Business

By Meenakshi Iyer
New Delhi, Feb 10 (IANS) Artists never really leave anything alone. If you give them a tool it's going to get used. The prophetic words of art connoisseur Bill Goldston resounded as one witnessed the digital artworks of three brilliant artists at the ongoing India Art Fair here.


Taking mixed media art to a whole new level, Varun Desai, Mira Felicia Malhotra and Gaurav Ogale used the Apple iPad Pro to do things at the sort of speed at which the artist can imagine, well almost!

"Apple has been providing me with the best technology for this whole thing... An artwork like mine has a whole bunch of layers, so I am able to create about 150 layers at a really huge size. You can see that I am actually drawing on a small iPad, but it can be blown up to a bigger size," Mumbai-based visual artist and illustrator Malhotra told IANS.

Malhotra, known for her bold, multicoloured, illustrated portraits of Indian women, feels that her iPad Pro and Apple Pencil help her bring her ideas out into the world quicker than ever.

Aligning with the theme for this year's showcase, "Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary", was multidisciplinary artist Desai's work titled, 'Dimorphism' -- a digital installation of code-generated video art, 3D LiDAR scanning, hand-drawn animation, and sound synthesis.

"This was created using code. Being a computer engineer, I learnt coding in a very sterile way that was not catered towards creating a visual art. So once this software called processing came along, I was able to channel all this technical knowledge I had to visualise these ideas," Desai said.

"The next process came from a very powerful aspect of the device which is called LiDAR Scanner, which allows you to scan architectural objects in the real world," Desai told IANS.

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Friday tweeted that at the first India Art Fair, "Digital Artists in Residence programme shows how technology can unlock creativity".

"Great to see how iPad Pro is helping artists Mira, Varun, and Gaurav to tap into such incredible creative expression," Cook said.

A friendly interactive session at the event showed the attendees how to use the iPad Pro along with the Procreate graphic editor app to create basic artworks and unlock new styles and techniques.

"Digital art is the future. I think one needs to be a pro at both -- digital as well as traditional art. Using digital tech like Ipads etc will only help us understand art better," Amisha Garg, a student of Delhi College of Art who attended the digital art exhibit, told IANS.

(Meenakshi Iyer can be reached at meenakshi.i@ians.in)

--IANS
mi/ksk/

New Delhi, Feb 10 (IANS) Microsoft-owned open source developer platform GitHub is laying off 10 per cent of its workforce through the end of the company's fiscal year.

GitHub had about 3,000 employees before the layoffs were announced.

Fortune first reported that GitHub is also shutting down offices and will move to fully remote work culture.

It will also continue its hiring freeze and make a number of other internal changes to "protect the short-term health" of its business, the report mentioned.

In an email to employees, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said sustained growth is important for every business.

"Today, we are the home of 100 million developers, and we must become the developer-first engineering system for the world of tomorrow. We must continue to help our customers grow and thrive with GitHub, expedite and simplify their cloud adoption journey, while supporting them every day," the CEO wrote.

"Unfortunately, this will include changes that will result in a reduction of GitHub's workforce by up to 10 per cent through the end of FY23. The hiring pause that I announced on January 18 remains in effect," he added.

He also said that another decision is to move toward a fully remote GitHub.

"We are seeing very low utilisation rates in our offices around the world, and this decision is a testament to the success of our long-standing remote-first culture. We are not vacating offices immediately, but will move to close all of our offices as their leases end or as we are operationally able to do so," Dohmke said.

The open source developer platform has reached 100 million members globally, and is growing fast in India too where it has crossed 10 million developers on the platform.

This makes India the second largest developer community on GitHub, behind the US.

--IANS
na/shb/

San Francisco, Feb 10 (IANS) Twitter CEO Elon Musk has fired the company's top engineer because of his declining reach, the media reported.

Musk, last week, kept his account private for one day to see whether that would increase the amount of his audience, reports The Verge.

The action was taken in response to complaints from many prominent right-wing accounts with whom Musk communicates that Twitter's recent adjustments have decreased their reach.

In search of answers, Musk on Tuesday gathered a team of engineers and advisors in a room at Twitter's headquarters.

"This is ridiculous," he said, according to numerous sources with direct knowledge of the meeting.

"I have more than 100 million followers, and I'm only getting tens of thousands of impressions."

"One of the company's two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk's declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning," the report mentioned.

Employees showed Musk internal data related to the engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart.

In April last year, they informed him, Musk was at "peak" popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of "100."

However, now, he is at a score of nine.

Engineers previously looked at whether Musk's reach had been purposely limited, but they couldn't find any proof that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well and told the engineer, "You're fired, you're fired."

