Category: Tech

Shopify Collaborates With Twitter to Help Merchants With Online Sale, Unveils 100 New Tools

Shopify has launched new tools to help its merchants sell to other businesses and on Twitter, as the Canadian tech giant attempts to shore up sales to counter a post-pandemic slowdown in online shopping.

More than a 100 new tools were unveiled on Wednesday, including ones to support its plans to push into business-to-business, for shoppers to connect their crypto wallets to a store and Apple‘s “Tap to Pay” feature on iPhones.

Shopify, which helps businesses set up their online stores, hit the jackpot during lockdowns as global brands and mom-and-pop stores alike turned to selling online directly to consumers while their shops were shut.

With the economy reopening, however, investors are starting to question Shopify’s future, sending the company’s stock down 76 percent this year and erasing a big chunk of its pandemic gains.

Shopify’s answer to the slowdown is expanding into the wholesale market, a far bigger avenue than direct-to-consumer and with “billions in untapped revenue”, according to President Harley Finkelstein.

Businesses are looking to move from direct-to-consumer to “connect-to-consumer”, which makes it easier for people to shop through social media platforms and pay using their phones, Finkelstein said in an interview.

“This is the next phase of retail… In many ways, shopping has become a vote with your wallet to support that brand… And that’s what I think connect-to-consumer is all about,” he said.

The post-pandemic world has thrown up challenges for Amazon as well, Shopify’s biggest rival, as it fields massive losses after building more warehouses than needed during the boom.

In a podcast earlier this month, long-time Shopify investor Mawer Investment Management’s Vijay Viswanathan said it was exiting the stock on concerns of slowing growth and competition. “The internet is getting crowded… It became harder and harder to justify the valuation.”

© Thomson Reuters 2022

Are affordable smartwatches worth it? We discuss this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

 

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Microsoft Alleges Russian Spies of Targeting Ukraine’s Allies in 42 Countries Including US

Coinciding with unrelenting cyberattacks against Ukraine, state-backed Russian hackers have engaged in “strategic espionage” against governments, think tanks, businesses and aid groups in 42 countries supporting Kyiv, Microsoft said in a report on Wednesday.

“Since the start of the war, the Russian targeting (of Ukraine’s allies) has been successful 29 percent of the time,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote, with data stolen in at least one-quarter of the successful network intrusions.

“As a coalition of countries has come together to defend Ukraine, Russian intelligence agencies have stepped up network penetration and espionage activities targeting allied governments outside Ukraine,” Smith said.

Nearly two-thirds of the cyberespionage targets involved NATO members. The United States was the prime target and Poland, the main conduit for military assistance flowing to Ukraine, was the second. In the past two months, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Turkey have seen stepped-up targeting.

A striking exception is Estonia, where Microsoft said it has detected no Russian cyber intrusions since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. The company credited Estonia’s adoption of cloud computing, where it’s easier to detect intruders. “Significant collective defensive weaknesses remain” among some other European governments, Microsoft said, without identifying them.

Half of the 128 organisations targeted are government agencies and 12 percent are non-governmental agencies, typically think tanks or humanitarian groups, according to the 28-page report. Other targets include telecommunications, energy and defense companies.

Microsoft said Ukraine’s cyber defenses “have proven stronger” overall than Russia’s capabilities in “waves of destructive cyberattacks against 48 distinct Ukrainian agencies and enterprises.” Moscow’s military hackers have been cautious not to unleash destructive data-destroying worms that could spread outside Ukraine, as the NotPetya virus did in 2017, the report noted.

“During the past month, as the Russian military moved to concentrate its attacks in the Donbas region, the number of destructive attacks has fallen,” according to the report titled Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War. The Redmond, Washington, company has unique insight in the domain due to the ubiquity of its software and threat detection teams.

Microsoft said Ukraine has also set an example in data safeguarding. Ukraine went from storing its data locally on servers in government buildings a week before the Russian invasion — making them vulnerable to aerial attack — to dispersing that data in the cloud, hosted in data centers across Europe.

The report also assessed Russian disinformation and propaganda aimed at “undermining Western unity and deflecting criticism of Russian military war crimes” and wooing people in nonaligned countries.

Using artificial intelligence tools, Microsoft said, it estimated “Russian cyber influence operations successfully increased the spread of Russian propaganda after the war began by 216 percent in Ukraine and 82 percent in the United States.”

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Twitter Notes Expected to Launch in Coming Weeks for Sharing Long-Form Content: Report

Twitter Notes — a feature to let users publish long-form content on the platform — has been in testing and is launching in the coming weeks, according to a report. The reported development was earlier known as Twitter Articles. It would let users express their ideas in detail and share in-depth thoughts on the platform. However, Twitter already has features including the ability to create threads to go beyond the given word limit with tweets and write longer content on the platform.

