Video chat app Zoom unveils latest products, aims to provide the 'work anywhere' experience
As countries reopen and millions rejoin offices, video collaboration and chat app
has seen a massive erosion in its stock value -- nearly 80 per cent -- from its high in 2020.
The demand for Zoom soared in the two years of the pandemic as companies shut offices and employees had to work from home.
Remote learning and telemedicine also gave a boost to
Now, the growth of Zoom has slowed down as in-person meetings resume and schools/colleges reopen.
Zoom is now undergoing a year of transition in 2022.
Alarmed at its slow user growth, the company has unveiled latest innovations in the Zoom platform to help businesses improve customer and employee experiences for the new 'work anywhere' workforce.
For example, 'Zoom IQ for Sales' is a conversation intelligence solution for sales professionals, as well as new
The new products announcements helped Zoom stock zoom 8 per cent on Wednesday.
"Following our recent launch of
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- Zilingo's board members have suspended CEO Ankiti Bose amid a financial probe, reports say.
- Investors are concerned with the
startup 's accounting practices, Reuters and Bloomberg reported.
A fashion e-commerce startup in Singapore valued at $970 million has suspended its CEO after investors launched a probe into the company's accounting practices, Bloomberg and Reuters reported this week, citing unnamed sources.
Ankiti Bose, 30, cofounded
On Wednesday, Zilingo said its board members decided to suspend Bose as an investigation into "matters" is underway, Reuters reported.
The company did not specify the focus of the probe to Reuters, but unnamed sources told Reuters and Bloomberg the probe is related to the company's financial and accounting practices. These include how the startup was keeping records of transactions and revenue, sources told Bloomberg. The company has avoided filing annual financial statements since 2019.
Bose and cofounder Kapoor met in Bengaluru, India, in 2014 where they shared an idea to help small players to produce, source for, and trade fashion apparel. They made Singapore the company's base, Bloomberg reported in 2019. The investigation and Bose's suspension threaten to derail Bose's push to have the startup she cofounded reach unicorn status.
Big-name Zilingo investors Temasek Holdings and Sequoia Capital first raised concerns to its board last month, sources told Bloomberg and Reuters.
"The major investors hired an independent firm to investigate the matter, and the company is working closely with the major investors and the independent firm for the investigation," Zilingo said in a statement to Reuters.
Bose disputed Zilingo's board's decision to suspend her and called it a "witch hunt," according to a correspondence seen by Bloomberg. The outlet was the first to report on Bose's suspension.
"We are of the view that our client's suspension has been procured by invalid and defective means; that the investigation commenced into her is unfair and lacking in due process, and that she has been suspended without proper and reasonable cause," Bose's lawyer told Bloomberg.
A Zilingo spokesperson declined to comment when approached by Insider. Bose and her lawyer did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.
Zilingo has offices in Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and India, per Bloomberg. In 2020, the company laid off dozens of employees from its 900-strong workforce as
As these economies reopen, Zilingo is forecasting better financials in the fiscal years to come. In late 2021, it predicted that core net revenue would rise from about $40 million for that fiscal year, to about $60 million in fiscal year 2022, according to documents seen by Bloomberg.
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Oil India Limited (OIL) is a state-run hydrocarbon explorer headquartered in the north-eastern state of Assam.
OIL says it has been hit by a major cyberattack, with hackers demanding 196 bitcoins in ransom.- Earlier, suspected Chinese hackers had reportedly targeted the Indian power grid near the Ladakh border.
The state-run Oil India Limited (OIL) has been hit by a major cyberattack that has compromised some of the servers of the company. The ransomware attack has hit the company’s headquarters in Assam.
According to
media reports, the hackers have demanded 196 bitcoins as ransom. At the current prices (approx. ₹31.35 lakh per bitcoin), that is a little more than ₹61 crore.
According to a statement from the company’s spokesperson Tridiv Hazarika, while the breach is serious and the virus is severe, the company has disabled the affected systems as a precautionary measure.
This should help the company prevent the virus from spreading to other servers, especially when the vector used for the cyberattack is still under investigation.
Also Read
Suspected Chinese hackers reportedly targeted Indian grid near the Ladakh border
Oil India Limited (OIL) is a state-run hydrocarbon explorer headquartered in the north-eastern state of Assam. OIL says it has been hit by a major cyberattack, with hackers demanding 196 bitcoins in ransom. Earlier, suspected Chinese hackers had reportedly targeted the Indian power grid near the Ladakh border. The state-run Oil India Limited (OIL) has been hit by a major cyberattack that has compromised some of the servers of the company.
Hazarika also added that the cyberattack has not had any impact on the company’s day-to-day operations so far and that the drilling activities are ongoing without any interruptions.
This is not the first Indian infrastructure company to bear the brunt of cyberattacks, nor will it be the last. However, of late, suspected state-backed hackers were reportedly behind the attack on the Indian power grid.
According to a
report by a threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, the Chinese cyber campaign against the Indian power grid could be a part of an espionage operation. The report adds that this could have been an attempt to collect critical data for positioning China for future activities against India.
“The prolonged targeting of Indian power grid assets by Chinese state-linked groups offers limited economic espionage or traditional intelligence gathering opportunities,” said the Recorded Future report.
Earlier in 2021, Record Future also discovered that a Chinese malware had been found pervading the Indian power grid months after the Galwan valley clashes broke out in 2020.
At the same time, Mumbai, India’s financial capital and amongst the worst-hit regions during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic,
suffered
a city-wide blackout. This forced hospitals across the city to switch to emergency generators to keep critical life support systems functioning.
