Tech Nuggets with the Technology

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Reliance launches JioMart in more than 200 towns across India

Reliance Industries Ltd has officially launched its online grocery delivery service- JioMart in more than 200 towns across India. The service is now active in across Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Delhi, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Trivandrum and some other tier-II cities too. Reliance has made the JioMart website live after running a pilot for limited pin codes in Mumbai. Customers can now log on to jiomart.com to place an order. Note that the app is not live yet, but it may follow soon.

JioMart will deliver groceries in more than 200 towns across the country, Damodar Mall, CEO, Reliance Retail, said on Twitter late on Saturday. As of now, the JioMart website has listed essential grocery, FMCG goods and farm produce. The company also says it has collaborated with farmers to source selling fruits and vegetables from them. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that product catalogue on JioMart's website would be expanded after lockdown restrictions are eased.

With JioMart, Reliance will rival against the existing giants like Amazon India, Walmart's Flipkart, and other leading micro delivery players like BBDaily, Grofers, Milkbasket and Swiggy's Supr Daily. The fresh produce supply chain connecting farmers to businesses will take on existing players like Crofarm and Ninjacart.

JioMart: a clear threat to competition

JioMart's entry is not a surprise as the company was preparing for a rollout way before the country got hit with Coronavirus pandemic. Now, since the online demand for daily essentials and FMCG good is booming, Reliance sees it as the perfect time to enter the market. "Never waste a crisis, they say!" Mall said in his tweet. He also shared Alibaba's case by quoting his colleague, who said, "Alibaba also flourished starting from the SARS crisis."

We've seen Reliance Jio disrupting the telecom sector, and being the largest offline retailer having 11,784 stores and a massive amount of user base on the Jio platform; it is already well equipped to take on the smaller players. On top, Jio recently got funded by Facebook, and other firms totalling a hefty investment of Rs 78,562 crores (approx. USD 7 billion).

Since Facebook now has ties with Reliance Jio, the company is also expected to utilise Facebook-owned services like WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook app to integrate shopping feature and reach a broader user base. Facebook told that it had a daily active user base of 1.6 billion in India by Q4, 2019. The company confirmed to Techcrunch that its messaging service WhatsApp had 400 million users in India as of July 2019. JioMart launched its WhatsApp business account, enabling people to track their order and invoice directly on the messenger app. It gives us more reasons to expect something similar going forward, especially after WhatsApp gets a green signal to launch its payment feature in the country.

Lastly, Prime Minister's push to support for getting 'vocal for local' might also drive some customers towards the platform as Jio has grown as one of the biggest homegrown brands to become a household name in no time.

https://ift.tt/2Xipigk

A look at webcam supply chain issues as ecommerce tracking firm CommerceIQ finds 78% of views on webcam product pages showed out of stock in the week of May 9 (Rachel Lerman/Washington Post)

Rachel Lerman / Washington Post:
A look at webcam supply chain issues as ecommerce tracking firm CommerceIQ finds 78% of views on webcam product pages showed out of stock in the week of May 9 — Webcams are back-ordered and sold out across the Internet as we struggle to look our best on camera while working from home

JioMart website goes live across 200 cities in India

The wider launch of the service comes after the company began testing its home delivery service in Navi Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan in late April https://ift.tt/3d0zuAL https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Startup Genome study finds global VC funding fell 20% since the onset of COVID-19 in December 2019 (Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat)

Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Startup Genome study finds global VC funding fell 20% since the onset of COVID-19 in December 2019 — Global venture capital funding has dropped by 20% since the onset of the coronavirus crisis in December 2019, according to a new report by Startup Genome. — The drop was even more pronounced in China, where the pandemic began.

