Education on technology

Spotify said on Wednesday it would roll out new features like smart shuffle and previews of podcasts and music playlists on its audio streaming platform, as it crossed 500 million in monthly active listeners. The Swedish company, which has invested heavily in building up its podcast and audiobooks business in recent years in a bid to attract users and advertisers, announced the "new re-imagined user interface" at its Stream On event. Spotify also shared an update to its annual music royalties report, noting that the number of artists making over $1 million (roughly Rs. 8 crore) as well as those generating over $10,000 (roughly Rs. 818,500) had more than doubled in the past five years. Earlier this year, Spotify said it would tighten spending and work to become efficient given the tough macroeconomic backdrop and projected the number of listeners would reach 500 million in the current quarter. Features like autoplay for podcasts, personalized visual and audio previews of

Reliance Jio, the country's largest telecom operator, on Wednesday announced the launch of its 5G services in 27 more cities of 13 states and union territories to extend its network of ultra high-speed telephony to 331 cities across India. Jio True 5G is now available in 27 additional cities in states like Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jammu & Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal, the company said in a statement. Starting March 8, 2023, Jio users in these 27 cities will be invited to the Jio Welcome Offer, to experience unlimited data at up to 1Gbps speeds, at no additional cost, it said. Its billionaire chairman Mukesh Ambani had previously announced that Jio's 5G services will cover the entire country by the end of 2023. "Starting today, the technological advantages of high-speed internet, low-latency, stand-alone True 5G services shall be made available to the people

India's much awaited data protection law is expected to come into effect between July and August this year. The regulation is aimed at reforming the tech-reliant relationship between consumers and the market. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology has claimed that these ‘behavioural changes' in India's technology sector will secure the user data collected from Indians within the nation, while helping technology firms operate in the country in compliance with the law. During the recent India Fintech Conclave (IFC), Chandrasekhar said that the upcoming data protection bill willl change the way that people's personal data is being harvested by companies and social networking platforms in present day. “The days that anonymised personal data will be stored for many years and learning models be created on top of that, will also certainly, will have to be replaced by something that is more instantaneous in terms of learning and

The White House on Tuesday welcomed a bill that would allow the United States to ban Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said in a statement. The bill was backed by Mark Warner, a senior US senator from the Democratic party, and John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, in a rare act of political entente by US lawmakers. "We applaud the bipartisan group of senators, led by Senators Warner and Thune, who today introduced the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act," Sullivan said. The bipartisan bill "would empower the United States government to prevent certain foreign governments from exploiting technology services... in a way that poses risks to Americans' sensitive data and our national security," Sullivan said in a statement. The Senate bill and the backing of the White House accelerated the political momentum against TikTok, which is also the target

The strikes by hundreds of Amazon workers at the company's Coventry warehouse in the English Midlands have brought into relief some of the problems of work in today's high-tech society. While primarily focused on pay, the workers are pushing back against long hours and an automated surveillance system that times how long they take to do each task, as well as going to the toilet. It all contributes to a high pressure and intensive work environment – plus more accidents. We have much to learn from this painful situation about the future of work and technology. On the one hand, Amazon's whole employment model goes against the general assumption that technology destroys jobs. Equally, however, the company's employment practices show how automation can make workplaces oppressive, forcing workers to become more like robots. Pessimistic predictions about the threat to jobs from technology are nothing new. One frequently cited study published in 2013 predicted that up to 47