiary focused on space robotics, for $1 billion CAD (around $765.23 million USD), Reuter reports . The purchasing entity is a consortium of companies led by private investment firm Northern Private Capital, which will acquire the entirety of MDA’s Canadian operations, which is responsible for the development of the Canadarm and Canadarm2 robotic manipulators used on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station respectively. Maxar’s goal in selling the business is to help alleviate some of its considerable debt, which stood at $3.1 billion as of this past September. The company was already known to be seeking potential buyers for MDA, so it’s not much of a surprise. MDA will continue to operate as its own company under the terms of the new ownership, which should mean that its current plans and contracts will continue. MDA is working on a number of projects for various clients, including developing wildfire monitoring sa...

The holidays might be a time of slowed activity for most companies in the tech sector, but for SpaceX, it was a time to ramp production efforts on the latest Starship prototype – “Starship SN1” as it’s called, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. This flight design prototype of Starship is under construction at SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas development facility, and Musk was in attendance over the weekend overseeing its build and assembly. Musk shared video of the SpaceX team working on producing the curved dome that will sit atop the completed Starship SN1 (likely stands for ‘serial number 1,’ a move to a more iterative naming system and away from the “Mark” nomenclature used for the original prototype), a part he called “the most difficult” in terms of the main components of the new spacecraft. He added that each new SN version of the rocket SpaceX builds will have minor improvements “at least” through the first twenty or so versions, so it’s clear they expect to iterate and test these...

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The largest mobile phone manufacturers in the world, including Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Vivo, OPPO and Xiaomi need to scale up their exports from India to meet the goals of the National Policy on Electronics (NPE) 2019, the India Cellular and Electronics Association (ICEA) Chairman has said. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/36lOJ3S

According to Israeli news site Girafa, the Samsung Galaxy S11 or Galaxy S20 (if recent rumours are to be believed) will launch on February 11 at an event in San Francisco, which is almost two weeks before the MWC 2020 which is scheduled for February 24 in Barcelona. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/365Rlmu

Around 100,000 people were urged to flee five Melbourne suburbs on Monday evening as Australia's spiralling bushfire crisis killed a volunteer firefighter battling a separate blaze in the countryside. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/39tezFs

Bank of England head Mark Carney, soon to become UN special envoy on climate action and finance, urged companies on Monday to move faster on helping to cut carbon emissions. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/39o6uld

In order to comply with stringent e-commerce regulations, Amazon.com has already sold much of its stake in its desi partner Cloudtail, a joint venture between the Jeff Bezos' behemoth and software major Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy's Catamaran Ventures. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/36819MM

2019 brought more global attention to Africa’s tech scene than perhaps any previous year. A high profile IPO, visits by both Jacks (Ma and Dorsey), and big Chinese startup investment energized that. The last 12 months served as a grande finale to 10 years that saw triple digit increases in startup formation and VC on the continent. Here’s an overview of the 2019 market events that captured attention and capped off a decade of rapid growth in African tech. IPOs The story of the year is the April IPO on the NYSE of Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia. This was the first listing of a VC backed tech company operating in Africa on a major global exchange —  which brought its own unpredictability. Founded in 2012, Jumia pioneered much of its infrastructure to sell goods to consumers online in Africa. With Nigeria as its base market, the Rocket Internet backed company created accompanying delivery and payments services and went on to expand online verticals into 14 Africa countr...

Nokia’s budget smartphone — Nokia 4.2 — has got a price cut in India. The smartphone that was listed at Rs 12,999 on Amazon India website, is now selling at Rs 6,999 on the e-commerce website. The price of Rs 6,999, is right now available for the Black colour variant only. The second colour option of Pink Sand is selling at Rs 9,400. Interested buyers can get additional Rs 6,100 off on exchange. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/37mH71q

Security camera start-up Wyze has announced that it was hit by a data leak that exposed the personal information of more than a whopping 2.4 million of its customers. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/2SzYbgd

Grab and Singtel, one of the largest telecoms in Singapore, announced today that they are applying for a digital full bank license together. If approved, the license will allow them to offer simple credit and investment products, before progressing to a full-functioning bank if they meet the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) criteria. Grab will hold a 60% stake in the consortium, with Singtel holding the other 40%. A joint statement said the companies are “committed to contributing to the financial services sector with a differentiated offering that addresses the unmet and underserved needs of consumer and enterprise segments in Singapore,” including SMEs that need access to credit. Securing working capital is a major pain point across Southeast Asia, with several startup and financial institutions working on new tools to gauge creditworthiness and manage loans. Grab launched in 2012 as a ride-sharing company, but now bills itself as “Southeast Asia’s leading super app,” w...

