Daily Briefing: Top 5 tech news you need to know today

Good Morning! Even though the lockdown is being lifted in major parts of the country, work from home is still a necessity. So, many companies are waiting to tell employees what the near future will look like. But there are some, who have benefitted from this pandemic. The EdTech sector is on a boom. Many companies here have seen a rise in investments. So, today in top tech news here is a round-up of all major findings (edtech or otherwise).

1. Major Fundings

AI Platform o9 solutions raised $100 million from KKR. The company is looking to expand in India and thus, will be providing job opportunities to many. Next, Grocery delivery startup Milkbasket raised $5.5M in Series B by Inflection Point Ventures. The startup is on a fast track to improve the grocery delivery market in Mumbai.

Further, EdTech Startup Instasolv received $2 Million from Vedantu in pre-series A funding round. This will bring a partnership between both to ramp up the high-school and competitive exams' study and problem-solving. Vedantu even has the right to Instasolv now. Also, FinTech Aye Finance raised $27 Million from Google’s CapitalG and other investors.

2. CCI Probe on Facebook-Jio deal

The major tech news of the time is everything about Jio getting investments. But this time, it is not to applaud it. The CCI Antitrust Watchdog is watching the entire deal. This is to know if the dealing is anti-competitive or not. CCI Chairmain Ashok Gupta has said that access to the huge amount of data incentivises the digital firms to do anti-competitive things.

Plus, we are not unaware of the tough competition that Jio is giving to the other telecom giants. CCI is also conducting studies on the telecom sector to understand M&As and thus, improve capabilities to deal with unfair business ways.

3. Trump bans work visa in a major blow to the Indian IT sector

Since Donald Trump has been in power in the US, he has been trying to twist laws related to immigration. With the pandemic in force, and American losing their jobs, he has got one more chance. So, he banned the entry of people through H1B and/or all kinds of Visas in the US. This is not tech news per se, but it has a lot of infliction to the IT sector, both in and out of India.

Major IT firms are dependant on cheap and highly manually skilled labour from India. While Indians that reside in the US are a very small proportion to the population of India, a lot of people are homeless, jobless and now, in no way to return or come back to normal. This will have bad effects on America and industry leaders opine the same.

4. WWDC kickstarted on Monday and here's a round-up of all that was announced

The major tech news that is going to do rounds all week is the Worldwide Developers' Conference 2020! This is the annual event that tech giant Apple holds to release new launches, changes and bring the community together.

Its been two days and the company has already made major announcements. First, it has announced the launch of iOS14 and iPadOS14. Then there are certain small product upgrades with the Apple Pencil, WatchOS, Siri, Apple Maps and Apple translate. But the largest tech news among all these developments is that Apple will now be producing its chips called Apple Silicon. These are power-efficient processors that will replace the intel processors that Apple currently uses.

And then there is the Big Mac Sur. It will be the standard OS in Macbooks that will mirror Apple's iPhone and iPad features with additional highlights.

5. Madhusudan Ekambaram, CEO of KreditBee opines on the FinTech Industry, the govt's economic package and much more in this exclusive interview.

In his exclusive interview, Madhusudan Ekambaram said that user experience, robustness (or reliability) and scalability of a solution these three aspects are the keys to success. He emphasised on weighing options and not jumping the gun. Instead, one must not get into the FinTech sector unless they are very sure of what they are doing.

Speaking on the economic package, Mr Ekambaram said, "I think it’s a fairly well-thought-out plan. The government has tried to cover all bases and sections of society. Having said that, we would have appreciated some direct benefit schemes for NBFCs rather than routing it via banking institutions."

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