As the first week of August draws to a conclusion, we at Indianweb2 give you a quick recap of what all happened in the tech world in the week gone by.

1) Google (Alphabet) Will Soon Compete With Elon Musk’s Tesla

Alphabet’s secretive research lab X is currently in the midst of brainstorming and developing a new and innovative way to store renewable energy that otherwise might have gone wasted. They’re doing so by making use of salt and antifreeze.

The lab X researchers are creating a system that has the potential of outperforming lithium-ion batteries, both in terms of performance and price. The system being developed by the researchers is capable of operating irrespective of the fact where it is located and can go head-to-head with new hydroelectric plants and other energy storage methods when it comes to the price point.

The project is reportedly named “Malta,” but since it hasn’t been inducted as an official X project yet, it doesn’t have the same benefits as a full-blown project under the research lab X such as Project Loon.

When the entire state of South Australia had to suffer through a blackout earlier this year, the world realised that even in today’s age of technological innovation, existing electrical grids still struggle with renewable energy. The Australia episode even prompted Tesla’s Elon Musk to commit to build the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in the region. The company has teamed up with French-based renewable energy company Neoen for the same. But, it seems, Musk has now got a competitor in the field in the form of Alphabet’s Malta.

2) LinkedIn Rolling Out Free “Tinder-Like” Interface To Pair Users With Mentors

Microsoft-owned business-and employment-oriented social networking site LinkedIn is rolling out a new service especially meant for people looking for work. The new service, which began with a small test run last month, will be available free of cost, according to a recent report in techcrunch.
LinkedIn’s new service will identify potential mentors and people who might be looking for mentorship in a specific area, and then get them in touch with each other by matching them.

The service, which will be first made available to LinkedIn users in Australia and San Francisco, is similar to Tinder but for professionals who indicate they are interested in getting some mentoring. Initially, LinkedIn has made a hand-selected list of potential mentors, who will be displayed to people who indicate that they are interested in getting some mentoring, so that a match can be made.

3) India Bitcoin Law Not Yet Ready, Reveals Finance Minister

In order to make people aware about the consequences of using virtual currency, Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley recently clarified that as of today there is no law in circulation on the use of the popular bitcoin or any similar cryptocurrencies in the Indian subcontinent. He further highlighted that users using such currencies in their day-to-day lives must know that in case they incur some damage or face a fraud situation during these bitcoin/virtual currencies transaction, they won’t have any legal recourse to their aid in India.

However, Jaitley did clarify that even though today there’s no law, the government is working on coming up with some regulations for virtual currencies seeing the increasing interest of people in the country. He added that the government has in fact already got a committee in order that is currently working on coming up with suggestions for a regulatory framework to address this popular new form of value exchange.

4) NASA To Pay You $187,000 A Year To Protect Earth From Aliens

If you have ever given even some thought to alien invasion and how we as Earth inhabitants can help in protecting our home planet, then United States’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) might just have the perfect job for you.

NASA is currently on a lookout for a new Planetary Protection Officer. The person will be responsible for ensuring that aliens don’t bring their questionable microbes down to Earth with them and don’t infect our future generations.

This position is assigned to Office of Safety and Mission Assurance for Planetary Protection. Planetary protection is essentially focused on avoidance of organic-constituent and biological contamination in human and robotic space exploration.

The new hire will draw six-figure salary of as much as $187,000 (£141,000) a year plus benefits.

The three-year position was created after the US signed the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 where it pledged to pursue studies of outer space and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.

5) Get This Free Antivirus Software Launched By Russia’s Kaspersky Lab

While we all have expensive lock/security systems to protect our homes from burglars, but when it comes to the security of our personal information on our computers, a lot of us look the other way and hope that the everything works out on their own as we are not interested in spending big bucks on renewing our antivirus every year. If you’re one of those who belongs to the anti-antivirus group, then you must give a try Kaspersky Lab’s latest antivirus release, Kaspersky Free.

The Russian multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider headquartered in Moscow has recently released a free version of its antivirus software across the globe. The launch comes amid growing speculations in the United States that the cyber firm is vulnerable to Russian government influence.

6) AI and Automation Will Make Many IT Jobs in India Obsolete in 5 Years

Humans adopted the route of digitisation and automation so as to make it easier for businesses to interact with their customers and make their internal processes smoother and more organised. While the whole transformation did help humans in achieving what they set out to achieve, somewhere on the way, they ended up impacting the role they themselves were playing in the whole process.

