Intelligent Communication Systems India Limited (ICSIL) recruits 15 MTS posts. Candidates with 8th Class can attend interview on 14-07-2020.
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Google reportedly cancelled a cloud project meant for countries including China
After reportedly spending a year and a half working on a cloud service meant for China and other countries, Google cancelled the project, called “Isolated Region,” in May due partly to geopolitical and pandemic-related concerns. Bloomberg reports that Isolated Region, shut down in May, would have enabled it to offer cloud services in countries that want to keep and control data within their borders.
According to two Google employees who spoke to Bloomberg, the project was part of a larger initiative called “Sharded Google” to create data and processing infrastructure that is completely separate from the rest of the company’s network. Isolated Region began in early 2018 in response to Chinese regulations that mean foreign tech companies that want to enter the country need to form a joint venture with a local company that would hold control over user data. Isolated Region was meant to help meet requirements like this in China and other countries, while also addressing U.S. national security concerns.
Bloomberg’s sources said the project was paused in China in January 2019, and focus was redirected to Europe, the Middle East and Africa instead, before Isolated Region was ultimately cancelled in May, though Google has since considered offering a smaller version of Google Cloud Platform in China.
After the story was first published, a Google representative told Bloomberg that Isolated Region wasn’t shut down because of geopolitical issues or the pandemic, and that the company “does not offer and has not offered cloud platform services inside China.”
Instead, she said Isolated Region was cancelled because “other approaches we were actively pursuing offered better outcomes. We have a comprehensive approach to addressing these requirements that covers the governance of data, operational practices and survivability of software. Isolated Region was just one of the paths we explored to address these requirements.”
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, broke out Google Cloud as its own line item for the first time in its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings report, released in February. It revealed that its run rate grew 53.6% during the last year to just over $10 billion in 2019, making it a more formidable rival to competitors Amazon and Microsoft.
In Hong Kong, Facebook and WhatsApp have a penetration rate of around 80% according to Statista, Instagram has 60%, whereas WeChat is used by just 54% (Karen Chiu/South China Morning Post)
In Hong Kong, Facebook and WhatsApp have a penetration rate of around 80% according to Statista, Instagram has 60%, whereas WeChat is used by just 54% — Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft all say they're suspending requests for user data in Hong Kong because of a new national security …
Govt sends questions to 59 Chinese apps, seeks beneficial owner details
The questions come a week after the government, in an interim order, banned the 59 Chinese apps in the country owing to their activities https://ift.tt/3iJOTZH https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Why the Apache Lucene and Solr "divorce" is better for developers and users
Commentary: A decade ago Apache Lucene and Apache Solr merged to improve both projects. The projects recently split for the same reason, which is a really good thing for users of search services.
Display country of origin by August 1, Govt tells e-commerce companies
Platforms seek more time, ask govt to involve sellers and manufacturers; call on deadline soon https://ift.tt/3gGPAB7 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Ant plans Hong Kong IPO, targets valuation over $200 billion: Sources
Ant is looking at selling between 5% and 10% of its shares in an initial public offering, said one of the sources, in what would be one of the world's biggest listings this year. https://ift.tt/31Wd9So https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
E-commerce sales surge for food & grocery retailers in April-June quarter
E-commerce accounted for a record 20% sales for India's top food and grocery retail chains in June quarter https://ift.tt/2O4pmfA https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Karnataka HC's stay order paves way for online classes by private schools
Karnataka education minister said the government will decide on its next steps after studying the order. https://ift.tt/2ClsBfT https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Talks held on legal action against JioMeet: Zoom India head
Zoom is also trying to clear misconceptions that it is of Chinese make, and has been in touch with the government over three months on how it runs its platform and does not store data outside the country. https://ift.tt/2ZOgxfv https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
This VC just closed on $60 million to fund “technical risk,” saying other VCs rarely do the same
Ashmeet Sidana, a longtime VC who struck out on his own in 2015 to form Engineering Capital, just closed his third and newest fund with $60 million in capital commitments from a university endowment, a fund of funds, and three foundations.
