Tech

LONDON - There may need to be limits initially on the use of major stablecoins for payments, and they should also be backed by high quality and liquid assets to protect consumers, Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said on Monday. Britain is due to adopt rules for regulating stablecoins, a form of cryptocurrency backed by an asset or fiat currency, which consumers could use to make payments digitally. "Systemic stablecoins will need to be backed with high quality and liquid assets," Cunliffe told a conference held by Innovate Finance, a UK fintech industry body. "These could include either deposits at the Bank of England or very highly liquid securities, or some combination of the two. We are currently considering which of these options is most appropriate," Cunliffe said. (Reporting by Huw Jones, Editing by Iain Withers)...

By Stephen Nellis - Adobe Inc on Monday said it plans to introduce new artificial intelligence (AI) features into its video editing software used by the film and television industries. The tools will let video editors do things like change the lighting in a shot from midday to sunset or generate background music just by typing in a few words of text to tell the system what to do. The tools build on a new system called Adobe Firefly that the company introduced last month for generating still images and text. Adobe is riding a wave of interest in generative AI spurred by applications from Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI and Stability AI that allow users to create novel images with just a few words of description. But after Getty Images sued Stability AI alleging that the startup misused Getty's copyrighted images in training its AI system, legal questions clouded whether the output of such AI systems can be used in commercial work....

SHANGHAI - China's auto market, the world’s largest, is accelerating toward an electric future – leaving established global brands stuck in the slow lane. When auto executives convene in Shanghai for the auto show starting Tuesday, they will return to a sharply different market from the one they left in 2021 when the industry gathered for a limited event under strict COVID-19 controls. The biggest change: China-made brands now lead in key segments and their rise has been powered by new electric-drive models that are gaining share at home and overseas. The biggest winner has been BYD, which will use the Shanghai show to unveil a new hatchback electric vehicle (EV) for value-seeking buyers and a pricier EV styled as an SUV. BYD’s sales in China are up almost 69% this year, giving it an 11% share of the overall car market, more than Volkswagen or Toyota, according to an analysis of sales data. "The stratification...

- Activist investor Trillium Capital said on Monday stock-photo company Getty Images Holdings Inc should expand and create partnerships with technology firms and publishers to grow its revenue. Last week, Trillium asked Getty for a board seat and urged the company to evaluate strategic options including a sale. According to Trillium's Monday statement, Getty should expand its partnership with Nvidia Corp to use the chip company's image-rendering technology and collaborate with Adobe Inc to combine their media collections. Trillium also said that the stock image and video platform should partner with Microsoft and its search engine Bing through their Open API (application programming interface) system. A metadata partnership with Meta Platforms Inc's Facebook and Instagram to upload Getty's content as well as tie-ups with National Geographic, New York Times Co and The Washington Post to upload and download digital libraries s...

- Legislators from the European Parliament said on Monday that political attention needed to be focused on powerful artificial intelligence (AI), agreeing with an open letter signed by academics, experts and business leaders including Elon Musk on AI regulation. The EU Parliament called on European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen and U.S. President Joe Biden to convene a global summit on AI. (Reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Alex Richardson)...

By Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil NEW DELHI - Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook will meet India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its deputy IT minister as part of his visit to inaugurate the iPhone maker's first retail store in the country this week, people familiar with the plans said. The visit by Cook to open the first official company-owned outlets in Mumbai and New Delhi this week underscores Apple's growing ambitions for India, where despite having just a 3% market share the company has been expanding iPhone assembly via contract manufacturers, and also boosting its exports. Cook will meet Modi on Wednesday in New Delhi, said the two sources, who included an Indian government official. One of the sources added the Apple chief would also meet India's deputy IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar. Modi's office declined to comment, while Apple and the IT ministry did not immediately respond to requests for com...

