Reliance reportedly nearing agreement to purchase Disney’s India operations

Reliance is reportedly close to agreeing to buy Disney’s India operations as Mukesh Ambani’s oil telecom empire looks to expand its digital and television assets.

Disney values ​​its India operations at about $10 billion, while Reliance pegs its assets at $7 billion to $8 billion, Bloomberg News reported on Monday. According to the report, a deal could be signed and announced as early as next month.

Reliance said in an earlier statement that the company is constantly evaluating properties for acquisition.

In 2019, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets for $71.3 billion, a move that was significantly strengthened by the addition of Star India.

The deal was critical to Disney’s global streaming expansion, giving Disney broadcast and streaming rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches, a number of multilingual television channels, and an interest in a Bollywood film production company. At the time of acquisition, Star’s Hotstar had approximately 150 million monthly active users.

Hotstar dominated India’s video streaming world for several more quarters, but its popularity grew after Reliance-backed Viacom18 secured five-year rights to stream IPL cricket matches for about $3 billion, and the situation has since changed. became tapered. Disney paid $3 billion for the same five-year rights to air the content on television.

Reliance has poached a number of top leadership and engineering talent to strengthen JioCinema over the past year, bringing premium content from HBO and NBC to its on-demand streaming service.

Disney’s Hotstar, which lost around 20 million subscribers this year as consumers flocked to JioCinema to watch IPL matches, has turned to the ongoing Cricket World Cup in hopes of winning back customers. Streaming for free to mobile viewers. Earlier this month, the Disney Streamer app took back the global on-demand video streaming record from JioCinema when a cricket match drew 35 million concurrent viewers. During Sunday’s India vs. New Zealand match, concurrent viewership jumped to 43 million viewers, breaking its own record.

Source: techcrunch.com

Monday.com opts to develop a new database rather than buying an existing one

Monday.com launches more Ten years ago, we wanted to help companies build a highly flexible set of business tools, including CRM, marketing, operations, and HR, built in a customized way that you wouldn’t find out of the box. Not only did companies love the flexibility, they found that they were pushing the boundaries beyond the ability of the underlying database technology to continue handling all use cases.

So the company began looking for a successor. With a myriad of off-the-shelf database choices, you might think finding the right one is just a matter of time and testing, but it’s worth considering some options and talking to some experts. After Monday came to the conclusion that we needed more than what was available on the market.

One of the main issues was flexibility. Monday.com had no idea how customers would incorporate building blocks into their applications. This meant we needed a schemaless database to handle whatever the customer decided to build. So we decided to build our own database, but there was a twist: we couldn’t build a single database that would take over all future functionality. Instead, it overlays other databases to handle specific tasks.it called New solution MondayDB.

The new database has been in place since July, and even though the company has migrated to the new database, the old database still exists as another layer in the complex Monday.com architecture.

No matter how careful they are with their technology choices, startups struggle to bring their products to market, which is often not possible, and they are often unable to see how their products grow and develop over time. You must realize that there is no way to predict what will happen. At some point, though, companies will have to start with a completely new architecture and pay off their technical debt, as Monday.com had to do.

We spoke with Daniel Lereya, Chief Product and Technology Officer, to learn how his team decided to build this solution and the challenges they faced in finding a database technology that met these unique requirements. I learned about the challenges I faced.

Another manic Monday

The process leading to the construction of the database has been going on for several years. In fact, the company started considering the idea of ​​a new database in his January 2021 with a completely open mindset. Lereya says customers value his Monday.com because of the flexibility it provides, and the company needed a solution that could manage an adaptable approach.

Source: techcrunch.com

Science and Technology News: Elon Musk’s X (previously known as Twitter) conducts trial to enforce posting fees for new users

Elon Musk’s X has started testing potential sign-up fees for new users.

The company formerly known as twitter introduced a fee of $1 (82 pence). new zealand And that Philippinesmost of the main features are behind a paywall.

New accounts that do not pay will not be able to post anything or interact directly with other users.

Instead, you are limited to viewing and listening to content and following other accounts.

X said the move was aimed at “reducing spam, platform manipulation, and bot activity.”

musk We have long complained about the presence of fake accounts on the platform; and tried to use his concerns to get out of the contract to buy it last year..

The trials in New Zealand and the Philippines came after the billionaire businessman discussed plans to introduce “small monthly payments” to all users.

Speaking at an event with the Israeli Prime Minister Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Musk said last month that the fee would help fight “a horde of bots.”

