Mumbai: Billionaire Adar Poonawalla, chief executive officer (CEO) of the world’s largest vaccine maker Serum Institute of India Ltd, is in talks to acquire Mumbai-based Micro Housing Finance Corp. Ltd (MHFC), as he seeks to enter the financial services space, two people aware of the development said. “The due diligence of Micro Housing is underway and the deal may be signed at a size of Rs300 crore,” said one of the two persons, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are private. Poonawalla, 36, whose father Cyrus founded Serum Institute of India in 1966, refused to comment…
Author: Loknath Das
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Ubisoft let slip some details on what to expect from Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle for the Nintendo Switch when it hits on August 29. From playable characters, strategies, and story mode, this is what you need to know. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle gameplay is similar to Final Fantasy Tactics Yes, you read that right. Here there is a team to balance, techniques to master, and a Skill Tree to develop for each hero. The enemies you face at the very beginning are tougher than you’d expect. However it seems to be a whole lot more cerebral. Encounters in Mario…
AMD has formally announced a return to the enthusiast-class gaming space with new graphics cards based on its next-generation Vega architecture. The new AMD Radeon RX Vega series takes on Nvidia’shigher-end GeForce GTX 10-series cards, targeting gamers who want 4K quality and variable refresh rates. The new cards will be positioned above the existing Radeon RX 500 series. There are two primary models, the Radeon RX Vega 56 and Radeon RX Vega 64. As their names suggest, they have 56 or 64 of AMD’s next-gen Vega compute units, for a total of 4,096 or 3,584 execution blocks called “stream processors”. This makes these cards capable of…
Popular multiplayer shooter Overwatch received a new update that adds Doomfist – a new hero to the game. The patch brings Overwatch to version 2.16 and has a size of 1.448GB on the PS4. In addition to including Doomfist, it also promises to fix one of the game’s long-running issues – duplicate loot boxes. “We always want the experience of opening a loot box to feel exciting and rewarding, and in our latest patch, we’re working to improve that experience in two key ways. First, we’re drastically reducing the amount of duplicates you will receive when opening loot boxes,” said Blizzard in a post on its…
When Free Basics was launched in India by Facebook, it met with a lot criticism, the big bone of contention being its alleged violation of net neutrality by being a zero-rating platform that offered free access to a limited number of services. There were also worries that Facebook was using the service to collect more data on users, and about what the social network’s ulterior motives could be. Eventually, the service was shut down last year, after many rightful protests from Internet activists in the country. Now, a report outlines all the things that are wrong with Facebook’s Free Basics including violation of net neutrality,…
Alphabet Inc’s Google aims to train 10 million people in Africa in online skills over the next five years in an effort to make them more employable, its chief executive said on Thursday. The US technology giant also hopes to train 100,000 software developers in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, a company spokeswoman said. Google’s pledge marked an expansion of an initiative it launched in April 2016 to train young Africans in digital skills. It announced in March it had reached its initial target of training one million people. The company is “committing to prepare another 10 million people for jobs of the…
Internet colossus Amazon on Thursday reported its profit shrank in the recently ended quarter despite surging sales as it poured money into growth. The US-based company said that net sales increased 25 percent to $38 billion (roughly Rs. 2,44,047 crores) when compared to the same period last year, but that profit plunged 77 percent from a year ago to $197 million (roughly Rs. 1,265 crores). Investments, depreciation of equipment, share buys and other expenses ate into revenue in a familiar pattern of Amazon putting long-term growth ahead of short-term profit. “Our teams remain heads-down and focused on customers,” Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said…
Red Dead Redemption 2’s release date has been pushed back to 2018, but that hasn’t stopped rampant speculation on what to expect. The latest bout, now fuelled by comments of Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two which imply that the Wild West open-world adventure could have a bigger online component than expected. “Obviously we know what Rockstar tends to do. And Rockstar’s activities have been transformed by Grand Theft Auto Online,” Strauss Zelnick said to Games Industry. Though fans of Red Dead Redemption would expect Take-Two to have it succeed as well as GTA does, that doesn’t seem to be the case. To put it into perspective, 2008’s…
Hours after billionaire Elon Musk made a public aspersion about Mark Zuckerberg’s knowledge, by saying Facebook chief executive’s understanding of artificial intelligence is “limited,” Zuckerberg has reaffirmed why he is so optimistic about the nascent technology. To recall, Musk was responding to Zuckberberg’s comments made during a Facebook Live broadcast, where the Facebook CEO called out naysayers. In a public post, Zuckerberg congratulated his company’s AI research division for winning the best paper award at the “top” computer vision conference for research in “densely connected convolutional networks” subject. In the same post, Zuckerberg shared “one reason” why he is so optimistic about AI. These efforts, he…
Facebook on Tuesday announced several updates to make its Live 360-degree videos a more lucrative proposition for broadcasters and more attractive to media consumers. The social networking company has now added support for up to 4K resolution for streaming 360-degree Live videos. It has also added the support for virtual reality to the service as well. Notably, users will be able to see the 360-degree Live videos in 4K through Samsung Gear VR headset but Oculus Rift users will not be able to use the functionality just now. The Samsung VR headset users will be able to see Live 360 videos through the Facebook app through ‘Watch…