Spicing up deals 🌶️
Fossils found, duty hikes, and audio tweets are here.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
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Let’s go ahead and get started:
Stock market summary: 😍
US - S&P 500 up 0.059% 🔼
India - Sensex up 2.09% 🔼
Little birdie will let you chirp too 🐦
After introducing fleeting tweets a couple of days back, Twitter is now rolling out a feature which enables users to record audio and attach them to the tweets.
The new feature is available on iOS and for a limited group of people and will roll out to more people later in the coming weeks.
Voice tweets can capture 140 seconds of audio but you cannot retweet with audio. Also, audio tweets will keep playing in the background even if you switch to another app, which is supposed to be good? Who knows!
Spicing up deals in a pandemic 🌶️
Indore based spices and condiments brand Pushp has attracted ₹125 Crore from private equity firm A91 Partners. This is A91’s sixth investment since it was founded last year.
Pushp, a 45 year old family business has raised this first round of institutional financing and is expected to part away about 25% of ownership to A91.
In a similar deal, ITC bought Kolkata based Sunrise Foods. Other players within the food and condiment industry such as Badshah Masala are also planning on selling stakes. As small businesses across the country are hit by the pandemic, these deals will be common as businesses look to raise and conserve as much cash as possible to get through this storm.
Also, as by bringing external partners, family owned businesses open themselves to new perspectives and ideas to compete across the world.
Zoom tightens security 🔐
As Zoom’s usage as well as its stock have soared like a rocket, so have concerns about safety.
So in a bid to assuage users, Zoom is planning to offer all its users end to end encryption and is set to launch a trial in July. Zoom came under a lot of scrutiny over its security issues after it failed to disclose that the service was not end to end encrypted and that many of its engineers were based in China.
Previously, Facebook had also embraced end-to-end encryption on Whatsapp and other chat apps after facing privacy related backlash.
Duty hikes on neighboring imports 📈
The government of India is considering duty hikes on goods and services imported from China as a way to retaliate against the aggression shown by the neighbor at our borders.
While nothing has been finalized about the type of goods or the level of increase that may come, the idea is however to focus exclusively on non-essential goods at this time.
In the last 12 months, India imported nearly $63 Billion worth of goods from China while exporting just about $15.5 Billion, making the deficit a considerable amount. Imports from China currently stand at about 14% of our total imports.
The move also comes as a result of India’s focus to be Atma Nirbhar in the post COVID world.
Tweet of the day -
It’s Friday so let’s lighten up a bit. We discovered today that there is a whole twitter account dedicated to just rating dogs. And it has over 8.7 Million followers 😱
The creativity of people on the internet is awesome! Checkout this good boy.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
📱 German coronavirus app downloaded 6.5 million times- the Bluetooth LE enabled contact tracing app that Germany introduced has been downloaded widely. The app talks to devices in the vicinity and intimates you and authorities whether you came into close contact with a COVID-19 positive person. Many EU nations as well as India have adopted some version of the technology.
🏆 OSCARS to be pushed back this year - the event for next year will be pushed further into 2021 as production delays and closed theaters mean new releases have stopped. If the pandemic continues, expect the event even to be cancelled.
🦖 Deflated football like egg fossil found in Antarctica- A 68 million year old fossil found on Seymour Island off Antarctica's coast has turned out to be the second largest egg on record measuring 8 by 11 inches and scientists believe that this soft shelled egg which looks like a deflated football, belonged to sea going reptiles called Mosasaurs or Plesiosaurs which lived alongside dinosaurs.
😎 Whatsapp rolls out payments in Brazil - this has been a most awaited feature as a lot of small businesses and users do most of their work on Whatsapp in emerging countries. India is yet to see the feature, but if Brazil is a success then we might get lucky soon.
Hope you took a thing or two away from today’s edition. 😀
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