
US court holds Byju in contempt; Apple's new India-born COO
Also in the letter:
US court to Byju Raveendran: Pay $10K daily until you comply
Driving the news:
Backstory:
Also Read:
Compounding trouble:
The big picture:
Also Read:
Sabih Khan, an Indian-origin executive at Apple, elevated to COO role
Handing over:
How he got here:
Khan joined Apple in 1995 from GE Plastics, starting in procurement.
He climbed the ladder steadily, becoming senior vice president of operations in 2019.
Since then, he's led Apple's global supply chain, earning praise from Cook as one of its 'central architects.'
Also Read:
In other Apple moves:
Apple will go up against Disney-owned ESPN, whose exclusive negotiating window has ended.
Netflix is also reportedly in the mix.
The rights could cost upwards of $121 million per year starting from the 2026 season.
Also Read:
Sponsor ETtech Top 5 & Morning Dispatch!
Why it matters:
The opportunity:
Reach a highly engaged audience of decision-makers.
Boost your brand's visibility among the tech-savvy community.
Custom sponsorship options to align with your brand's goals.
What's next:
WhatsApp calling shakes up enterprise telecom
Coming soon:
What could this mean?
Case in point:
Why the rush?
Short-form video's leap to TV could reshape India's digital commerce playbook
Shift to big screen:
The small-town creator boom is contributing to this expansion. Google, Nallur said, works with brands to identify new trends and collaborate with local creators to generate genuine traction in regional markets.
Discovery to purchase:
A Google-commissioned survey revealed that 72% of Indian users discover new products through Shorts, with a similar proportion claiming that it influences their purchasing decisions.
Also Read:
AI gone too far: xAI's Grok draws flak for antisemitic remarks as 'MechaHitler'
What's the matter?
In one, Grok replied to a post by a Jewish user celebrating the deaths of children in the Texas floods. The bot linked Jewish surnames to anti-white hate and praised Hitler as someone 'who would have spotted the pattern and handled it decisively.'
In another instance, asked to tell a joke, Grok replied: "Hey! Sure, I know a classic: Why do Jews have big noses? Because air is free!"
Also Read:
A US bankruptcy court has held Byju Raveendran in civil contempt for ignoring multiple court orders tied to Byju's US unit. This and more in today's ETtech Top 5.■ WhatsApp eyes enterprise telecom■ Brands play around short-form video■ Grok's antisemitism problemByju Raveendran, cofounder, Byju'sThe legal firestorm around Byju Raveendran, the cofounder of edtech startup Byju's, just got hotter. A US bankruptcy court has found the edtech founder in civil contempt for repeatedly ignoring court orders related to Byju's US arm, Alpha.A Delaware judge slammed it as a 'strategic and patterned failure' to submit basic documents or show up in court. Raveendran will have to pay a daily fine of $10,000 until he complies.The case stems from a lawsuit by lenders who accuse Raveendran and his wife, Divya Gokulnath, and former senior executive Anita Kishore of hiding and misusing $533 million from a loan to Alpha.Back home, Raveendran is battling creditors keen to oust him from Aakash Institute's board and overhaul governance at Byju's parent, Think & Learn.From poster child of India's edtech boom to global cautionary tale, Byju's unravelling is a masterclass in how scale without structure can spiral. With lawsuits, fire sales, and a founder scrambling to stay afloat, Byju's fall is as dramatic as its rise.Sabih Khan, COO, AppleAnother day, another India-born executive climbing to the top of global tech.Moradabad-born Sabih Khan is poised to become Apple's next chief operating officer , succeeding the retiring Jeff Williams , the iPhone maker announced on Tuesday. Khan, who has spent nearly 30 years at Apple, will assume the role later this month.Williams, 62, is retiring after a 27-year tenure at Apple. He will continue to report to CEO Tim Cook and oversee the company's design team, along with the Apple Watch and Health app, for now, with his official retirement scheduled for later this year.The tech giant is revving up its Formula One ambitions. After the buzz around its Brad Pitt-led F1 film (and its strong box office performance ), Apple is now chasing US streaming rights for the sport, according to the Financial Times.ETtech Top 5 and Morning Dispatch are must-reads for India's tech and business leaders, including startup founders, investors, policy makers, industry insiders and