40% drop in offline sales this festive season
+ UPI goes global
Hello there
It’s Diwali season and we wish you nothing but a great time ahead. It is also the time of the year when you ‘clean’ your house, let go of things you don’t need and just focus on things that matter.
Precisely, what we are doing at NextBigWhat too! We are heavily focused on curation - ensuring you get access to world’s wisdom via our newsletter, conferences and courses.
More on this very soon! For now, here are a few important pieces you should be in the know of.
The Secretary General of the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) says the major reasons for decline in sales are cash crunch of consumers and the mass shift to the online markets on the back of "deep" discounts. Speaking to IANS, he said that the footfall in the brick and mortar shops including malls has taken a hit by around 60% in comparison to last year.
So far in comparison to last year, sales are down 40% (during the festival season). Although traders have lost every hope, the jewellery sector feels, may be 'Dhanteras' would help jewellery along with utensils and kitchen equipment sales," Khandelwal told IANS [via]
Microsoft India revenue crosses $1 billion for the first time
Maruti’s EV plans derailed by the lack of infrastructure and support
Maruti Suzuki’s India chairman, R. C Bhargava has announced that the company is not planning to launch a personal use EV next year. He cited many reasons behind this decision including lack of charging infrastructure, support mechanism and the lack of government support for personal-use electric cars.
Wagon R EV, which was rumoured to be the getting ready for commercial launch, is a testing vehicle and will only move forward for more trials and tests, he said.
UPI to go global with UAE and Singapore launch
NPCI is working on UPI’s global launch in the next six months, starting with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Singapore.
“These two countries already have opened up to RuPay cards; now the target is to enable UPI payments. This will be a big boost for Indians traveling in those countries and, just like their debit card or credit card, they can pay via UPI,” [Via ET]
The Catch-22 of building a business on Apple’s APIs #sherlocking
What’s good for Apple isn’t necessarily good for you!
Apple always encourages adopting their latest APIs, tools, and languages like Swift; they’re incredibly powerful resources, but they also make us dependent on Apple’s ecosystem. From Apple’s perspective, they are happy to lock developers in. If they can have tons of incredible and unique apps that are exclusive to their platforms, that makes Apple’s products that much more compelling to their customers.
[Via]
AI can now generate videos of people who do not exist
DataGrid, a startup based in Japan’s Kyoto University, has released a video showcasing people in their proper attire, morphing into a different person with unique characteristics every time. It has used GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), which deploys two different artificial neural networks at the same time (via).
The End of Millennial Urban Lifestyle Product Businesses?
As WeWork crashes and Uber bleeds cash, the consumer-tech gold rush may be coming to an end.
You might call it the Millennial Lifestyle Sponsorship, in which consumer tech companies, along with their venture-capital backers, help fund the daily habits of their disproportionately young and urban user base. With each Uber ride, WeWork membership, and hand-delivered dinner, the typical consumer has been getting a sweetheart deal. [via]
IBM: Google’s ‘Quantum Supremacy’ Is 150 Million Percent Wrong
Google announced its Quantum Computing achievement claiming :
Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds, and from measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.
IBM’s response? Google is off by 150 million percent (via).
We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. This is in fact a conservative, worst-case estimate, and we expect that with additional refinements the classical cost of the simulation can be further reduced.
That is, not 10,000 years but 2.5 days.
[via]