Use Chrome Browser for a more accessible video player

Mr. Musk starts charging fees for using X

Fees will make X “difficult to operate”

Since Musk took ownership of the company, much of his focus has been on monetizing Company X’s user base, with advertiser spending declining due to concerns over his moderation policies. ing.

X already offers a premium subscription for £9.60 per month. This gives users a verification check, allows them to write longer posts or edit existing ones, and gives their account priority visibility in search results.

Musk acknowledged that the new $1 fee “will not completely stop bots,” but argued that it will “make it 1,000 times harder to manipulate the platform.”

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This means that Company X israel-hamas war To spread.

EU officials warned Musk to take actionsaid it violated the block’s new online content rules.

Misleading content includes video game footage purporting to depict scenes of conflict and reusing unrelated war clips.

Later, X announced changes to the Community Notes feature. This allows volunteer posters to attach fact-checks to their posts, making them more visible if other users find them useful.

However, there are concerns that the tool is being manipulated, and all notes must include a source.

Source: news.sky.com

New research reveals the potential of using short audio recordings as a diagnostic tool for diabetes | Latest Findings in Science and Technology

New research has found that diabetes may be diagnosed with just a short audio recording from a mobile phone.

Scientists can determine whether someone has diabetes with nearly 90% accuracy using just a 6-10 second audio sample and basic health data such as age, gender, height, and weight I created an AI model.

Klick Labs recruited 267 people for the study, including some who had already been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

Each subject was asked to record a phrase on their phone six times a day for two weeks, and the team used AI to analyze more than 18,000 samples to determine the acoustic differences between diabetics and non-diabetics. I looked into it.

These included changes in pitch caused by type 2 diabetes that are imperceptible to the human ear.

This model had an accuracy rate of 89% for women and 86% for men.

Study author Jaycee Kaufman said the results could “change” the way we screen for diabetes.

More than 90% of adults with diabetes in the UK have type 2 diabetes, but many go undetected for years as symptoms may be systemic or absent. I am.

Testing for this disease usually requires a visit to a general practitioner and urine and blood tests.

“Current detection methods can be time-consuming, travel-intensive, and costly,” Kaufman said.

“Voice technology has the potential to completely remove these barriers.”

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Previous research has shown that audio recordings can be used in conjunction with AI to diagnose other diseases. Including new coronavirus infection.

Klick Labs believes this technology can also diagnose conditions such as prediabetes and hypertension.

This peer-reviewed study was published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings journal.

Source: news.sky.com

Chinese tech giants vie for $340 million investment in rival to OpenAI

It is becoming increasingly clear that two parallel AI universes are forming between the United States and China. While the US has produced notable players such as her OpenAI and Anthropic, China has its own emerging candidates. One of these basic model developers, Zhipu AI, announced Today, the company announced that it has raised a total of 2.5 billion yuan ($340 million) so far this year.

Established in 2019, Chipu was Spun out from China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and is led by Tang and Jieprofessor in the university’s Department of Computer Science and Technology.

This announcement came at a sensitive time. This week, the Biden administration imposed additional restrictions on Nvidia AI chip exports to China, further hampering rivals’ ability to train large-scale language models. In anticipation of Washington’s semiconductor ban, China’s deep-pocketed AI companies are stockpiling semiconductors, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these coveted chips.

To stay in this expensive AI race, Zhipu is keeping itself well-funded by raising money from local investors. The $340 million investment was made from a renminbi-denominated fund, marking a shift from a two-decade trend in which US dollar funds were the preferred funding source until geopolitical tensions created a technology gap.

In August, President Joe Biden signed the agreement. presidential order Excludes U.S. investments in key Chinese technology areas including AI, semiconductors, and quantum computing. Although aimed at curbing China’s military buildup, the order also had a negative impact on China-focused U.S. venture capital, which currently avoids investing in sensitive areas. Some companies, such as Sequoia Capital China and GGV Capital, which were renamed Hongshan, are looking for solutions to continue operating in the market by spinning off their China divisions.

HonShan invested in Zhipu along with other prominent VCs such as Shunwei Capital and Hillhouse Capital, as well as state funds managed by Legend Capital.

The AI ​​startup has also raised funding from an impressive roster of Chinese internet giants, bringing together even its biggest rivals like Alibaba and Tencent, which rarely co-invest. The lineup includes Ant Group, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Meituan, Kingsoft, TAL Education Group, and Boss Zhipin.

