We provide original News on the latest happenings in the social media industry and Technology updates.
The Dktopzone platform gives guaranteed and genuine updates of social media. If you truly want to see best content of the future, then you have to successfully connect with our fame.
Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
There are two types of zoom on a video camera — digital zoom and optical zoom. A camera can have either or both types. The two different types are very different and the unwary buyer can get caught out badly by not understanding how they work.
Conversations about zoom technology in smartphones have become more common since optical zoom entered the mobile market. Smartphones can now implement all three types of camera zoom: optical, digital, and hybrid. Such concepts can be confusing if you haven’t dealt with the topic before, so we are here to clear any doubts. Here’s what to need to know about camera zoom, whether it’s optical, digital or hybrid!
Understanding camera zoom types:
What is camera zoom?
Optical zoom
Digital zoom
Hybrid zoom
What is camera zoom?
Let’s start with the basics. In photography, camera zoom refers to making a subject appear closer or farther away in an image. Zooming in gives you a closer look at objects, while zooming out will let you capture a wider space. This can be done by using optics to magnify an image, or by simply cropping into an area of the image.
Optical zoom
Optical camera zoom is achieved by using a series of lens elements. Glass can move through the lens to zoom in or out. Optical zoom offers the best results and is the truest form of image magnification. Because the content in your photograph is enlarged by manipulating rays of light coming from the scene, optical zoom offers lossless results.
Optical zoom offers the best results and is the truest form of image magnification.Edgar Cervantes
Optical zoom should offer identical results to moving closer to your subject. Of course, that’s in theory. Glass quality can affect results. Depending on the lens, aperture can also be reduced as you increase the focal length. Regardless of the downsides, optical zoom continues to be the best solution if you can’t physically get closer to your subject.
In smartphones, optical camera zoom is a novel feature. Samsung made theGalaxy Camera back in 2012, but that didn’t quite take off, and neither did the second iteration. Polaroid and ASUS also gave the idea a shot without much success. But those were niche products with little to no appeal to general consumers.
Meanwhile, common modern smartphones like the Huawei P40 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro are highly appealing to consumers, and also have camera zoom lenses installed inside. Unlike a DSLR or point-and-shoot camera, lenses don’t protrude out of these devices. Instead, these phones can have embedded periscope-like lens setups that achieve the same effect, without affecting looks. Other smartphone camera lenses with less complex set-ups must sacrifice focal length.
In the case of smartphones, lenses don’t actually move to achieve optical camera zoom. Instead, the phone seamlessly switches to the camera with the higher magnification factor.
Digital zoom
Digital camera zoom achieves a similar effect to optical zoom, without mechanical work or glass elements. It will essentially cut off areas around your scene to make it seem like you are closer to the subject. The remaining part of the image is enlarged using algorithms, hence the name digital. Unlike optical zoom, digital zoom is not lossless, meaning some information from the scene is discarded in the process. The algorithms will add pixels in order to preserve detail in the magnified image, but this process is imperfect. That’s why digitally zoomed images will often look blurry and smudgy.
Digital zoom is good to use it when you need to better compose an image and can’t physically move in closer, but keep in mind image quality will deteriorate as you zoom in.
Digital zoom is the equivalent to cropping an image.Edgar Cervantes
Digital camera zoom is the equivalent to cropping an image. This is why I recommend taking shots at the original focal length if you rely on digital zoom. You can always crop later if you must, and the results would be the same.
Digital zoom is what most smartphones use, but they tend to get some help on the software side of things.
Hybrid camera zoom
Modern phones with optical zoom have lenses with 3x or 5x optical zoom. Trying to zoom in further than that should result in loss of quality, as you would then technically be using digital zoom. This is where hybrid camera zoom comes to the rescue.
The manufacturer can take advantage of the phones’ different sensors and focal lengths to grab detail from multiple cameras simultaneously. All this information can then be used to intelligently improve the digitally zoomed photo. It’s certainly not at the level of true optical camera zoom, but it’s more powerful than basic digital zoom for preserving fine details at a distance.
Plans for Tom Cruise’s outer space film with Elon Musk have been finalised, with the trip now scheduled for 2021.
