As large-scale layoffs begin at Facebook's parent company Meta, employees on work visas such as H-1Bs are now faced with uncertainty over their immigration status, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging "this is especially difficult if you're here on a visa" and offering support to those impacted. Meta announced that it is laying off 11,000 employees or 13 per cent of its workforce, with Zuckerberg describing it as "some of the most difficult changes we've made in Meta's history." US-based technology companies hire a large amount of H-1B workers, the majority of whom come from countries such as India.
The high court of Karnataka has orally warned Facebook (Meta) that it may order its operations in India to be shut down if it does not cooperate with police investigation over a fake profile.
'With free software on the Internet and apps, creating a deepfake video can take 3 to 5 minutes. Anyone can make these videos.'
Could it be about clout? Given its size and influence, RIL doesn't need the media for that, notes Vanita Kohli-Khandekhar.
'The estimated expenditure is expected to be more than double the Rs 60,000 crore spent in 2019'
Many ethical, competent corporate leaders aspire to join public life today. However, the transition to politics is far from easy, observes Indrajit Gupta.
This election will be remembered for being the first election where the Election Commission failed to take action on gross violations involving the ruling party that repeatedly used religion, communal slurs, lies and undocumented allegations, observes Ramesh Menon.
Google on Tuesday began reinstating about 250 Indian apps it had delisted from its Play Store over a billing dispute as it caved in to government criticism, but the squabble may not yet be over.
'When Bad Newz was given to me to direct, the first thing I did was go back to my childhood.' 'It's an ode to Hindi cinema.'
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday met top officials of the finance and corporate affairs ministries to review the implementation of various announcements of the Union Budget FY24. "The finance minister underlined the importance of continuous assessment of progress to ensure that various announcements are implemented in a time-bound manner," the finance ministry said in a tweet. Sitharaman also discussed in detail various issues on the digital competition laws with Rajeev Chandrashekhar, the minister of state for entrepreneurship, skill development, electronics and technology.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta, summed it up well as he explained the reason for the company sacking 13 per cent of its employees. He said no one predicted that the boom for digital services during the Covid pandemic would die out. "Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended.
Vaishnaw told reporters that the government had recently issued a notice to companies on the deepfake issue, and the platforms responded, but added that the firms will have to be more aggressive in taking action on such content.
The first step to keeping your job safe, experts tell Rediff.com's Divya Nair, is understanding why layoffs happen.
'Enterprises have become more demanding in terms of their productivity expectation from their employees.'
'We went from zero to about 10 million users in three months. Paytm came out with the wallet play and we came out with the UPI play.'
Indian mobile and Web consumers speak in 30 languages and around 1,600 dialects.
Haven't they heard about the 'Tale of Two Brothers'? asks Suveen Sinha.
Walmart-owned fintech firm PhonePe said it has crossed 500 million lifetime registered users on its platform. With this milestone, 1 in 3 Indians are now on PhonePe. The company said it is the first Indian internet company to have reached this scale globally. This milestone has been achieved in just over 7 years since the PhonePe UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payments launched in August 2016.
Reliance Jio has sent a second legal opinion to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on the subject of the potential allocation of satellite spectrum. The letter is written by retired Supreme Court Justice L Nageshwara Rao and argues in favour of auctions, stating that any other method for allocating spectrum apart from auctions could be constitutionally unsound. Business Standard has reviewed the letter.
Tech giant Apple has stopped accepting payments via debit and credit cards in India. Apple has stopped accepting cards for subscriptions, and purchases using credit cards issued by banks in India. Apple will also not accept payments for ad campaigns on Apple Search using credit cards issued by Indian banks. All campaigns will be put on hold from June 1.
Ordering groceries, vegetables and daily essentials is just a WhatsApp away as billionaire Mukesh Ambani's e-commerce platform JioMart taps into the popular messaging app to scale up online business in its fight for dominance in the giant Indian retail market with Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Ambani's twin children, Akash and Isha gave a preview of the ordering at Meta's second edition of the Fuel for India event on Wednesday. A new 'tap and chat' option allows users to order groceries through WhatsApp.