Ahead of its public launch, the Twitter Notes feature is being tested with select users, TechCrunch reports. It was initially spotted in February as Twitter Articles by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong.

The feature would let users write in-depth posts on the platform that could be saved as a draft or shared with the public.

App researcher Nima Owji shared some screenshots in April that suggest users would get options to share their long-form posts with followers or create links to them for sharing on the Web.

 

Twitter declined to comment on the matter, though the company told TechCrunch that it would share updates about the feature “soon.”

In 2017, Twitter doubled the word limit per tweet on its platform to 280 characters from the earlier 140. The company back then also introduced threads on the platform to let its users share thoughts longer than the given 280 characters limit.

Those moves have, however, not yet helped people who are looking to share detailed content on the platform. Some users have overcome the limitation — to some extent — by sharing their notes from a third-party app in the form of screenshots.

Twitter may address those users by introducing Notes as an integrated feature in the future.

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Rolling Stone Magazine Teams With BAYC for Special Edition NFTs, Marks 2nd Collab



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New Technology Can Repair Heart Muscles After an Attack, Say Researchers

In a groundbreaking finding, researchers have developed a technology that can help effectively treat heart diseases in humans. The technology repairs heart muscles in mice after a heart attack and also successfully regenerates them. Researchers, from the University of Houston, have used a synthetic messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to deliver mutated transcription factors to the heart of the mouse. The transcription factors are the proteins that control the conversion of DNA into RNA.

In their study, published in The Journal of Cardiovascular Aging, the team conducted an experiment to show that two mutated transcription factors, Stemin and YAP5SA, work closely to increase the replication of heart muscle cells or cardiomyocytes in mice.

“What we are trying to do is dedifferentiate the cardiomyocyte into a more stem cell-like state so that they can regenerate and proliferate,” said Siyu Xiao, Ph.D graduate and co-author of the study. According to another co-author Dinakar Iyer, Stemin transcription proved to be a game-changer in their experiment. While Stemin triggers stem-like properties in cardiomyocytes, YAP5SA works on organ growth resulting in more replication of the myocytes.

Demonstrating the effects of Stemin and YAP5SA on the heart of the mouse, researchers, in a separate finding, showed that the transcription factors repaired the damaged heart. They observe that after the factors were injected, the myocytes replicated at least 15-fold in 24 hours.

“When both transcription factors were injected into infarcted adult mouse hearts, the results were stunning. The lab found cardiac myocytes multiplied quickly within a day, while hearts over the next month were repaired to near normal cardiac pumping function with little scarring,” said Robert Schwartz, lead author of the study.

According to Xiao, using mRNA, in the treatment, was better than vial delivery as it disappears in a few days. In addition, when gene therapy is delivered to cells using viral vectors, it comes with some biosafety concerns as it cannot be stopped easily.

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SoftBank Overseas Business Chief Michel Combes Exits in Latest Churn

Japan’s SoftBank Group said on Wednesday it has appointed Alex Clavel as chief executive of its SoftBank Group International (SBGI) unit, replacing Michel Combes who leaves after just six months in the role.

SoftBank transformed the tech industry with big bets on late-stage startups but the conglomerate has turned over much of its executive team and has been forced to radically scale back investing activity through its Vision Fund as its portfolio slumps.

Clavel takes charge of a hodgepodge of assets including chip designer Arm, which SoftBank hopes to list, and stakes in satellite company OneWeb, telco T-Mobile US and robotics firm Boston Dynamics.

The executive, who spent 19 years at Morgan Stanley before joining SoftBank in 2015, participated in the restructuring of office space-sharing firm WeWork and the integration of Latin American funds into the Vision Fund following the departure of Chief Operating Officer Marcelo Claure.

The recent exits underscore the dominance by chief executive Masayoshi Son of the Japanese conglomerate and its board at a time of strategic drift. Son will address shareholders on Friday.

Son “needs people to provide safeguards, give him advice, and make him even more successful,” outgoing SoftBank board member Lip-Bu Tan wrote in a statement earlier this month, adding that “poor choices made too quickly can have negative consequences for the company”.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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Planet Formation Theory Upset After New Study Of Mars Meteorite

The planetary formation theory that scientists have been referring to for decades seems to have been jeopardised by a recent study regarding an old meteorite. The theory explained how rocky planets like the Earth and Mars acquire volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and noble gases during the formative stages. During the research, scientists observed minute quantities of krypton isotopes in samples of the meteorite. The low abundance of krypton isotopes makes it more difficult to measure. Hence, in order to find out the origin of these isotopes, researchers used a new method set up at the UC Davis Noble Gas Laboratory.

