Author: Punit Panchal

New Delhi: Google wants you to make a video game by typing what you’d like it to be. On Wednesday the company rolled out Playground, an experimental platform where you describe a game in plain text and the thing gets built, then you play it in your browser. That’s the pitch, anyway. According to Google’s announcement, written by software engineer Maryam Karimzadehgan, you can start from a blank canvas, remix a starter prompt, or take some guided help shaping an idea. After that you keep talking to it. Change the physics, rewrite the rules, swap out the characters, rebuild the…

New Delhi: Dispute between relatives controlling one of the nation’s most popular car brands finally takes steps toward court. The reports and social media posts that were circulated on Friday Sunday state that the children of Venu and Mallika Srinivasan have not been able to settle on the division of the family assets. Two sides, one memorandum The case involves a fight between Venu Srinivasan and his son Sudarshan Venu, on one hand, and Mallika Srinivasan and her daughter Lakshmi Venu on the other. Venu Srinivasan and Sudarshan head TVS Motor and Holdings, while Lakshmi runs the business of Sundaram…

New Delhi: OPPO will unveil the Find X10 series on October 21 in Mallorca, Spain, the company said Thursday. The pitch is simple: cameras first, everything else second. The lineup has two phones, the Find X10 and the Find X10 Pro Max. OPPO is making a big claim about the Pro Max. It says this is the first smartphone with 200MP sensors on the ultra-wide, main and telephoto cameras, all co-developed with Hasselblad. The standard Find X10 gets two 200MP cameras. Whether more megapixels mean better photos is an old argument, and OPPO’s launch will have to settle it with…

New Delhi: Elon Musk has accused unnamed Indian business interests of blocking entry of Starlink in the country and the government has responded within one day. The exchange has brought up a five-year-old issue that SpaceX has been dealing with in India: why’s the service not live? On X, Musk stated that certain oligarchs were attempting to monopolize the market and blocking access to Starlink, and gave his followers a list of one or two names to guess, concluding his description by calling it a “crime against the Indian people.” He didn’t say who or what they were, nor did…

New Delhi: Garmin’s CIRQA is a better-specced band than Google’s Fitbit Air on paper. Whether it beats it is a different question, and the Rs 12,000 gap between them makes that hard to answer. Start with the price. Garmin has priced the CIRQA at Rs. 25,990 in India. Google’s Fitbit Air went on sale on October 2 at Rs 13,999. That’s nearly double. It also lands above Whoop, whose entry plan starts at ₹21,990 with a 12-month membership. A Garmin band costing more than Whoop is not where most people expected this to land. So what does the extra money…

New Delhi: Gravelly voiced veteran actor Nana Patekar has passed away in Goa on Thursday. He was 75. Dr Shekhar Salkar of Manipal Hospital had certified his death as 5.20 am after a major cardiac arrest at his residence. CPR had to be done almost continually for 45 minutes, but failed to revive him. His colleagues and fans were reportedly surprised by the news since he had made a public appearance in Goa just a few days ago. Vishwanath Patekar was born in Murud-Janjira, Raigad district in Maharashtra on 1 January 1951 and studied at the Sir J.J. Institute of…

New Delhi: Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) is yet again making headlines for its ReRoute solution. The company has posted on X on October 4, explaining that at its Nagothane factory it is creating lengthier roads using end-of-life plastic. How much is Reliance investing? No investment figure comes out for the project from RIL’s announcement, nor does the post refer to any figure. There is no evidence of ReRoute being a significant capex programme, but rather a technology and service offering that requires low levels of capital investment. The company has laid almost 40 km of road by mixing 50 tonnes…

New Delhi: Vivo has put a mixed reality headset in front of Indian audiences for the first time. The company showed the Vivo Vision Discovery Edition at its Vivo NEXT event on October 6, and it’s the brand’s first move into spatial computing here. The numbers come first. The headset weighs 398 grams, which Vivo calls ultra light. It runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 platform and uses 8K dual binocular Micro-OLED displays. Navigation is by eye and hand tracking, so there’s no controller to hold. Comfort is where Vivo seems to have put real effort. The company says…

New Delhi: World Animal Day falls on October 4, and an animal protection activist of long standing, Mr. Ambani, Executive Director of the Reliance Industries, has initiated a campaign called Champions of Care, that is running nationwide via Vantara, as part of the week-long celebration. It is designed to provide short-, medium- and long-term assistance to groups around the country who take care of community animals. Over 50 animal welfare groups from various states are connected to the programme. They take care of street dogs and cats, working animals like cattle, donkeys and horses as well as different types of…

New Delhi: On Tuesday, OpenAI shared a massive library of mathematics facts that it says it generated with an “extremely cutting-edge” model it developed internally. The company has uploaded 722 manuscripts to GitHub in 372 result families. They are taken from tests carried out on the model when it was pitted against approximately 4000 unsolved problems, like in number theory and computer science. In a post on X, OpenAI stated that it has taken advice from and relied on the recommendations of the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence from the Institute for Advanced Study, influencing the way…