Twitter rushes to advertisers, says chill on Musk’s ‘free speech’ call
Twitter has reached out to its advertisers, reassuring them that Elon Musk’s position as a ‘free speech absolutist’ and other threats to drastically rejig the platform won’t put the brands in bad light. Twitter has contacted advertising agencies — including campaigners and car manufacturers — to reassure them that Musk’s plans won’t make the platform an inhospitable place for brands. Twitter under Parag Agrawal fears that Musk’s ‘free speech’ agenda can hurt its $4.5 billion a year advertising business. Twitter reached out to ad agencies to allay such fears, telling them that the advertisements won’t appear alongside offensive content.
Snapchat’s Dress Up feature turns your phone into an AR shopping mall
It’s becoming a fundamental law of the internet: where people socialize, they must also shop. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and practically every other social network and messaging app on the planet has spent the last couple of years trying to make every pixel of your chats and pictures into a one-click purchasing possibility. Snap’s plans on this front are more ambitious than most. It’s trying to take the whole shopping experience — you see a shirt you like on a stranger, figure out what it is and where to buy it, try it on, buy it, wear it, return it because everything looks better on Ryan Reynolds than you, rinse and repeat — and funnel it through Snap’s AR camera. Through Camera Kit, most of that tech can also work within brands’ websites and retailer apps. And there’s always — always — a buy button.
Flipkart opens up logistics arm to other eCommerce firms; plans NFT play too
Flipkart has opened its internal logistics arm Ekart to other ecommerce players. On this , recently Kalyan Krishnamurthy the Flipkart Group CEO has also discussed the matter at the company’s town hall. Sources said, “This time, they (Flipkart) are going to double down on Ekart serving non-Flipkart group orders as existing group businesses are covered at scale by the in-house logistics infrastructure”. Ekart has added around 30 clients and is looking to add more as it doubles down on leveraging its in-house logistics infrastructure to service non-Flipkart orders. It is also being said, “The opening up was gradually done from January onwards and now it has about 30 companies including Snapdeal and others”. Prior to the Walmart deal in 2018, Flipkart had once attempted to open Ekart to external platforms on a smaller scale, but the project was not expanded as the company was still figuring out how to manage its own order volumes, how to do it in the best way, and few more things. In future, companies like Nykaa, Firstcry and others may place orders through Ekart. Krishnamurthy also said that, “Flipkart was in the early stages of building its own non-fungible token (NFT)-related business.”
Google says it will focus on accelerating growth in India’s digital ecosystem
Speaking at the earnings call for the first quarter results for Google parent Alphabet, Philipp Schindler, SVP and CBO, said that the tech giant will remain committed to accelerating growth in India’s digital ecosystem. Talking about collaborations across the world, Schindler said, “We’re closely collaborating with them [Google’s partners] to grow and evolve healthier, sustainable ecosystems and bring them the best of Google. We continue to focus on accelerating growth in India’s digital ecosystem and are excited about our expanding partnerships with a number of partners in the region,” Schindler added. The US-based company has been investing in India’s digital ecosystem with the help of the Google for India Digitization Fund. Announced in July 2020, the fund, worth a total of $10 Bn, has since been used to invest in Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel. The tech giant first invested INR 33,737 Cr ($4.4 Bn) in Reliance Jio parent Jio Platforms Limited, in 2020, mere weeks after announcing the Digitization fund. Similarly, Google further invested about a billion dollars in Bharti Airtel in 2022, acquiring a nominal stake in the telecom player while also putting a part of the investment towards smartphone affordability programs.
Gaming NFTs are the most common type of collectibles owned
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that relate to metaverse platforms or games are outpacing NFTs of images that can be used as profile pictures, said a new survey by blockchain tracking website CoinGecko. Metaverse refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. The industry is projected to be an $800 billion market in the next 2 years, and games look like the most likely NFT-point-of-entry for most people, particularly crypto enthusiasts. NFTs saw a meteoric rise in 2021, as total trading volume of NFTs hit over $5 billion at its height in August 2021. Since then, the market has tapered off slightly but NFT is still one of the hottest buzzwords in crypto arena. Out of the 871 respondents in the survey, 72% own NFT(s), with more than half of them having five or more collectibles.
