Apexon to hire 1,000 engineers across India
Apexon, a newly formed digital engineering powerhouse — the result of the merger between two major players in digital engineering services — has announced it plans to hire close to 1,000 engineers across India in the next three to four quarters to meet the surging demand for its products and services, a company release said.
Apexon, and Infostretch Corporation have completed the merger of their complementary digital engineering businesses. The combined organisation, which has 19 offices and close to 6,000 employees across the globe, will operate under the Apexon brand name beginning in late July 2022.
The company will focus its hiring efforts across horizontal as well as vertical expertise. The newly merged entity is expanding its MedTech and healthcare solution offering. It also plans to strengthen its offering in the financial services industry. They plan to leverage their expertise in digital and analytics to deliver a modern digital experience in retail and commercial banking, lending, mortgage, payments, and more.
The new hires will join the teams at Apexon’s existing best-in-class delivery centres including Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune, the release added.
India holds better Web3 career opportunities
In India, cryptocurrency, metaverse, and NFT (non-fungible tokens) are the most popular and desired fields for a Web3 career. Indian users interested in working in Web3 show a stronger passion for metaverse, NFT, and blockchain-based gaming, over-indexing the global average, according to a report from global cryptocurrency exchange, KuCoin.
The global survey report, Journey into Web3, Indian Web3 professionals are significantly younger than their global counterparts with 80% of them under 30 years of age. 47% of them have joined Web3-related communities, 23% have received related education, and 14% are looking for jobs in the industry, a release from KuCoin, quoting the report said.
Additionally, 60% of surveyed Indian users who never worked in Web3 are very interested in exploring the career, mainly motivated by space for professional growth and a better salary package in the industry. The report flagged the shortage of women-led communities, educational resources, and the stress of fast-paced industry as key challenges for Indian women to work or invest in Web3, the release said.
IIT Madras launches initiative to advance Indian language technology
The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras), launched the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat on July 28 2022 to advance the state of Indian language technology.
IT Madras said AI4Bharat is its initiative to build open-source language AI for Indian languages. The institute also said the centre has made several cutting-edge resources open source for mass public use and can be downloaded from their webpage.
According to the institute, the AI4Bharat initiative, over the past two years, has helped develop models for Machine Translation and Speech Recognition, among other contributions to Indian language technology.
Data Breach Costs Reach All-Time High
Data breaches are getting costlier than ever before, with the global average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of $4.35 million, IBM Security’s annual Cost of a Data Breach Report released on 27 July 2022 said.
With breach costs increasing nearly 13% over the last two years of the report, the findings suggest these incidents may also be contributing to rising costs of goods and services. In fact, 60% of studied organisations raised their product or services prices due to the breach, when the cost of goods is already soaring worldwide amid inflation and supply chain issues.
According to the report, businesses that paid threat actors’ ransom demands saw $610,000 less in average breach costs compared to those that chose not to pay – not including the ransom amount paid. However, when accounting for the average ransom payment, which according to Sophos reached $812,000 in 2021, businesses that opt to pay the ransom could net higher total costs, all while inadvertently funding future ransomware attacks with capital that could be allocated to remediation and recovery efforts and looking at potential federal offenses, the release said.
The report is based on in-depth analysis of real-world data breaches experienced by 550 organisations globally between March 2021 and March 2022.
Worldwide semiconductor revenue growth to slow to 7% in 2022
Global semiconductor revenue is projected to grow 7.4% in 2022, down from 2021 growth of 26.3%, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. This is down from the previous quarter’s forecast of 13.6% growth in 2022, according to a Gartner release.
“Although chip shortages are abating, the global semiconductor market is entering a period of weakness, which will persist through 2023 when semiconductor revenue is projected to decline 2.5%,” said Richard Gordon, Practice VP at Gartner.
Overall, 2022 global semiconductor revenue has been reduced from the previous quarter’s forecast by $36.7 billion, to $639.2 billion, as economic conditions are expected to worsen through the year. Memory demand and pricing have softened, especially in consumer-related areas like PCs and smartphones, which will help lead the slowdown in growth, the release said.