Meta Quest Pro, Meta’s advanced mixed-reality headset, is now available for US$1,499.99. The headset was announced at Meta Connect 2022 with cutting-edge features that enable users to have a mixed-reality experience.
Meta Quest Pro is a potent device for collaboration and working closely and naturally with developers located at different locations using virtual reality. The headsets come with pancake optics, advanced LCD for sharp visuals, eyes, and natural facial expression tracking, all in a versatile design. It offers a guided Fit Adjustment to make it convenient for the users to carry it for longer durations.
The headset comes with two self-tracking Touch Pro controllers, partial light blockers, a charging clock, and stylus tips. It can be purchased from the company website and at select retailers where Meta Quest products are supported.
Meta aims to develop and improve a rich ecosystem of experiences by leveraging Meta’s social presence capabilities and plans to continue working on improvising the technology to enhance the consumer experience.
Meta releases EnCodec, a neural network trained to reconstruct input audio signals into smaller files. Meta researchers claim to receive state-of-the-art results in low-bit-rate audio hypercompression.
Encodec, our AI-powered compression neural net, has 3 parts: 1️⃣ Encoder: transforms raw data into higher dimensional + lower frame rate 2️⃣ Quantizer: compresses to target size, equiv. to mp3 3️⃣ Decoder: turns compressed signal back to waveform, most similar to the original
EnCodec has a streaming encoder-decoder architecture that utilizes sequential modeling. Such convolutional-based encoder-decoder architectures are very potent in multiple audio-based jobs, like audio enhancement, audio bandwidth extension, audio separation, and many others.
EnCodec comes with three main components, Encoder, Quantizer, and Decoder. The Encoder network (E) transforms input audio into a latent representation (z) with a higher dimension and lower frame rate. Then the Quantizer (Q) compresses it to the desired target size in an MP3 format and outputs z𝔮. Finally, the Decoder network (G) transforms the compressed audio signal into a waveform (ẋ), nearly similar to the original one.
Meta researchers claim to have achieved a 10x compression rate vs MP3 at 64kbps without compromising audio quality. It is a pioneer research as this is the first time a 48kHz stereo audio was used as an input. Meta released a research paper highlighting all the technical details and architecture behind EnCodec. The paper also highlights that a Transformer model of EnCodec can be used to make it more efficient and reduce audio bandwidth by 40% without any quality loss. To help developers and people with a technical background to understand more about EnCodec, Meta has also released the code.
According to the new prime minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak, the G7 is launching a set of policy principles for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The UK is a member of the G7 along with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Japan.
Recently, Rishi Sunak was elected as the new Prime Minister of the UK. Sunak has been pushing the country to support cryptocurrency. He was vocal about the same while serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Sunak issued support and a renewed focus on the cryptocurrency sector on Monday. Sunak said governments and central banks would work together on a potential digital currency issued by a central bank. Key priorities are having a secure transaction that can offer other ways to pay, is energy efficient, and is available to everyone, Sunak added.
Sunak added that he had announced a joint task force for the UK Treasury and Bank of England to look into the CBDCs earlier this year. He said the decision on CBDCs is in the exploratory stages.
Sunak called the exploration a critical step in support of cryptocurrency and working with international partners. He said, “We’re excited to be taking a leading role with G7 members in publishing this exploratory work, bringing money and finance into the 21st century.”
Photo licensing service Shutterstock will begin selling images generated by artificial intelligence along with those created by humans. The AI-generated images will be powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 software exclusively. According to both companies, human creators whose work inspired the AI will be compensated.
Shutterstock began removing AI-generated art from its archives last month. A Shutterstock spokesperson said that the company would keep banning people generally from uploading AI-generated art to its platform. They added that its collaboration with OpenAI was an attempt to adopt new technology ethically.
The two companies also plan to launch what the Shutterstock spokesperson called the Shutterstock Contributor Fund to compensate artists for their contributions and provide royalties when their intellectual property (IP) is used.
OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment. Shutterstock spokesperson said that a deal had been struck in which the AI that produces the pictures was trained only on images from Shutterstock’s archives rather than online content.
According to the Shutterstock spokesperson, contributors whose work was used to train the models will receive a share of royalties from AI sales. Still, they didn’t say what percentage of revenue would go to contributors or how the contributions would be divided. It is often difficult to determine what input data was referenced to create any one piece of output.
