Tech-tical News

With concerns to climate change and country’s plans to have be carbon-negative by 2070, many companies including the fuel retailer, Indian Oil has announced its plans to go all electric.The country’s largest automobile fuel retailer Indian Oil Corporation has announced its plans to set up 10,000 charging stations in three years. Setting up of EV charging stations and production of green hydrogen will both be part of the company’s net carbon zero strategy that is expected to be unveiled soon. Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum have also announced their plans of establishing 7000 and 5000 EV charging stations respectively. IndianOil has announced partnerships with EV manufacturing companies like Tata, Hyundai, Ola, Mahindra, etc. to facilitate charging for all cars. Hyundai, Mahindra, Tata and MG already have launched electric cars for the Indian market, out of which Tata Nexon EV is the current most selling electric car in India. OLA’s subsidiary company. Ola Electric has announce...

2021 is about to end and India has already added 33 unicorns to the list this year alone, bringing it ahead of China with 18 unicorns this year and it is now second only to the USA which added 237 unicorn startups. India is now the hub for investors all around the world as so many successful startups are budding out of the country. Investors from all around the world, particularly China, USA, Japan and the Middle East are flooding the Startup space encouraging more and more people to bring their dreams to reality. The Indian startups that entered the Unicorn club in 2021 are Apna Jobs, BharatPe, BlackBuck, Browserstack, ChargeBee, CarDekho, Coin DCX, Coinswitch Kuber, CRED, Digit Insurance, Droom, Eruditus, Grofers, Groww, Gupshup, Infra.Market, Innovaccer, Licious, Messho, Mindticle, Mobikwik, Moglix, MPL, Ofbusiness, PharmEasy, Rebel foods, ShareChat, UpGrad, Urban Company, Vedantu, Zeta and Zetwerk. Apna Jobs became the fastest unicorn in India as it crossed $1 billion valuation in ...

Facebook (now Meta) owned VR headset brand Oculus announced a bunch of updates for their latest pair of headsets, Oculus Quest 2 (which will be rebranded as Meta Quest). The biggest addition is Space Sense. Just as the name suggests, it will be able to sense if any object, animal or person has intruded into the space around the wearer and is able to notify the person. This prevents a lot of accidents that happen when the player isn’t able to see what’s around him in reality and accidentally bump into things or hurt their pets. Pets often come near the person when he/she is in a virtual game and get kicked or stepped on by accidentally. Space Sense will now prevent any such accidents in the future. Other updates include voice commands and getting phone notifications on the VR screen.

After its massive success through just the beta release, and with 2 million active weekly users in just a year-and-half of its release, Clubhouse has survived fierce competition against social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc. Now it has planned to add 13 more languages to the app to facilitate local users from all around the world. These languages are Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, French, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), German, and Spanish.  Clubhouse will provide support for iOS and additional languages for users globally. International Head of Clubhouse, Aarti Ramamurthy said in an interview that the app has taken this step so that “people from Mumbai and Paris to Sao Paulo and Jakarta can experience Clubhouse in a way that feels a bit more native to them”. The app also added singer-songwriter, Anirudh Deshmukh, as its app icon. His show on Clubhouse called ‘Late Night Jam’ is very popular among the Internationa...

Just days after Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect the company's aspiration in the metaverse space, Microsoft Corp announced that it is gearing up to take its own stab at the idea and will launch Mesh for its video conferencing platform Teams in the first half of 2022, where its customers can interact as well as collaborate in 3D digital avatars in offices, or on shop floors. Mesh is a collaborative communication platform introduced by the tech giant for virtual experiences, directly into Microsoft Teams. The virtual collaboration tool lets people interact with each other using 3D holographic images. Microsoft has already excelled in creating the 1:1 replica of the entire world in its game Microsoft Flight Simulator. Even though the virtual world is expected to be much larger than the physical world, that is quite an important checkpoint for the advancement to the digital world.

Tech Giants like Micrisoft, Yahoo and Epic Games have started siting China and withdrawing their services. But this isn’t something out of the blue. China has always been infamous for blocking International news firms and sites like Google and YouTube to control the flow of data and information in the country. This is what it calls the Great Firewall. Last month Yahoo Finance’s app was removed from app stores in China. It was the last source of International news for Chinese citizens.

