Quick notes: Advertising blitz | Cleantech ecosystem...

• WhatsApp scrambles as users fret over privacy: The reaction in India - where 400 million users exchange more messages on WhatsApp than anywhere in the world - has forced the messaging app to unleash an advertising blitz costing tens of millions of rupees this week in at least 10 English and Hindi newspapers.




• China’s Plan to Take Over the Global Economy: China kept Google on the far side of the Great Firewall of China. It did so to allow Tencent, Baidu, and other Chinese companies to come up the learning curve without getting stifled in the cradle by American competition.
  
  Huawei is building the world’s biggest Cloud computing capacity and racing to design the world’s fastest artificial-intelligence processors. And behind Huawei stands the Chinese government’s massive commitment to supercomputing, and — most ominously — to quantum computing. Americans are busy with the valuation of competing providers of streaming video, the relative merits of e-commerce platforms at Amazon and Walmart, and the profitability of the 110th smartphone dating app. The Chinese want to transform the way we live. They do the physics, and we do the apps.
  
  In principle, China’s virtual empire is just an extension of what Facebook, Google, and Amazon have been doing for years. They don’t steal your data, although you may not be aware of how much personal information you hand over to them every day.


- The myth of India's IT prowess: Big Fat Lie

The main casualty of the Big Tech crackdown is the myth of India’s “strategic autonomy” & the myth of its “IT prowess”. If the country accepted such a huge lie that was visible in plain sight, imagine how bad the state of India’s defence & foreign policy is, cloaked in secrecy.

— Abhijit Iyer-Mitra (@Iyervval) January 13, 2021




• A vibrant Cleantech startup ecosystem takes root in India: The rise of renewables is forcing utilities and other energy stakeholders to make the grid smarter, more resilient and efficient.



• RISC-V: The Linux of the chip world, is starting to produce technological breakthroughs.
  
  Move over, ARM: BeagleV is a $150 RISC-V computer designed to run Linux