According to Sandrine Péron, a postdoctoral scholar working with Professor Sujoy Mukhopadhyay in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Davis, “A basic assumption about planet formation is that planets first collect these volatiles from the nebula around a young star.” But the recent study contradicts the process.

Scientists found that the krypton isotopes in the meteorite suggest that they originated from meteorites and not from the solar nebula. This suggests that meteorites were delivering volatile elements to planets at a much earlier formative stage, even in the presence of the solar nebula, which is contradictory to what was previously believed.

The new study indicates that the growth of Mars was completed before the radiation from the sun dissipated the nebula. But the irradiation should also have blown off the nebular atmosphere on Mars. This means that atmospheric krypton must have been preserved in some way, either by being trapped underground or stored in polar ice caps.

Professor Mukhopadhyay said, “However, that would require Mars to have been cold in the immediate aftermath of its accretion. While our study clearly points to the chondritic gases in the Martian interior, it also raises some interesting questions about the origin and composition of Mars’ early atmosphere.”

Krypton, among other noble gases, is instrumental in discovering the source of volatile materials on planets.

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Fry Cry 5 Coming to Xbox Game Pass for Console, PC, Cloud on July 1

Far Cry 5 Xbox Game Pass release date is out. The fifth instalment of the popular first-person action-adventure shooter game Far Cry will be available July 1 on Xbox Game Pass for PC, console, and cloud. This means that subscribers will be able to play Far Cry 5 on these platforms at no additional cost. The title comes to Xbox Game Pass nearly four years after it was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in 2018.

Developed by Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto and published by Ubisoft, Far Cry 5 lets you play as an unnamed junior deputy sheriff, who teams up with various resistance factions in a bid to liberate Hope County, a fictional region of Montana, United States, from the clutches of a charismatic tyrant named Joseph Seed.

Far Cry 5 received generally favourable reviews with praise directed towards the visuals and gameplay features. Most critics, however, were not too impressed by the core storyline and character development. There was also a perception that it had the potential to spark controversy as it explored themes such as religious fanaticism and the rise of far-right political movements in the US. Despite this, Far Cry 5 went on to deliver the fastest-selling title in the Fry Cry franchise’s history, grossing $310 million (about Rs. 2,423 crore) in its first week itself. The overwhelming response to the title paved the way for its 2019 spin-off Far Cry New Dawn and the 2021 sequel Far Cry 6.

Besides Far Cry 5, the football game FIFA 22 and the legends of the Far East-inspired action game Naraka: Bladepoint are coming to Xbox Game Pass on June 23. Moreover, the science fantasy tabletop role-playing Shadowrun trilogy and the strategy game Total War: Three Kingdoms are already available for console and cloud and PC, respectively.

Far Cry 5 comes to Xbox Game Pass on July 1.

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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 Bespoke Edition to Have Wider Rollout, Offer More Colour Options: Report

Samsung launched the Galaxy Z Flip 3 Bespoke Edition in October last year, only a couple of months after unveiling the regular Galaxy Z Flip 3. The Bespoke Edition did not offer any specifications upgrade. It only allowed customers to mix and match various colour options for the back panel and the handset frame. According to a new report, the Galaxy Z Flip 4 would also get a similar treatment when it eventually launches later this year. The South Korean tech giant is expected to offer more colour options than the special edition Galaxy Z Flip 3.

As per a report by Sammobile, Samsung is likely to also launch the Galaxy Z Flip 4 Bespoke Edition after the regular version arrives as expected on August 10. When the Galaxy Z Flip 3 Bespoke Edition was unveiled in October last year, it allowed customers to select separate colours for the top and bottom half of the rear panel. Customers have the option to pick between a matte black or glossy frame along with a possible 49 colour combinations. This report suggests that the company could offer even more colour options for the Galaxy Z Flip 4 Bespoke Edition.

The Galaxy Z Flip 4 Bespoke Edition might also get a wider release in comparison to its predecessor, which is currently available only to customers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, the UK, and the US. This time Samsung is expected to go for other leading markets in Europe and Asia as well. It is expected to be made available to purchase online from the official Samsung site.

There is still not much known about the specifications of the Galaxy Z Flip 4. A recent report suggested that this handset could offer up to 512GB of onboard storage, which is expected to have a launch price of $1,100 (roughly Rs. 86,000). It could also be powered by a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC.

Are the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Z Flip 3 still made for enthusiasts — or are they good enough for everyone? We discussed this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Moto G42 India Launch Tipped for Next Week



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Delhi Government Launches Shopping E-Portal Dilli Bazaar, to Go Live in December

Delhi government’s ambitious “Dilli Bazaar” e-portal that will enable shoppers across the globe to have a virtual tour of the city’s key markets and shop on the lines of other e-commerce platforms, will go live in December with 10,000 vendors, an official statement said.

