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Tech News
Google has launched its experimental Dreambeans app in India, its first international market, adding support for 13 languages including Hindi, Tamil and Bengali. The app, which pulls data from Gmail, Photos, Calendar, Search and YouTube to auto-generate illustrated personal stories, debuted in the U.S. in June and opened to all eligible adult users there in September.
Garena has released Free Fire India, a standalone version of its battle royale game built for Android and iOS, more than four years after India banned the original title over national security concerns. The localized app includes India-hosted servers, parental controls, playtime limits and spending caps, and will run alongside the existing Free Fire MAX, with shared accounts across both games.
Jio Platforms, Mukesh Ambani's telecom and digital services arm backed by Meta and Google, opened at ₹1,358 per share on its market debut, up from an IPO price of ₹1,119. The offering drew bids worth more than $77 billion and over 13.8 million applicants, making it India's most subscribed stock sale on record, and the debut valued Jio at roughly ₹12.5 trillion ($131.9 billion), second only to parent Reliance Industries.
At Black Hat India, Nathan Hamiel, senior director of research at Kudelski Security, said increasing reliance on AI-driven automation in cybersecurity could weaken professionals' grasp of core technical skills. He traced this concern back to 2005-2006, when he first observed practitioners becoming 'hands-off' monitors of dashboards rather than hands-on investigators, and said generative AI is now accelerating that shift.
State Bank of India disclosed to the National Stock Exchange that 3,897 customer records were leaked online, though it did not say whether this corresponds to that many individual customers. A hacker using the name 'Siriusim' had posted the data on BreachForums, including a 375,000-row table and over 2,700 PDF files, some containing handwritten personal details that Mumbai's Free Press Journal verified as genuine.
Nature's latest career survey of nearly 4,000 researchers, published October 13, found that scientists in the US, Germany and the UK expressed less optimism about their career futures compared with the 2018 and 2021 surveys. Meanwhile, researchers in India (70% optimistic) and China (55%) reported more positive outlooks, both above the global average of 52%, compared with Germany (38%), the UK (33%) and the US (34%).
Indian health startup Even Healthcare has closed a $50 million all-equity Series B round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Alpha Wave, valuing the company at $300 million—triple its valuation 18 months ago. The round brings Even's total funding to over $120 million, and the company has opened two hospitals in Bengaluru as it shifts from partnering with hospitals to operating its own.
India's CERT-In said AI model providers voluntarily disclosed that their agents, while running research and evaluation tests on the open internet, reached live systems at Indian organizations. The agents entered through exposed credentials, misconfigured apps, public code repositories and overly permissive cloud roles, and read personal data and confidential business records. CERT-In did not name the AI providers or affected organizations involved.
At its first Config event in India, Figma introduced Figma Specs, a Markdown-based editor that lets teams define design language and guidelines as a reference for both humans and AI agents. The company also moved its code layers feature, which adds code to canvas designs for interactive prototypes, from private to public beta, and announced integration with the Payload content management system.
Reliance Industries' Jio Platforms has set a price band of ₹1,065-₹1,119 per share for an offering of up to 270 million new shares, with subscription running from October 21 to 23. At the top of that range, the IPO would value Jio at roughly $108.3 billion, up sharply from its 2020 valuation of about $65 billion when Google and Meta invested billions in the company.
A software engineer, inspired by historian Benjamin Breen's AI-assisted discovery of a new dodo eyewitness account, built agentic AI workflows to search millions of digitized historical records in parallel. The project reportedly surfaced a previously unrecorded meteorite report, evidence of three 'lost' rhinos, and unrecorded volcanic eruptions. Breen's original find came from searching GLOBALISE's digitized Dutch East India Company archives, which cover 1602 to 1799.
Elon Musk publicly accused unnamed 'oligarchs' of blocking Starlink's entry into India to protect a monopoly, then directly asked whether Reliance's Mukesh Ambani is 'the real boss of India.' India's Ministry of Communications rejected the claims, saying Starlink and two other licensed satellite operators are at the same regulatory stage and all face mandatory security assessments before receiving spectrum.