Adrian Alexander Medina, the editor of the literary website and magazine Aphotic Realm and a creator of book covers, says he has lost three potential clients to AI-generated art since October. He disagrees with Shutterstock selling AI-generated art and believes it risks ostracizing photographers and illustrators.
Every year, the Indian technology market expands, increasing its desire for new smartphones, smart TVs, and PCs. Semiconductors play a crucial part in all the electrical devices we use because they control the flow of electricity, which powers devices. The pandemic caused a sharp fall in semiconductor chip output, which sped up and increased the demand for semiconductors in India. For that cause, several semiconductor companies in Bangalore are at peak production and planning for innovations. For a decade or more, Bangalore has been the technology hub for curious minds, so it is known as the Silicon Valley of India and is home to some best VLSI (very large-scale integration) industries. Here is the list of top semiconductor manufacturer companies in Bangalore.
1. Qualcomm
Qualcomm is an American multinational corporation founded in 1985 under the idea of “QUALity COMMunications,” from which the name has been derived. The company is based in San Diego, California, and incorporated in Delaware, which stands as one of the most popular processor manufacturing companies in the mobile industry. Qualcomm is a provider of semiconductors, software, and wireless technology. Additionally, the company produces software components for automobiles, computers, cell phones, watches, and many other electronic devices. Qualcomm developed the code division multiple access (CDMA) in 1995, which changed wireless communications forever and is the foundation for all 3G networks that also helps to define the latest 4G and 5G technologies. Over the years, the company has used a fabless manufacturing strategy to commercialize semiconductor components and provides powerful connectivity solutions, including patents for 4G, 5G, TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000, and WCDMA mobile communication protocols. Qualcomm India office is set up in Banglore, Karnataka, which is in top semiconductor companies in Banglore, intending to make mobile communications affordable and accessible to all.
2. ASM Technologies
ASM Technologies Ltd is an Indian technological solution provider headquartered in Banglore, India, established in 1992. It is one of the top semiconductor companies in Bangalore, with global offices in the USA, Singapore, the UK, Mexico, Japan, and Canada. The company works in the areas of engineering services and product R&D (research and development) by offering innovative solutions with development and support centers in India and overseas. ASM Technologies’ vision is “To be a global leader, committed to the customer in providing the technology solutions with the highest degree of excellence, quality and value by an agile team and efficient process.” The company has nurtured a successful business in consulting and product development services for over two decades and wishes to do more in the future.
3. IBM
IBM (International business machines) Corporation is an American multinational technology based in Armonk, New York, and operates in over 171 countries, including 12 facilities in different cities in India. The company was founded in 1911 by businessman Charles Ranlett Flint under the name Computing-Tabulating-Recoding Company (CTR), and later in 1924, it was changed to IBM. IBM primarily works in producing and selling computer hardware, middleware, and software and delivers hosting and consulting services in mainframe computers, nanotechnology, and more. Additionally, the company offers a range of semiconductor technologies, products, and services in product R&D, supply chain and marketing, sales, and services. It has been one of the best semiconductor companies in Banglore since 2006, when IBM first set up its office in India. IBM has a legacy of leadership in semiconductor research delivering smaller, faster, and more reliable semiconductor devices. Currently, IBM and its industry partners are pushing the limits of chip technology to adapt implementations of cloud computing and AI.
Broadcom Inc. is an American global designer, developer, manufacturer, and supplier of semiconductors and infrastructure software products, which was founded in 1961 and based in San Jose, California. The company is focused on category-leading semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions, which led the company to be one of the technology leaders. Broadcom has established several research and development sites worldwide, including the UK, Frame, Canada, and India. Broadcom India Pvt Ltd was set up in 1997 and currently operates three offices in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune. The company delivers semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions by combining global scale engineering depth, broad product portfolio diversity, superior execution, and operational focus. Additionally, the company helps clients to shape their industry standards to ensure great performance and capabilities with interoperability.
5. Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is an American multinational technology and semiconductor company that designs, manufactures, tests, and sells analog and embedded processing chips. The company was founded in 1930 and is based in Dallas, Texas, which is one of the top semiconductor companies. Texas Instruments is the pioneer in the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors and integrated circuits (ICs). Though the company has advanced IC technologies, it also provides innovations in each generation to make technology smaller, affordable, more efficient, and reliable, leading the way for semiconductors to go into electronics everywhere. In 1985, TI became the first multinational technology company to establish an R&D center in Bangalore, India, and has been on the list of semiconductor manufacturing companies in Bangalore ever since. The company has developed and delivered over 80,000 products that help customers efficiently manage power, accurately sense and transmit data, and provide core control or processing in electronic systems. TI is powered by the passion for creating a better world by making electronics more affordable through semiconductors and helping customers develop new applications in the industrial and automotive markets.
