Business

San Francisco, Feb 14 (IANS) In more bad news for global workers, tech and biotech companies in the Silicon Valley in the US are preparing for multiple rounds of fresh job cuts, the media reported.

To date, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Twitter, Salesforce, PayPal, RingCentral and Zymergen have all filed WARN notices that reflect at least two distinct rounds of layoffs.

Six of the eight companies filed disclosures of planned job cuts this year, a review of the WARN notices showed.

"As of February 9, these were the 10 most recent WARN notices that tech or biotech companies filed to disclose job cuts in the Bay Area," the report mentioned.

Tech and biotech companies have filed plans that cut at least 19,500 jobs in the Bay Area, "with no indication that the job losses have begun to abate".

The unsettling news came to light after Microsoft reported it would cut 62 jobs in Mountain View a" the second time the tech titan filed layoff notices with the state's labour agency, the report said.

More than 17,400 employees in the tech industry have lost jobs in the month of February globally to date.

In 2023 so far, around 340 companies have laid off more than 1.10 lakh employees worldwide, and there appears to be no respite from job cuts.

In January, close to 1 lakh of them lost jobs in the month of January globally, dominated by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce and others, according to layoff.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts globally.

More job cuts are likely coming in days to come amid recession fears.

So far, more than 2.5 lakh tech employees have lost jobs.

--IANS
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Hyderabad, Feb 14 (IANS) The Telangana State Road Transport Corporation (TSRTC) will operate as many as 2,427 special buses from various districts in Telangana and neighboring Andhra Pradesh on the occasion of Maha Shivratri.

The state-owned transport operator announced that the special buses will be operated from February 17 to 19.

Maha Shivratri is scheduled to be celebrated on February 18.

TSRTC officials said the buses for the devotees will be operated to 40 Shaiva Kshetras located in various parts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

As many as 578 services will be operated to Srisailam, 481 to Vemulawada, 239 to Keesaragutta, 497 to Edupayala, 108 to Velala, 51 to Kaleshwaram, 52 to Komuravelli, 37 to Kondagattu, 16 to Alampur, 15 to Ramappa and 14 to Uma Maheshwaram.

Special buses will be available for devotees from MGBS, JBS, Dilsukhnagar, IS Sadan, KPHB, BHEL in Hyderabad to Srisailam. Advance reservation facilities will be available for these bus services.

Officials said the corporation will run more services, if required, for the convenience of devotees.

TSRTC Chairman Bajireddy Govardhan stated that the management is taking all measures to ensure that devotees do not face any difficulties on the occasion of Maha Shivratri. "It has been decided to run special buses to the 40 famous Shiva temples across the state," he said

TSRTC Vice-Chairman and Managing Director V.C. Sajjanar said that instructions have been given to the officials to arrange more special buses according to the traffic.

The TSRTC is also providing a 10 per cent discount on rented buses. Sajjanar advised devotees to use this rental bus facility.

The corporation had operated about 4,000 special buses during Sankranti last month. Over 2.8 crore people had earned the services. The TSRTC had earned more than Rs 165 crore by operating the special services in a span of 11 days.

--IANS
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New Delhi, Feb 10 (IANS) Global technology brand OnePlus on Friday announced its schedule of pop-ups across seven cities in India, which will take place on February 11, where attendees will be the first to get their hands on the newly launched products OnePlus 11 5G and the OnePlus Buds Pro 2, starting at 11 a.m.

At the OnePlus pop-ups, the first 11 people to buy the all-new OnePlus 11 5G will receive exclusive OnePlus 11 goodies, such as OnePlus products and merchandise.

In the seven major cities, the pop-ups will take place at OnePlus Experience Store, Phoenix Palladium, Mumbai; OnePlus Boulevard, Brigade Road, Bengaluru; Select Citywalk Mall, Saket, New Delhi; OnePlus Experience Store, JM Road, Pune; OnePlus Nizam Palace, Himayat Nagar, Hyderabad; OnePlus Experience Store, Phoenix Market City, Chennai; and OnePlus Experience Store, CG Road, Ahmedabad.

At the Cloud 11 launch event, OnePlus announced an array of its products -- 11 5G, 11R 5G, Bus Pro 2, TV Q2 Pro, Pad, and 81 Pro keyboard.

The new line-up of products is distinguished by purposeful designs, industry-leading technology, and advanced interconnectivity, which is set to take the brand's fast and smooth experience to all new heights.

The OnePlus 11 5G was launched at a starting price of Rs 56,999 which comes in two colourways -- Titan Black and Eternal Green.

It features a 6.7-inch display that comes with a refresh rate of 120 Hz.

The smartphone comes equipped with the 3rd Generation Hasselblad Camera for Mobile with a "three-main-sensor" triple-camera system -- 50MP+32MP+48MP.

The smartphone also comes powered by the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset with up to 16GB of RAM.

OnePlus has also designed the ideal companion to the OnePlus 11 5G -- the OnePlus Buds Pro 2, which promises to deliver a full-bodied, stereo-quality audio experience with crystal clarity.

The Buds Pro 2 is the second generation of its flagship earbuds, which is priced at Rs 11,999.

Apart from the first 11 buyers, other buyers will get an instant discount of Rs 1,000 on the OnePlus 11 5G, on purchase through ICICI Bank Credit Cards and EMI transactions, and up to 12 months No-Cost EMI on purchase using major credit cards.

--IANS
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Washington, Feb 10 (IANS) The number of individuals in the US who applied for unemployment benefits early this month climbed to 196,000, an increase of 13,000, according to government figures.

New unemployment applications edged up from 183,000 in the previous week, reports Xinhua news agency.

According to the Labor Department, this was the first increase in claims since December 2022.

Economists in a Wall Street Journal survey had predicted that new jobless claims would amount to 190,000 for the seven days before February 4.

Meanwhile, inflation continues to hurt the wallets of millions of Americans.

Polls find that 50 per cent of Americans said they are financially worse off than a year ago.

--IANS
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New Delhi, Feb 10 (IANS) Chinese short video-making app TikTok has reportedly sacked its entire India staff -- about 40 employees -- and February 28 will be their last working day.

According to a report in The Economic Times, the ByteDance-owned platform, banned in India in June 2020 over national security concerns, told its employees they would receive up to nine months of severance package.

However, most of the staff will only get three-month severance.

In June 2020, the government banned TikTok along with 59 other Chinese apps citing security concerns.

Since then, the country has banned over 300 Chinese apps, including WeChat, Shareit, Helo, Likee, UC News, Bigo Live, UC Browser and many more.

The Centre last week blocked over 230 apps, including 138 betting and about 94 loan apps, which were traced to Chinese links.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) was recently instructed by the MHA to ban such apps, which operate through a third party link.

All these apps were found violating Section 69 of the IT Act and contained materials which were deemed as a threat to India's sovereignty and integrity.

Meanwhile, US Senator Michael Bennett has urged Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to immediately remove TikTok from their app stores, calling it an unacceptable risk to American national security.

The US plans to ban Chinese short video-making app TikTok nationwide, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold a vote next month on a bill to completely block the platform.

--IANS
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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