Jailbreaking team Unc0ver has released a tool that will jailbreak most versions of iOS from 11 to the 13.5; the tool makes use of a 0-day flaw in the iOS kernel (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)

Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
Jailbreaking team Unc0ver has released a tool that will jailbreak most versions of iOS from 11 to the 13.5; the tool makes use of a 0-day flaw in the iOS kernel — The Unc0ver tool works on all versions of iOS from 11 to 13.5, the current release. — Over the years, Apple …

New York City-based Spruce, whose tech helps buyers, sellers, and lenders digitize paperwork for completing real estate transactions, raises $29M Series B (Danny Crichton/TechCrunch)

Danny Crichton / TechCrunch:
New York City-based Spruce, whose tech helps buyers, sellers, and lenders digitize paperwork for completing real estate transactions, raises $29M Series B — Real estate is one of those classic industries we always talk about in Silicon Valley: multi-trillion dollars in scale in terms …

Run The World, which helps clients organize and host virtual conferences and events, raises $10.8M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Run The World, which helps clients organize and host virtual conferences and events, raises $10.8M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund — Some businesses have boomed, and others have gone bust due to the COVID-19 crisis — without question, live events is one sector that has been hit hardest.

Hackers release a new jailbreak that unlocks every iPhone

A renowned iPhone hacking team has released a new “jailbreak” tool that unlocks every iPhone, even the most recent models running the latest iOS 13.5.

For as long as Apple has kept up its “walled garden” approach to iPhones by only allowing apps and customizations that it approves, hackers have tried to break free from what they call the “jail,” hence the name “jailbreak.” Hackers do this by finding a previously undisclosed vulnerability in iOS that break through some of the many restrictions that Apple puts in place to prevent access to the underlying software. Apple says it does this for security. But jailbreakers say breaking through those restrictions allows them to customize their iPhones more than they would otherwise, in a way that most Android users are already accustomed to.

The jailbreak, released by the unc0ver team, supports all iPhones that run iOS 11 and above, including up to iOS 13.5, which Apple released this week.

Details of the vulnerability that the hackers used to build the jailbreak aren’t known, but it’s not expected to last forever. Just as jailbreakers work to find a way in, Apple works fast to patch the flaws and close the jailbreak.

Security experts typically advise iPhone users against jailbreaking, because breaking out of the “walled garden” vastly increases the surface area for new vulnerabilities to exist and to be found.

The jailbreak comes at a time where the shine is wearing off of Apple’s typically strong security image. Last week, Zerodium, a broker for exploits, said it would no longer buy certain iPhone vulnerabilities because there were too many of them. Motherboard reported this week that hackers got their hands on a pre-release version of the upcoming iOS 14 release several months ago.

A powerful spyware app now targets iPhone owners

JioMart rolls out its online grocery delivery service, including directly sourced farm produce, in dozens of cities in India, after a month of testing in Mumbai (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
JioMart rolls out its online grocery delivery service, including directly sourced farm produce, in dozens of cities in India, after a month of testing in Mumbai — The rationale behind the deluge of dollars flooding into billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Platforms is beginning to become …

Friday, May 22, 2020

London-based Blink, an app that helps companies and orgs connect with their frontline workers, raises £8.2M Series A led by Partech as it launches publicly (Annie Musgrove/Tech.eu)

Annie Musgrove / Tech.eu:
London-based Blink, an app that helps companies and orgs connect with their frontline workers, raises £8.2M Series A led by Partech as it launches publicly — Blink, a London-based app that connects frontline employees, has announced £8.2 million in funding from Partech Partners and a group of angel investors.

PresenceLearning, which helps school districts provide speech and mental health therapy to students online, raises $27M Series D, bringing total raised to $70M+ (Tony Wan/EdSurge)

Tony Wan / EdSurge:
PresenceLearning, which helps school districts provide speech and mental health therapy to students online, raises $27M Series D, bringing total raised to $70M+ — Speech and other special-education professionals were already in short supply even when classes were in session.

AI has played a useful but fragmented role in the global fight against COVID-19, from predicting outbreaks to aiding diagnosis and drug discovery efforts (Kai-Fu Lee/Wired)

Kai-Fu Lee / Wired:
AI has played a useful but fragmented role in the global fight against COVID-19, from predicting outbreaks to aiding diagnosis and drug discovery efforts — Disease diagnosis, drug discovery, robot delivery—artificial intelligence is already powering change in the pandemic's wake.