According to a current employee, Musk has told employees to keep track of how frequently each of his tweets is recommended since he is dissatisfied with the engineers' current work.

Meanwhile, the micro-blogging platform on Thursday faced a global outage, including in India, and it seems like an employee had deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter.

The team that worked on that service left the company in November last year, the report said.

--IANS
aj/shb/

New Delhi, Feb 5 (IANS) Followin constant complaints against Chinese loan and betting apps, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has started the process of banning 138 betting apps and 94 lending apps that had Chinese links, on the instructions of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).

According to the information, the MeitY was recently instructed by the MHA to ban such apps, which operate through a third party link.

Sources said that all these apps were found violating Section 69 of the IT Act and contained material which was deemed as a threat to India's sovereignity and integrity.

As per sources, these apps are used to trap financially strapped people in a debt trap, by increasing their interest on loans up to 3,000 per cent.

Many such people who were caught in the debt trap committed suicide when the people working for the apps mentally harassed them.

The issue came to the fore after several cases of suicides by borrowers of these apps were seen in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

On the other hand, the Chinese apps can potentially misuse server-side security by using them as spying tools as they have access to the important data of many Indians.

Access to such data can be used for espionage on a large scale, due to which all such apps are being considered as a threat to the country.

The MHA had started investigating some Chinese loan giving apps around six months ago.

It was revealed that 94 such apps were available on the e-store and operated through third party links.

Around that time, security agencies had asked the Ministry to impose a ban on such betting and loan lending apps.

Significantly, the Centre had banned 54 Chinese apps that posed as a threat to the country's security in 2022.

--IANS
spt/fs/vd

New Delhi, Feb 5 (IANS) The global smartphone revenue declined by 9 per cent, amounting to $409 billion in 2022, the lowest since 2017, a new report has said.

According to Counterpoint Research, the global smartphone market declined by 18 per cent (year-over-year) to reach 304 million units in Q4 2022.

"The smartphone market remained under pressure in the fourth quarter of 2022 as the cost-of-living crisis, shortage in the labour market and a decline in consumers' purchasing power resulted in double-digit declines in the shipments of each of the top five smartphone players," said Senior Analyst Harmeet Singh Walia.

Moreover, Apple achieved an all-time high revenue share of 48 per cent in 2022, and also captured the highest-ever operating profit share of 85 per cent.

"Having proficiently managed its production problems, Apple was able to weather a year already marred by economic and geopolitical turmoil better than other major smartphone players," said Research Director Jeff Fieldhack.

Chinese smartphone players suffered from domestic lockdowns for much of the year in addition to facing global economic and geopolitical difficulties, said the report.

As a result, the shipments of Xiaomi, OPPO and Vivo fell by more than 20 per cent each.

Despite offering premium phones at aggressive margins, Chinese brands have yet to break into the premium market and have been unable to fully capitalise on Huawei's decline, the report added.

--IANS
shs/khz/

San Francisco, Feb 5 (IANS) Music streaming platform Spotify founder Daniel Ek has launched a new startup called Neko Health based in Sweden, which specialises in providing body scans powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

Daniel Ek founded the company along with Hjalmar Nilsonne, who is a co-founder and CEO of Neko Health, with the vision to create a healthcare system that can help people stay healthy through preventive measures and early detection, according to Neko Health's LinkedIn post.

The startup was officially launched after four years of research and product development, reports Sifted.

"Early detection and prevention of serious illness would mean that we can avoid both the human suffering and the high social costs that serious illness entails. With our technology and AI, that future is now a possibility. This could be the basis for a whole new era in healthcare," Nilsonne, was quoted as saying.

People with skin and heart issues, according to the startup, can get the Neko Body Scan and a thorough examination of their health in their first health centre in Stockholm, Sweden.

Ek and Nilsonne founded HJN Sverige, now Neko Health, in 2018 and have since raised more than 30 million pound (approximately $32 million) in funding, primarily from Ek and his moonshot investment firm Prima Materia, said the report.

Meanwhile, Spotify announced its premium subscribers base has touched 205 million, representing a 14 per cent increase year-on-year. This makes Spotify the world's first music streaming company to achieve such a large user base.

--IANS
shs/uk/

New Delhi, Jan 19 (IANS) Domestic air traffic continued to register growth as passengers carried by domestic airlines during January-December 2022 were 12.32 crore as against 8.38 crore during the corresponding period of previous year thereby registering annual growth of 47.05 per cent and monthly growth of 13.69 per cent.

As per the data released by the aviation regulator DGCA on Thursday, nearly 1.27 crore passengers were carried by the domestic airlines during December in the country as against 1.12 crore during the same period last year.