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Google aims to develop sustainable and energy-efficient data centres.- The company became
carbon neutral in 2007. - Google emphasis on PUE and a clean global grid to become carbon-free by 2030.
Google uses twice as much electricity as the city of San Francisco in its data centres. The amount of energy used by Google is increasing every day as its business grows and overall internet usage grows.
Since 2007, the company says it has been carbon neutral meaning, the company says it bought equal amounts of carbon offsets (through land restoration and planting trees) and used renewable energy to make the company’s net operating carbon emissions zero.
Following this from 2017, Google also claims to have matched its total electricity usage with renewable energy purchases. Over the years, the company has announced significant steps to use carbon-free energy but still, it operates with some power that emits carbon dioxide.
Now, by 2030 Google aims to operate 24/7 electricity on carbon-free energy. Simplifying this, the company will operate every hour with carbon-free electricity. Sounds stressing? Let us tell you how.
Efficient data centres and power usage effectiveness (PUE)
Google’s data centres are the most prominent source of energy consumption. In order to be carbon-free by 2030, data centres must use clean sources of energy and should be ultra-efficient.
Google says that they are the largest annual corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world. But you must be thinking about why energy is so important for Google. Well, every Google search you do requires a tiny amount of energy used by the servers at Google data centres. With millions of searches per minute and trillions per year, it adds up to a whole lot of energy at data centres. Having efficient data centres around the world will help Google to use 100% carbon-free energy.
Google focuses on efficient data centres and power usage effectiveness (PUE) which is the ratio of energy used by a computer at data centres divided by the total energy used by the computing equipment. For example, 1 PUE means all of the energy goes to computing equipment and 2 PUE means if 1 unit of energy is used by computing equipment then 1 unit of energy will be used to cool the equipment.
The head of energy development for data centres at Google, Maud Texier says, “to manage PUE, the company is using a combination of hardware and software developments. We have invested in new raw materials for servers that emit less heat.” In addition, the company is also using a machine learning program developed by
DeepMind. These machines predict the most efficient time to run the heat pumps to cool down data centres.
The most difficult challenge — a clean energy grid
Having an energy-efficient data centre is not enough, Google also focuses on how the energy is produced. Texier said, “if we have a clean grid then being 100% carbon-free will be easy for the company. If the grid is not clean in a location where the company wants to build a data centre, then there should be a path to make an impact and accelerate the regional grid’s transition.”
She also added that Google uses certain algorithms to decide where to establish or execute computing functions for their data centres in order to achieve sustainability.
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- Christopher Dawley's family alleges in a suit
Facebook andSnap are liable for hissuicide at 17. - The family says he grew addicted to the platforms and they affected his mental health and body image.
The mother of a teenager who died by suicide says she believes Facebook and
In a federal lawsuit filed in Wisconsin on Monday, Donna Dawley accuses the social-media platforms of aiding in the deterioration of her son Christopher's mental health and alleges that eventually led to his suicide in 2015, when he was 17 years old.
Dawley is represented by the Social Media Victims Law Center, which says in the
The family also says their son, who began using Snapchat and the Meta-owned platforms Facebook and
The lawsuit came several months after a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, provided information to the press, and later to Congress, about internal studies at Facebook and Instagram that found the apps negatively affected the mental health of teenagers. In the wake of Haugen's disclosures, politicians in the US and the UK have proposed legislation directed at regulating social-media companies like Facebook.
Facebook has since changed its corporate name to Meta in a bid to create a version of what it calls the "metaverse," an ostensibly 3D interactive version of the internet and digital spaces. The company also said it would pause its development of a version of Instagram for children younger than 13.
Suicide is complex, and the reasons behind a suicide are not always clear. In the lawsuit, Dawley says her son developed a severe addiction to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat in 2014 and would spend hours every day and through the night "absorbed" in his phone. She says he became "obsessed with his body image" and was frequently found on Instagram at 3 a.m. Dawley adds that her son "never showed outward signs of depression or mental injury." The suit says Christopher's sister discovered his body "still clutching his smartphone" after he killed himself in January 2015.
"Each of defendants' products contain unique product features which are intended to and do encourage addiction, and unlawful content and use of said products, to the detriment of defendants' minor users," Dawley writes in the complaint.
Snapchat, for example, creates rewards and trophies for users, prompting teens and young adults to use it "in excessive and dangerous ways," the lawsuit alleges. Likewise, the suit says Facebook and Instagram are designed around the rewards of likes and followers, adding that Instagram, specifically, is designed like a slot machine to be "maximally addicting."
"It creates an endless feed, designed to manipulate brain chemistry and prevent natural end points that would otherwise encourage users to move on to other activities," the lawsuit says.
A spokesperson for Snap said the company could not comment on active litigation. "Our hearts go out to any family who has lost a loved one to suicide," the spokesperson said.
"We intentionally built Snapchat differently than traditional social media platforms to be a place for people to connect with their real friends, and offer in-app mental health resources, including on suicide prevention for Snapchatters in need," the spokesperson added. "Nothing is more important than the safety and wellbeing of our community and we are constantly exploring additional ways we can support Snapchatters."
The lawsuit argues that all the apps are not simply social platforms but products that are subject to product-liability claims. Dawley is suing for strict product liability because of what she alleges are the apps' design defects, failures to warn, and negligence and deceptive trade practices. She is seeking unspecified damages.
A spokesperson for Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
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Source: www.businessinsider.in