6. Samsung Semiconductor
Samsung Semiconductor Inc. (SSI) is a daughter company of Samsung Electronics under the Samsung Group, a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung town, Seoul, South Korea. Today, Samsung has a huge brand value in the electronics industry, expanding with highly differentiated mobile devices and working harder to develop next-generation innovation. Samsung Semiconductor was founded in 1983 and is based in San Jose, California, which is advancing as the world’s technology leader in memory, system, LSI, and LCD technologies. The company develops and provides products and technology that industry leaders use in mobile, automotive, AR/VR, gaming, IoT, edge, AI and enables remarkable growth rates in enterprise and hyper-scale data centers. The company established an R&D Institue India-Bangalore (SRI-B), which is the largest center after South Korea and is the key innovation hub in Samsung Group.
7. Tata Elxis
Tata Elxis is a premium engineering service provider around the globe and is one of the prominent leaders in the automotive, media, broadcast, communications, and healthcare industries. It was founded in 1989 based in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, with the mission to foster innovation in the fast-emerging technology and IT market and adopt the cutting-edge technology. Tata Elxis combines advanced technology and user-centric design expertise to deliver innovative solutions for helping customers. The company’s integrated design and technology teams empower enterprises to reimagine their products and services from strategy, consumer research, and insight to service and experience design, integration, launch, and more. Tata Elxis provides some state-of-art products in the fields of AI, broadcast and media, automotive, and healthcare.
NXP Semiconductors is an American-Dutch semiconductor designer and manufacturer company established in 2006 as a Philips semiconductor spin-off. The company provides technology solutions in automotive, industrial, IoT, mobile, and communication infrastructure markets. NXP aims to bring together bright minds to create innovative technologies that connect the world better and make it safer and more secure. NXP invented near-field communication (NFC) with Sony and supplies NFC chip sets for mobile phones used for paying for goods, storing, and exchanging data securely. Also, the company manufactures chips for eGovernment applications like electronic passports, RFID tags and labels, transport and access management with chipsets, and contactless cards for MIFARE (MIkron FARE collection system). NXP has acquired four sites in India, including Noida, Pune, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. NXP Bangalore is an innovation center for the company’s connectivity, security, and advanced analog and radio frequency products.
9. Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation known as the largest semiconductor chip manufacturer in the world. The company manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers, integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors, and more for communication and computing. Also, Intel supplies microprocessors to big computer system manufacturers like Acer, Lenovo, Dell, and HP. The company was founded in 1968 by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, the semiconductor pioneers under the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove. With the early developments of SRAM (static random access memory) and DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips, Intel has shined through other semiconductor companies. Intel established a development center in Bangalore, India, in 1998 and invested over $140 million in 2017 for its upcoming R&D center.
10. Mediatek
Mediatek Incorporation is a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company that develops innovative system-on-chip (SoC) for mobile, home entertainment, connectivity, and IoT products. It is the world’s 4th largest fabless semiconductor company and one of the prominent semiconductor manufacturing companies in Bangalore, India. The company was founded in 1997 and headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan. MediaTek has 25 offices around the world and stands as a market driving force in many key technology areas like power-efficient mobile technologies, automotive solutions, and a wide range of advanced multimedia products, including smartphones, Chromebooks, smart TVs, and voice assistant devices. As the company’s products are in high demand in the Indian market, the MediTek India office was established in Bangalore to strengthen its India presence.
11. Applied Materials
Applied Material is an American corporation providing top-class materials engineering solutions to produce every new chip virtually and advanced display worldwide. The company supplied equipment, services, and software for the production of semiconductor chips for electronics, flat panel displays for computers, smartphones, TVs, and solar panels. Applied Materials excels in modifying materials at atomic levels, which helps customers to transform possibilities into reality at an industrial scale. It was established in 1967 by Michael A. McNeilly and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company operates globally in many locations, including Europe, Japan, North America, Israel, China, Italy, India, Korea, Southeast Ais, and Taiwan. Applied Materials India is the second largest resource for engineering support for Applied globally and one the best semiconductor companies in Bangalore. The office in India provides engineering design, support services, and materials science and engineering innovations through a solid partner ecosystem in India.
