WORLD
Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies after battling cancer
Susan Wojcicki was crucial to Google's founding years, having rented garage space in her parent's house to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to start the company in 1998. She was also the company's 16th hire.
TECHNOLOGY
Nazara Technologies to buy UK-based gaming studio Fusebox Games for $27.2 million
Fusebox Games operates intellectual property-driven interactive story games and has published a title called ‘Love Island’
TECHNOLOGY
Disney+ Hotstar's paid subscriber base drops to 35.5 million in Q3-FY24
Disney+ Hotstar's subscriber drop comes despite the T20 Cricket World Cup happening during the quarter, where India clinched an ICC trophy after 11 years.
TECHNOLOGY
Reddit's international daily active user base surges to 45.7 mn in Q2, driven by growth in India, France
Reddit said it will begin testing new search result pages powered by AI to summarise and recommend content on the platform
TECHNOLOGY
Nazara subsidiary Absolute Sports to buy assets of Deltia's Gaming
The acquisition is expected to bolster Sportskeeda parent's presence in the gaming and esports media publishing sector in the United States.
TECHNOLOGY
India is the largest market for Meta AI usage, says CFO Susan Li
Meta AI is on track to achieve the social networking giant’s goal of becoming the most used AI assistant by the end of the year, founder Mark Zuckerberg said.
TECHNOLOGY
Meta's Threads set to hit 200 million monthly active users, says Mark Zuckerberg
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg expects Threads to become the next billion-user social network in the company's suite of apps in a few years.
TECHNOLOGY
Meta bets on India's AI talent with Llama 3.1, Hindi support
Llama 3.1 is touted as the first "frontier-level" open-source AI model capable of matching the performance of leading proprietary foundation models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
TECHNOLOGY
MPL-backed Mayhem Studios bags funding from Lumikai
Mayhem Studios is building a battle royale title Underworld Gang Wars, which is expected to be launched later in the year. The game has, so far, clocked more than 7.5 million pre-registrations
TECHNOLOGY
Google Maps wants to help you navigate flyovers and narrow roads in India
Google has developed an AI model specifically for Indian roads that estimates road width using satellite and Street View imagery. This will help four-wheelers avoid narrow roads whenever possible.
TECHNOLOGY
Google Maps to provide metro tickets in Kochi, Chennai via Namma Yatri
Google plans to expand the feature to more cities and additional modes of public transport such as buses in collaboration with Namma Yatri and ONDC
TECHNOLOGY
Google India country head Sanjay Gupta elevated as APAC president
India is Google's largest market in terms of users and a critical region for its future growth including its artificial intelligence efforts.
TECHNOLOGY
Google Cloud's Q2 revenue crosses $10 billion, operating profit $1billion
Google Cloud's strong performance along with a rise in digital advertising sales drove Alphabet's revenue growth in the second quarter
TECHNOLOGY
Meta AI gets multilingual with support for 7 languages including Hindi
Meta is also releasing Llama 3.1, the latest version of its open source large language model that will be available in 8B, 70B and 405B versions.
TECHNOLOGY
Spotify's Q2 paid subscribers rise 12% to 246 million; clocks record quarterly profit
Spotify's continued subscriber growth in Q2 2024 helped the streaming service achieve its second consecutive quarter of record profit growth.
ENTERTAINMENT
India becomes Netflix's 2nd largest market in paid user additions in June quarter
Netflix said India growth was driven by big successful original titles such as Sanjay Leela Bansali's Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar and Imtiaz Ali's Amar Singh Chamkila during the quarter.
TECHNOLOGY
Bhavish Aggarwal unveils new Ola Maps pricing day after Google Maps cuts rates
Google recently said it is slashing the rates for the Google Maps platform for developers in India by as much as 70 percent from August 1, 2024.
TECHNOLOGY
Google to slash Maps Platform pricing for Indian developers by up to 70% from August 1
Google Maps API price reduction comes at a time when Ola chief Bhavish Aggarwal has been publicly encouraging developers to adopt Ola Maps for their mapping needs.
TECHNOLOGY
Google, MeitY Startup Hub to train 10,000 Indian startups in AI
Google also unveiled a series of tools, programmes and partnerships to help developers who are building AI solutions and products for India and the world
BUSINESS
Google woos India's booming AI developer community with new tools, access to latest models
Google's move is aimed at helping developers in building AI-driven products and solutions for both domestic and global markets.
TECHNOLOGY
Ola-Uber challenger Namma Yatri pilots auto, cab rentals
Ride-hailing firm Namma Yatri, built on top of ONDC, is expanding its offerings as the company looks to compete with rivals Uber and Ola.
TECHNOLOGY
Swiggy founders, Cred's Kunal Shah, DeVC, others invest in gaming startup Felicity Games
Felicity Games has launched over 10 game titles within a year of its launch. These games are played by more than a million monthly users across 14 geographies.
TECHNOLOGY
Gaming studios to PM Modi: Need clear distinction between video games and RMG
A group of 70 video game studios and esports companies have sought a comprehensive video games-focussed policy in line with global best practices. It has also requested that the I&B ministry be designated as the nodal agency for video games
TECHNOLOGY
Meta's Threads now has over 175 million monthly active users, says Mark Zuckerberg
Threads, designed as rival to Elon Musk's X, has been steadily building a range of new features to attract more users onto its platform.
