IRAI Titbits -- 200801

IRAI Titbits -- 200801

Rural India with 227m Internet users over takes Urban india having 205m Internet users

The FCC has unanimously approved Amazon’s Project Kuiper, giving the tech giant the go-ahead to deploy and operate a constellation of 3,236 satellites. The company plans to invest over $10 billion on the project

India still has 300 million mobile subscribers trapped in the 2G era, their feature phones keep them excluded even from the basic usage of the internet at a time when both India and the rest of the world are standing at the doorsteps of 5G telephony. 

The decks have been cleared for the formation of three capital cities for Andhra Pradesh – the executive capital at Visakhapatnam, the legislative capital at Amaravati and the judicial capital at Kurnool.

China recently has announced its fully operational home-made Beidou navigation satellite system is ready to provide global services, joining an elite group providing space-based systems comprising the US’s GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo. Over 300,000 scientists, engineers and technicians from more than 400 domestic institutes, universities and enterprises have been involved in Beidou’s development since the 1990s

IRNSS is an independent regional navigation satellite system being developed by India. It is designed to provide accurate position information service to users in India as well as the region extending up to 1500 km from its boundary, which is its primary service area

The quantum of COVID-19 biomedical waste generated in the national capital has increased from 25 tonnes per day in May to 349 tonnes per day in July, the Environment and Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority has said in a report submitted to the Supreme Courtt

In June 2020, France and Germany kicked off the GAIA-X cloud project, a non-profit foundation designed to re-establish European control over US and Chinese cloud giants.

MLPerf, the consortium of over 70 companies and academic institutions behind the MLPerf suite for AI performance benchmarking consists of object detection, image classification, natural language processing, machine translation,  recommendation & reinforcement learning benchmarks.

Just as in Industry 4.0 as the fourth industrial revolution, Society 5.0 is also depicted as an evolution in five societal stages in the position paper of Keidanren: 1) the hunting society, 2) the agrarian society, 3) the industrial society, 4) the information society, and, 5) the super-smart society a.k.a. Society 5.0.

Visitor Location Register (VLR), a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network, indicated that 95.26% of the users were active for Airtel, 88.85% for VIL and 78.75% for Jio.

Hackers have compromised student and alumni data at least eight universities in the UK and Canada including University of York, University College, Oxford, University of Leeds and University of London via a massive attack on a US-based Blackbaud, software provider for education administration, fundraising, and financial management.

The Andean condor can fly 100 miles without flapping its wings, according to recent research published in PNAS. The bird's 10-foot wingspan appears to help it catch bursts of rising air, allowing it to only flap its wings for about 1% of flight time.

According to GeekWire, Microsoft is reportedly trimming its workforce in the news business (MSN) further amid shift to artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms and automation to perform their editorial duties.

According to Nasscom, the adoption of big data, analytics, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things is expected to push the cloud market in India to $7.1 billion by 2022, growing at an annual rate of 30%.

According to Velchamy Sankarlingam,  President of Products and Engineering, Zoom, at the end of Dec 2019, Zoom had 10 million daily meeting participants. By the end of April,  it had reached 300 million daily meeting participants. The use cases for the platform took off.. in diff ways.. from workplace collaboration to yoga classes, weddings, graduations on Zoom.. Further, between Jan and April, Zoom recorded the growth of 67 times the number of free users and 4 times the number of paid users in India.

In a change of guard at HCL Technologies, co-founder Shiv Nadar has stepped down from the position of the Chairman of the Board of directors. Roshni Nadar Malhotra, currently a non-executive director has been appointed as the Chairperson of the Board of Directors with effect from July 17, 2020. Shiv Nadar would continue to be the Managing Director of the company with the designation as the Chief Strategy Officer of the company.

The Punjab Police cyber crime cell has warned people against downloading any ‘.apk’ files that mimic the services of TikTok or any other popular apps banned by the Indian government as these can be sources of malware.

Microsoft issued a fix for a bug which had been in its code for 17 years. The vulnerability, which the company says is not known to have been exploited, could reportedly have allowed attackers to take over a victim’s entire IT infrastructure — making it possible to steal sensitive information and manipulate network traffic like emails.

According to the survey to identify today’s most pressing data management challenges and solutions to them by Seagate and  IDC,  68% of  data available in  enterprises  goes unused while over the next two years, enterprise data globally will grow at a 42.2% annual rate. 

In 2019, Cognizant settled the charges (of authorising a contractor to pay a $2 million bribe to a senior government official to issue a planning permit for its new campus in Chennai, india) with the SEC without admitting or denying the allegations. It agreed to pay disgorgement and prejudgment interest of approximately $19 million and a penalty of $6 million.

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