1.India undeniably become GCC capital of the world: Nasscom-Zinnov report

India-based global capability centres (GCCs) have redefined the country’s tech landscape over the last five years. According to a report, 70 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will expand their presence to India by 2030.

The report by Nasscom and Zinnov titled ‘India GCC Landscape Report: The 5-year Journey’ stated that the GCC revenue by 2030 was expected to touch between $99 billion to $105 billion, at a compound annual growth rate of 9-10 per cent from the current revenue of $64.6 billion.

It also said the number of GCCs is expected to reach 2,100-2,200 in 2030 from the current figure of over 1,700. This growth will be driven by developments such as global roles moving to India, AI Centres of Excellence (CoE) and overall engineering and R&D focus.

2.Dixon Technologies’ HP deal powers ambitious IT hardware play

Dixon Technologies Ltd is raising the stakes in India’s IT hardware market. With a new partnership with HP, alongside existing deals with Lenovo and Acer, the company is now aiming for 60% of the rapidly expanding IT hardware sector. Dixon has been vocal about its ambitious plans of scaling IT hardware revenue to ₹48,000 crore over the next six years. For context, the company's FY24 consolidated operating revenue stood at ₹17,690 crore.

3.G42 Launches Advanced Hindi Language Model NANDA

A UAE-based artificial intelligence company (backed by Microsoft) is set to launch a Hindi large language model as global tech firms race to adapt AI platforms for India. 

G24’s platform will be trained on around 2.13 trillion “tokens” of language datasets including Hindi, which is spoken by more than 50% of Indians. G42 has partnered with global tech leaders, including a recent $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft. It has collaborated with OpenAI as well, the company behind ChatGPT.

4.Goodbye to toll plazas and waiting? Centre notifies GPS-based toll system

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has updated the National Highways Fee Rules, introducing satellite-based toll collection via Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), including GPS.

This new system calculates tolls based on the actual distance travelled, unlike the current FASTag system. Vehicles with GNSS On-Board Units (OBUs) will automatically pay tolls without stopping at booths.

This modernised system aims to boost revenue, with annual toll collections expected to rise from Rs 40,000 crore to Rs 1.4 trillion within two to three years once the system is fully implemented.

5.Why Indian firms don’t scale, opines Shruti Rajgopalan and Kadambri Shah in a new research paper

Some excerpts from their report:

“Surveying the literature on the impact of labor regulation, we find that India’s firm-level labor regulations punish businesses in two ways. First, the regulations are too onerous, preventing firms from remaining competitive. While some sectors and large-scale industries might be able to comply with this regulatory overload, most regulations are imposed on firms with as few as 10 employees, disincentivising firm growth and large-scale employment. Second, labor-related regulations tend to micromanage factory operations through uncertain enforcement by a labor inspection system, further discouraging firms from expanding. India’s labor laws do too much, too soon in a firm’s life cycle.

We argue that to scale manufacturing across industries and foster job creation, India needs to revise its stringent labor regulations. This paper begins by describing the predominance of small-scale firms, indicating the extent of informality in India’s manufacturing sector, which is well established in the literature. It then shows that India’s labor law tries to do too much; instead of merely setting standards, the statutes micromanage workplaces, colours, fonts, uniforms, and more by requiring permissions for a host of workplace activities such as changing the tasks of a worker. It argues that the laws apply too soon in firms’ life cycle—namely, at low employee thresholds (typically as low as 10 workers). Both these aspects increase labor and compliance costs and discourage firms from scaling. Next, the paper offers recommendations for reforms to stop disincentivizing firms from scaling—including streamlining labor laws, raising employee thresholds, optimising inspections, and avoiding excessive reliance on criminal penalties to ensure compliance.”

6 US Vice President Kamala Harris successfully baited ex-President Donald Trump in their debate, but fell short of a knockout blow.

The pair discussed economic and foreign policy, abortion, and each other’s fitness for office, but the highest-wattage moments were when she forced him on the defensive. “Harris was often the agressor,” Semafor’s David Weigel wrote, while Trump “struggled to make his own case consistently.” Conservative outlets lamented Trump’s missteps, with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board saying he let Harris “off the debate hook,” and the right-wing magazine National Review characterizing him as “unfocused.” Minutes after the debate concluded, the music superstar Taylor Swift publicly supported Harris. Still, analysts largely agreed that polls were unlikely to shift significantly.

And the New York Times opined that It is uncertain how much Harris’s strong overall performance will matter. “Hillary Clinton also won the debates against Donald Trump,” Julia Ioffe of Puck News noted. The same prediction markets that shifted toward Harris last night continue to show the election as a tossup.

7.Huawei takes on Apple in China with $2,800 trifold phone
A $2,800 smartphone from Huawei with a 10-inch folding screen has passed 5mn in pre-orders during its launch week, as the Chinese technology giant takes on Apple in its home market with increasingly sophisticated devices.

The Shenzhen-based group debuted the Mate XT on Tuesday at an event held hours after its US rival unveiled the iPhone 16. Huawei’s handset is the first commercially available smartphone with a display that folds out into three segments.

8.Foreign companies hit ‘tipping point’ in China; Financial Times
Foreign companies in China are reaching a “tipping point” on investing in the world’s second-largest economy as market access barriers, low growth and fierce competition cloud the outlook, according to the EU chamber of commerce in the country.

European companies complain that operating in China is becoming tougher because of a growing web of ill-defined data, cyber security and anti-espionage laws while a weak domestic economy means lower profits.

“For some companies, a tipping point has been met,” said Jens Eskelund, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, which released its annual position paper. 

‘Companies are beginning to conclude that, considering supply chain risks, considering anticipated lower profits in China, considering the continued barriers . . . that maybe other markets are becoming more competitive, more attractive,” Eskelund said.

China’s policymakers are grappling with a two-speed economy in which a property market slowdown has undermined domestic demand and created deflationary pressures, while exports have risen, helped by cut-throat competition among manufacturers.

9.You’ll Never Know How Accurate Your Fitness Tracker Is, and That’s OK

The appeal of fitness-tracking smartwatches is that they have all the answers. They turn our squishy bodies’ inscrutable secrets into hard numbers we can plainly read and analyze. But we would be fooling ourselves if we believed that our smartwatches always tell the truth. According to a new scientific analysis, not only do wearables often get things wrong, it may not be possible to ever really know how accurate they are.

This isn’t going to be shocking news to longtime Lifehacker readers. We’ve discussed the fact that some smartwatch metrics are more reliable than others, and that calorie burn is one of the less accurate ones. On the other hand, heart rate variability shows different raw numbers from one device to another, but the major recovery-focused devices all manage to capture the same rough trend—if you trust my homebrew study with a sample size of one. 

So what do we know about the accuracy of the smartwatches on the market, and why is it so hard to answer that question? That’s the problem that the recent analysis, from a group of sports scientists and data scientists in Ireland, set out to answer. It’s an umbrella review—a study of studies of studies—that aimed to collect all the relevant published data on consumer wearables. Here’s some of what they learned. Read on.