The pioneering movie was announced earlier this year, confirming that Cruise had teamed up with Musk and NASA to film a new movie in outer space, set to be directed by Edge of Tomorrow‘s Doug Liman.
READ MORE: Get your motor running with this high-octane playlist inspired by ‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’ The project is now firmly on its way, as Space Shuttle Almanac confirmed on Twitter that the Axiom Space Station, piloted by Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, will set off on a tourist mission in October 2021 with Cruise and Liman on board.
NASA confirmed their involvement in the project earlier this year via Twitter, where NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted: “NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station!
“We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality.”The film, still untitled, was pitched to Universal via an “exuberant Zoom call” with Cruise, Liman, Christopher McQuarrie and PJ van Sandwijk.
Liman is in the process of writing the film’s script, and the budget is estimated to be around $200 million. McQuarrie, who is the writer/director on the Mission: Impossible films, will act as story advisor and producer, alongside Cruise, Liman and van Sandwijk as producers.
Tom Cruise will next be starring in Mission: Impossible 7, still filming after a number of coronavirus-lated delays, and will be promoting Top Gun: Maverick which is set for release on December 23 after being pushed back from this summer.
Apple iPhone 12 has been simmering among top searched keywords for a while. However, last night, on Tuesday, September 15, Apple hosted a hardware event that featured practically everything, but the much awaited iPhones. This caused some amount of furore among many Apple watchers regarding the potential delay in the launch timeline of the iPhone 12. However, it is important to note that the iPhone 12 has been expected to be postponed from its usual launch timeline for a while now, so it really wasn’t that big a surprise when Apple only featured its 8th gen iPad, the all-new iPad Air, Watch Series 6, Watch SE and subscription services at the Time Flies event last night. Typically, Apple launches its iPhones in the first or second week of September. It subsequently goes up for preorders, and is up for sale towards the end of September or the first week of October. While the ‘Time Flies’ event fell almost within Apple’s natural period of launching devices, reports from the past few months had already indicated a possible delay in the launch of Apple’s latest iPhones. At the centre of it, of course, is the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the outbreak of the pandemic in China, as most major factories were shut down and extensive lockdown brought industries to a halt, Apple faced an unprecedented setback in its manufacturing timeline. Typically, the February-March period is by when Apple’s next generation iPhones are cleared through the engineering validation testing (EVT) stage, and enters production stage. It is this key phase that was delayed, due to restrictions in travelling causing Apple executives to have limitations in coordinating with their production and supply chains, and of course, factories staying shut.
ALSO READ | Apple Event 2020 Launches: iPad Air With New Design, 8th Gen iPad, Watch Series 6, Budget Watch SE, Apple One
As factories reopened, Apple focused on its business to stock up on more of its ‘affordable’ iPhones, such as 2018’s iPhone XR, or this year’s iPhone SE. Subsequently, Apple also stated back in February that it was lowering its revenue guideline, as resumption of normal market conditions was taking longer than what it had anticipated. As a result, most analysts reduced guidance figures for Apple’s 5G ready iPhones, and the iPhone 12 took a back seat to make way for more value-first iPhones.
5G CHIPS It isn’t just about the production timeline, either. Earlier this year, Qualcomm stated that it expects a slight delay in the launch of a marquee 5G iPhone later in the year, which most analysts took to be the iPhone 12. The resultant delay may also have happened as an indirect effect of the pandemic, which would have stifled Qualcomm’s supply of 5G radio chips to Apple – a feature that is imperative for the 5G iPhones to enter production stage.
ALSO READ | Apple iPhone 12 Launch Soon: Everything We Know So Far About Apple’s First 5G iPhones
Apple and Qualcomm cleared their differences last year in a billion-dollar settlement suit, which in turn gave Apple the licence to use Qualcomm’s 5G chips in its first 5G iPhones – the iPhone 12 lineup. While Apple had subsequently acquired Intel’s 5G modem business as well to make its own 5G radio chips, something that’ll only feature in future iPhones. For now, however, the delay in the component manufacturing chain is likely to have also pushed back the launch of the iPhone 12 by about a month.
