Multimedia
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Sauna Day: The Indian-Estonian film about men embracing intimacy
Co-directors Anna Hints and Tushar Prakash take us through the journey of 'Sauna Day', a short film about the ritual of men immersing themselves into Estonian smoke saunas at the end of a hard work day, as is the ritual. Here, men seek purification of their bodies, but also their souls—and are forced to grapple with ideas of intimacy in the process
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What's driving the modest IT hiring pickup? Hint: not the IT companies
In this episode, Kamal Karanth, co-founder and CEO of Xpheno, a staffing firm in Bengaluru, explains the modest increase in open IT positions in recent times. Consider that in FY22, the IT sector alone hired some 2,30,000 people, net, according to the industry lobby Nasscom. That fell to 60,000 in FY23 and FY24 was about the same. Not much has changed yet for the IT giants, but non-tech companies rooted in India's economy, as well as a new wave of global capability centres are hiring, Karanth says
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Not jugaad, but a scientific approach to using AR and Gen AI in schools
In this episode, Sumeet Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Leadership Boulevard, more popularly known as Leadschool, offers a quick update on the company's latest product. Techbook, as they're calling it, is actually a physical textbook, designed and engineered to comprise scannable pages that link up with an AR solution. This opens up a world of interactive content for students, and, alongside an AI-based reading assistant, makes learning a more personalized experience. Mehta hopes to put Techbooks in the hands of 4-5 million students by 2028
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What Zoho is doing in AI? Here's what you should know
Sridhar Vembu, co-founder and CEO of Zoho, offers a quick update on the AI investments at India's biggest software products company. In an interview with Forbes India at the company's annual user conference on Sep. 25, Vembu spoke about small models Zoho has commercialized, efforts to ensure enterprise customers' security and privacy in putting such models to use across different functions and customers, and R&D aimed at ensuring reliability of the output from AI models. He also anticipates more energy efficient AI tech will emerge
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The high cost of AI development and what that means for many countries
The AI hardware and software market will likely grow between 40 percent and 55 percent annually, potentially reaching $990 billion by 2027, the consultancy Bain & Company projects in its fifth annual global technology report, which was released earlier today. In this episode, David Crawford, a partner and chairman of the consultancy's global technology practice, discusses some of the top takeaways from the report — including whether AI is actually delivering value, and the implications of the high cost of development of advanced AI
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Understanding Indian startups' mission to build AI infrastructure for all
The latest edition of Forbes India is dedicated to understanding the efforts of Indian tech startups to build an artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure accessible to everyone. But what is AI infrastructure? What is its importance? Which are the startups dedicated to this cause? What are other Indian startups breaking barriers in AI development? To answer all these questions and more, Harichandan Arakali dives deep into the stories of our AI issue.
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Agentic AI: Unpacking the hype cycle, challenges, and opportunities
In this episode, Sidu Ponnappa, co-founder and CEO of Realfast, unpacks the hype cycle, challenges and opportunities in 'agentic AI.' Realfast, a Singapore and Bengaluru startup, recently out of stealth mode, is initially offering AI assistants to Salesforce implementation services teams. Ponnappa also talks about the intangible human experience that's often discounted in conversations about AI, and offers his personal guesstimate on when we might see agents autonomously capable of building their own agents
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Quad Summit: Cancer Moonshot and other science and tech initiatives announced
The leaders of the Quad nations, Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India, Anthony Albanese of Australia, and Kishida Fumio of Japan, and US President Joe Biden unveiled the Quad Cancer Moonshot, a collaborative effort in the Indo-Pacific region, in a statement called The Wilmington Declaration, on Sep. 21. This partnership will initially focus on cervical cancer, which the leaders note is a preventable disease that continues to affect many. The leaders also announced greater collaboration in critical technologies
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AR glasses: Will enterprise applications help advance the technology?
Is the enterprise opportunity on the rise in the world of augmented reality, or AR? Just this week, Microsoft, maker of HoloLens, has announced a partnership with Anduril, the US deep-tech defence startup founded by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus headset, now part of Meta, and Snap has released the latest version of its AR Spectacles. To understand the landscape better, we speak with Milind Manoj, co-founder and CEO of Pupilmesh, a head-mounted display systems deep-tech startup that's part of MapMyIndia
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'Tired of cliched 'brown' roles, I wrote my own': Lawrence Valin
Born and raised in France, Lawrence Valin grew up fascinated by cinema in his native language, Tamil. His thrilling French-Tamil film, 'Little Jaffna', came after he tried to break it as an actor in the French film industry, but was disappointed with the roles he was being typecast in
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B-schools need to rethink their teaching methods: Pratham Mittal of Tetr
The founder of Tetr College of Business, a cross-border B-school based on experiential learning, offers his views on the country's education system, and advice for entrepreneurs wanting to enter the education space