By Reuters | Updated: 2 June 2023

The India and South Asia head of Amazon.com’s cloud division, Puneet Chandok, has resigned with effect from August 31, the company said on Friday.

Chandok had taken the helm of Amazon Web Services in June 2019.

Vaishali Kasture, currently head of the enterprise for mid-market and global businesses at AWS India and South Asia, would take on the role of interim leader of commercial business for the unit, Amazon India said.

The news came over two weeks after Amazon’s cloud computing unit revealed plans to invest $12.87 billion (roughly Rs. 10,60,12 crore) in India by 2030, doubling down on its past investments to cater to the growing demand for such services in Asia’s No. 3 economy.

The interim provides an opportunity for other cloud companies such as Azure and Google Cloud Platform, along with homegrown players, to make aggressive bids for accounts, said Akshara Bassi, an analyst at Counterpoint Research.

In April, AWS released a suite of technologies aimed at helping other companies develop their own chatbots and image-generation services backed by artificial intelligence.

The firm also partnered with startup Hugging Face, a software development hub, in February to make it easier to carry out artificial intelligence work (AI) in Amazon’s cloud.

AWS, the biggest cloud computing provider, already offers tools to help developers create AI-based software, including proprietary computing chips for raining AI algorithms on huge amounts of data at lower cost than rivals to services that reduce how much time it takes to create a chatbot or other AI products.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

By Reuters | Updated: 2 June 2023

Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, told Reuters on Thursday that she has resigned from the social media company, which has faced criticism for lax protections against harmful content since billionaire Elon Musk acquired it in October.

Irwin, who joined Twitter in June 2022, took over as head of the trust and safety team in November when previous head Yoel Roth resigned. She oversaw content moderation.

An email to Twitter returned an automated reply with a poop emoji. Irwin declined further comment and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Irwin’s departure comes as the platform has struggled to retain advertisers, with brands wary of appearing next to unsuitable content.

Musk announced earlier this month that he hired Linda Yaccarino, former NBCUniversal advertising chief, to become Twitter’s new CEO.

Since Musk’s acquisition, Twitter has cut costs dramatically and laid off thousands of employees, including many who had worked on efforts to prevent harmful and illegal content, protect election integrity, and surface accurate information on the site.

Musk has promoted a feature called Community Notes, which lets users add context to tweets, as a way to combat misleading information on Twitter.

The company is also facing increasing scrutiny from regulators over its moderation efforts. Twitter withdrew from a voluntary agreement with the European Union to tackle disinformation while saying it was committed to complying with upcoming internet rules in the EU.

EU industry chief Thierry Breton warned Twitter last week that it would not be able to avoid legal obligations in the EU after quitting the voluntary agreement.

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By Reuters | Updated: 2 June 2023

A 2018 privacy lawsuit brought by Washington, DC, against Facebook owner Meta Platforms, was dismissed on Thursday by a Superior Court judge, who ruled the firm did not mislead consumers over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The lawsuit alleged a violation of the district’s consumer protection law.

The social media firm drew global scrutiny in 2018 after disclosing that a third-party personality quiz distributed on Facebook gathered profile information on 87 million users worldwide and sold the data to British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

“While the district may disagree with Facebook’s approach to the situation, there is no legal basis that required Facebook to act differently,” Judge Maurice Ross of the Superior Court for the District of Columbia said in his ruling.

The judge said Facebook’s policies had disclosed how third parties may get user data and the social media platform also gave instructions on how to limit sharing of data.

“Facebook did not materially mislead consumers as to their response to Cambridge Analytica,” the judge said on Thursday.

The District of Columbia attorney general’s office said it disagreed with the court’s decision and was considering options.

Meta did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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By Reuters | Updated: 2 June 2023

Better cost controls helped Dell Technologies beat estimates for first-quarter profit on Thursday, a positive sign for personal computer makers after months of cratering demand.

The results contrasted rivals HP and Lenovo Group, but a full recovery remains some ways off as Dell forecast current-quarter revenue below Wall Street targets and warned that IT spending would stay cautious.

Shares of the company were down 2 percent after the bell, reversing gains of 5 percent. The stock was briefly halted during regular trading hours when the company announced results earlier than scheduled.

“We maintained pricing discipline, reduced operating expenses, and our supply chain continued to perform well after normalizing ahead of competitors,” said Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer of Dell.

Total operating expenses fell 6 percent to $3.57 billion (roughly Rs. 28,826 crore) during the first quarter.

