One important thing: The UPI of e-commerce is here! ONDC, the protocol that seeks to break e-commerce monopolies in India, goes live on Friday in Bengaluru. The Moneycontrol team will bring you all the action as it happens. Stay tuned for tomorrow's edition!

In the meantime, do read our explainer on ONDC.

In today's newsletter:

• Layoffs @ SoftBank 
• Can Zomato's Inter-City delivery break even?
• Facial recognition is coming to Bihar polls 

You know that things are bad if tech investors start laying off people.

SoftBank, one of the world’s most aggressive tech investors, is resorting to mass layoffs amid widening losses.

SoftBank Group has laid off 150 employees worldwide from its Vision Fund and International units.

• The layoffs are going to affect 30 percent of employees across the two businesses, according to a Reuters report citing sources.

In August, SoftBank’s chief Masayoshi Son had said that they would reduce jobs to cut costs after the investment conglomerate reported a net loss of 3.16 trillion yen ($23.34 billion) for the June-ended quarter.

• The Vision Fund unit, which invests in high-growth tech companies across the world, had lost 2.9 trillion yen ($21 billion) on its investments in the June quarter amid a market rout and major valuation corrections.

Employees in investment teams and back-office departments such as finance and legal will be affected by the layoffs. Major cost centres such as the United States, Britain, and China will be impacted.

• However, a source tells us that India will be unaffected.

The mass layoffs reveal signs of stress at one of the world's largest investment firms. It could also imply that the company will make fewer investments this year.

• Son had previously said that SoftBank would cut investments to a fourth in 2022 compared to 2021.

SoftBank has been a prolific investor in the country’s startup ecosystem and has backed at least 21 unicorns to date.

So far, the Japanese conglomerate has invested over $14 billion in Indian technology startups, with the majority of the investments happening in the last five years.

• SoftBank has invested over $3 billion in 17 deals in 2021 alone. However, so far this year, the investment conglomerate has not participated in or led a single large round in India.

Remember the Pune couple who delighted each of the 'sharks' with their product, but could not get any funding in the India edition of the Shark Tank?

That’s because participating 'sharks' Ashneer Grover, Peyush Bansal, Namita Thapar and Anupam Mittal were not convinced that it was a scalable business.

Fast forward six months.

Last month, Zomato launched a pilot for the same product, albeit in a more complicated version. While the Shark Tank participants ran a 24-hour delivery service for sweets between cities, Zomato is doing it for 'legendary' dishes of different cities — sweets, biryanis, kebabs, paranthas, and so on.

Zomato has been testing the service in Gurugram for about a month, with restaurants from ten cities on board. It is now planning to expand this service to users in ten cities over the next few months.

• While its intra-city food delivery service broke even in the June quarter after being started in 2015, Zomato expects the inter-city version to break even much faster.

The company is banking on the festive period, which starts with Dussehra in early October, to increase the footprint of the service.

Although the company expects the inter-city service to break even soon, Zomato has to spend big on customer acquisition. It is wooing users with coupons worth as much as Rs 200 and Rs 300.

Contrary to what the sharks had said about inter-city food orders, Zomato’s new service is doing well on the repeat customer front.

• 30 percent of the users ordering on any day are repeat customers. Also, the average order value in inter-city service has been seen to be over Rs 950 – around 2.5 times of intra-city food deliveries.

What was once a one-time pilot project to explore the efficacy of a new, and often criticised technology, is increasingly looking like it may become the norm in elections.

In October, Bihar will see a massive facial recognition exercise as part of its urban local body elections.

• This comes two years after Telangana piloted a small-scale deployment of this technology.

The Bihar State Election Commission (SEC) intends to address the ‘major problem’ of bogus voting, and they believe that only a real-time mechanism that can generate notifications and alerts can deal with a fraudulent voter.

During the election, approximately 15,000 tablets with an Android app will be distributed to booth officers in Bihar.

• This app, with camera access, GPS, and internet, will be able to capture voters' faces and verify them with voter ID or any other ID.

The SEC has stated that the app's architecture should be end-to-end encrypted because it deals with sensitive data such as voter photos and documents.

• The SEC has also said that system logs will have to be properly stored for the future

Go deeper!

Before it became one of the all-time largest software IPOs in 2020, Snowflake was already backed by Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway to name a few.

While its cloud-based SaaS and data warehousing services were already available in India and Southeast Asia, the company only opened an office and hired its first employee in 2019. With around 300 employees already, India will be a strong market for its expansion strategy. Swiggy, BYJU's, Urban Company, Khatabook, Marico, Cars24, and others are among its clients in India.

In an interview, Vimal Venkatram, the company's first employee and now managing director for India, talks about:

• Snowflake’s India game plan
• Next growth frontiers in India and globally
• Beating rival solutions from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud
• Top client sectors
• Impact of data localisation

Read our interview

• Robinhood has announced a partnership with crypto firm Circle to offer customers the ability to buy and sell stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) on the brokerage's platform.
  
  
• According to a report by blockchain data firm Chainalysis, small retail payments in Sub-Saharan Africa are driving exceptional crypto adoption and usage, with the region conducting the world's highest proportion (80%) of crypto retail payments under $1,000.
  
  
• In crypto havens such as Portugal’s Meia Praia beach, the confidence in digital currencies remains undimmed even after this year’s crash.

Here’s a video that will likely bring back a rush of nostalgia among early computer enthusiasts.

For today's Internet users, the wide range of privacy violations and data leaks is no longer surprising. However, the debate over privacy dates back several decades.

In 1981, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (then 26 years old) and US investigative journalist David Burnham debated potential privacy concerns with personal computers during a television interview. Interestingly, Jobs had argued that a (computer) literate public was the best defence against this. It's an enthralling watch.

Watch the interview