Digital transformation initiatives boost domestic IT services to $14bn in India
A rise in companies implementing digital transformation initiatives in India led to a year-on-year growth of 7.2% in the domestic information technology (IT) services sector in India in 2021. According to a report by market research firm the International Data Corporation (IDC), the domestic IT services industry was valued at $14.15 billion in 2021, outpacing the 5.3% growth pace that the sector clocked in 2020. According to IDC, adoption of new technologies such as cloud platforms, artificial intelligence (AI)-based services, cyber security and modernization of applications helped the growth of IT services through last year. Going forward, the domestic IT services sector is projected to reach $21.67 billion in valuation by 2026 – with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.9%.
Nandan Nilekani aims to protect Indian retail from Walmart, Amazon
He co-founded software powerhouse Infosys Ltd., became a billionaire and went on to spearhead a colossal government program to create biometric identification for India’s almost 1.4 billion people. Now 66, Nandan Nilekani has one more ambitious goal. The high-profile mogul is helping Prime Minister Narendra Modi build an open technology network that seeks to level the playing field for small merchants in the country’s fragmented but fast-growing $1 trillion retail market. Its stated purpose is to create a freely accessible online system where traders and consumers can buy and sell everything from 23-cent detergent bars to $1,800 airline tickets. But it’s unspoken objective is to eventually curb the powers of Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc.-owned Flipkart, whose online domination has alarmed small merchants and the millions of local mom-and-pop stores, called kirana, that form the nation’s retail backbone. As the two global giants poured a combined $24 billion into India and captured 80% of the online retail market with aggressive discounts and promotion of preferred sellers, the kirana shops are fearful of an uncertain future. Despite online commerce accounting for just about 6% of the overall retail market, they are anxious they will be eventually snuffed out, meeting a fate similar to many family-owned businesses in the U.S. and elsewhere. The not-for-profit system, which goes by the unwieldy name of Open Network for Digital Commerce, or ONDC, seeks to address those concerns.
Govt to launch open network for digital commerce in five cities
The central government’s ambitious Open Network for Digital Commerce’s (ONDC) small-scale implementation began on the 29th of April to see how the technology-enabled infrastructure works, thereby making processes more robust before it is officially launched. This will be done across five cities — Delhi, Bengaluru, Coimbatore, Bhopal, and Shillong. Thereafter, it will be scaled up and launched in 100 cities over a period of six months, said a senior government official. “The pilot aims to test end-to-end transactions on the ONDC architecture across different platforms, including ordering, payment, and delivery. This exercise will help in the creation of a robust playbook for further scaling up operations,” said the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) Additional Secretary Anil Agarwal. Touted as the Unified Payments Interface equivalent for the e-commerce space, ONDC is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project.
New cybersecurity guidelines issued
All companies and enterprises will mandatorily have to report all cyber incidents to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) as per new guidelines issued under Sec 70b of the IT Act. This is in order to coordinate response activities as well as emergency measures with respect to cyber security incidents, CERT-In said in a statement. All service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporate and Government organizations shall mandatorily enable logs of all their ICT systems and maintain them securely for a rolling period of 180 days within the Indian jurisdiction. “These should be provided to CERT-In along with reporting of any incident or when ordered / directed by CERT-In,” as per the guidelines. These rules will come into effect 60 days after being issued.During the course of handling cyber incidents and interactions with the constituency, CERT-In has identified certain gaps causing hindrance in incident analysis. To address the identified gaps and issues so as to facilitate incident response measures, CERT-In has issued directions relating to Other directives include synchronization of ICT system clocks, maintenance of logs of ICT systems; subscriber/customer registrations details by data centers, virtual private server (VPS) providers, VPN Service providers, Cloud service providers; KYC norms and practices by virtual asset service providers, virtual asset exchange providers and custodian wallet providers.