employees.Interested? Reach out to us at spotlightpartner@timesinternet.in to explore sponsorship opportunities.WhatsApp is entering the enterprise voice market , and telcos may want to prepare themselves.Launching in India on July, WhatsApp Calling for businesses is already attracting major names such as Thomas Cook, Redcliffe Labs, and HCG Hospitals.Smoother support calls, AI-powered agents, and interactive features (like sending reports or payment links mid-call).Thomas Cook, for example, shifted 14% of its forex queries to WhatsApp in just 10 days, reducing call centre costs by 25% and turning support into a new sales channel. Redcliffe Labs anticipates that up to 40% of voice traffic will transition to WhatsApp within a few years.India's dirt-cheap data rates (as low as Rs 5/GB) make OTT calling almost free. Telcos are sweating. GlobalData expects India's telecom voice revenues to fall from $11.5 billion now to $10.1 billion by 2029.Short-form video, once limited to smartphones, is now making a bold push into televisions across India , and brands are taking notice. With platforms like Google transforming into full-funnel commerce engines, this shift is altering how companies interact with a rapidly growing, digital-first audience.Harsha Nallur, head of vertical business for ecommerce at Google India, told us that YouTube Shorts is no longer just 'a mobile phenomenon', adding that it is bridging phones and TV screens, and helping brands and creators reach wider audiences, especially beyond the metros.Once regarded as a brand discovery tool, Shorts now operates across the entire funnel, from generating awareness to encouraging purchase intent.Grok, the chatbot built by Elon Musk's AI startup xAI, deleted several posts from X after being accused of pushing antisemitic content.Multiple X users, along with the Anti-Defamation League, flagged Grok for posts that echoed antisemitic tropes and even praised Adolf Hitler.There were several disturbing examples (many of which are now deleted).
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Time of India
24 minutes ago
- Time of India
Quick commerce is the new battleground: How brands are adapting, scaling and winning the 10-minute race
Bengaluru: Quick commerce , once an emerging experiment, has now become a growth engine for new-age brands and legacy players alike. At the recently held panel discussion at ETRetail's E-commerce & Digital Natives Summit 2025, titled 'Instant Impact: What Brands Must Get Right in Quick Commerce Ecosystems' moderated by Jivraj Singh Sachar, Investor and Podcaster, Indian Silicon Valley , founders and senior leaders across categories shared how they are decoding the unique opportunities and constraints of this fast-evolving channel. Vinay Maheshwari, Founder and CEO, The Health Factory , said his brand was an early mover in quick commerce. 'Traditional trade is very difficult to penetrate when you're doing retail and get that distribution right. It takes brands years and years of experience, and I believe that every new channel gives rise to new brands. And quick commerce is that level playing field where national players and the D2C/new age brands get a level playing ground,' he said. He emphasised how quick commerce allows for rapid national expansion. 'Now you can do 40 cities in the span of six months. If you've got your operations ready, you've got your manufacturing ready... at least from a distribution standpoint, it gives you leverage into the Indian ecosystem.' Pallav Bihani, Founder and CEO, Boldfit , admitted initial scepticism about his fitness accessories selling on 10-minute platforms. 'We never thought people would buy yoga mats on Blinkit… but I think it's the new reality,' he said. 'Quick commerce works well if you've built a lot of awareness elsewhere. Not a great platform to build discoverability unless you're in a very specific use case. But once that awareness is there, it becomes a great channel to capitalise on the demand you've created.' He warned that brands ignoring this channel could risk being forgotten. 'It's to capture the intent that's there. Brands that are not there on quick commerce right now stand a huge risk of being forgotten.' Ankur Goel, COO, Epigamia (Drums Food International) , shared that his experience underscored the platform's strength in consumption and flexibility. 'Quick commerce is a lot less prone to seasonality,' he said, explaining that reduced store footfalls during rains don't affect consumption thanks to at-home delivery. 