Thursday's here - time to shine before the weekend!
Geek Gossip
#AR Rahman - Google Cloud is teaming up with the Indian music director AR Rahman's digital band Secret Mountain to create a new kind of interactive entertainment using AI and virtual avatars!
#MacBookPro - First they came for the mobile phones. No chargers for iPhones are the norm now. The latest development is that MacBook Pros are now shipping without chargers! Apple's 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro doesn't ship with a charger or power adapter, so you'll need to buy a new one if you don't have a spare lying around. Apple has confirmed the same on its website and online store by writing phrases like "No power adapter" and "Power adapter sold separately".
Latest Updates
WazirX Gets Court Approval For Major Rebuild
WazirX is a cryptocurrency exchange, a platform where people buy, sell, and trade digital currencies. Today, the company got court approval to rebuild after a major hack that affected 234 million users.
Infosys Lands £1.2 Billion NHS Contract
Infosys has been awarded a £1.2 billion, 15-year contract by the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) to deliver the Future NHS Workforce Solution. Infosys will develop a cutting-edge, data-driven workforce management solution that will replace the current Electronic Staff Record (ESR) system. The solution will empower the NHS workforce to manage their personal information with ease, saving them valuable time.
Bharti Airtel Partners With Ibm For Enhanced Cloud Services
Bharti Airtel, a leading telecommunications company in India, has entered a strategic partnership with IBM to improve its Airtel Cloud services, integrating IBM's expertise in cloud solutions and AI technologies to provide secure and efficient cloud infrastructure for regulated industries like banking, healthcare, and government.
Coinbase Doubles Down On Indian Crypto Market
Coinbase has increased its investment in India’s CoinDCX, valuing the exchange at $2.45 billion post-money. The U.S. crypto giant bets on the country's digital-asset potential even as regulation remains unclear.
Apple Unveils M5 Macbook Pro
Apple has finally introduced a new 14-inch MacBook Pro, powered by the latest M5 chip. It delivers up to 3.5x faster AI performance and up to 1.6x faster graphics performance, compared to the previous M4 chip.
Changelog
Ray-Ban Meta - New AI Features and Experiences Including Hindi Support, Celebrity Voice Assistant, and Diwali-Style Photo Restyling. Bonus - Deepika Padukone, the Bollywood actress is now the voice behind Meta AI.
Gmail - Help me schedule feature with Gemini-powered suggestions for coordinating meeting times with others in emails.
Threads - Group chats and messaging now available.
Google reCAPTCHA - Migrated to Google Cloud, requires new Google Cloud account and billing setup, updated APIs and pricing model.
Veo - Rich audio generation with enhanced creative capabilities, including new editing features and integration with Veo 3.1.
SQL Server - GitHub Copilot integration now available in Preview 3 with AI-powered assistance for T-SQL writing, editing, and debugging.
Tech Talk Thursdays
Adam Argyle rapid-fires through 25+ new CSS features. He showcases innovations like view transitions for smooth page navigation, container queries for responsive components, cascade layers for style orchestration, and scroll-driven animations, urging developers to learn these terms to elevate their designs beyond basic AI outputs.
Shruti Kapoor's talk provides a live demo of optimizing a slow React/Next.js app (dubbed "React Flex," a Netflix clone). She transforms a 30-second LCP to 1.28 seconds by addressing bundle size with code splitting, reducing re-renders using React Compiler, offloading data fetching to the server with Tanstack Start, and optimizing image loading with lazy loading and fetch priority.
This Devoxx talk builds a Spring Boot app to demonstrate Project Loom's features: Virtual Threads, Structured Concurrency, and Scoped Values. The presenter progressively incorporates each feature, showcasing their practical application in a web application context. Learn how these features work together to create simpler, more scalable, and maintainable concurrent code.
In Case You Missed It
🎁 We now have a dedicated page to list all events. We will be updating this page EVERY WEEK. We will of course be publishing new (and coming-soon) events in this section but for a comprehensive list of events, check the link(s) below:
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Miscellaneous
View Transitions In Multi-page Applications
Imagine a seamless navigation experience between pages in your website, made possible by the View Transition API. Learn how this feature, now supported in modern browsers, brings smooth animated transitions to multi-page applications.
Productivity Hacks For New Grads
Be introspective, plan ahead, and take breaks to stay on track. Limit distractions, review daily progress, and be honest about effort. No need for fancy systems, just find what works for you.
Emotional Design Strategies
Brian Cugelman, PhD, developed the Emotion Map to help designers apply science-based emotional design strategies. Emotion maps help us create products and campaigns that connect with users on a deeper emotional level. Explore the 12 major emotional transitions, helping you better understand the different types of transitions that motivate and reinforce user behavior.
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We believe in sharing great resources, and these newsletters are some good ones. They offer sharp, focused insights - especially around tech topics we might only touch on briefly.
If you're into cryptocurrency and blockchain, we recommend Cryptogram - it dives deep into the space, which we don’t often cover in detail.
For startup enthusiasts, Rustic Flute is a must-read, especially since we’ve noticed many of you love staying on top of the latest in the startup world.