According to official customs data released on Monday, China’s chip imports fell 12.4% in September, continuing a decline amid tensions with the US and an ongoing chip shortage. Recently, US officials ordered Nvidia to stop exporting computing chips for AI work to China.
According to the data, the country imported 47.6 billion units of chips during September 2022, compared with 54.3 billion units in September last year. The data was expected to be released earlier this month. However, it was delayed by the Communist Party Congress.
The data shows an ongoing downward trend for chip imports. In the initial nine months of 2021, China imported 417.1 billion chips, down by 12.8% year-on-year. Chip imports to China increased in 2021 as tensions between the US and China over technology policy surged, and a global chip shortage made many companies in China stockpile supplies.
Additional data from the National Bureau of Statistics indicates that domestic chip output in September decreased by 16.4% year-on-year to 26.1 billion units. During the initial nine months of this year, total output fell 10.8% to 245 billion units.
Achieving self-sufficiency for China’s chip industry remains a key policy priority for Beijing, especially as Washington continues to target the progress of China’s semiconductor sector, with the latest being a set of sanctions announced by the Biden administration earlier this month.
The sanctions have caused big overseas-based chip manufacturing equipment companies to cease supplying chips to key Chinese companies. These include Yangtze memory Technologies Co (YMTC), Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), and advanced artificial intelligence chip makers.
Meta, L’Oréal, and French business school HEC Paris are joining hands to launch a startup acceleration program to boost creativity in the metaverse.
The program will support at least five startups specializing in mixed reality, avatar creation, portability in user experience, 3D production, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), token economy, or other domains related to the metaverse and Web3. Startups do not have to be related to the beauty industry specifically.
It will be located in the Meta space within Station F, which is in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It is considered the world’s most extensive startup campus. Applications for the same are open until 20 November.
A jury of HEC, Meta, and L’Oréal members, along with investors, will select the startups in December. The program will run from January 2023 to June 2023. Selected applicants will be offered mentorship along with access to investors and experts.
Some experts believe the hype around NFTs and Web3 is waning following the crypto crash earlier this year. However, luxury, beauty, and fashion brands continue to invest in new projects.
L’Oréal also plans to extend its existing technologies to the new space. In 2018, L’Oréal acquired the AR beauty company Modiface. In 2021, L’Oréal and Meta announced a platform integration that utilized Modiface to bring AR-powered makeup try-ons to the social media platform Instagram. The companies were convinced that acquiring Modiface would be a competitive advantage when they entered Web3 and the metaverse.
Graphics chip giant Nvidia is probing the graphic card reports that have had caused power cables burns or melts for some users.
A Reddit user shared details of RTX 4090 card issues, including some pictures, which show burn damage on a new adapter cable. The connection on the graphic card was also damaged, according to The Verge. Replying to the same thread, another Reddit user showed similar damage to an Asus RTX 4090 card power connector.
Bryan Del Rizzo, Nvidia spokesperson, said they are investigating the issue. “We are in touch with the first owner and will reach out to the other for more information,” he added.
There are concerns that when the 12VHPWR power connector, intended for new ATX 3.0 power supplies, is twisted in a specific way, it can cause problems. Earlier, a YouTuber warned about the new connector by calling it dangerous.
A senior technical marketing manager at Nvidia, Brandon Bell, replied in an email that people are worried about issues that do not exist.
The solutions to these issues might be to avoid Nvidia’s power adapter altogether or be very careful about how you position or bend it. It’s a bulky adapter supplied with RTX 4090 cards and needs up to four 8-pin power connectors.
The increasing demand for food products is driving farmers and agro companies to find newer ways to increase production and reduce waste. To address the issue, experts are turning to digital interventions and artificial intelligence to find viable solutions, which are steadily emerging as a part of the agriculture industry’s technological evolution. AI-powered solutions have been enabling farmers to improve efficiencies. It is also enhancing quantity, quality, and ensuring faster go-to-market for crops. And in this arena, Cropin is one name that has been leveraging digital tools and artificial intelligence to benefit the agriculture landscape.