Sidana — who previously spent nearly nine years with Foundation Capital and received one of his first limited partner agreements afterward from Foundation’s legendary founder, Kathryn Gould — says the fund came together despite the pandemic without too much pain.
That’s thanks in part to Sidana’s track record, including the sale of the cloud monitoring startup SignalFx to Splunk for $1 billion after it raised $179 million from VCs, and the sale of the cloud application monitoring startup Netsil by Nutanix for up for $74 million in stock after it raised just $5.7 million. (Engineering Capital was the first investor in both.)
Sidana’s day-to-day work in Palo Alto, Calif. –which centers on working with teams “that you can feed with two pizzas,” yet whose narrow technical insights can have broad applicability — was also an apparent draw. To learn more, we talked earlier today with Sidana, a self-described engineering nerd who studied computer science at Stanford about what “technical insights” have caught his attention most recently.
TC: You talk about pursuing founders with technical insights. Is that not true of most venture capitalists?
AS: No. Silicon Valley is a tech investing ecosystem, but most of its participants aren’t solving hard technical problems. They have market insights or consumer insights. It’s the difference between Google and Facebook. Google figured out how to index better, how to better prioritize a sorting problem. Facebook was started with the consumer insight that people want to be connected with each other. I focus on companies based on technical insights. Most VCs don’t.
TC: What are you looking for exactly?
AS: A team that’s using software or tech to solve a known problem that exists but for which there does not exist a solution. Many such problems exist. For example, we now the future will be multi cloud. Amazon has succeeded wildly with AWS. Microsoft is doing well with its cloud business. Google is catching up to them. Then you have the seven dwarves, including Digital Ocean. It’s a difficult way for enterprises to engage with infrastructure. Another technical problem is rooted in all of us wanting to give our infrastructure over to the cloud but not our data. How do we solve this? Some are solving it legally, some with publicity. But really, it’s a technical problem.
TC: What’s a recent bet you’ve made that has solved a technical problem?
AS: I’m the first investor in Baffle, which is a really interesting company that enables the user of a traditional relational database to see the data but not an administrator. [Editor’s note: the company says it enables the field level protection of data without requiring any application code changes.] Or Robust Intelligence is an even newer investment that’s solving the problem of data contamination in artificial intelligence.
TC: How so?
AS: When you run models and do machine learning, you do cybersecurity and protect them, but what about the data that the AI is working on? They have a killer demo that shows that when you deposit a check with your iPhone, your bank is of course using AI to recognize check and ensure the right amount goes into the proper account. [But a nefarious actor could] procure a small number of pixels that are invisible to the human eye in the photo of check and change the numbers and the routing number. What Robust does is protecting [both the bank and its customers] from that kind of data contamination.
TC: I know you tend to invest very early — often writing the first check. Are you hovering around Stanford all day? How do you find these nascent teams?
AS: I have good relationships with many schools, including [the University of] Michigan, Stanford, I’m involved with the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab; I keep active relationships with [schools in India]… I spend a lot of time with engineers in academia or industry.
TC: What size checks are you writing to get them started, and how much of their companies do you expect in return?
AS: Most people think investing in technical insights is expensive, but it can be very capital efficient if you are working with software. I’m also looking at companies where you can get to revenue with $1 million and $3 million and funding. That typically takes a small team of five to eight people who you can feed with two people. Linux was ultimately written by one person. VMWare was started by a technical insight addressed by two people. Google had its earlier stuff working with just Larry and Sergey.
As for ownership, my job is to buy low and sell high. I’m as greedy as the next VC and would love to have as much ownership as I can, but there is no formula.
TC: What’s a mistake you tend to see with new teams?
AS: Gluttony. Most think they have to go after a big market and solve a big problem, but the magic of doing a startup is to focus on an incredibly narrow problem that has broad application. As Steve Jobs used to say it is difficult to throw away features, not to add them.