'If I wanted to eat one cup of Greek yogurt, I will end up ordering a pack of four.' Highlighting the marketing opportunities unique to quick commerce, he added, 'Epigamia is a breakfast option at 9am, a mid-meal snack at 12pm, a post-workout snack at 6pm, a dessert post 10pm. The flexibility with quick commerce is that I can tailor my communication depending on the actual use case, a luxury traditional retail doesn't offer.' Rahul Kumar Srivastava, COO, Parag Milk Foods , noted that while 95 per cent of their business still comes from traditional channels, quick commerce is seeing exponential growth. 'We are still learning,' he said. 'We manufacture ghee under Govardhan, cheese under Go, farm-to-home milk under Pride of Cows, and sports nutrition under Avvatar. Each has a preferred channel, but we're seeing tremendous growth on quick commerce across categories from milk to paneer, yoghurt to flavoured milk.' He highlighted operational challenges. 'We have to manage micro inventory for very hyperlocal fulfilment. Milk has a two-day shelf life, curd is 15 days, paneer is 20… how are you going to handle 40-50% growth with perishable commodities?' Akshay Gulati, Co-Founder and CEO, Slikk , which operates in fashion and lifestyle, discussed how apparel presents unique challenges for Q-commerce. 'Fashion and lifestyle is an input-difficult business,' he said. "Generally, other verticals are output difficult. But here, supply chain is complex, with brands having thousands of SKUs.' Since quick commerce is real-estate constrained at the backend, SKU selection becomes critical. 'You have to be super careful in terms of what you put in your dark store and whether it's loved by customers… it's very important to get that Pareto right,' he said, referring to the 80/20 rule of sales concentration. 'The biggest challenge is replan. Fashion has a longer lifecycle. It's capital intensive, recovery is slower. So, we've focused deeply on understanding supply chain better than traditional marketplaces.' Aniket Shah, Co-Founder and CEO, Swish , a brand focused on 10-minute food delivery, spoke about competing in a space dominated by giants like Zomato and Swiggy. 'Food has the highest product-market fit when it comes to 10 minutes,' he said. 'Everyone wants everything from chai to dessert, delivered quickly.' To build a differentiated product, Shah focused on infra-first innovation. 'Even if there's one bad experience, not just on time but on quality, people just tend not to order again. So consistency and quality is very important. We have started imagining how the infrastructure for kitchens should be built so that food can be prepared faster."
&w=3840&q=100)

Business Standard
24 minutes ago
- Business Standard
New EU Russia curbs may bolster Indian oil refiners' reliance on traders
Indian private refiners that have leveraged cheap Russian crude to boost margins will be forced to find workarounds and rely more on traders to find new markets for their products after the latest round of European Union sanctions, traders and industry sources said. Russia is India's top oil supplier, and refiners such as Reliance Industries and Nayara Energy have benefited in recent years from pressure on Russian crude prices from sanctions linked to its invasion of Ukraine. Many have then exported refined products to buyers in Europe. However in its 18th package of sanctions against Russia, approved on Friday, the European bloc banned imports of refined petroleum products made from Russian crude coming from third countries, excluding a handful of Western nations. It has also placed direct sanctions on Nayara Energy, a refinery backed by Russian oil major Rosneft. The package will be phased in over six months. Reliance, India's largest buyer of Russian oil and refined products exporter, shipped an average of 2.83 million barrels of diesel and 1.5 million barrels of jet fuel per month to Europe in the first seven months of this year, LSEG shiptracking data showed. That roughly accounted for nearly 30% and 60% of its respective exports of the two products. Nayara Energy typically exports four million barrels or more of refined products including diesel, jet fuel, gasoline and naphtha per month, though only jet fuel typically heads to European markets, LSEG and Kpler shiptracking data showed. Under the sanctions, traders are likely to play a bigger role in placing refined products made from Russian crude, the sources said. Given the long phase-in time, they are likely to get creative with routes, they added. For diesel, traders are likely to swap Indian supplies with