  Bollywood’s Shehenshah, Amitabh Bachhan recently released his NFT collection ’Madhushala’ for auctioning and it already had the highest bid at $520,000 on day 1. The auction is to go until 4th November and could be one of India’s biggest auctions till date as it contains Amitabh Bachhan’s vintage film posters signed by him, hand-painted film posters and a recording of his father’s iconic poem ‘Madhushala’. After Amitabh Bachhan, many Bollywood celebrities entered the NFT space including Rajnikanth, Salman Khan, Sunny Leone, Manish Malhotra, etc. International fast-food chain giant McDonald’s also announced an NFT giveaway to celebrate 40 year anniversary of its very popular item McRib. Prior to this Burger King and TacoBell have also entered the NFT space. The most popular music awards, Grammys have also announced to release and auction NFTs for the next 3 years of Grammys Awards and the portion of the fund will go to scholarship funds.

  Nike has filed 7 patents this October for its name Nike, ‘Just Do It’ , swoosh logo, MJ Jumpman logo, etc. in the ‘online and virtual world’. This comes days after Facebook announced its metaverse plans to create a virtual world for all and Mark Zuckerberg changed Facebook’s name to Meta. With the world’s biggest social media company and multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg betting on virtual plans, things are getting serious and Nike already has plans for it. Nike is one of the world’s largest footwear companies and now it wants to sell virtual sneakers and apparel in the virtual world. It might be just like you customize your video game character with different clothes with in-game currency, but now you can get an AirJordan on your character in the ‘Meta’ world.

An Austrian startup, SmaXtec, has developed a 10 cm capsule that is filled with sensors and is safe to ingest for cows. The capsule and detect temperature changes, pH levels, drinking behaviour, metabolism, etc. The 24/7 monitoring helps in the early detection of diseases and health issues along with internet access anywhere on any device. Once a disease is detected, an AI helps farmers in deciding what actions to take next. It can also alert livestock health officials in case of extreme diseases or if asked by the farmer through the app. The capsule is not only capable of detecting the health of one cow but the entire herd through the AI and internet. This helps in getting better yields and much-reduced cost and workload on farmers that own big cattle farms. 

The 10 year old logistics delivery startup Delhivery filed for an IPO to rase $998 billion dollar at a valuation of over $6 billion dollar. The startup claims to have worked with India’s all big e-commerce platforms and delivered more than 1 billion orders to more than 2,300 cities. The startup launched as a food delivery startup when it realized the discrepancies in Indian logistics business and went on to make it easier for both the customers and the sellers.

World’s richest man and visionary entrepreneur, Elon Musk has finally decided to enter the Indian market but not with the long-awaited Tesla cars but with his latest plan to cover the Earth with satellites that provide cheap and very fast Internet to the remotest areas of the Earth from the scorching Sahara desert to the trembling tops of the Himalayas. The project is called Starlink and is one of SpaceX’s most ambitious projects. The others being inhabiting Mars and placing a Dogecoin on the Moon. SpaceX has registered a company with the name Starlink Satellite Communications Private Limited with goals of providing ultra-fast and cheap broadband to the rural parts of India without traditional towers but through innumerable satellites. Once active, the prices of the internet will be directly competing against Reliance Jio’s $0.68 per GB. Even in Broadband services, both Airtel and Jio’s monthly plans start with as low as $6.7 and a refundable installation fee of $20, while Starlink’s p...

Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra are two 19-year-olds who started a grocery delivery startup in April this year. The startup aims to deliver fast-food, ritual flowers and daily groceries in less than 10 mins. “Our average delivery time is 8 minutes 40 seconds”, says Palicha. The startup recently raised $60 million at a valuation between $200 million to $300 million in a series - A funding round led by Grade Brook Capital. The two friends decided to start their own venture when they couldn’t attend classes at Stanford University and dropped out to launch an app to help neighbourhood shops with online delivery. They shut it down after 10 months and launched Zepto in a highly competitive market that has billion-dollar unicorns like Swiggy and Grofers and Google-backed startup Dunzo. The founders claim that it is going to repeat Swiggy’s success after 7 years in just 18 months.

A Japanese startup, A.L.I. Technologies, has launched a hoverbike that looks direct out of a sci-fi movie. The drone startup is backed by the automotive corporate Mitsubishi and the football player Keisuke Honda and has been working on the project since 2017. It is the world's first hoverbike available for the public and is called the Xturismo Limited Edition. The hoverbike is available for sale since 26th October and is priced at 77.7 million yen (5.1 crore rupees). It can reach speeds up to 100km/h and hover for about 40 minutes on a single charge. Even though the bike is too pricey and can only be afforded by the super-wealthy class, it signifies a change in the upcoming automotive sector when hoverbikes, drones, electric vehicles and autonomous driving would be normal. Many companies and startups around the world have built and showcased their concepts of hoverbikes, but none have successfully launched one before. This is a first for the world in both technology, and creating a...