By Jeffrey Dastin - The artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT, the homework-drafting chatbot that some schools have banned, is coming to more students via the company Chegg Inc. The U.S. educational software maker has combined its corpus of quiz answers with the chatbot’s AI model known as GPT-4 to create CheggMate, a study aide tailored to students, CEO Dan Rosensweig told last week. "It's a tutor in your pocket," he said ahead of its announcement of CheggMate on Monday. The software will adapt to students by processing data on what classes they are taking and exam questions they have missed, personalizing practice tests and guiding study in a way generalist programs like ChatGPT cannot, Rosensweig said. It will be available next month for free initially, Chegg said. The release is poised to widen what pupils do with AI just as educators are grappling with its consequences. Last year’s launch of ChatGPT led...

By Josh Ye HONG KONG - Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings said on Monday its self-developed video transcoding chip Canghai has entered mass production and is currently supporting services from cloud gaming to video live streaming. The Shenzhen-based company, best known for its popular messaging platform WeChat, said in a post published online that tens of thousands of its Canghai chips, first revealed in 2021, have been serving clients in areas ranging from cloud gaming to video live streaming. The Canghai chip "focuses on solving the impossible triangle of high image quality, low latency, and low cost in video encoding and decoding", the company said in the post. Mostly known as a software company, Tencent unveiled three self-designed chips in 2021, joining other Chinese tech giants in answering Beijing's call to help China develop its own semiconductor industry amid a growing number of U.S. sanctions. Be...

By Joey Roulette WASHINGTON - Demand for sending satellites into space remains strong, but U.S. rocket startups are taking drastic measures to survive a tight funding environment where fears have been exacerbated by the bankruptcy of Virgin Orbit. The industry faces an interesting dichotomy. Demand has surged from launching a few satellites on small rockets to launching swarms of satellites at once using bigger rockets, even as investors shy away from the sector in search of safer bets. Venture investment in space startups has dropped 50% year-over-year in 2022 to $21.9 billion, according to VC firm Space Capital. As the cost of capital rises with the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, investors are less incentivized to fund capital intensive projects that do not have a clear revenue stream or path to profitability, leaving many space startups scrambling for funds. "I've never raised capital in a harder ma...

By Jane Lanhee Lee OAKLAND, Calif. - Quantum computers promise to be millions of times faster than today's fastest supercomputers, potentially revolutionizing everything from medical research to the way people solve problems of climate change. The wait for these machines, though, has been long, despite the billions poured into them. But the uncertainty and the dismal stock performance of publicly-listed quantum computer companies including Rigetti Computing Inc have not scared investors away. Some are turning to startups who are pivoting to using powerful chips to run quantum-inspired software on regular computers as they bide their time. Lacking quantum computers that customers can use today to get an advantage over classical computers, these startups are developing a new breed of software inspired by algorithms used in quantum physics, a branch of science that studies the fundamental building blocks of nature. Once too bi...

- Australia's IPH Ltd said on Monday a forensic probe into the data breach last month revealed that a limited set of data, which originated from member firm Spruson & Ferguson (Australia), was downloaded by an unauthorised third-party. The intellectual property services provider detected an unauthorised access to its document management system, which included administrative and some client documents as well as correspondence at its head office and two member firms. The investigation further suggested there was no evidence that data stored in any other component of its IT network was accessed by any unauthorised third-party during the course of the incident, the company said. "Based on this analysis, IPH has determined to notify a small number of individuals whose personal information was in the dataset." The Sydney-based firm estimated A$2 million ($1.34 million) to A$2.5 million (pre-tax) to be incurred as non-underlyin...

- Apple Inc's sales in India hit a new high of almost $6 billion in the year through March, Bloomberg News reported on Monday. Revenue in India grew by nearly 50%, from $4.1 billion a year earlier, the report added, citing a person familiar with the matter. (Reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D'Souza)...

HELSINKI - Japan's Sega Sammy Holdings Inc has agreed to launch an offer for Finland's Rovio Entertainment, the maker of the Angry Birds mobile game, for 706 million euros ($775.8 million), the companies said in a joint statement on Monday. Tokyo-based Sega will offer 9.25 euros per share for Rovio, a 19% premium over Friday's closing price of 7.775 euros. Rovio, which has been conducting a strategic review, on Saturday said it was in talks with Sega over a possible tender offer. The Wall Street Journal had reported on Friday that a deal between the two companies was imminent. Israeli peer Playtika had made a preliminary bid in January to buy Rovio for 683 million euros, but the Angry Birds maker confirmed last month talks had ended. ($1 = 0.9101 euros) (Reporting by Terje Solsvik, editing by Louise Rasmussen)...