The iPhone 12 is now expected to be launched in a separate event in October, but hopefully not later than that. Apple reportedly expects to manufacture about 75 million units of the iPhone 12 for this year’s last quarter. iOS 14, the latest version of Apple’s software, has been rolled out for users today already, so you can at least get a glimpse of the new iPhone’s interface on your older devices, too.
A telephoto lens is designed to get you as close to a distant subject as possible. With their higher focal length, telephoto lenses let you zoom in generally between 2-2.3x of the frame without compromising on the image quality.
The best camera phone in 2020 is able to take photos that you simply can’t believe come from a smartphone. You’re getting ease of use, versatility and a pocketable design that not even a the best mirrorless camera can give you.
At TechRadar we test smartphone cameras extensively, taking pictures in the various modes and from the different lenses and sensors any device may have. This helps us work out how each camera fares in the real world, so we’ve made this list of the best camera phones to help you choose which is best for you.
The specs and capabilities of a camera on a phone are important, after all, but they don’t tell (or shoot) the whole picture – post-processing and image optimization can vary quite a bit by phone, and this can be instrumental in taking a good picture. In addition things like the availability of microSD slots, video quality and modes, and big shortcomings in the phone like poor battery life, can affect how good a phone is for photography.
Huawei P40 Pro The P40 Pro has superb cameras, but it’s not the best phone
Release date: April 2020 | Main camera: 50MP (f/1.9) | Telephoto: 12MP (f/3.4) | Ultra-wide: 40MP (f/1.8) | OIS: Yes | Front camera: 32MP | Weight: 209g | Dimensions: 158.2 x 72.6 x 9mm | Battery size: 4,200mAh | Max video quality: 4K 60fps | Storage: 128GB / 256GB / 512GB | Memory card slot: Yes
Phenomenal battery lifeBrilliant camerasFrustratingly limited softwareBig camera bump The Huawei P40 Pro is the best camera phone you can buy for under $1,000 / £900 it’s that simple. In fact, for a certain type of photographer – one who values a telephoto camera – it’s just the best camera phone around, period.
iPhone 11 Pro Previously the best point and shoot camera phone
Release date: September 2019 | Main camera: 12MP (f/1.8) | Telephoto: 12MP (f/2.0) | Ultra-wide: 12MP (f/2.4) | OIS: Yes | Front camera: 12MP | Weight: 188g | Dimensions: 144 x 71.4 x 8.1mm | Battery size: 3,046mAh | Max video quality: 4K 60fps | Storage: 64GB / 256GB / 512GB | Memory card slot: No
Excellent night modeVersatile triple cameraConsistent colors across camerasExpensiveLower on detail than the competitionNo manual mode The iPhone 11 Pro doesn’t just feature the best smartphone camera Apple’s ever made, it’s also the best camera phone money can buy for a certain type of user. It’s reliable – you take a shot and it’s likely going to be a good one, even in middling light. Dynamic range is strong, and with three cameras, it’s versatile too.
Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra The ultimate flagship – at an ultimate price
Release date: March 2020 | Main camera: 108MP (f/1.8) | Telephoto: 48MP (f/3.5) | Ultra wide: 12MP (f/2.2) | TOF: 0.3MP (f/1.0) | OIS: Yes | Front camera: 40MP + 40MP | Weight: 222g | Dimensions: 166.9 x 76 x 8.8 mm | Battery size: 5,000mAh | Max video quality: 4K 60fps | Storage: 128GB / 256GB / 512GB | Memory card slot: Yes
Best specs of 2020, period5x optical, 100x digital ‘Space Zoom’Enormous 6.9-inch displayVery expensiveExtras not worth price bumpSpace Zoom dubious worth There’s a huge amount going on with the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra’s camera setup. For starters, you’ve got over 200 megapixels across the front and rear cameras, then there are those smart new shooting modes to talk about; and finally – there’s that huge zoom – 100x ‘Space Zoom’. Marketing jargon? Absolutely, but irrespective, the S20 Ultra’s camera is a telephoto champion.