Cropin is a global ag-ecosystem intelligence provider whose suite of products assists stakeholders in the agroecosystem, including even financial services providers, to adopt and drive digital strategy across their agricultural operations. Using cutting-edge technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing, Cropin creates an intelligent, interconnected data platform. Cropin helps organizations digitize their operations from farm to fork and leverage near real-time farm data as well as actionable insights to make effective decisions.
The Initial Idea
Cropin was founded by Krishna Kumar, Co-founder, and CEO, along with his childhood friend Kunal Prasad who is currently the COO of the company. “In 2010, we saw massive distress in the agriculture sector that was real and had to be addressed. We found an opportunity to impact society and the world at large by building a technology solution for the agriculture sector,” said Kumar. Though there have been several technological advances in farming, by 2010, the sector had not yet reaped the benefits of various new technological advances in data science and artificial intelligence that could give a boost to the agriculture industry. This lack of initiative inspired the founders to come up with the idea of making this industry data-driven and democratizing data for all the key stakeholders in the value chain with their services.
Digitizing the Farm Landscape
Cropin builds products that enable its customers to digitize their farming practices and allow multiple data sources to connect with farm data. The company unifies disparate data sources across the farming process, allowing agro-industry players to derive and act on critical agri-intelligence. Cropin builds a single, holistic view of the risks and opportunities across the crop value chain.
Recently, Cropin announced the launch of Cropin Cloud, the world’s first purpose-built industry cloud for agriculture. Cropin Cloud is a multi-tenant, scalable, flexible, secure, and intelligent platform enabling development agencies, governments, agri-businesses, and allied industries to boost digital transformation across the agro-industry. “Cropin Cloud is an integrated platform of applications for digitized, contextual, and clean data pipelines for enhanced decision-making through data analytics as well as globally proven crop and geography-agnostic, crop-specific machine learning models,” explained Cropin’s CEO.
Within the Cropin Cloud, Cropin Apps are the solutions that help streamline farm data capture, management, as well as other complex field operations involved during seed production, seeds strain tracking/trialing across generations, crop protection, nutrition development for row crops, horticulture and plantations. The application platform comprises an integrated portfolio of mobile apps and web solutions that one can choose from. These include:
Cropin Grow
Cropin Grow is a farm monitoring and management solution to help you geotag your farms, digitize farm/farmer records, share advisory, monitor crop productivity, improve farm efficiency, and boost field officer productivity. It enables geotag farm plots for area audit and helps crop health management by monitoring crop performance for yield predictability. It can also set pest as well as disease alerts and manage alerts/activity logs.
Cropin Connect
Cropin Connect is a seamless communication solution connecting growers, agri-businesses, and field officers to help digitize grower activities. It can monitor plots easily, record task progress, raise alerts to get instant advice, gather farmer feedback, and market services to farmers. It also has multiple language support and a simplified user interface.
Cropin Trace
Cropin Trace is a QR code-enabled farm-to-fork traceability solution to track and meet quality benchmarks. It eliminates counterfeiting and ensures that everyone involved in bringing food to our table is recognized and rewarded. Cropin enables end-to-end traceability and facilitates customizable, weatherproof, and tamper-proof labels.
Collecting Data with Cropin Data Hub
Cropin Data Hub enables easy management as well as allows access to structured and unstructured agri-data sources for raw and processed incoming data pipelines. Cropin Data Hub addresses this by structuring agri-data through an agri-object model, which enables it to interface with all agri-data sources such as in-field farm management apps, IoT devices and drones, mechanization data from farming equipment, remote sensing satellite information, and weather advisory sources.
The Cropin Data Hub also has pre-built advanced data frameworks designed to solve the most common and constantly challenging problems in agriculture remote monitoring, such as cloud-free satellite imagery, boundary-detection of farm plots, and segmentation of land use. It enables combining enterprise, agronomy, and remote field data with Cropin’s Crop Intelligence models/datasets to surface significant insights for the business, while sparing the need to expend critical resources on re-inventing the wheel. The three steps involved in the process are:
Collect: Aggregating data from various sources across applications, IoT devices, weather and earth observation data, amongst others.
Clean: Processing data inputs with meta-data to solve for search and query needs.
Contextualize: Making contextual custom reports/visualizations available on OLAP for easy access and use.