By Joe Skipper and Joey Roulette BOCA CHICA, Texas - Elon Musk's SpaceX made final preparations early on Monday to launch its powerful new Starship rocket system to space for the first time, on a brief but highly anticipated uncrewed test flight from the Gulf Coast of Texas.     The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, was due for blastoff from the SpaceX facility at Boca Chica, Texas, during a two-hour launch window that opens at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT).     The test mission, whether or not its objectives are entirely met, represents a key milestone in SpaceX's ambition of sending humans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars - also the central goal of a renewed NASA spaceflight program intended to integrate the Starship. But SpaceX faces enormous challenges in merely launching a spacecraft that would instantly become, if it successfully gets off the ground, the most po...

BENGALURU - Infosys Ltd shares slumped as much as 10% on Monday to their lowest level in over two years after the IT services exporter forecast revenue growth this fiscal would be the slowest in six years and missed profit estimates for the fourth quarter. India's second-largest IT services firm on Thursday said it expects revenue growth of 4%-7% for the fiscal year ending March 2024, well below analysts' expectations of 10.7% growth, as clients clamped down or deferred spending due to growing fears of a recession in many countries. The Bengaluru- based company's net profit of 61.28 billion rupees ($748.21 million) in the January-March quarter also missed analysts' expectations of 66.24 billion rupees, according to Refinitiv IBES. The Nifty IT index dropped over 6%. ($1 = 81.9020 Indian rupees) (Reporting by Nishit Navin; editing by Eileen Soreng)...

HANOI - Vietnam's electric vehicle maker VinFast said on Monday it had shipped a second batch of 1,879 longer-range VF 8 sport utility vehicles (SUVs), as it seeks to expand its foothold in overseas markets. VinFast, which is backed by Vietnam's largest conglomerate Vingroup JSC, in November dispatched a shipment of 999 of its VF8 SUVs to California from Vietnam in November, but needed until March to prepare them for delivery to customers after disclosing the car would have a lower battery range than it had flagged to buyers. After a 20-day sea journey, 1,098 of the cars of the new batch will land in California, while the remainder will go to Canada, VinFast said in a statement. Deliveries will start from May for the U.S. market and June for customers in Canada, the statement said. Currently, VinFast is offering a monthly lease price of $399 for the VF 8 City Edition model for a 24-month lease. VinFast, whic...

- Netflix Inc. is down for more than 11,000 users in the United States on late Sunday, according outage tracking website Downdetector.com. Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users. (Reporting by Urvi Dugar in Bengaluru; Editing by Tom Hogue)...

- Amazon.com's voice assistant Alexa was down for thousands of users in the United States on Sunday, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com. More than 9,000 users reported issues with Alexa. Users also reported issues accessing Amazon's mobile app. Amazon did not immediately respond to ' questions on reasons for the outage and estimated timeline for resolution. Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. (Reporting by Jose Joseph in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)...

TOKYO - Japan's Panasonic Holdings, a battery supplier to electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc, is considering building a battery plant in Oklahoma, it third in the United States, Kyodo news service reported on Sunday. (Reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by William Mallard)...

By Rozanna Latiff and Yantoultra Ngui KUALA LUMPUR/SINGAPORE - Malaysia plans to introduce a second 5G network from next year, four sources told , in the latest policy shake-up aimed at dismantling monopolies and promoting competition by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's six-month-old administration. Malaysia's 5G roll-out by state agency Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB) has seen repeated delays since its launch in December 2021 because of industry concerns over pricing and transparency, as well as worries that a single government-run network would result in a nationalised monopoly. Since taking office in November last year, Anwar has ordered reviews of billions of dollars in government projects as he looks to strengthen governance and minimise wasteful spending. He has also vowed to boost competition to ensure better services for the public.  Anwar's government is now planning to introduce a second 5G network from January 2024...