Education on technology

Indian grocery startup Zepto said on Friday it has raised $200 million (nearly Rs. 1,650 crore) in fresh funding at a valuation of $1.4 billion (nearly Rs. 11,560 crore), making it the first startup in the country to cross the billion-dollar valuation mark in nearly a year. Zepto said it raised the funds "in the midst of the deepest downturn in capital markets in over a decade" from US-based investment firms StepStone Group and Goodwater Capital. Existing backers including Nexus Venture Partners, Glade Brook Capital and Lachy Groom also participated in the deal. Zepto, which promises delivery of groceries in 10 minutes, was started in 2021 by two 19-year-old Stanford dropouts, and competes with SoftBank-funded Swiggy and Blinkit , which are all betting on fast deliveries in the so-called quick commerce sector. Even among them, Zepto's CEO Aadit Palicha said the company has the quickest average delivery time of 13 minutes.  Zepto's rival Swiggy plans to list in In...

Samsung Rollable Flex was unveiled by the company earlier this year in May. A new leak now suggests the production timeline of the phone, along with some key design and hardware specifications that the phone is likely to launch with. Samsung joined the rollable display conversation after Lenovo-owned Motorola showed the Rizr Concept with a 6.5-inch rollable pOLED display at the 2023 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Oppo is also a major brand that has been rumoured to work on a rollable display phone. Tipster Revegnus (@Tech_Reve) suggested in a tweet that the Samsung Rollable Flex will go into mass production in 2025 and will feature the Under Panel Camera technology, which suggests that the camera sensors will not be visible. The phone is also tipped to come with a zero-bezel design.  During the first showcasing of the display, the rollable smartphone was claimed to be five times its original size when rolled open, from 49 mm to 254.4 mm. As per...

On the heels of the success of the Chandrayaan-3 moon landing, India's space agency has set a date for its next mission — this time to study the sun .  The Aditya-L1 , India's first space observatory for solar research, is getting ready for launch at the country's main spaceport in Sriharikota, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told reporters at its satellite command centre this week, as scientists and crew celebrated the moon mission's success. "We are planning to launch in the first week of September," said ISRO chairman S Somanath. What will Aditya-L1 do? Named after the Hindi word for the sun, the spacecraft is India's first space-based solar probe. It aims to study solar winds, which can cause disturbance on earth and are commonly seen as "auroras". Longer term, data from the mission could help better understand the sun's impact on earth's climate patterns. Recently, researchers said the European Space Agency/ NAS...

India is working on a new electric vehicle policy that would slash import taxes for automakers that commit to some local manufacturing, following a proposal by  Tesla  which is considering entering the domestic market, people with direct knowledge said. The policy being considered could allow automakers to import fully-built EVs into India at a reduced tax as low as 15 percent, compared to the current 100 percent that applies to cars which cost above $40,000 (nearly Rs. 33 lakh) and 70 percent for the rest, said two of the sources, including a senior Indian government official. Tesla's best-selling Model Y , for example, starts at $47,740 (nearly Rs. 39 lakh) in the US before tax credits. "There is an understanding with Tesla's proposal and government is showing interest," said the official, who is familiar with the issue. If such a policy is adopted, it could amount to a drastic reduction in the cost of imported EVs that local carmakers have been keen to avoid. ...

At 9 pm on September 22 last year, a group of City of London police officers waited outside room M15 at the Travelodge Bicester, a one-star budget hotel in Oxfordshire, England, for the right moment to bust in. On the other side of the door was someone they believed to be behind two serious data hacks: one on Uber Technologies and the other an unprecedented leak of code for Rockstar Games's unreleased Grand Theft Auto sequel. A complicated tracing and surveillance operation had helped the cops zero in on a user of the messaging platform Telegram named @lilyhowarth. Behind the door, however, was not Lily Howarth, but 17-year-old Arion Kurtaj — already on bail for a daring, large hack against chip maker Nvidia and an intrusion at the UK phone group BT Group. A member of a shadowy international bunch of loosely connected online extortionists who called themselves Lapsus$, Kurtaj had been lodged in the room by the police for his own safety after being outed by the hacker community....

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will resolve its two-year investigation into Tesla Autopilot and could make a public announcement soon, the agency's acting head told Reuters. "We'll get to a resolution (of the Tesla probe)," Acting NHTSA Administrator Ann Carlson told Reuters in an interview at the agency's headquarters. Speaking broadly of advanced driver assistance systems, she said: "It's really important that drivers pay attention. It's also really important that driver monitoring systems take into account that humans over-trust technology."  She declined to discuss how the Tesla investigation might be resolved, but added "hopefully you'll hear something relatively soon." Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency is investigating the performance of Autopilot after identifying more than a dozen crashes in which Tesla vehicles hit stationary emergency vehicles. It is als...