Arvind's Newsletter

1.Climate change may have its deniers but the weather gods aren’t listening. At least 42 people have died because of heavy rains in various parts of India over three days, with raging rivers washing away national highways, bridges, buildings and vehicles, and landslides snapping the only links to many towns and villages.

People in Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Chandigarh were among the hardest hit with Himachal alone accounting for 20 deaths. Weather officials issued a red alert for Uttarakhand where spells of heavy rain were forecast for several days, sparking fears of similar chaos as what the neighbouring Himachal.Even Ladakh, a frigid desert received 10,000% of its annual rainfall between July 8-9.

Climate change isn’t just precipitating extreme downpour in mountains, but also triggering freak weather in North Eastern, USA and Kyushu, Japan.

2.The Tata group is close to acquiring Wistron’s $600-million factory in southern Karnataka by next month, according to Business Standard. The Wistron unit makes iPhones for the Cupertino-based company.

Sources said that Wistron will continue to provide the Tatas technical know-how on assembling the phone and keep back some personnel during the transition process.Also, key Apple Inc executives, for the time being, will be closely involved in the plant operation to ensure smooth assembly of phones.

The Tatas already have tied up with Apple vendors to manufacture iPhone enclosures, which account for 9-12 per cent of the cost of production of an iPhone. They are an important part of the Apples's quest for increasing value addition from 12-15 per cent to 30 per cent by FY26 as committed to the government.

3.Ideaforge Technologies, India’s only listed drone-maker is flying high, reports Mint.

Ideaforge is a cutting-edge technology company – a market leader in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Promoted by three entrepreneurs from IIT-Bombay, it makes a range of drones for civilian and defence use and is currently the only listed drone maker in India.

The company has a footprint across every common civil and military vertical except logistics. Apart from agricultural support, it offers mapping applications and is used extensively for defence, security and surveillance.

Ideaforge is by far the largest Indian pure-play drone manufacturer, and it’s profitable. In FY22 the company reported revenues of ₹160 crore, operating profits of ₹73 crore, and profit after tax of ₹44 crore. The IPO projections indicate it may register revenue of around ₹186 crore in FY23.

There’s a huge and expanding range of civilian and military applications and use-cases for drones. Capable of performing tasks in difficult terrain, they are safer than using humans in high-risk environments.

4. Indian ride-hailing upstart BluSmart takes on Uber with electric cars, reports the Financial Times.
   

   BluSmart, an Indian ride-sharing company backed by BP’s venture capital unit, is adding hundreds of new electric vehicles a month

   as it tries to beat Uber and Ola in the race to electrify the country’s taxi market.
   

   Founded in 2019, BluSmart now operates

   about 4,500 electric cars in the capital New Delhi and tech hub Bengaluru. While dwarfed in total size by Uber and Ola,

   which have each operated in India for a decade or longer, it has shot ahead of the incumbents in the fast-growing EV segment of the market.

   
   Uber last month launched its “Uber Green” EV business in India, with a plan to grow to 10,000 electric two-wheelers by 2024. Ola has previously said it plans to add 10,000 EVs to its ride-sharing fleet, though it has not started.

   BluSmart’s co-founder Punit Goyal said the company planned to add 600 to 800 new cars a month in order to keep up with Uber

   and Ola’s EV plans. “We’re now increasing our fleet size substantially,” he said in an interview in Gurgaon, a satellite city of New Delhi. Goyal argued chronic pollution in cities such as New Delhi, which suffers from some of the worst air quality in the world, made EV ride sharing necessary for public health. “It’s a huge, huge opportunity for the EV space, for ride hailing companies to switch to EVs,” he said.
   
   BluSmart has tried to set itself apart from rivals by offering better service,with newer vehicles and a pre-booking model designed to help cars arrive for pick-ups on time. The company’s fleet consists of EVs made by Indian conglomerate Tata; MG Motor India, a subsidiary of Chinese carmaker SAIC Motor; and BYD, a Chinese rival to Tesla that has embarked on an aggressive international expansion.

5.After just a few days, Threads, the Twitter clone that has enticed users disillusioned with the original and has amassed 100 million users.

A lesson is that Facebook might be a lot better at copying other successful products than creating new, cutting edge experiences of their own. The success of the simple and familiar Threads linked to Instagram is the opposite of Meta's much grander plans for the Metaverse, which have been a failure.

Kate Wagner in The Nation: Lessons from the catastrophic failure of the Metaverse . "Since the virtual reality service’s launch in 2021, the so-called 'successor to the mobile internet' became the recipient of a kind of soaring hype few things are ever blessed with.

According to Insider, McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion.There was only one problem: The whole thing was bullshit. Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus. It’s not even that the platform lagged behind expectations or was slow to become popular. There wasn’t anyone visiting the Metaverse at all. The sheer scale of the hype inflation came to light in May. In the same article, Insider revealed that Decentraland, arguably the largest and most relevant Metaverse platform, had only 38 active daily users."