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 ...

The price of Bitcoin stood at $22,155 (roughly Rs. 18.2 lakh) on Wednesday on both national as well as international exchanges. The oldest cryptocurrency has been trading around $22,000 (roughly Rs. 18 lakh) for a few days. On Wednesday, Bitcoin recorded an 0.88 percent drop in its value. In terms of numbers, the price of the oldest and most widely used cryptocurrency fell by $301 (roughly Rs. 24,738) over the last 24 hours. BTC's market movement often sets the course for the performance of other cryptocurrencies. Ether , for instance, joined BTC as its value fell by 0.43 percent on Wednesday. ETH is trading at $1,560 (roughly Rs. 1.28 lakh), according to Gadgets 360's crypto price tracker . A group of popular cryptocurrencies has been seeing more losses than gains in recent days. These include Cardano , Polygon , Solana , Polkadot , and Litecoin . Both memecoins Dogecoin and Shiba Inu saw their values fall further on Wednesday, alongside Avalanche , Chainlink , and Cosmo...

Women in India are entering the technology sector in large numbers, while female-led startups from Bengaluru, Delhi, and Mumbai have collectively raised $20.5 billion (roughly Rs. 1,63,645 crore) in industrial funding. On the other hand, women leading India's up-and-coming Web3 industry are celebrating a huge influx of female talent in the sector, in time for the 48th International Women's Day that is celebrated on March 8. There has been a strong sense of community and peer encouragement in modern India, that has added to the growth of women-led initiatives in Web3, as well as India's overall tech industry. While well-established technology sectors like gadgets and gaming in India have often been called out to resolve glaring gender gaps, the advent of Web3 offered a clean slate for the crypto sector. “Newer tech branches like Web3 have opened the door to learning and transitioning to technical and software roles. Non technical fields have been a key catalyst in incre...