The passenger load factor or occupancy of the airlines remained on the higher side in the range of 80 to 90 per cent. Newly launched Akasa Air marked the occupancy of 83.8 per cent during December.

Spicejet recorded the highest occupancy of 92.7 per cent while Indigo witnessed 87.5 per cent of passenger load factor during the December month. Air India had 89.3 per cent and GoFirst had 92.6 per cent occupancy during the month.

Industry sources said that the data has reflected restoration of normalcy in the aviation traffic. The government has gradually done away with various restrictions in the last few months.

Country's major airports have witnessed a higher number of passengers in the last couple of weeks. Domestic air traffic in the country has already crossed the mark of four lakh passengers per day and during weekends it generally reaches more than 4 lakh.

Many airports during the last month had witnessed massive rush due to increased passenger traffic.

--IANS
kvm/uk/

San Francisco, Jan 19 (IANS) Amazon on Thursday announced that it will shut down its charity donation programme, "AmazonSmile", as it failed to create the impact the company hoped for.

The company plans to wind down AmazonSmile by February 20.

"In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for customers to support their favourite charities. However, after almost a decade, the programme has not grown to create the impact that we had originally hoped. With so many eligible organisations -- more than 1 million globally -- our ability to have an impact was often spread too thin," Amazon said in a notice to customers posted to its website.

However, the company said it will continue to grow and invest in other areas where they have seen it can make a meaningful change -- from building affordable housing to providing access to computer science education for students in underserved communities, and more.

The tech giant further mentioned that once AmazonSmile closes, charities will still be able to seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists.

Meanwhile, Amazon also started notifying its employees affected by its new round of layoffs, as a part of its plan to reduce its headcount by around 18,000 people.

It however, remains unclear as to how many employees are being affected in this particular round, but the company already laid off 2,300 employees in Washington of which the majority worked in Seattle, where one of the company's headquarters is located.

--IANS
shs/ksk/

New Delhi, Jan 19 (IANS) Road safety body International Road Federation (IRF) wrote a letter to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, demanding removal of GST on life saving device helmets for safety of the two-wheeler riders in the forthcoming Union Budget 2023-24.

"India accounts for about 11 per cent of road accident deaths worldwide and the economic loss is about $15.71-38.81 billion to the Indian Economy as per the latest Bosch Report. The two wheeler riders, being most vulnerable, constitute almost 31.4 per cent of road accidental deaths primarily due to head injuries. One of the most effective measures to reduce the two wheeler accident injuries and fatalities is the use of standard helmets," said K.K. Kapila, President Emeritus, International Road Federation (IRF) said in his letter.

"The helmet usage in our country has been found to be low. It has been noticed that most of the two-wheeler riders fall in economically weaker and lower income group and prefer to purchase helmets which are cheaper and inferior in quality. Many of these helmets are not capable to save a rider's life, in case of an accident," Kapila stated.

He said that currently, the applicable rate of GST on helmet, which is a life saving device, is 18 per cent. "I, as a proponent of Road Safety, strongly recommend that there should be no GST on helmets. This will help in making the standard helmets more affordable for the masses and will discourage them from buying helmets of substandard quality. This in turn will assist, not only in reducing road accident fatalities of two wheeler riders, but will also help in reducing the whooping GDP loss due to road accidents to our economy," Kapila added.

As per the Section 129 of the Central Motor Vehicle Act, 1988 wearing of helmets is mandatory for two-wheeler riders.

--IANS
kvm/uk/

New Delhi, Jan 19 (IANS) As Microsoft begins job cuts, affected employees have started looking for new jobs on LinkedIn, and among those impacted is an Indian-origin worker in the US who says "she is on visa and have limited time".

Harshita Jhavar, a data and applied scientist at Microsoft, who spent four years in the company in Washington, writes in her LinkedIn post, "I am affected by the layoffs at Microsoft today. Many teams from the hardware side fell on the chopping block within Microsoft".

"I am on a visa and have limited time to find a new position," she added.

The Indian-origin worker is looking for new opportunities in the domain of Data Science and ML Engineering to align her career, visa status, and family responsibilities.

Jhavar concluded her LinkedIn post by saying, "Please help me find a suitable position to connect with a team where I can have a relevant role to play. I will be persistent until I crack my next move".

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in a note to employees that the layoffs, which would affect about 5 per cent of Microsoft's workforce, would be completed by the end of March, with notifications beginning Wednesday.

Microsoft currently has more than 2,20,000 employees, and this round of layoffs affects around 10,000 jobs.

--IANS
shs/svn/