🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #309

Happy Friday! You're one step closer to the weekend!

#Infosys - Contrary to the beliefs of their founder, Narayan Murthy, who advocated 80 hr work weeks, Infosys has been mailing its employees to ensure they maintain a good work-life balance. When detecting a higher amount of work hours, a system triggers a message to that employee reminding him or her of the importance of work- life balance.

#PrivateTechIsland - An Indian origin entrepreneur has purchased a private island near Singapore to build a decentralised, digital-first society for tech professionals, creators and founders.

#Meta - Project Omni - that’s the name of a new project Meta’s been working on that’s basically a chat bot that pings you first to strike a conversation with you and keep you engaged with the platform. Get ready to be bombarded with more AI slop

#ZoomDystopia - People seem to be wary of attending meetings. So much so, that they are sending their “AI” representatives to attend it - and prepare a summary for them to check out after. Zoom meetings with more AI attendees than humans are becoming the norm.

Railone Superapp Launched
Indian Government’s Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw launched the RailOne SuperApp. App brings all essential Indian Railways services together. Indian Railways' new SuperApp combines various services like booking, PNR status, and food ordering into one mobile app, aiming to make travel smoother for millions of users.

Max Financial Services Experiences Data Breach
Max Financial Services on Wednesday said its insurance subsidiary Axis Max Life Insurance received communication from an anonymous sender about unauthorized access to its customer data. The Noida-based financial services company said in its stock exchange filing that it initiated an information security assessment and data log analysis.

Google Workspace - Gems are now accessible from the side panel of Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Drive, and Gmail.

Pickaxe | Build agents that scale with a zero-cost abstraction.

Autumn | Autumn is an open-source pricing & billing platform

Intl T | A Fully-Typed Object-Based i18n Translation Library

Optimizing Shopify's Admin With Remix: A Web Standards Approach
Shopify's Admin was facing challenges in managing its massive scale, including inconsistent loading patterns, duplicate data requests, and conflicting features. With the acquisition of Remix, Shopify aimed to transform its system using web standards and predictable data flow. The four goals were to create a single source of truth for all Admin routes, make pages load faster and more consistently, make developers' lives easier, and prepare the UI architecture for AI. The solution involved transitioning to React Router data mode, introducing route manifests, and using Remix loaders to improve performance.

Emotional Design 2.0
Designers now leveraging negative emotions to boost user engagement, accuracy, and motivation, while avoiding manipulation and exploitation, in products like social campaigns, e-commerce, and charity platforms.

AI-powered Vtubers Emerge - Earning Their Creators Millions Of Dollars
A new wave of virtual YouTubers is emerging on YouTube. They are powered by artificial intelligence. One of the most popular YouTuber is named Bloo, who is a fully virtual personality. Virtual YouTubers, like Bloo, are gaining traction on the platform, leveraging AI for content creation, voiceovers, and even entire video production, with some already generating millions in revenue.