It all starts with a 108MP primary camera sensor – the same as the one on the Xiaomi Mi Note 10. This time around, it’s combined with a 48MP optical zoom camera, a 12MP ultra-wide camera and a time-of-flight sensor around the back, which gathers depth information for the blurry background, sharp foreground Live Focus stills and video.
The United States’ efforts to clamp down on the popular short video-sharing app, TikTok, can only be understood in the wider context of the fight for technological dominance with China, a cybersecurity expert said.
TikTok is owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance and has grown in popularity over the years, especially among younger users. As of April, the app has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally across Apple’s App Store and Google Play, according to data from Sensor Tower.
Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. was looking at banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps over national security concerns.
“It’s not clear to me that there is a huge security risk,” Adam Segal, director of the digital and cyberspace policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday. He said that China likely already has access to large amounts of U.S. citizens’ data through hacks carried out against government agencies and companies like credit ratings agency Equifax and others.
“The risk on propaganda and influence might be more but I think the larger context is … the Trump administration really wants to push back on China’s rise as a tech competitor to the United States,” Segal added.
For its part, TikTok has said U.S. user data is stored in the country itself with a backup in Singapore and that its data centers were located outside China, implying their information was not subjected to Chinese law. But, experts have pointed to existing legislation in China which could force local Chinese companies like ByteDance and others to hand over data to Beijing.
“I think there are legitimate concerns there, even if the law doesn’t say that,” Segal said, explaining that intelligence services in China can work around the law and get access to the information. He said there may be reasons for the U.S. to ask federal employees, Defense department officials and others working in sensitive jobs to keep the app off their phones.
“But, again, the data of 15-year-olds who are dancing around doesn’t have very clear national security implications.”
Potential Microsoft deal Late Sunday, tech giant Microsoft confirmed that it held talks with ByteDance to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations. The two companies are looking a potential deal that would involve Microsoft buying TikTok in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Microsoft said it may also offer other U.S. investors to get involved in the acquisition. The company did not disclose deal terms but said CEO Satya Nadella has spoken with President Donald Trump.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States gets to have oversight on all of the acquisition negotiations between the two companies, which is “very unusual,” according to Theresa Payton, CEO of Fortalice Solutions and a former White House chief information officer.
“I doubt most companies are used to having the federal government have a seat at the table, but they will, and they can actually reject the deal,” Payton told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Monday. She explained that the companies would have to show that they can quickly divest the infrastructure and show that the data will be transferred and only stored in servers in the U.S. or risk having the deal blocked.
“There’s a lot that still has to be worked through as well as some of the retroactive looking at how was the data treated. That can all be on the table and it will be very interesting to see what the final decision is, what the final deal looks like,” Payton added.
Trump told reporters on Friday that he would act soon to ban TikTok from the U.S. and that he didn’t support the spinoff deal involving Microsoft, NBC News reported. But, the president appeared to have agreed to give both companies 45 days to negotiate a deal, Reuters reported citing three sources familiar with the matter.
As India continues to fight the spread of coronavirus with 1071 confirmed cases and 29 deaths, people from all walks of life, including celebrities, industrialists and politicians have stepped in to contribute.
The Union government has set up a public charitable trust under the name The Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM-CARES) in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.
Many have donated to the PM-CARES fund while some have chosen to help in other capacities. Here is a list of people who have so far donated towards efforts to fight the coronavirus in India:
Celebrities Pledged Support
Actress Anushka Sharma, her cricketer-husband Virat Kohli have pledged their support to the PM CARES fund and Maharashtra Chief Minister’s relief fund. However, they chose not to disclose the amount.
Filmmaker Karan Johar, actor Sonam Kapoor, Ayushman Khurrana and few others also pledged support but did not say how much they were donating.
Sachin Tendulkar donated Rs 25 lakh each to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and the Chief Minister of Maharashtra’s Relief Fund
Cricketer Suresh Raina donated Rs 31 lakh to PM-CARES Fund and Rs 21 lakh to UP CM’s Disaster Relief Fund to combat coronavirus.
Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar announced that he will be donating Rs 25 crore to PM-CARES.
Bollywood actor Kartik Aaryan has contributed Rs 1 crore to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s PM-Cares fund.
