Thursday, June 25, 2020
iPhone makers, local firms apply for govt's Rs 41K crore production-linked scheme
'Origin' debate to benefit us: eBay India
Amazon, Bigbasket ask sellers for 'origin country'
Bigbasket hits annualised gross sale runrate of $1 billion
Amazon Pay now allows you to buy from local stores & pay via QR code
Google launches group calling support for Assistant-powered smart displays, like Next Hub Max, in Google Meet for up to 100 users and in Duo for up to 32 people (Dan Seifert/The Verge)
Google launches group calling support for Assistant-powered smart displays, like Next Hub Max, in Google Meet for up to 100 users and in Duo for up to 32 people — Chat with up to either 32 or 100 right from your Nest Hub Max — Google is expanding the ways you can make video calls …
Online platforms step in to keep graduates engaged in hiring winter
Everything we know about the new Ford F-150 truck—including the hybrid
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When the new F-150 arrives this fall, it will be Ford's most technologically advanced truck yet. Burt did you also know there are 11 different styles of front grille? These are just three of them. [credit: Ford ]
On Thursday evening, Ford livestreamed the launch of its newest F-150 pickup truck. It's hard to overstate how important the truck is for Ford; the F-Series has earned the company tens of billions of dollars, and it regularly tops the chart of best-selling light vehicles in the US market. So redesigning the truck for its 14th generation is not a task the company has undertaken lightly—according to the automaker, more than a thousand hours of customer research has informed this latest evolution of an American staple. When it goes on sale this fall, it will be Ford's most advanced light truck ever, with over-the-air updates enabling new features and for the first time, a hybrid option, and a battery EV version due in a year or two.
What’s PowerBoost?
For model year 2021, Ford is providing a variety of options when it comes to powertrains. Most of these carry over from the 13th-generation F-150, including a naturally aspirated 3.3L V6, turbocharged 2.7L and 3.5L V6 EcoBoost engines, a naturally aspirated 5.0L V8, and a 3.0L turbodiesel. (Exact power and torque outputs are not being disclosed yet.) All these use the same 10-speed automatic transmission. As standard, the F-150 is rear-wheel drive, but it can also be configured with all-wheel drive, with an open or locking rear differential.
The new, exciting addition to these is called PowerBoost, which is Ford-speak for a parallel hybrid. It combines the 3.5L EcoBoost V6 with a 35kW (47hp) electric motor that's integrated into the transmission and fed by a 1.5kWh lithium-ion battery pack. The pack is liquid-cooled and located between the frame rails, so there's no negative effect on interior volume or the load bed. There's no overall power or torque figure yet, but we are told it should tow up to 12,000lbs (5,443kg).
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In email to staff, Uber CEO says it will "deprioritize" its finance-related projects, including Uber Money, as the head of its financial products quits (Bloomberg)
In email to staff, Uber CEO says it will “deprioritize” its finance-related projects, including Uber Money, as the head of its financial products quits — Uber Technologies Inc.'s financial services leader Peter Hazlehurst is calling it quits as the ride-hailing giant focuses …
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
Odisha Civil Service Exam Result 2020 – Prelims Result & Mains Exam Date Announced
Slice raises $6M to help young Indians pay digitally and build credit score
The streets of Koramangala, one of the largest neighborhoods in Bangalore, are plastered with hoardings and banners of digital payment services. Every few steps, you find a bank, and offices of fintech startups.
But when Mohammed Nayeem wanted to get a credit card, he realized his options were limited. He applied for a credit card at RBL Bank, a Mumbai-headquartered bank that has been around for more than 70 years. In the days that followed, he answered many of their questions over phone calls and provided them with a number of documents.
The calls kept coming, but the card never did.
Nayeem works as a freelance interior designer and earns an average of $580 each month, he told TechCrunch in an interview last year. Though this is more than enough for most banks in the nation to issue him a credit card, the fact that he does not have a traditional kind of job was off-putting to all of them.
Tens of millions of people like Nayeem in India today can’t get a credit card. They have lived much of their lives on debit cards and with little to no credit score. There are close to 1 billion debit cards in use in India today, but only about 50 million credit cards in circulation.
Eventually, Nayeem came across a startup called Slice, which provided him with a Slice Card that for all intents and purposes, serves as a credit card. For more than a year now, he has been using Slice’s offering and his experience has been “wonderful,” he told TechCrunch.
Slice offers a prepaid card that comes with a pre-approved credit line, Rajan Bajaj, co-founder and CEO of the four-year-old startup, told TechCrunch in an interview. The Koramangala-headquartered startup focuses on people like Nayeem — young demography comprising mostly of students, freelancers, startup employees and blue-collar workers.
Bajaj said more than 250,000 customers use Slice’s card today. In the course of a month, an average user performs about 10 transactions to digital services such as Swiggy and music apps and spends about Rs 10,000 ($132). As users spend more, Slice increases their monthly limit to up to Rs 100,000 ($1,320).