Dynamic Decision-making with Cropin Intelligence
Cropin Intelligence is enabling dynamic decision-making on and off the field through the actionable predictive insights generated by their mature machine learning models. Cropin has built several contextual deep-learning models to solve diverse challenges agri-stakeholders face while managing day-to-day operations. Cropin has 22 AI models that give you a head-start crop detection, yield estimation, irrigation scheduling, water stress detection, harvest date estimation, pest/disease prediction, nitrogen uptake, change detection, and plot score, among others.
Technological Revolution for the Future of Agriculture
“Cropin is at the focal point of its journey, where we see the global agriculture industry immensely benefit from its innovation. For instance, Cropin Cloud will enable the client partners with the power to achieve the unprecedented productivity in agriculture through specificity, speed, and agility. We began this journey by studying, learning, and structuring data generated by the complex global agri-ecosystem. Growing practices mapped to different agroclimatic zones for different crop varieties helped us build the world’s most extensive Crop Knowledge Graph,” said Krishna Kumar while elaborating on the future prospects.
A Knowledge Graph is a reusable, flexible data layer used for answering complex queries across data silos. These graphs create supreme connectedness with contextualized data, organized and represented in the form of graphs. Built to capture the constantly changing nature of knowledge, they easily accept new data, definitions, and requirements. Cropin’s Crop Knowledge Graph is crop-agnostic and geography-agnostic, so its benefits are immediately available to the entire spectrum of agriculture data needs. “This is the beginning of a new era of possibilities for technology-enabled solutions for real agriculture problems,” said Kumar.
“Over the years, we have analyzed how different crop varieties behave in different environments and climatic conditions when treated differently through varied practices. The edge in our solutions comes from the unparalleled experience and learnings gathered from 500+ crops and 10,000+ varieties grown in 92 countries managed via their solutions. And these numbers keep growing every day as Cropin continues to add and manage new crops, new geographies or solve new crop challenges faced by this industry,” said Kumar.
Cropin’s experience demonstrates that data science can enable the industry to understand risks better, maximize revenue, and optimize costs by making every farm asset traceable, predictable, and sustainable in a connected agriculture ecosystem.
From Top of the Agro World
Being founded in 2010, the company’s first milestone was the launch of SmartFarm (now Cropin Grow). According to Krishna Kumar, this solution addressed the industry pain point of building a standard operating procedure for managing every farm asset and enabling the Agri ecosystem to produce high-quality, traceable, nutritious, and sustainable food systems.
The second milestone in their journey was building the platform to be crop-agnostic as well as location agnostic so that anyone can deploy it in any country or continent and contextualize it to local crops, climate conditions to scale. “The biggest hurdle in this was localization (India has 30-40 different languages, for example). However, today our platform is crop and location agnostic,” said Kumar.
When scaling the product deployment in more than 50 countries, Cropin thought of building intelligence on top of the Agri data assets created over a period of time. This was the 3rd milestone where the company built proprietary AI/ML models when Cropin had generated trillions of datasets consisting of more than 350 crops and 5,000 varieties from 52 countries. They also built a small team intending to see what customers could learn from all the data.
The fourth feat is the launch of Cropin Cloud, which is “the world’s first intelligent agriculture cloud,” according to Kumar. Moreover, Cropin has partnered with over 250+ organizations globally to digitize over 16 million acres of farmland and enrich the lives of nearly 7 million farmers while building intelligence for over 500 crops and over 10,000 crop varieties in over 92 countries.
Apple has reportedly told its suppliers to cut back on production this year after anticipating reducing demands for new iPhone14 models. The California-based tech company is planning to decrease production by six million units.
The tech firm is looking to produce almost 90 million handsets for the period, almost the same level as last year and coherent with Apple’s original forecast this summer. Apple had previously told its suppliers to be prepared for a 7% increase in orders.
The demand has been more for iPhone 14 pro models as compared to the entry-level ones. This has forced suppliers to focus the production capacity on the premium versions. Apple’s shares went down about 4% following reports of cuts in production plans this year.
Apple announced that it began making its new iPhone 14 much sooner in India than it was anticipated as it takes some of its production away from China. Apple worked with Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, its most crucial production partner, with the goal of assembling iPhones in Chennai almost two months after its global launch.
Apple’s move to diversify the supply chains comes in response to rising tensions between China and the US over Taiwan and trade. Recently, US Officials ordered Nvidia to stop exporting computing chips for AI work to China. JP Morgan analysts said Apple expects to move around 5% of iPhone production to India this year. They also predicted that 25% of all iPhone production will be in the South Asian region by 2025.