Bollywood superstar Salman Khan will extend help to 25,000-odd daily wage workers of the film industry whose lives have been affected by the ongoing national lockdown. Salman’s contribution will aid the artistes of Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE), said the body’s president BN Tiwari.
Varun Dhawan pledged Rs 30 lakh to PM-CARES Fund and Rs 25 lakh to Maharashtra CM’s relief fund.
Actor Shilpa Shetty, along with her husband Raj Kundra, pledged to donate Rs 21 lakhs to PM-CARES.
Bhushan Kumar, who heads film studio T-Series, said he will donate Rs 11 crore.
TV host and actor Maniesh Paul said he will donate Rs 20 lakh and Murad Khetani, the producer of 2019 blockbuster “Kabir Singh”, pledged Rs 25 lakh to PM-CARES and another 25 lakhs to the Maharashtra Relief Fund
designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee has pledged to give Rs 1 crore of his personal funds to the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF) along with Rs 50 lakhs to Chief Minster of West Bengal’s Relief Fund.
Teen shooting sensation Manu Bhaker donated Rs 1 lakh to the Haryana government
Corporates Made Donations
Adani Foundation has contributed Rs 100 crore to the PM CARES Fund for the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Tata Sons and Tata Trusts have pledged to contribute Rs 1,500 crore for the cause while Reliance Industries had made an initial contribution of Rs 5 crore besides opening India’s first COVID-19 hospital in Mumbai.
The JSW Group said it will extend a financial assistance of Rs 100 crore to combat the deadly virus.
Engineering and construction giant Larsen & Toubro announced Rs 150 crore donation to the PM-CARES Fund it has set aside over Rs 500 crore per month to support about 1.60 lakh contract workers.
TVS Motor Company said it will donate Rs 25 crore to the PM’s Relief Fund for battle against COVID-19 pandemic.
The Sajjan Jindal-led group will provide equipment to healthcare workers and its employees will donate one day’s salary.
Anand Mahindra of the Mahindra & Mahindra Group had offered to provide Mahindra resorts as care facilities for those infected. The Mahindra Group is also working on making ventilators for Covid-19 infected patients.
Several FMCG companies such as ITC, HUL, RB, and Godrej have also pledged material and monetary aid to help the government.
ITC chairman Sanjiv Puri announced the conglomerate has set up Rs 150 crore COVID-19 contingency fund to provide relief to most vulnerable section of the society, provide assistance to rural healthcare and even provide protective gear for medical staff.
Private sector lender Kotak Mahindra Bank and its Managing Director Uday Kotak announced a Rs 60-crore donation. The bank will donate Rs 25 crore to PM Cares Fund and Rs 10 crore to Maharashtra Chief Minister’s Relief Fund, it said in a tweet.
Megha Engineering and Infrastructure Limited (MEIL) managing director PV Krishna Reddy has donated Rs 5 crore each to the Chief Minister’s relief funds of AP and Telangana.
Ministers Let Go Of Salaries, Release Funds
President Ram Nath Kovind said he will donate a month’s salary to the fund to “help the nation tide over the crisis of COVID-19” and appealed to countrymen to donate generously to it.
Six-time world champion boxer M C Mary Kom said she will donate her one month’s salary as Rajya Sabha MP, amounting to Rs 1 lakh, to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.
Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and several Union ministers including Rajnath Singh, Nitin Gadkari, Piyush Goyal, Dharmendra Pradhan, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Prakash Javadekar, Kiren Rijiju and Santosh Gangwar were among those who made a similar commitment.
Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said he has donated Rs 1 crore from his MPLADS fund to combat the spread of coronavirus in the country.
The BJP has also directed all its MPs to contribute Rs one crore from MPLAD funds in the country’s fight against COVID-19 pandemic.
Others Who Donated
Besides these, political leaders, defence personnel, employees of PSUs such as Railways were also among a cross-section of organisations and people who pledged their contribution on Sunday to the fund announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
The Railways donated Rs 151 crore to the PM CARES Fund while the Central Armed Police Forces contributed Rs 116 crore, a total of one-day salary of its personnel.
Sports body BCCI pledged a donation of Rs 51 crore to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund.