The company’s revenue dropped 20 percent to $20.92 billion (roughly Rs. 1,72,30,339 crore) but came in above analysts’ expectations of $20.27 billion (roughly Rs. 1,66,91,838 crore), according to Refinitiv data.

Demand for desktops and laptops slumped after a pandemic-driven rush for work-from-home equipment, leading to a pile-up in inventory amid an uncertain economic outlook.

Dell’s client solutions unit – home to its consumer and enterprise PC business – posted a 23 percent fall in sales, while the infrastructure solutions unit, which includes servers, storage devices, and networking hardware, saw an 18 percent decline.

Excluding items, Dell earned $1.31 (roughly Rs. 108) per share, compared with estimates of 86 cents.

The Texas-based company expects second-quarter revenue to be between $20.2 billion (roughly Rs. 166,31,892 crore) and $21.2 billion (roughly Rs. 1,74,55,126), below expectations of $21.2 billion (roughly Rs. 1,74,55,126) at the midpoint.

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By ANI | Updated: 1 June 2023

Elon Musk has yet again claimed his position as the world’s richest person after beating the CEO of the French luxury brand Louis Vuitton Bernard Arnault, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as of Thursday, Musk’s net worth was about $192 billion (roughly Rs. 15,82,483 crore), with Arnault’s $187 billion (roughly Rs. 15,41,272 crore).

Index data showed behind Musk and Arnault are Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates at $144 billion (roughly Rs. 11,86,862 crore) and $125 billion (roughly Rs. 10,30,262 crore), respectively.

The index is a daily ranking of the world’s wealthiest people. Details about the calculations are provided in the net worth analysis on each billionaire’s profile page. The figures are updated at the close of every trading day in New York.

Tesla chief Musk is back on top of the list of wealthiest persons after shares of Arnault’s firm fell over 2 percent in the latest trade.

The rise in Musk’s wealth can also be partly attributed to the latest surge in Tesla stock prices. They rose about 89 percent so far in 2023, data showed.

Musk and Arnault have been neck-and-neck on the list of the richest people.

In December 2022, Bernard Arnault reportedly overtook the Tesla head when he was in the second spot for more than two months. Musk reclaimed again in late February.

By Reuters | Updated: 1 June 2023

Alphabet’s Google is leading a $36 million (roughly Rs. 297 crore) funding round for Bengaluru-based Pixxel, a satellite-image startup, in the first major investment in the Indian space sector since the government launched its privatisation policy in April.

Pixxel, founded in 2019, is building a constellation of satellites that have the ability to identify mineral deposits or the productivity of crops by analysing the spectral signature of an image.

Miner Rio Tinto and Australian agritech company DataFarming are clients, Pixxel said.

The startup has raised more $71 million (roughly Rs. 585 crore) from investors including Accenture PLC. Pixxel did not specify how much Google had invested or the valuation it reflected.

Google in India did not immediately respond to questions about the investment.

Founder and Chief Executive Awais Ahmed said Pixxel would be “the most valued space tech company in India after this investment”.

That had been rocket and launch provider Skyroot Aerospace, valued at an estimated $163 million (roughly Rs. 1,343 crore), according to Tracxn, which tracks startups.

“We work with satellite data and Google does a lot of work around that with agriculture and environment,” Ahmed told Reuters. “They also have Google Earth … so a combination of that led to them seeing a benefit.”

Pixxel is among the many private companies looking for a fillip since India opened the space sector, encouraging startups to deliver broadband services like Starlink and to power applications like tracking supply chains.

The government announced its private-sector space policy framework in April.

The funding comes at a time when startups globally have struggled to raise funds. Space startups, in particular, have come under pressure after the bankruptcy of Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit launch company.

Ahmed said the funding would be used to build out its satellite network. Pixxel is readying six satellites for launch next year to add to the three it has now and looking to hire more engineers for its analytics.

Ahmed has said he was inspired to launch a space startup from a visit Elon Musk’s SpaceX as part of a student competition to build a demonstration “hyperloop” transport pod.

He and co-founder Kshitij Khandelwal set out to build an AI model that could use satellite data to predict crop yields, detect illegal mining and track natural disasters.

They launched Pixxel when they concluded existing commercial satellite images did not provide enough detail. Pixxel’s satellites take in and analyse a wide spectrum of light instead of just assigning primary colours to each pixel, a technology known as hyperspectral imaging.

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