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Oyo to enter US market
Oyo, after launching in China, is now entering the US market (taking Airbnb head on?).
After recently closing $1 billion fund-raise by SoftBank, Oyo has stepped on the gas in terms of expansion on foreign soil. Besides, the new market of US, it is also present in the UK, Indonesia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka among others.[via]
Flipkart in talks to list offline players as sellers on platform
Flipkart is in talks with a host of offline retailers as well as distributors of Samsung, Xiaomi and FMCG products to enroll them as sellers on its platform, to push sales while staying within the new regulations for foreign owned online marketplaces, people in the know said. [via]
Spotify to launch in India by end of March
Spotify was expected to launch in India in January. But it has been now delayed till late March.
Spotify is facing multiple issues before its official launch, ranging from last-minute contractual negotiations with local music labels to customising the application for the Indian audience, said technology journalist Sahil Mohan Gupta citing people familiar to the matter. [via]
LS polls 2019: Facebook to tell users who paid for, published political ads
Ahead of upcoming general elections, Facebook on Thursday further updated its policy for political advertising in the country and said it would add disclaimers about who paid for or published an ad and would make more data available about these ads on Facebook and Instagram. [via]
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India Now Second Largest Consumer Of LPG Globally
India is now the second largest consumer of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in the world and the number of active LPG consumers has grown from 14.8 crore in 2014-15 to 22.4 crore in 2017-18, registering a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15 per cent. [via]
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At Rs 26,961 crore, Tata Motors logs biggest quarterly loss for India Inc
Tata Motors reported the biggest quarterly loss among Indian corporates after it was hit by asset impairment in its UK subsidiary, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) Automotive in the December quarter.
The non-cash loss of Rs 26,961 crore, the largest in the company’s history in absolute terms, was on account of uncertainties around Brexit, slowing sales in China, and technological disruptions facing JLR. [via]
India’s Bruised Telecom Operators Are Shedding Flab
India’s top two telecom operators deactivated connections of more than eight crore low-paying subscribers as they focus on better-paying customers and lowering costs. Vodafone Idea Ltd. introduced a minimum average revenue per user, and deactivated 3.5 crore users who bought recharge plans of less than Rs 35 a month in the December-ended quarter, according to its filing. Sunil Mittal-led Bharti Airtel Ltd. too had dumped 4.8 crore such users. [via]
Apple Becomes Most Valuable US Company Again, Ousting Recent Leaders Microsoft and Amazon
Apple won back its crown as the most valuable publicly listed U.S. company on Wednesday, ending the session with a market capitalisation above recent leaders Microsoft and Amazon.com.
Apple edged up 0.03 percent, putting its market value at $821.5 billion (roughly Rs. 58,60,000 crores). Microsoft’s market capitalisation ended at $813.4 billion (roughly Rs. 58,10,000 crores) after its stock dipped 1.11 percent, while Amazon’s stock market value finished the day at $805.7 billion, in third place, after its shares slid 1.12 percent. [via]
Skype will now automatically blur the background using AI
Microsoft has rolled out new Skype, which automatically blurs out the background in a video call, and thus removing un-necessary and often embarrassing clutter; focussing only on the user’s face and action. [via]
Now, contents of your refrigerator can help you find your soulmate
Samsung has launched a dating app called ‘Refrigerdating’ that will allow you to find ‘the One’ with the help of a photo of that leftover pizza or a bottle of fine wine in your refrigerator. By uploading an image of your food, you can get in contact with others who have realised that ‘you are what you eat’! [via]
We Finally Got The Period Emoji We Have Been Waiting For. Of Course, it’s Red.
The Emoji 12.0 update has been finalized, which means you will soon be able to add value to your conversations with friends and family with even more emojis. There are 59 new emojis as well as 171 variants for gender and skin tone, which makes this a total of 230 new emojis that have been approved for release.
But of all of these, the one that stands out is the period emoji. The emoji itself is shaped like a drop, and unabashedly red in color. None of that sanitary napkins depicted with blue liquid mirage. It’s big, bloody and real. [via]
Honeybees Are Smart Enough to Learn Basic Math
A team of Australian and French researchers has discovered that honeybees can also speak the universal language of mathematics on a rudimentary level — and the discovery could impact the future of artificial intelligence.
The researchers detail how they taught honeybees math in a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
First, they trained 14 honeybees to enter a Y-shaped maze through one arm of the Y. At the entrance, the bee would see a gray square displaying between 1 and 5 shapes, all either blue or yellow. If the shapes were blue, the bee was supposed to add one to the number of shapes; if yellow, it was supposed to subtract one.[via]
‘Rare species’ of asteroid spotted in our solar system
An odd kind of asteroid has been hiding out in our solar system, close to Venus, and it took a new state-of-the-art surveying camera to detect it.
The Zwicky Transient Facility, known as ZTF, was installed on the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in March. Since then, it has observed over a thousand supernovae outside our galaxy, extreme cosmic events and more than a billion Milky Way stars.[via]