Ookla: T-Mobile's 5G coverage extends to 5,013 US cities, compared to AT&T's 237 and Verizon's 39; Verizon's 5G had the highest speed score of 870.5 (Bevin Fletcher/FierceWireless)
Ookla: T-Mobile's 5G coverage extends to 5,013 US cities, compared to AT&T's 237 and Verizon's 39; Verizon's 5G had the highest speed score of 870.5 — Both AT&T and T-Mobile nabbed bragging rights in Q2 mobile performance, according to new analysis by Ookla.
First teaser for The Boys S2 promises another wild and bloody ride
Our vigilantes are on the run from Homelander (Antony Starr) and the rest of the Seven in the second season of Amazon Prime's The Boys.
The war between corrupt, evil superheroes and a ragtag band of vigilantes out to expose their true nature and curb the power of "super" in society will escalate dramatically, judging by the first teaser for S2 of The Boys. The Amazon Prime series—one of the most-watched on the streaming platform when it debuted last year—is based on the comics of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson.
(S1 spoilers below.)
The Boys is set in a fictional universe where superheroes are real but corrupted by corporate interests and a toxic celebrity-obsessed culture. Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) is a self-appointed vigilante intent on checking the bad behavior of the so-called "supes"—especially The Seven, the most elite superhero squad and, hence, the most corrupt. Butcher especially hates Seven leader Homelander (Antony Starr), a psychopath who raped his now-dead wife. Butcher recruits an equally traumatized young man named Hugh "Hughie" Campbell (Jack Quaid, son of Dennis) to help in his revenge, after another Seven member, A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) used his super-speed to literally run through Hughie's girlfriend, killing her instantly.
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Report says Quibi lost 92% of its earliest users after free trials expired
The Independence Day weekend was a big one for Quibi, it was time to see how many of their earliest subscribers would convert from free users to paid subscribers.
Early reports indicate that the streaming service held onto some subscribers through that period, but perhaps at a lesser rate than recently launched rival services. Data provided to TechCrunch by Sensor Tower estimates that around 8% of the 910,000 users who signed up for a free trial of Quibi in the app’s first three days stuck with the service past the expiration of the three-month free trial period. All-in-all Sensor Tower approximates that “a maximum of” 72,000 subscribers of that 910,000 subscriber number stuck with Quibi after their free trials expired.
It’s important to note that this is not the total number of Quibi’s users and only accounts for conversions for the first 3 days of sign-ups. For context, Sensor Tower shared that of the 9.5 million downloads for Disney+ in its first three days of sign-ups, about 1 million users (or 11% of the total) converted to paid subscriptions. The huge difference here is that Quibi opted for a lengthy three month free trial, whereas Disney+ launched with a 7-day free trial.
Sensor Tower estimates Quibi has been downloaded 4.5 million times in total since April 6. After April, Quibi transitioned from a three-month free trial to a 14-day free trial as it scaled back its early efforts to juice early momentum.
TechCrunch has reached out to Quibi for comment.
In a statement to The Verge regarding the same data, a spokesperson for Quibi pushed back on Sensor Tower’s findings, saying that “the number of paid subscribers is incorrect by an order of magnitude. To date, over 5.6 million people have downloaded the Quibi app. Our conversion from download to trial is above mobile app benchmarks, and we are seeing excellent conversion to paid subscribers — both among our 90-day free trial sign-ups from April, as well as our 14-day free trial sign-ups from May and June.”
In response to Quibi’s statement, a Sensor Tower spokesperson indicated that the cause of the mismatch between total download numbers could be, in part, due to the fact that its data only counts installs as “the first download of an app by a single Apple ID or Google account. As such, our figures won’t reflect if the app is installed again by the same user, such as after deletion or to another device.”
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Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-world tasks like navigating rooms, trained on Qwen3-VL (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg : Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-worl...
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Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal : An interview with White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, a Peter Thiel protégé confirmed by ...
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