Hyped AI startup Humane has announced plans for its first international market, inking a deal with South Korean carrier SK Telecom.
The announcement comes shortly after the San Francisco-based company revealed it was pushing back the shipping date of its Ai Pin device from March to mid-April in its domestic U.S. market.
The Ai Pin costs $699 up front, with a recurring $24 monthly subscription that gives the user a phone number and unlimited data to power as many AI-powered queries they like.
And just yesterday, SK Telecom announced a partnership with AI search engine Perplexity to bring its premium “Pro” plan to SK Telecom’s 32 million subscribers.
It’s also not yet clear when the Ai Pin might make it to market in South Korea, but given the delays currently surrounding its U.S. launch we maybe shouldn’t expect it too soon.
Internet monitoring firms say a near-total internet blackout in Gaza is reaching its seventh day, the longest outage of the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict so far.
Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch in a Signal message that this is the “longest internet blackout ever and longer than all of the previous blackouts combined” in Gaza.
On January 12, Palestinian telecom giant Paltel announced that “all telecom services in Gaza Strip have been lost due to the ongoing aggression.
According to NetBlocks, this is the “ninth and longest sustained” telecom’s outage since the onset of the present conflict with Israel.
David Belson, the head of data insight at Cloudflare, which also monitors internet connectivity across the world, told TechCrunch on Thursday that there is an ongoing internet outage in Gaza.
The valuation reassessment comes at a time when Reliance is expected to undertake initial public offerings for both Jio Platforms and Reliance Retail.
In 2020, Jio Platforms raised over $20 billion from a series of investments by companies like Meta, Google, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners and others.
Reliance Retail, which raised about $7 billion in 2020, recently raised about $1.85 billion at $100 billion valuation.
The investment bank also expects the Indian telecom industry to hike tariff in the second half of the year, it said.
“On enterprise business we see three areas where Jio Platforms could capitalize on: government contracts, SMEs and corporates (by offering VAS),” BofA added.
The bill also mandates biometric verification for subscribers and restricts the number of SIM cards each subscriber uses to limit fraud.
The legacy of the old scammers in the telecom sector will be left behind, and arrangements will be made through this bill to make the telecom sector a sunrise sector,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Indian telecom minister, said while introducing the bill in the parliament.
Interestingly, the telecom bill excludes the term “OTT,” available in its initial draft last year, indicating regulations for over-the-top (OTT) messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.
“The bill is regressive as it enhances the government’s colonial-era powers to intercept communications and shut down the internet.
It undermines end-to-end encryption, which is crucial for privacy,” said Namrata Maheshwari, Asia Pacific Policy Counsel at Access Now, in a prepared statement.