If you’re in IT or considering making IT as your career choice, then a recent survey from Simplilearn on how the future of IT jobs is changing in India can help you decide your course. Titled How Automation is Changing Work Choices: The Future of IT Jobs in India, the survey reveals that the future of IT lies in Cyber Security, Big Data and Data Science, Big Data Architect, Big Data Engineer, Artificial Intelligence and IoT (Internet of Things) Architect, and Cloud Architect as these job profiles will be high in demand in the near future.

According to the survey report, the jobs that are in the jeopardy of getting extinct are the ones that have become repetitive and are most likely to be taken over by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in next five years or so. These includes job profiles such as BPO, manual testing, system maintenance and infrastructure management etc.

Simplilearn’s report also highlighted the preferred technology skills based on a survey it conducted of 7,000 IT professionals from key metros. The survey found out that over 50 per cent of IT professionals in India with work experience in the bracket of 4–10 years have invested in courses and training programs that can help them better their knowledge and build new skills. Some of the top domains preferred by professionals for online training programs includes Big Data & Analytics, Project Management, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Agile & Scrum, and Digital Marketing.

7) How A European Startup in India Can Change the Course of Paytm Revolution

While the rest of the world is going the smartphone way, two-thirds of the mobile devices sold in the Indian subcontinent are still feature phones. Two of the main reasons for the trend are financial inadequacy and illiteracy to afford and understand the technology respectively. This feature phones trend acts as a major deterrent in the Indian government’s ambition to make in India into a digital economy where its citizens have minimum dependence on physical cash and carry out a majority of their transactions online. But, a Slovenian company named Margento might have just cracked the code for the Indian government’s this problem.

Margento is an innovative global provider of powerful mobile transactions and payment solutions. At the core of their technology, is the ability to turn any mobile phone into an easy-to-use, convenient, and secure payment and transaction instrument. And, the company has now decided to bring the technology to India. Margento’s technology will allow low-cost feature phones users in India to make mobile payments without internet. If and when the technology comes to India, it could pose a major threat to paytm’s status quo of number one digital payments provider in the country.

8) IBM Opens First Machine Learning Hub in India

IBM has announced the opening of its first Machine Learning (ML) Hub in India. The hub, located in Bengaluru, is a physical space for organizations to visit for hands-on training on ML.

IBM ML Hub has a acquired a reputation for hosting data scientists eager to collaborate with IBM’s ML specialists. IBM’s ML specialists work with companies and data professionals to implement initial prototypes while companies can collaborate with IBM experts to build and deploy analytic models for a new generation of intelligent applications that learn as they are used. IBM experts also help visitors build and test rapid, scalable prototypes for fast deployment of their models on their organizations’ enterprises.

The Bengaluru ML Hub fifth such hub by IBM in the world as other IBM ML Hubs are already operating in Toronto, San Jose, California, at IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab, Beijing, and Boblingen, Germany.

9) Breakthrough: Microsoft’s Labs Including Bangalore’s Puts Artificial Intelligence Into $10 Raspberry Pi

In what could be considered as a breakthrough achievement, Microsoft’s Labs has successfully integrated Artificial Intelligence into Raspberry Pi. With this, Microsoft has allowed AI to take big leap by putting deep learning algorithms onto a Raspberry Pi. The goals is to Squeeze AI into “dumb” devices like sprinklers, medical implants and soil sensors to make them more useful, even if there’s no supercomputer or internet connection in sight.

The idea came about from Microsoft Labs teams in Redmond and Bangalore, India.

10) Telangana is Now India’s First State To Deploy Artificial Intelligence For Eye Care Screening

India’s southern state Telangana has announced that it will adopt the Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE), an AI platform, to reduce avoidable blindness thus becoming the first State in the country to deploy artificial intelligence for Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram (RBSK), its eye care screening programme for children.

It has also decided to adopt Microsoft’s cloud-based analytics for same.

Telangana state government and Microsoft had in November 2016 signed an MoU to use the latter’s cloud technology to drive citizen services and digital inclusion. Under the MoU, the Microsoft India conducted a cloud-based, advanced analytics pilot project to understand the health screening programme among children from birth to 18 years in 10 districts, a press release said.

The project was now being scaled to a full-fledged solution. One of the insights already derived indicated that vision impairment was one of the most prevalent health issues among children. The State government has decided to adopt MINE to address this issue which would help them make in early interventions and preventing or treating instances of refractive errors, the release said.
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