Through Dilli Bazaar, the Arvind Kejriwal government aims to bring Delhi’s markets to a “cutting-edge” digital platform where every Delhi-based trader will be able to display and sell their products to the world, it said.

The government will bring over one lakh shops of Delhi to the e-portal within six months of launch and give them a 24×7 digital storefront. With zero setup cost, products on Dilli Bazaar will be significantly cheaper than those on other e-commerce portals, the statement said.

According to the statement, Kejriwal chaired a high-level review meeting at the Delhi Secretariat to take stock of the progress of the project. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi (DDCD) Vice Chairperson Jasmine Shah were also present in the meeting.

“Delhi’s markets will be known all over the world in the coming years. By December 2022, ‘Dilli Bazaar’ will be launched with store fronts of 10,000 shops in Delhi. The Delhi government will connect one lakh sellers to the portal in the first phase,” the statement quoted Kejriwal as saying.

He said these shopkeepers will be verified by the market association.

“An agency will be appointed to oversee all aspects of Dilli Bazaar’s operations. This will be the first time in the country that Delhi’s markets will be available on multiple digital platforms,” he said in the statement.

The statement said the portal will adopt the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) protocol to establish an open network of e-marketplaces in Delhi, which will help shift buyer and seller transactions from closed platforms to decentralised open networks.

For instance, if a customer wants to purchase shoes from a shop in Connaught Place while sitting at home, he/she will log on to the portal and choose the desired pair. After this, the customer will get an option to purchase the footwear from not just Dilli Bazaar portal but also other empanelled portals where the seller has listed his products, it said.

“This provision will help the shopkeepers of Delhi get a digital presence not just on the Dilli Bazaar portal but on various e-commerce portals opening a wide horizon of opportunities for them,” the statement said.

The government intends to make the portal’s products available on all e-commerce platforms with all e-payment options available for transactions, it added.

Dilli Bazaar will also introduce virtual market tours wherein the customers and visitors will be able to view market streets and shops, easing the journey of their purchase and itinerary planning, the statement said.

For instance, if people from other states or countries want to visit Chandni Chowk market from home, they can virtually navigate each street to see what the shops there are selling and purchase the items they like while getting a unique experience, the statement explained.

“The Delhi government will empanel vendors for this purpose and kick it off from five markets and then gradually implement it in every market of Delhi,” the statement added.

The statement said all shopkeepers will get a personalised digital storefront on the portal and all products in their shops will be listed on the e-portal.

The portal will allow users to search for a shopkeeper, market and product by name. It will also act as a repository of verified sellers of Delhi with comprehensive product catalogues.

The vision behind the move is to showcase Delhi’s unique markets on a virtual platform; expose city’s businesses to buyers globally; facilitate businesses to be setup, grow and diversify and to provide credible and affordable e-commerce platform to trades, it said.

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Toyota Joins Redwood Materials’ EV Battery Recycling, Remanufacturing Initiative

US startup Redwood Materials on Tuesday said Japan’s Toyota Motor has become the latest auto industry giant to join its comprehensive electric vehicle (EV) battery recycling and remanufacturing initiative.

Redwood Materials, whose partners include automaker Ford Motor and EV battery maker Panasonic Holdings, is building a closed-loop battery ecosystem aimed at lowering EV costs by lessening dependence on imported materials while also reducing the environmental impact.

The five-year-old company has focused initial work at a 175-acre campus in northern Nevada, and plans to build another complex in southeastern United States, its chief executive and founder, JB Straubel, said in an interview.

The new facility would be able to supply Toyota‘s planned $1.3 billion (nearly Rs. 10,000 crore) battery plant in North Carolina, as well as Ford’s planned battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky with SK On, a subsidiary of South Korea’s SK Innovation.

Redwood Materials is ramping up production of anode and cathode components to 100 gigawatt-hours by 2025, enough to supply batteries for 1 million EVs a year, then to 500 GWh by 2030, enough to supply 5 million EVs a year or more, said Straubel, a co-founder of Tesla.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has said the EV maker expects to build up to 20 million EVs a year by 2030, while total global EV production including Tesla could reach as much as 40 million, industry forecasters said.

Straubel said Redwood Materials is having “various discussions” with Tesla, but has no deals to announce yet. Tesla’s partners also include Panasonic.

Toyota has been building hybrid electric vehicles under the Prius name for more than two decades. With a car’s average lifespan roughly 12 years, some early Prius models will be reaching the end of their useful lives.

Once out of service, their nickel metal hydride batteries can be recycled and materials such as nickel and copper reintroduced into the battery supply chain, where they can supplement raw materials from mines.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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