Latest news with #India-born
India Today
12 hours ago
- Business
- India Today
From Agra to edge of space: Arvi Bahal to fly on Bezos' Blue Origin spaceflight
India-born businessman Arvi Bahal is all set to travel to space aboard Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin NS-34 mission. This mission is the 14th human flight under the New Shepard programme and the 34th in its history. Indian-American Bahal will travel to space as part of the six-member far, Blue Origin has flown 70 people above the Karaman line, the internationally recognised boundary of space, offering brief moments of weightlessness and a panoramic view of the Karman Line, set at an altitude of 100 kilometres above sea level, is widely recognised as the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. The live webcast on launch day will start 30 minutes before lift off, according to the US-based space technology Bahal on the flight are Turkish businessman Gkhan Erdem, meteorologist Deborah Martorell, teacher Lionel Pitchford, repeat flier JD Russell, and Justin Sun – a tech entrepreneur and the original $28 million winning bidder for the first New Shepard seat in IS ARVI BAHAL?Arvi Bahal is a real estate investor born in Agra and is now a naturalised US citizen.A lifelong traveller and adventurer, Bahal has visited every country in the world, the North and South Poles, and skydived on Mount Everest and the Pyramids of Giza. He holds a private pilot's licence and also flies helicopters, according to Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp expressed enthusiasm for the company's mission, highlighting the growing momentum of its space tourism program."Looking forward to our sixth New Shepard launch this year and welcoming back our fifth astronaut to fly twice! Proud to have this international crew as we continue opening up space to people from all backgrounds," Limp said in a post on Gopichand Thotakura was the first Indian to venture into space as a tourist as part of Blue Origin's New Shepard-25 (NS-25) ACCOMPANYING ARVI BAHAL ALSO BIG LEAGUERSGkhan Erdem is a Turkish businessman and a board member of Erdem Holding, a diverse group of companies operating in the energy, telecommunications, construction, and manufacturing of his professional responsibilities, Gkhan is a passionate space enthusiast and an avid photographer. Deeply inspired by space exploration, he dreams of one day travelling to the International Space Station and possibly even beyond, Blue Origin wrote on its third crew member's name is Deborah Martorell. She is a Puerto Rican meteorologist and journalist. Her reporting on environmental and space topics has garnered eight Emmy Awards and two Awards of Excellence in Science Reporting from the American Meteorological Society, according to Blue fourth crew member is Lionel Pitchford, an Englishman who has spent the last four decades in Spain working as a teacher, translator, and tour guide as a means to travel the world. In 1992, following a plane crash with his sister and her family onboard, Lionel founded a nonprofit in Nepal dedicated to serving disadvantaged children and girls, Blue Origin fifth member is JD Russel, an entrepreneur and founder of Alpha Funds, a technology-focused venture capital company, and Alpha Aerospace, an aerospace consulting and solutions company. He founded the Victoria Russell Foundation to honour the memory of his deceased foundation is dedicated to supporting children's education and assisting the families of first responders, Bezos's Blue Origin wrote about his Sun is the Ambassador and former Permanent Representative of Grenada to the World Trade Organisation, founder of TRON - a cryptocurrency with an associated blockchain DAO ecosystem, and advisor to HTX - one of the world's largest crypto exchanges. A protege of Alibaba's Jack Ma, Sun was featured on the cover of Forbes Magazine in April 2025, where he was recognised as one of the most dynamic and outspoken figures in crypto, earning the moniker "Crypto's Billionaire Barker" for his bold approach to innovation, advocacy, and industry leadership.- EndsMust Watch
Straits Times
15-07-2025
- Straits Times
‘World's oldest marathon runner' dies at age 114 in road accident
Find out what's new on ST website and app. Mr Fauja Singh, in a photo taken after a 10km event of the Hong Kong Marathon on Feb 24, 2013, was not certified as the oldest marathon runner as he could not prove his age. NEW DELHI – India's Mr Fauja Singh, believed to be the world's oldest distance runner, has died in a road accident at age 114, his biographer said July 15 . Mr Singh, an India-born British national, nicknamed the 'Turbaned Tornado', died after being hit by a vehicle in Punjab state's Jalandhar district on July 14 . 'My Turbaned Tornado is no more,' Mr Singh's biographer, Mr Khushwant Singh, wrote on X. 'He was struck by an unidentified vehicle... in his village, Bias, while crossing the road. Rest in peace, my dear Fauja.' Mr Singh did not have a birth certificate but his family said he was born on April 1, 1911. He ran full 42km marathons till the age of 100. His last race was a 10km event at the 2013 Hong Kong Marathon when he was 101, where he finished in one hour, 32 minutes and 28 seconds. Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Singapore $3b money laundering case: MinLaw acts against 4 law firms, 1 lawyer over seized properties Singapore Air India crash: SIA, Scoot find no issues with Boeing 787 fuel switches after precautionary checks Opinion What we can do to fight the insidious threat of 'zombie vapes' Singapore $230,000 in fines issued after MOM checks safety at over 500 workplaces from April to June Business 'Some cannot source outside China': S'pore firms' challenges and support needed amid US tariffs Opinion Sumiko at 61: Everything goes south when you age, changing your face from a triangle to a rectangle Multimedia From local to global: What made top news in Singapore over the last 180 years? Singapore 'Nobody deserves to be alone': Why Mummy and Acha have fostered over 20 children in the past 22 years India-born British national Fauja Singh waving a Hong Kong flag after crossing the finish line in the 10km event of the Hong Kong Marathon on Feb 24, 2013. FILE PHOTO: AFP He became an international sensation after taking up distance running at the ripe old age of 89, after the death of his wife and one of his sons, inspired by seeing marathons on television. Although widely regarded as the world's oldest marathon runner, he was not certified by Guinness World Records as he could not prove his age, saying that birth certificates did not exist when he was born under British colonial rule in 2011. Mr Singh was a torchbearer for the Olympics at Athens 2004 and London 2012, and appeared in advertisements with sports stars such as David Beckham and Muhammad Ali. His strength and vitality were credited to a routine of farm walks and a diet including Indian sweet 'laddu', packed with dry fruits and home-churned curd. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid tribute on social media. 'Fauja Singh was extraordinary because of his unique persona and the manner in which he inspired the youth of India on a very important topic of fitness,' said Mr Modi on X 'He was an exceptional athlete with incredible determination. Pained by his passing away. My thoughts are with his family and countless admirers around the world.' AFP
Indian Express
13-07-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Apple needs a new CEO to survive the high-stakes AI race, analysts warn
Apple might need a new CEO to avoid becoming one of the casualties of AI, analysts have said. While Tim Cook, Apple's current chief executive, has brought operational expertise to the top job, the iPhone-maker currently needs a product-focused CEO, according to LightShed partners analysts Walter Piecyk and Joe Galone. 'To be clear, Tim Cook was the right CEO at the time of his appointment and unquestionably has done a great job. Apple has sold over $2.0 trillion of iPhones with Cook as CEO. In fact, iPhone sales could show signs of life this quarter, as tariff-related pull-forwards help stabilize replacement cycles that may finally be bottoming out,' the analysts wrote on Wednesday, July 9, according to a report by Market Watch. But they questioned whether Apple can deliver a wave of new AI features and upgrades with Cook still at the helm. 'AI will reshape industries across the global economy, and Apple risks becoming one of its casualties,' they said. The note was published a day after Apple announced that its chief operating officer, Jeff Williams, will retire soon. The company has named India-born Sabih Khan as Williams' successor. Khan has been with Apple since 1995 and is widely credited with transforming the company's global supply chain. Since 2019, he has led Apple's operations team, overseeing manufacturing, supplier responsibility, and environmental sustainability initiatives across the globe. He was the company's senior vice president of operations before the promotion. As COO, he will now be number two in the big tech company, below Cook. While the elevation of an executive already working within the company's leadership ranks signals stability, the LightShed analysts have argued that Apple needs bold changes at the moment. This is because Apple is widely perceived to be struggling to keep pace in the high-stakes AI race. Apple Intelligence features have run into snafus, and its AI-enabled Siri has been delayed by more than a year as the company reportedly ran into technical challenges. The Cupertino-based tech giant had teased a smarter personalised assistant at the 2024 WWDC developer conference, with promised features boosting the ability for Siri to understand the context of conversations. The LightShed team said that calling the Siri delay 'simply a case of overpromising and underdelivering' would be overly generous. 'Apple was nowhere with AI then, and little has changed since,' they said. 'AI will reshape industries across the global economy, and Apple risks becoming one of its casualties. […] Missing on AI could fundamentally alter the company's long-term trajectory and ability to grow at all,' the analysts added. Last week, Ruoming Pang, a renowned engineer who was reportedly overlooking the development of foundational AI models at Apple, left to join Meta's artificial superintelligence unit. At the start of 2025, Kevan Parekh assumed the office of chief financial officer, succeeding Luca Maestri.