The officials and staff of the Supreme Court registry have decided to donate up to three days’ salary to the PM CARES fund
Senior lawyer and constitutional law expert Rakesh Dwivedi donated Rs 1 crore to the Prime Minister Citizens’ Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situation (PM CARES) fund.
A new study could have implications for how the general public and health care workers try to avoid transmission of the virus.
The coronavirus can live for three days on some surfaces, like plastic and steel, new research suggests. Experts say the risk of consumers getting infected from touching those materials is still low, although they offered additional warnings about how long the virus survives in air, which may have important implications for medical workers.
The new study, published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, also suggests that the virus disintegrates over the course of a day on cardboard, lessening the worry among consumers that deliveries will spread the virus during this period of staying and working from home.
When the virus becomes suspended in droplets smaller than 5 micrometers — known as aerosols — it can stay suspended for about a half-hour, researchers said, before drifting down and settling on surfaces where it can linger for hours. The finding on aerosol, in particular, is inconsistent with the World Health Organization’s position that the virus is not transported by air.
Crackdown on Southern Border Is Planned; U.S. Records 100th DeathMarch 17, 2020 The virus lives longest on plastic and steel, surviving for up to 72 hours. But the amount of viable virus decreases sharply over this time. It also does poorly on copper, surviving four hours. On cardboard, it survives up to 24 hours, which suggests packages that arrive in the mail should have only low levels of the virus — unless the delivery person has coughed or sneezed on it or has handled it with contaminated hands.
You Can Also See Live Corona Statues On These Websites
Let’s discuss the key areas which help the digitalization to be more effective for the changes which are taking place in GST.
According to BW Online Bureau
It has been about 30 months since Goods and Service Tax (GST) was rolled out in India. It is one of the major indirect tax reform, but in reality, it is a business process reform. Government directives to use data analytics to find out errant taxpayers is in place, and technology has made it a reality. To face this new era, trade and industry must come forward and adapt to evolve and be better prepared to implement new regulatory needs as they come.
As we are in the era of digitalization, embracing technology will impact the top line and bottom line of the businesses, Adoption of technology for the GST Compliances also allows revisiting the business process along with automation. Let’s discuss the key areas which help the digitalization to be more effective for the changes which are taking place in GST.
e-Invoice
Invoice Reference Number (IRN) can be issued either by uploading the invoice in the Jason format on the invoice Registration Portal (IRP) or by using the APIs. If the number of invoices issued is small in number, the Jason upload would be viable but in case of organizations that have to issue invoices in a larger number, it is recommended to use the API model as it will reduce the manual intervention and also saves time. Most of the organizations are generating e-waybills using API’s and with the e-invoice adoption, the same has to be modified as the e-invoice is expected to update the Part A of the e-waybills.
The APIs for the e-invoice is available and access to the sandbox is provided to selected taxpayers; alternatively, the taxpayers can access them through GSP’s. Though it is mandatory from 1st April 2020, the impact analysis on the existing systems has to carried out and rolled out accordingly. The IRN generated by the iRP has to be captured in the existing ERPs. As the implementation differs from one ERP to another, it is recommended to approach the OEMs directly or through their partners.
As a part of anti-tax evasion measures, the Government has rolled out matching for availing the input tax credit. In the existing returns, the taxpayers can avail input tax credit only when the data of suppliers is reflected in GSTR -2A and the taxpayers have to match their purchase register with the GSTR-2A. Matching can be done manually but it is time-consuming, prone to errors and the users have to check the GSTR-2A’s of the previous months if the suppliers have filed the GSTR – 1 for the previous periods. To make the process effective and error-free, the taxpayers can use various tools provided by various IT companies like Logo Infosoft, Tax Genie, etc. In case if the users have taken input tax credit erroneously the same has to be reversed with interest of 24% or it is reversed on account of notice issued by the department under Sections 73 or 74 of CGST Act 2017, then penalty will also be applicable, which is again a cost to the company and also drains time and efforts of the taxation teams.