Employees at Slice, a Bangalore-based fintech startup
But giving these users a card is only part of the value proposition. The biggest attraction perhaps for users is that they are able to build credit scores, which would eventually make them eligible for better credit cards from other firms and banks, and enable them to secure loans for various purposes. In about six months with Slice, most users have a credit score of more than 700, said Bajaj.
The startup also offers users the ability to secure small sachet of loan products and pay them at zero-cost interest and track their expenses.
On Thursday, Slice announced it had raised $6 million in a pre-Series B financing round. The round was led by Japan-based Gunosy, while the U.S.-headquartered EMVC, Kunal Shah of CRED, Better Capital, and existing investor Singapore-headquartered Das Capital participated in it. It also counts Blume Ventures, Traxcn Labs, and China’s Finup among its investors.
Bajaj said Slice plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its reach. It plans to reach 500,000 young customers in the next one year.
Raising capital at the height of a global pandemic is a testament to Slice’s technology to determine the creditworthiness of customers and its underwriting methodology, he said. But Bajaj cautioned that he expects to see slightly more number of defaults in the coming months due to local conditions and new rules.
But for Slice, formerly known as SlicePay, that figure would still remain below 5%, and the startup, which has been profitable since last year, is well positioned to navigate it.
“We believe slice has a sustainable advantage as it has decoded young credit users’ demands and has built a deep understanding of credit risk and low-cost distribution using technology,” said Yuki Maniwa, Director of Gunosy, in a statement.
Cambricon, once Huawei’s core AI chip supplier, eyes $400M IPO
One of China’s most valuable artificial intelligence chipmakers Cambricon is one step closer to its initial public offering, and its prospectus reveals a rare snapshot of where Chinese companies stand in relation to their international counterparts in this critical field.
Cambricon got the nod in early June to list on the Star Market, China’s new Nasdaq-like stock exchange conceived to attract high-potential tech startups. This week, the chipmaker received the final green light from the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the stock market watchdog, for its first-time sale.
The company is aiming to raise 2.8 billion yuan ($400 million) from its IPO and spend the proceeds on cloud-based algorithm training and inference, edge computing, and cash flow boost. It was last valued at 2.5 billion yuan in 2018 and expects its market cap to exceed 1.5 billion yuan when it floats.
Cambricon began life in a lab within the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the national institute for science and technology backed by government money. In 2016, the project spun out as a separate entity, making money by licensing intellectual property and selling chips for deep-learning acceleration. Before long, it had made its name as a major supplier of Huawei’s first AI chip-powered smartphones and other flagship models later on.
But the partners’ ties have weakened ever since Huawei began doubling down on its own semiconductor arm — HiSilicon — to hedge against U.S. sanctions. The direct consequence is a substantial revenue drop for Cambricon’s licensable IP, which slumped to an estimated 16-18 million yuan in 2018, down from 117 million yuan in 2018.
“Huawei Silicon has chosen to develop its own AI chips for end devices and has not extended the partnership with our company, and our AI chip business with other clients remains relatively small,” the company replied to regulators during the vetting process for its listing. Finding new clients at Huawei’s enormous scale is also challenging, as “most of the other well-known Chinese smartphone makers are using established handset chips and solutions from Qualcomm and MediaTek,” Cambricon noted.
The chipmaker also flagged that it remains “well behind” international competitors such as Nvidia, Intel, AMD in areas including “overall scale, capital reserve, resources for research and development and sales channels.” It’s also well aware of rising domestic competition from its old ally, Huawei, which has opted for chips from its home-grown HiSilicon unit.
Cambricon’s co-founders Chen Tianshi and Chen Yunji both hail from academia. The company still maintains close relationships with CAS and also works closely with Olivier Temam, a researcher at Inria, the French national institute for computer science and applied mathematics.
Cambricon is still operating in the red, adding up to a total loss of 1.6 billion yuan ($230 million) in the last three years in part due to large sums spent on research and development, according to its prospectus. It generated revenues of 444 million yuan ($63 million) in 2019, up from 7.84 million yuan in 2017.
The chipmaker is backed by a lineup of storied investors across the board. Besides the 41.7% stake Chen Tianshi commands, other shareholders include Zhongke Suanyuan, an asset management firm set up by CAS; Aixi Partners, an entity owned by Cambricon employees and controlled by Chen Tianshi; SDIC Venture Capital, a state-owned investment firm approved by China’s state council; e-commerce titan Alibaba; and voice recognition provider iFlytek.
Amazon app quiz June 25, 2020: Get answers to these five questions to win Rs 50,000 in Amazon Pay balance
California wants judge to classify Uber, Lyft drivers as employees
Wired broadband services gain if govt cuts licence fee
Sources: amid the Iran war, Asian bankers say rising power prices and energy security are becoming a bigger consideration in data center financing decisions (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg : Sources: amid the Iran war, Asian bankers say rising power prices and energy security are becoming a bigger consideration in ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
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