🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #578

Thursday's here - time to shine before the weekend!

ICYMI - a surprise for our readers - check out our Brand New Events And Hackathons Listing Page. Try it out - and respond to this email to let us know your thoughts on it.

#Claude - Researchers have found that if you want Claude to speak nicely to you - try talking to it in Hindi!! This study was conducted by Anthropic themselves so it’s not a biased report.

#OpenAI - Rumour has it that OpenAI is set to enter the hardware market with a portable, screenless smart speaker, described as a computer built for AI to aid productivity. The device features a camera, sensors, and advanced AI models, allowing it to understand user context and surroundings.

#Meta - Meta recently laid of a significant number of its employees - who have now sued it claiming that whom to layoff was identified by AI and not by humans.

Zepto To Launch Premium Grocery Service 'Select'
Zepto is launching Select, a premium grocery service within its app, offering curated imported foods, gourmet products, and other high-end items. Select will compete with existing services like FirstClub and Blinkit Gourmet, targeting affluent consumers in top Indian cities.

Swiggy's Instamart Partners With Hpcl To Deliver Cooking Gas Cylinders
Swiggy's Instamart has partnered with Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited to deliver cooking gas cylinders to customers' doorsteps in Bengaluru, with pricing following state-regulated oil marketing rates.

India's Big Bet On Smartphone Manufacturing
India unveiled a ₹625 billion smartphone manufacturing scheme and a ₹1.28 trillion semiconductor push to draw global electronics supply chains away from China. The five-year scheme rewards manufacturers with incentives and aims to create 60,000 direct jobs, with production expected to reach ₹39 trillion by 2031.

Anna's Historic Space Flight
NASA astronaut Anil Menon is set to launch into space with Russian crewmates, marking his first spaceflight after years of training as a flight surgeon. His wife Anna Menon, who flew on the Polaris Dawn mission in 2024, is on hand to witness the launch, accompanied by their children and friends, including former SpaceX commander and current NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.

Emergent Raises $130 Million In Series C Funding Round
Indian AI coding startup Emergent just raised $130 million in funding at a $1.5 billion valuation. They're targeting small businesses and entrepreneurs who need help with coding, and they've already got over 200,000 paying customers. They're looking to compete with other big players in the market, but they think their focus on non-technical users is what sets them apart.

Google Opens Up Android To Third-party App Stores
Google allows third-party app stores to access its app catalog starting July 22, following a court order related to its settlement with Epic Games. Third-party stores will be downloadable from within Google Play, but must pay a $5,000 upfront fee and annual maintenance fee to access the Play catalog.

Nvidia And TCS Partner To Accelerate AI-led Mobility And Industrial Solutions
Indian IT services giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is teaming up with NVIDIA to create a physical AI facility at its Bengaluru campus, aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of AI-led solutions in mobility and manufacturing.

Hinge - The app now provides a simple tool to categorize and control various types of cookies used for functionality, performance, and advertising purposes.

Cloudflare - You can now deploy a static site to Cloudflare without requiring a Cloudflare account, with the option to claim the deployment and connect a domain, enable observability, and control access.

Spotify - Younger users can now have their own profiles with personalized recommendations and playlists, and parents can control their content with features like explicit content filtering and profile restrictions.

Ishit Vachhrajani, an AWS leader, discusses the transition from automation to agency in AI. He highlights the dropping costs of intelligence and the rise of agentic systems that can plan, reason, and act autonomously. He emphasizes the need for a modern organizational design, real-time trust infrastructure, and a culture of learning to successfully scale agentic AI.

Philipp Schmid from Google DeepMind explains why developers must not deploy AI agent skills without rigorous evaluations. He highlights why vibe checks fail in production and provides practical tips for designing lean, directive skills. Schmid advocates using automated tests, such as LLM-as-a-judge, to continuously evaluate and retire skills.

Abhishek Bhardwaj of OpenAI discusses designing secure, reliable agent sandbox clouds to run untrusted code at scale. He compares runtime isolation methods like containers, gVisor, and microVMs, highlighting the safety advantages of virtualization. He also explains the importance of disk persistence (via snapshotting) and orchestration strategies to maintain agent progress across nodes.

ICYMI - a surprise for our readers - check out our Brand New Events And Hackathons Listing Page. Try it out - and respond to this email to let us know your thoughts on it.

AI Torches Junior Programming Market
The market for junior programmers has collapsed, with a 19% decline in employment among software developers aged 22-25, while older developers see a 14% increase.

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.