New Returns
The new returns under GST are to be rolled out from 1st April 2020 and few changes are required to be made in the data to be uploaded. In the new return format, reporting of HSN codes is required for all transactions except for the B2C transactions. The existing return filing data extract utility has to be modified to support the same apart from the other changes. Input tax credit (ITC) can be availed only when the user accepts the invoices; it is tough to do at the end of the month and the tax person may not be aware of the nitty-gritty of the transactions. It can be addressed by having a flag at the invoice level or the GRN/ MRN level for the availing credit. Automation here helps again to claim the credit as per law and also allows utilisation of the working capital more effectively and being GST compliant. A call has to be taken on modifying the existing tools being used or new tools to be purchased or developed or outsource the entire process of report filing, matching and follow up with vendors who have not filed the returns to external partners.
Technological intervention will help with GST Compliances as it will increase the efficiency of the organizations and also help in revisiting the business process to be in tune with the statutory requirements. The taxpayers can go on a CAPEX model or use cloud based solutions under the S-a-a-S model as it will help you to use the scarce working capital more effectively. A judicious call has to be taken by the organizations by involving the users from the IT, Finance, Supply Chain, Taxation, Purchase department, and inputs can also be taken from the Internal Auditors as well as the Statutory auditors. All these above changes need to be addressed together as they are interdependent. For instance, e-invoice API’s will be updating the Anx-1 also, if the return filing utility does not have a condition to exclude such transactions, then it may be updated twice. Or when the data is uploaded it will show error message for the duplicate records and again users have to spend additional time for cleaning the data. As we are racing against time, organizations have to start working in the direction that yields the most efficient results in compliance and tax obligations.
As many as a billion animals may have been killed in Australia’s wildfires since September, a scientist said, doubling his earlier estimate as the unprecedented scale of the crisis in the world’s driest inhabited continent continued to emerge.
New figures released on Wednesday by the University of Sydney’s Chris Dickman indicate more than 800 million animals have been killed in the state of New South Wales alone, while one billion had died nationally. That includes mammals, birds and reptiles directly killed by the fires or indirectly through loss of habitat.
Read more: Australia’s Wildfire Crisis: Key Numbers Behind the Disaster
“We’re probably looking at what climate change may look like for other parts of the world in the first stages in Australia at the moment,” said Dickman, a professor in ecology in the school of environmental science, said in a statement on the university’s website, noting events like this may hasten the extinction process for a range species. “It’s a very sad time.”
Distressing images of injured or dead Australian native animals — including koalas and kangaroos — have been flooding social media streams as the wildfires sweep through southeastern Australia, destroying vast tracts of land and homes. The human death toll stands at 25.
More than 10 million hectares (25 million acres) have been destroyed so far — that’s larger than the U.S. state of Indiana — while smoke from the fires has spread halfway across the globe, darkening skies in Argentina and into the Atlantic. The fires are so large they’re generating their own weather systems and causing dry lightning strikes that in turn ignite more blazes.
Koalas have been particularly affected, according to Environment Minister Sussan Ley who told local radio Saturday that up to 30% of the population on the mid-north coast of New South Wales may have been killed.
“With the type of fast-moving crown fires that we have been experiencing, koalas really have no capacity to move fast enough to get away,” Dickman said earlier. “There is such a big area now that is still on fire and still burning that we will probably never find the bodies.”
Smoke from deadly bush fires that have devastated Australia has now spread halfway across the world, darkening skies in Argentina and beyond.
As Sydney and Canberra on Wednesday faced another day of toxic haze shrouding the skyline, U.S. weather satellite captured the smoke crossing South America and spreading out over Buenos Aires before it drifted into the Atlantic Ocean — some 7,328 miles (11,793 kilometers) east of Sydney — according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. More than 25 million acres (10 million hectares) have burned, which is about the size of Indiana and five times larger than Wales in the U.K. The fires are so large they are generating their own weather systems and causing dry lightning strikes that in turn ignite more blazes. The death toll since the fire season began has risen to 25, with the announcement on Wednesday that a car accident last week that killed a 43-year-old firefighter from Victoria state was caused by the blazes.