Indian tech startups have never had it so good. Local tech startups in the nation raised $14.5 billion in 2019, beating their previous best of $10.5 billion last year, according to research firm Tracxn . Tech startups in India this year participated in 1,185 financing rounds — 459 of those were Series A or later rounds — from 817 investors. Early stage startups — those participating in angel or pre-Series A financing round — raised $6.9 billion this year, easily surpassing last year’s $3.3 billion figure, according to a report by venture debt firm InnoVen Capital. According to InnoVen’s report, early stage startups that have typically struggled to attract investors saw a 22% year-over-year increase in the number of financing deals they took part in this year. Cumulatively, at $2.6 million, their valuation also increased by 15% from last year. Also in 2019, 128 startups in India got acquired, four got publicly listed, and nine became unicorns. This year, Indian tech startups also a...

There’s plenty of hype around AI and we will see some disappointments. But in the case of drug discovery, this technology has already had a significant effect from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/367pEK0

A look back at the decade which completely and utterly failed to replicate or replace the iPhone from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2Q93i5u

From your travel patterns to your politics, small changes can contribute to a bigger overall difference from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2SzUpTU

Libra aims to target the unbanked, but it needs to recognise that American finance culture is not universally accepted from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/368AW0N

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When you look at all of the tech trend stories of the past decade, one important saga that’s likely to be overlooked is the platformization of gaming. In the 2010s, the value of video games was realized in a way that completely transformed how the majority of users experienced sitting down with their favorite FPS or RPG. The gaming industry questioned everything about the gaming experience in the past decade, but only in the past year have there been earnest efforts from major players to rethink where the game was actually rendered. Google Stadia isn’t the first cloud gaming effort by any means, but the platform, where games are rendered on remote servers and streamed to users’ screens over the web, was one of the most-talked about gaming announcements of the year. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Zx2RoA

The wildfires were more destructive. The drought was the longest on record. And the storms, when they finally came, unleashed more water than our dams could contain. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2MEj8ma

Quick shifts in climate have prompted Los Angeles to consider an unlikely place to bank some of its Sierra Nevada snowmelt: beneath dry Owens Lake, which the city drained starting in 1913 to fill the L.A. Aqueduct and supply a thirsty metropolis. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/358B7YD

As 1960 dawned, sub-Saharan Africa braced for historic change: that year, 17 of its countries were destined to gain independence from European colonial powers. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/37cbyY2

Coastal Maine has a lot of seaweed , and a fair number of cows. A group of scientists and farmers think that pairing the two could help unlock a way to cope with a warming world. from Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories https://ift.tt/2Zz8bYs

Apple Inc has rolled out the hugely revamped Apple Maps, on which it was working for over an year, in central and southeast US. from Gadgets Now https://ift.tt/368Bxzs

Happy New Year! It’s been another wild and wacky ride of a year in the tech world: breakthroughs and disgraces, triumphs and catastrophes, cryptocurrencies and starships, the ongoing rise of utopian clean energy and dystopian cyberpunk societies, and most of all, the ongoing weirding of the whole wide world. In other words it was another perfect year for The Jons, the annual award which celebrates dubious tech-related achievements, named, in an awe-inspiring fit of humility, after myself. We’ve got quite a lineup for you this year, folks. So let’s get to it! With very little further ado, I give you: the fuftg annual Jon Awards for Dubious Technical Achievement! ( The Jons 2015 ) ( The Jons 2016 ) ( The Jons 2017 ) ( The Jons 2018 ) THE CATLIKE FINANCIAL REFLEXES AWARD FOR LANDING ON YOUR FEET AFTER UNMITIGATED DISASTER To Adam Neumann, who presided over the spectacular rise and even more spectacular fall from grace of WeWork, which proudly launched its proposed IPO this year and pr...

AI has helped us decode ancient languages, and now researchers are turning the same technique to help understand our pets from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2F4nf6U

From prime-time stalwarts to streaming favourites, here's our pick of the best television series of the decade from WIRED UK https://ift.tt/2SAxhoh