Jio Financial and BlackRock to tap India’s wealth management and stock broking marketJio Financial Services, part of the Indian conglomerate Reliance, is forming a joint venture with U.S. asset manager BlackRock to set up a wealth management and stock broking business in India, the two firms said Monday.
The announcement follows BlackRock and Jio Financial launching a joint venture last year to offer asset management services in India.
The two companies plan to invest $150 million each in the joint venture, they said last year.
The expansion of BlackRock and Jio Financial’s partnership underscores Reliance’s growing ambitions in the financial services sector.
Since its public debut in August, Jio Financial Services has already expanded to insurance and lending businesses.
Meta announced on Tuesday it’s rolling out the ability for Messenger users to create shared albums in chats, send photos in high-definition, and share larger files up to 100MB in size.
With these new features, Messenger is targeting people who tend to create shared albums or share HD images via services like Google Drive.
Now, users can create albums of photos and videos in group chats, whether it’s to organize photos of a recent spring break or grandma’s 80th birthday celebration.
The launch of the new feature follows Meta’s rollout of support for HD photos on WhatsApp back in September 2023.
The new features are rolling out on mobile to all Messenger users.
With the aim of identifying criminal suspects, U.S. police departments are increasingly relying on a controversial surveillance practice to demand large amounts of users’ data from tech companies.
So-called “reverse” searches allow law enforcement and federal agencies to force big tech companies, like Google, to turn over information from their vast stores of user data.
Reverse searches effectively cast a digital dragnet over a tech company’s store of user data to catch the information that police are looking for.
Microsoft, Snap, Uber and Yahoo (which owns TechCrunch) have all received reverse orders for user data.
Some companies choose not to store user data and others scramble the data so it can’t be accessed by anyone other than the user.
French startup 900.care wants to try something new.
Instead of buying a new bottle of shower gel every time you need some shower gel, the startup focuses on the active ingredients.
On your first order, you receive an empty, reusable plastic bottle with a pump.
The next time you need more shower gel or shampoo, you only need a new stick (and some tap water).
In addition to shampoo and shower gel, 900.care also sells foaming hand soap, dish soap, laundry and dishwasher tablets, as well as a few other products.
PayPal launches Tap to Pay on iPhone for businesses using Venmo and Zettle in the USPayPal announced today that it’s launching “Tap to Pay” for merchants with an iPhone through the Venmo and Zettle apps in the U.S. PayPal, which owns both Venmo and Zettle, says the feature will allow businesses to accept contactless card and digital wallet payments directly on their iPhones with no additional cost or hardware.
In addition to being able to accept payments from cards or digital wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay, Tap to Pay allows merchants to add taxes, accept tips, send receipts and issue refunds without any additional hardware.
Funds from sales are quickly put into a business’s Venmo or PayPal Zettle account, the company says.
With Tap to Pay on iPhone, Venmo business profile users will be able to reach for customers by accepting payments from buyers even if they don’t have a Venmo account.
A year later, Strip enabled businesses to carry out Tap to Pay transactions on NFC-equipped Android devices, as well.
MacPaw, which makes Mac and iOS apps, has released a new iPhone app called CleanMyPhone, which helps users free up storage by removing duplicate photos and cleaning up other unwanted images.
Declutter detects and scans your photos to find duplicates, screenshots, screen recordings, TikTok videos, app folders and blurred images.
That’s why you might want to have a look at some of the grouped photos before cleaning them.
In the Uniques category, you might find some images that you can delete.
If you don’t want the app to scan certain images, you can mark them as sensitive.
Decentralized social network Mastodon has updated its official app for Android to let users easily share their profiles with QR Codes.
To share the QR code, users can go to their profile tab and tap the QR icon next to their name to get a code related to the profile others can scan.
Mastodon has also updated prompts for blocking and muting to explain the effects of taking those actions on a profile.
Users trying out Mastodon have complained about the complicated nature of having different servers on the ActivityPub network.
The company will have to work on making it easier for users to understand and navigate the decentralized social world.
WhatsApp announced today that it is rolling out a “search by date” function for individual and group chats on Android devices.
Users can only search for a chat on a particular date instead of specifying a date range.
To use the feature, users have to go a one-on-one or group chat details by tapping on the contact or the group name.
To search by date, they have to tap on the search button and then tap the calendar icon.
Users can already search through conversations by media type such as links, media, and docs through the conversation detail page.
The plan is for “centers of excellence” to be set up to support the development of dedicated AI algorithms that can run on the EU’s supercomputers, they added.
AI startups are more likely to be accustomed to using dedicated compute hardware provided by US hyperscalers to train their models than tapping the processing power offered by supercomputers as a training resource.
Using its supercomputing resources to fire up AI startups specifically has emerged as a more recent strategic priority after the EU president’s announcement of the compute access for AI model training program this fall.
It’s still early days for the EU’s ‘supercompute for AI’ program so it’s unclear whether there’s much model training upside to report off of dedicated access as yet.
But the early presence of Mistral in the EU’s supercomputing access program may suggest an alignment in the thinking.
The Indian fintech platform, CRED, is expanding its offerings to boost engagement and monetization on the platform. The buy now and pay later service and a tap to pay feature…