Zhipu recently open sourced a bilingual (Chinese and English) conversational AI model. Chat GLM-6Bhas been trained with 6 billion parameters and claims to be able to: Run inference on a single consumer graphics card. We also have an open source foundational model, GLM-130B, trained with 130 billion parameters.

Source: techcrunch.com

Snap collaborates with edtech firm Inspirit to introduce augmented reality technology in 50 American schools

Snap announced Wednesday that it is partnering with edtech company Inspirit to bring augmented reality to classrooms to help students better understand STEM lessons. The two companies are working together to create 25 AR lenses and his STEM curriculum that will be used by at least 50 people across the U.S. next year.

One of the AR lenses is designed to help students find the volume of a cylinder, and the other is designed to help users tap on a bubble to select the appropriate volume to pop it. Masu.

Image credits: snap

Snap says that since the pilot program began, 85% of students said AR helped them improve their memory and memory retention. The company also found that AR lessons increased his engagement by nearly 50%, and that 92% of his students found his AR content easy to understand.

“By incorporating custom-built lenses into an easy-to-use mobile application using a camera kit, Inspirit has designed an innovative curriculum that combines Snap’s AR technology with comprehensive learning guides to help teachers create dynamic learning. “We’ve empowered students to achieve their best, regardless of grade. They can learn in the classroom or at home,” the company said in a blog post. “This curriculum is designed to stimulate participation in class, increase confidence levels, and increase students’ sense of self-efficacy.”

Snap’s push into AR for education comes a month after the company shut down its AR Enterprise Services division less than a year after it launched. The initiative, announced in March, gives brands access to tools that allow him to perform AR try-on features, a 3D viewer to see products from multiple angles, fit and sizing recommendation technology, an enterprise manager, and more. became. their digital assets. The company said that ramping up its efforts would require “significant” investments and that it could not continue to fund the efforts.

Despite Snap’s declining revenue, the company’s stock rose nearly 12% yesterday. report revealed Snap Inc. could report better-than-expected results next year, according to an internal memo. The note reveals that Snap could reach more than 475 million daily active users in 2024, up from analysts’ prediction of 448 million, according to a report by It is said that it exceeds that. The Verge.

Snap is scheduled to announce its third quarter 2023 financial results on October 24th.

Source: techcrunch.com

Franks secures more capital to enhance automation of wealth services in Europe

side has secured $8 million in Series A capital to build an API for automated wealth management services and democratize access to wealth management across Europe.

Earlybird Venture Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors JME Ventures and 4Founders Capital. Scalapay co-founder Raffaele Terrone and Upvest co-founder and CEO Martin Kassing supported the round as angel investors.

The Barcelona-based company was founded in 2019 by software engineers Joaquín de la Cruz and Sergi Rao, and private banking executive Alvaro Morales. Their vision is to digitize global asset data across custodians and bring it under one API so that customers can get a complete picture of their investment portfolios in real time and make more intelligent investment decisions. was to be collected.

Franks, whose clients range from major financial institutions to family offices and independent financial advisors, is taking advantage of ongoing regulatory changes in Europe, especially around open banking. Additionally, recently proposed legislation includes Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID III) focuses on open finance, establishing rights and obligations governing access to financial data beyond payment accounts.

Dela Cruz explained that with open banking, there was previously no way to share financial data with third parties or for financial advisors to understand their clients’ global asset allocation. That’s why the company created its “Open Wealth” software.

“Open wealth refers to a movement in the industry that allows customers to share their data with third parties,” Delacruz told TechCrunch. “Financial advisors can connect their clients’ information with just two clicks on the platform, allowing them to get all their client’s financial information (360-degree view) in a single source of truth. It will be.”

Flanks operates in Spain, France and eight other countries. We connect with over 300 banks around the world and aggregate over 500,000 investment portfolios every month. Over the past year he has doubled the number of clients to 100, focusing on large clients that could potentially bring his Flanks to millions of end users.

Meanwhile, the company has grown its revenue more than 4x over the past 12 months.

The Series A funding will help the team continue to expand its footprint internationally and strengthen its product pipeline. Last year, Flanks created a product based on data. For example, a no-code process that allows financial advisors to use and analyze data. Another is that if a customer moves to a new bank, her financial advisor can change banks with her two clicks.

“This is the best opportunity for data in years because data can be combined with AI to create many vertical products,” Dela Cruz said. “We now want to continue building end-to-end use cases, using OpenAI to connect data so that financial advisors can actually manipulate the data and help their clients grow their portfolios. We are currently developing a use case for this.”

Source: techcrunch.com