🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #453

It's Thursday! Keep up the great work, the weekend is near!

#OnePlus - Rumours spread that OnePlus mobile handset maker is shutting down. However, the Indian arm of the company has clarified that OnePlus India remains active and the rumours are just that - rumours.

#ApplePay - Apple is reportedly mulling launching its digital payments service, Apple Pay, in India by late-2026. The big tech major is in discussions with global card networks like Visa and Mastercard to roll out the service in the country. Apple also plans to seek regulatory approvals to launch the service.

#curl - Curl, the command-line tool/library for transferring data with URLs, has shut down its bug bounty program. They were receiving too many AI slop reports and it consumed too much of their time to skim through them and determine the genuine ones that they decided to scrap the programme entirely.

#X-Algorithm - X (Formerly Twitter) released their algorithm.

#AI - Tech CEOs are admitting (together we may add) that AI isn’t giving the promised returns and that 95% of AI pilots have failed to deliver meaningful efficiency gains or cost savings.

#Chrome - Google Chrome was spotted with a new feature in their experimental build - vertical tabs.

Zomato Founder Deepinder Goyal Steps Down As Parent Company Eternal’s CEO
Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Eternal, the parent company of Zomato, is stepping down from his position. Blinkit’s CEO, Albinder Dhindsa, will replace him on February 1, as Goyal remains on the board of directors as vice chairman.

Indian Voice Startup Bolna Secures $6.3m Seed Round
Bolna is a voice orchestration startup that connects and manages AI voice technologies, helping businesses in India with customer support, sales, and hiring. It has seen growth in both call volumes and revenue, handling 200,000 calls per day and nearing $700,000 in ARR. The company has a self-serve platform and a team of engineers for custom implementations, with clients including Spinny, Snabbit, and beverage companies.

Iconic Sony Bravia TVs No Longer Owned By Sony
Sony, the Japanese tech giant behind popular Bravia TVs, is partnering with Chinese company TCL to outsource its TV business, allowing TCL to use the Bravia brand and Sony's tech to boost sales, particularly in the premium market.

YouTube - Removing custom subtitles, including SRV3 and YTT captions, used by popular creators like Hololive.

Adobe Acrobat - Adds AI-powered editing and summarization features, including chat-based editing, podcast generation, and visual presentation creation.

YouTube - Creators can now use AI to make Shorts featuring their own likeness.

X - Introduces Starterpacks, a new discovery feature showcasing top accounts in various niches and countries to help users find relevant content.

Agent Skills Specification - A new spec by Anthropic that is gaining traction - Skills feature, allowing agents to discover and use procedural knowledge and context to perform tasks more accurately and efficiently.

Threads - Expanding Ads to All Markets Globally, Offering Enhanced User Experience and Simplified Account Management

OpenAI - Will now predict age of the user to restrict content

jQuery - Version 4.0 is now available

Prashanth HN from AWS explores the synergy between serverless architecture and Agentic AI, emphasizing how event-driven systems like AWS Lambda, Step Functions, and EventBridge power autonomous agents. He highlights using LLMs for "thinking" while tools like MCP servers provide data access. The talk covers orchestrating complex workflows, parallel execution with Step Functions, and serverless vector storage options.

Mallika Rao explains how distributed systems principles like autonomy, fault tolerance, and eventual consistency provide a mental model for scaling leadership influence. She suggests that staff engineers should design organizational protocols and redundancy instead of just writing code. This strategy builds resilient teams that function effectively even without direct intervention.

Your AI coding agents need a manager
The shape of the work is changing as orchestration becomes more mainstream. The skills that make someone a strong tech lead or manager translate directly to AI coding. Once you’re running multiple agents in parallel, you stop just debugging context and start managing a team.

Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills
As AI coding agents advance, software engineers must focus on communication skills to succeed in their roles, making empathy and effective teamwork essential in the industry.