Time of India
11-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Cloud, AI make zero trust approach critical
Prague: As cyber threats become more sophisticated and workforces increasingly operate outside traditional office boundaries, the old model of network security – where anyone inside the system was automatically trusted – is no longer enough. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Traditionally, security worked like a `castle and moat': once inside the corporate network (the castle), you were trusted, and the moat (firewalls and perimeter defences) kept outsiders at bay. But as Jay Chaudhry, the India-born founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Zscaler, explained, this model fails in today's cloud-first world, where users are no longer confined to a physical location. One widely accepted new approach that is reshaping cybersecurity globally is what's called zero trust security. In this approach, said Chaudhry, nobody is allowed to roam the castle freely. "We escort them only to the meeting room they're authorised for, and then escort them out once done. The moat approach does not hold good any longer," he explained in his keynote address at Zenith Live 2025, the annual cybersecurity event Zscaler organises. He noted that the zero trust approach was becoming even more critical as AI accelerates. Because hackers can use AI to try and fool the system. Zero trust operates on the principle: trust no one, always verify – be it a user, a device, or a connection. "Data is everywhere. We serve over 50 million users globally – employees accessing tools like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, SAP, LinkedIn, and YouTube through our secure platform," said Chaudhry. "Think of us as an international checkpoint: we log every transaction – who accessed what, when, and from where. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now These digital records act like visitor logs, allowing us to capture early signs of malicious activity. Every day, we process around 500 billion transactions, generating 500 trillion data points – that is half a quadrillion. Analysing that is like finding a needle in a haystack. That's where generative AI helps – spotting anomalies and powering tools like breach prediction to stop threats before they unfold," said Chaudhry. That same principle, he said, must now extend to the next frontier: agentic AI. "Agentic AI can act autonomously and access a broad range of applications and data, so the need for Zero Trust is more urgent than ever," Chaudhry emphasised. To meet this challenge, Zscaler, he said, is working with several partners, including Microsoft, to define and manage the identities of AI agents. "Once an agent's identity is established, we're expanding our platform to apply Zero Trust principles to them – so you're not just protecting users, but also the AI agents acting on their behalf," he said. Phil Tee, a pioneer in using AI in IT operations with his venture Moogsoft (acquired by Dell in 2023), joined Zscaler earlier this year as EVP and head of AI Innovation, excited by the opportunities for AI use on top of the company's 500 trillion data points. He said if there's a security incident in a company, it can take hours to months to diagnose what went on and take remedial action. "But if we are able to use AI to extract the answer from the logs, we could shrink that from months to minutes to maybe zero. And then you can couple that with an agentic architecture, and you can have maybe an auto heal, an autonomic security system," he said. Given that many employees now use AI tools, the company is also working on a solution to do deep prompt inspection, just like cybersecurity tools do deep packet inspection to identify viruses and malware. This is to ensure there's, for instance, no accidental data exfiltration, where an engineer might paste some source code to a foundation model because they're trying to debug it or optimise it. That data could find its way into the training set of the model. "We can see the interaction between our clients and, let's say, a copilot. We can use language models to look at the prompt to check if it is just plain text, or is it source code, is it malicious intent, inappropriate content," said Tee. (The correspondent was in Prague at the invitation of Zscaler)
Time of India
10-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
India top contributor in US immigrant billionaire list: 12 Indian-origin tycoons in list; Jay Chaudhry beats Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella in US rich club
India now ranks No. 1 in supplying billionaire immigrants to the US, according to Forbes' 2025 list of America's Richest Immigrants. With 12 India-born citizens on the list, the country has overtaken Israel as the leading source of billionaire migrants in the US this year. Forbes' list of 125 foreign-born billionaires spans 43 countries, but Indian-origin names dominate the leaderboard. Among the list are global tech giants Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and Nikesh Arora, according to an ET report. But it's cybersecurity titan Jay Chaudhry who leads the Indian pack in both wealth and narrative. Chaudhry's story is as dramatic as it is inspiring. Born in a Himalayan village where electricity and running water arrived only when he was in Class 8 and 10 respectively, he boarded his first-ever flight in 1980 to pursue graduate studies in the US. Now 65, he heads Zscaler, the Nasdaq-listed firm he founded in 2008. Forbes pegs his wealth at $17.9 billion. 'I had never been on a plane before I flew from India to attend grad school at the University of Cincinnati in 1980,' Chaudhry told Forbes according to the ET report. He and his family still hold about 40% of Zscaler, which went public in 2018. Before Zscaler, he launched and sold four other cybersecurity startups—including SecureIT, the firm he co-founded with wife Jyoti in 1996 using their life savings after both quit their jobs. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft boss Satya Nadella—two of the world's most visible tech leaders—entered the list this year with fortunes of $1.1 billion each. Former SoftBank executive and current Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora is also a new entrant, worth an estimated $1.4 billion. Who made the list: The 12 Indian-origin billionaires Jay Chaudhry – $17.9B – Security software Vinod Khosla – $9.2B – Sun Microsystems, venture capital Rakesh Gangwal – $6.6B – Airlines Romesh T. Wadhwani – $5.0B – Software Rajiv Jain – $4.8B – Finance Kavitark Ram Shriram – $3.0B – Google, venture capital Raj Sardana – $2.0B – Technology services David Paul – $1.5B – Medical devices Nikesh Arora – $1.4B – Cybersecurity Sundar Pichai – $1.1B – Alphabet Satya Nadella – $1.1B – Microsoft Neerja Sethi – $1.0B – IT consulting US billionaire immigration: Top 3 and global shifts The top immigrant billionaire in the US remains Elon Musk , with a staggering $393.1 billion. Born in South Africa, Musk came to the US via Canada as a student. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, a Russian émigré, is No. 2 at $139.7 billion. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, born in Taiwan and sent to the US from Thailand at age 9 to escape political turmoil, ranks third with $137.9 billion. Taiwan also registered a strong showing this year with 11 billionaire immigrants—up from just four in 2022—tying with Israel for second place. That jump gives Taiwan the fastest growth among billionaire immigrant nationalities. Forbes notes that while more than a quarter of American billionaires inherited their wealth, a whopping 93% of immigrant billionaires are self-made. The top sectors for wealth creation? Technology (53 individuals) and finance (28). Stay informed with the latest business news, updates on bank holidays and public holidays . AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
