Tesla’s Elon Musk tweeted “You can now buy a Tesla with bitcoin” and added that the bitcoin earned though sales will not be converted into traditional currency. The buying option will be available outside the USA later this year. Tesla, last month, had bought $1.5 bn of bitcoin and said that it would soon accept it as a form of payment for cars. Musk, last month, had criticised conventional cash, saying when it “has a negative real interest, only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere.”
Category: Digital Tranformation (page 2 of 23)
IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told Rajya Sabha that the IT sector, since 2019, has contributed 8 % to the country’s GDP and created over two lakh jobs. Prasad said that govt wants to lay BharatNet in villages across the country and PM Modi wants the project to be completed in the next 1000 days. The minister also informed that over 70 lakh cases have been heard digitally by the Supreme Court and the High Courts during the pandemic.
India’s health and human services firms have had the highest adoptions of digital tech, during the pandemic, among the countries surveyed by EY and Imperial College of London. The survey said that 51% of Indians have increased the use of digital tech, since the outbreak. While 74% agreed that digitalisation has raised staff productivity. More than 2,000 global HHS professionals in India, Australia, Italy, UAE, the UK and the US participated in the survey.
Singapore’s OCBC Bank is using facial recognition technology to verify its customers at eight ATMs spreading across Singapore. A bank customer can authenticate their identity using the new age facial recognition technology at the ATMs, without using a card, for balance enquiries. The bank is planning to increase the usage of the technology for other banking services including withdrawals “progressively”, but gave no timeline on when this would be.
UK-based mobile device provider Carphone Warehouse said that the USA with ownership of 1.8 lakh apps ( 6% of global share) in the last year and consumer spending of $32.63 bn on them leads the world. YouTube is the most popular app, while Google asks for the most permissions from users (15) — contacts, storage, and access to Text messages. Disney+ app asks the least — permission to change TV channel info, internet and microphone.
Accenture, in a report, said that boardrooms of banks lack tech expertise and digital knowledge despite the rise in digitalisation over the past few years. The report, based on the analysis of the professional experience of 2,000 directors of 100 of the world’s largest banks by assets, revealed that only 10% of all board directors and 10% of the CEOs of banks have professional tech experience. Accenture recommends that 25% of banks’ board directors should have tech experience.
Dell is expanding its Hybrid Client, a client computing software that helps users to have easy access to apps and data on any platform like cloud, data centre or device. Hybrid Client 1.5 gives provide access through a secure single-sign-on and makes it easy to find anything the user needs by using a global file search. There is also a follow-me feature that ensures that users get a consistent experience regardless of the device they are using.
Tata Digital has held talks with Just Dial to explore the option of striking a strategic alliance to venture into the e-com space. But, nothing has been finalised as of yet. The mergers and acquisitions team of Tata Sons has been putting together a list of possible partnerships that can help Tata Digital reach and scale-up in the online consumer space. The company is also said to be in talks with various other firms to finalise its ‘Super App’.
Flipkart had extended the Voice Search feature from grocery service to its e-com platform in both English and Hindi languages. The company said the objective was to help new users understand who are mostly from non-metro/tier 1 cities. For sellers, the functionality will allow them to make in-roads to a larger market. It has deployed multiple capabilities such as Automatic Speech Recognition, NLP, and Text-to-Speech for Indian languages etc.