One important thing: Dunzo's legal troubles mount

In today’s newsletter:

• Byju's' biggest investor slams its corporate governance
• ONDC is going global
• Twitter's X-treme makeover

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When three directors on Byju’s board stepped down last month, the edtech firm said it was because the investors' shareholding had fallen below the minimum required threshold.

Well, unfortunately for Byju’s — the cat is out of the bag.

One of Byju’s biggest backers, Prosus, is crying foul against the debt-laden edtech firm.

• This comes a month after its representative on the board of Byju’s, Russell Dreisenstock, stepped down.

The executive leadership at Byju's regularly disregarded advice and recommendations on strategic, operational, legal, and corporate governance matters, the VC firm said.

"The decision for our Director to step down from the Byju's Board was taken after it became clear that he was unable to fulfill his fiduciary duty to serve the long-term interests of the Company and its stakeholders," the investor said.

Meanwhile, liquidity issues continue to haunt cash-strapped Byju’s as it awaits to close a much-needed funding round.

• A sign of distress has been the recurring delays in PF payments, despite a nudge from the EPFO

Fortunately for employees, the company remitted PF payments for June for a majority of them after the EPFO questioned the edtech firm following our exclusive report.

The new kid on the block of digital public infrastructure is set to go global.

• Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is about to start testing exports to countries like the UAE and Singapore by the end of this year, sources tell us 

• The plan is to secure B2B orders in these countries with large expat populations

ONDC is also developing a programme that will help small merchants with export documentation, logistics, and training to sell abroad.

• It could become something like Amazon Global Selling, which has scaled up significantly in India with more than 1 lakh merchants on board

• ONDC is also in talks with a top international business advisory company to supply credibility badges to merchants on the network

The development comes after the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was recently enabled in Singapore and France for cross-border transactions.

“India must take the lead to show the world how cross-border transactions could be done in 15 seconds,” National Payments Corporation of India chief Dilip Asbe said previously.

Go deeper

Is Elon Musk's Twitter the 'Ship of Theseus' of our time? It certainly appears so.

About nine months after buying Twitter, Musk has renamed the social media platform to X, shunning one of the world's most iconic brands and its unique lexicon.

• Musk's replacement of the bird logo with the new stylized X logo is probably the most visible change he has made to the platform in the past year

Musk said the Twitter name no longer makes sense as the company becomes a broader communications and financial services platform with X, which is dubbed as the "everything app". (P.S. Musk's obsession with the alphabet X also goes back a long way.) 

• Although, there could be potential legal challenges on the anvil with this move

Twitter's rebranding to X indicates how drastically the social media platform has changed since its purchase, thanks to multiple product and policy changes (sometimes bizarre ones) introduced by Musk in the past year.

• It also comes amid increased competition, particularly from the deep-pocketed Meta, which launched Threads earlier this month

"Twitter’s rebrand is a reminder that Elon Musk, not Threads or any other app, is and has always been the most likely 'Twitter killer," said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, a market research firm.

Read our story about what the rebranding could mean for the Elon Musk-led social media firm.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has done it again. His latest project is the Worldcoin protocol, which combines AI and cryptocurrency. The Worldcoin ecosystem included three key elements:

• World ID: This is a unique digital ID that is created by scanning your eyeball with the Orb, a biometric verification device

• Worldcoin tokens: These are free tokens that you can earn by creating a World ID

• World app: This is a digital wallet where you can store and use your Worldcoin tokens

Altman and his co-founders intend for the Worldcoin protocol to be the world's largest, most inclusive identity and financial public utility, owned by everyone.

Find out more

• MIT researchers have developed a tool called PhotoGuard that can protect your photos from being altered with AI.
  
  
• Microsoft has started to make Bing Chat, its AI chatbot based on OpenAI's GPT-4 model, available to users of Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome web browsers.

“The Marvels” trailer is finally here, and it's an electrifying treat for fans of the Marvel Universe.

The film stars Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), Ms Marvel (Iman Vellani), and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who team up to fight cosmic evil forces.

Mark your calendars, Marvel fans! Don't miss the magic unfold on the big screen on November 10.

Watch the trailer

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