Middle East cargoes for export to Europe, Singapore-based traders said. They may also ship Indian cargoes to floating storage facilities in the Middle East or West Africa to be re-exported, they added. For jet fuel, Indian refiners may either divert cargoes to local markets or ship supplies to Asia, they said. Reliance and Nayara did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The changes will benefit traders by generating more trade flows, but will be costly for producers and consumers, said an Asian trader. Europe, heading into winter, may have to pay higher prices for refined fuel, he added. Nayara said in a statement on Monday it condemned the EU's "unjust and unilateral" decision to impose sanctions on the company, while India said on Friday it does not support the EU's "unilateral sanctions". Indian state refiners, which also buy Russian crude, are likely to be less affected by the sanctions as they sell most of their fuel locally and export through tenders, mostly to buyers in Asia, including Singapore, refining sources said. Indian state refiner Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd said the company's diesel exports were unlikely to be affected by the latest sanctions. Traders in recent months sold some of MRPL's diesel parcels in the UK, according to LSEG. "We don't directly sell our diesel to the end customer. It is all picked up through a tendering process by a trader," managing director M Shyamprasad Kamath said, adding that he does not see problems in selling refined fuels due to the sanctions. Following the EU sanctions, Nayara Energy amended the terms of a naphtha tender issued on Monday to obtain payment in advance, a tender document seen by Reuters showed. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)


Time of India
24 minutes ago
- Time of India
Instamart CEO Amitesh Jha on quick commerce, hyperlocal bets and winning the Indian consumer one ad at a time
Bengaluru: 'If I like the campaign, maybe it's a problem,' says Amitesh Jha with a laugh. 'If I'm confused or scandalised, then the marketing team is doing something right.' In a landscape where 10-minute delivery is no longer the headline but the hygiene, India's most agile quick commerce player is doubling down on localised SKU curation , brand launches, and campaigns. At the ETRetail E-commerce & Digital Natives Summit in Bengaluru, Instamart CEO Amitesh Jha sat down for a candid fireside chat offering deep insight into what it takes to run and grow a quick commerce engine in India's most demanding consumer climate. The Indian consumer, decoded (again and again) 'The Indian consumer changes fast, sometimes even faster than we can model,' Jha observed. 'But some fundamentals never change. They want affordability, trust, convenience and speed. These needs are timeless and they apply to Gen Z as much as to a boomer.' Quick commerce, he explains, is far more local than it appears. "It's a micromarket business. You can't win by applying national playbooks. What sells in Bucha is very different from what sells in MG Road or Palam Vihar.' At Instamart, assortment decisions are made not just city-wise, but pin code by pin code. 'You're constrained by time and space. We can't offer an infinite aisle like traditional ecommerce. So we go hyperlocal .' This, he says, is what makes the job challenging and fascinating. 'We sometimes find that two cities in the same state say, Hyderabad and Guntur, can have a 50% difference in their top-performing food SKUs.' A market of surprises, not assumptions What excites Jha is how unpredictable demand can be. 'Every six months, our mental models change. A tier 3 town with five lakh people suddenly starts clocking tier 1-like growth. We're constantly recalibrating.' He's clear on one thing: brands or platforms that get rigid about their assumptions are bound to lose. ' Consumer demand in India is fluid. If you're not evolving every quarter, you're already behind.' The art of going viral Instamart's mango drop campaign, where the colour of the fruit changed depending on the weather, was one such bold move. 'We couldn't run it in Bangalore because it was too cloudy,' Jha chuckled. 'But that's what made it interesting. We don't just want people to watch an ad. We want them to discuss it, debate it, share it.' But he is quick to clarify: good branding doesn't always show up in next-day dashboards. 'You have to be consistent, long-term, and sometimes uncomfortably bold. If the campaign is making too much sense to the senior leadership… it probably won't go viral.'