Messaging platform WhatsApp on Wednesday said it has rolled out a pilot program across 500 villages across Karnataka and Maharashtra, aimed at empowering villagers with access to digital payments through 'payments on WhatsApp'. The announcement was made at Fuel For India 2021 - Meta's annual event in India. WhatsApp India Head Abhijit Bose said the pilot aims to effect a behavioral transformation to digital payments at the grassroots.
Assume Voot, JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar are merged into one entertainment app, and you have a streaming service with more than 233 million unique visitors. That is a reach just under half of India's largest streaming app: YouTube. 'This level of consolidation does not exist even in the US.'
India witnessed a 12 per cent year-on-year (YoY) jump in total household wealth last year, at $14,225 billion, according to the Global Wealth Report 2022 by Credit Suisse. The report also forecasts the number of millionaires in the country to more than double from 796,000 in 2021 to 1.6 million in 2026. According to the report, which is based on data for the wealth holdings of 5.3 billion adults across nearly 200 countries, global household wealth rose 9.8 per cent in 2021 to $463.6 trillion, driven by widespread gains in share prices and a favourable environment created by central bank policies in 2020 to lower interest rates but at the cost of inflationary pressure.
'The risks for injury and mortality will be increasing, and these risks are factored into the reintroduction plan'
A day after getting permission to raise its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) user base to 100 million, WhatsApp on Thursday said it has plans to make significant investments in 'payments on WhatsApp' across India, including India-first features and driving adoption. The company, however, did not share details of its plans. The Meta-owned messaging app got its first greenlight for its payments service from the National Payments Council of India (NPCI) in November 2020 with a cap of 20 million users. A year later, in November 2021, the limit was raised to 40 million users.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday urged the government to put an end to the alleged 'systematic interference' of Facebook and other social media giants in India's electoral politics.
In a country like India, where counterfeit items are sold in every nook and corner, the regulation of trademark infringement poses a big challenge.
'Our proactive detection rate for hate speech in India is close to 97 per cent -- which means that of the hate speech content we remove, we detect 97 per cent of it proactively, even before anyone reports it.'
Shikhar Dhawan opened up on one instance where he tried learning one of Suryakumar Yadav's shots in the T20 World Cup 2022.
The Editors Guild of India on Wednesday said it was extremely disturbed by the manner in which the Delhi police carried out searches and seizures at the homes of the editors of The Wire as well as their office and the newsroom.
Eyeing a windfall of close to Rs 50,000 crore, the Board of Control for Cricket in India on Tuesday floated the media rights tender for the next five seasons of IPL from 2023 to 2027.
Significant controls and exemptions to the government under the proposed Digital Personal Data Protection bill 2022 are likely to make it harder for companies to invest in data centres and data processing activities in India, according to global technology industry body ITI. The ministry of electronics and IT has floated draft Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill 2022 and has invited comments on the same till January 2. "The Bill grants significant controls to the executive arm of GOI (Government of India) and delegates much of the detailed rulemaking authority to separate, as yet undefined processes.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani's children -- Isha, Akash and Anant -- on Monday were appointed on the board of his energy-to-technology conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd, in what is seen as a clear path of succession planning at India's most valuable company.
Back home, the Nifty IT index - a gauge of the performance of the IT stocks on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) that has closely mirrored the performance of NASDAQ over the past few years - has lost nearly 2 per cent in CY23.
100 years of Dev Anand and 10 scenes etched in our memory!
Social media allowed them to connect even more directly with potential clients, and gave them multiple new marketing and outreach channels, explains Devangshu Datta.
'We're seeing major Bollywood celebrities, fashion icons, and even movie studios all wanting to build Metaverse experiences'
RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das on Friday said the entry of big tech firms into the financial sector poses systemic concerns like overleveraging at the borrowers' ends.
A bench of Justices BR Gavai and Vikram Nath was told by the Centre in its application moved by additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati that a status report in this regard will be filed before the court within six months on the basis of the advice of the experts on the tanslocation of Asiatic lions from Gir to Kuno.