The Sydney Opera House and harbor bridge were barely visible on Wednesday through the smoke wafting in from bushfires that have devastated huge swathes of the Blue Mountains and other national parks to the north and west of the city. The air quality in national capital Canberra, which at times has been the worst in the world in recent weeks, was deemed unhealthy by AirVisual.
As Australians awoke on Wednesday, there were almost 120 blazes burning in New South Wales state alone, with about 50 not contained. South Australia state is facing “extreme” fire danger on Wednesday. Authorities are warning that dangerous conditions will return to the nation’s blaze-ravaged southeast on Friday, when the temperature in Canberra is forecast to reach 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit).
More than 1,500 homes have been destroyed in New South Wales alone this fire season and the tally is rising daily as the fires continue to burn and authorities assess damage. The University of Sydney estimates that 480 million animals have been killed by the bushfires in the state since September.
The Australian government has pledged A$2 billion ($1.4 billion) over two years to assist recovery efforts, focused on repairing infrastructure and boosting mental-health care. Prominent Australian residents, including actor Russell Crowe, called for more action on climate change to mitigate the risks of more devastating infernos.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has faced criticism for his belated response in pooling national resources to combat the fires. He’s signaling his conservative government won’t toughen policies to combat climate change, which has been blamed for exacerbating a crippling drought that’s helped create tinderbox conditions.
Smoke from deadly bush fires that have devastated Australia has now spread halfway across the world, darkening skies in Argentina and beyond.
As Sydney and Canberra on Wednesday faced another day of toxic haze shrouding the skyline, U.S. weather satellite captured the smoke crossing South America and spreading out over Buenos Aires before it drifted into the Atlantic Ocean — some 7,328 miles (11,793 kilometers) east of Sydney — according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. More than 25 million acres (10 million hectares) have burned, which is about the size of Indiana and five times larger than Wales in the U.K. The fires are so large they are generating their own weather systems and causing dry lightning strikes that in turn ignite more blazes. The death toll since the fire season began has risen to 25, with the announcement on Wednesday that a car accident last week that killed a 43-year-old firefighter from Victoria state was caused by the blazes.
The Sydney Opera House and harbor bridge were barely visible on Wednesday through the smoke wafting in from bushfires that have devastated huge swathes of the Blue Mountains and other national parks to the north and west of the city. The air quality in national capital Canberra, which at times has been the worst in the world in recent weeks, was deemed unhealthy by AirVisual.
As Australians awoke on Wednesday, there were almost 120 blazes burning in New South Wales state alone, with about 50 not contained. South Australia state is facing “extreme” fire danger on Wednesday. Authorities are warning that dangerous conditions will return to the nation’s blaze-ravaged southeast on Friday, when the temperature in Canberra is forecast to reach 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit).
More than 1,500 homes have been destroyed in New South Wales alone this fire season and the tally is rising daily as the fires continue to burn and authorities assess damage. The University of Sydney estimates that 480 million animals have been killed by the bushfires in the state since September.
The Australian government has pledged A$2 billion ($1.4 billion) over two years to assist recovery efforts, focused on repairing infrastructure and boosting mental-health care. Prominent Australian residents, including actor Russell Crowe, called for more action on climate change to mitigate the risks of more devastating infernos.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has faced criticism for his belated response in pooling national resources to combat the fires. He’s signaling his conservative government won’t toughen policies to combat climate change, which has been blamed for exacerbating a crippling drought that’s helped create tinderbox conditions.
Technology is at the core of whatever Amazon does — from algorithms that forecast demand and place orders from brands, and robots that sort and pack items in warehouses to drones that will soon drop packages off at homes.
At its new Go Stores, for instance, advances in computer vision have made it possible to identify the people walking in and what products they pick up, helping add them to their online shopping carts.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, is always pulling new rabbits out of his hat, like next-day or same-day shipping and cashier-less stores. Besides, there is Blue Origin, the aerospace company privately owned by Bezos, which is on a mission to make spaceflight possible for everyone.
Be that as it may, a lot more disruption aimed at reaching the common man is on the anvil.
The most far-reaching and impactful technologies being developed today are for Amazon’s own use, but some others have the potential to disrupt every sector.
The technology marvels that Amazon Web Services — the largest profit driving unit in Bezos’ stable — is working on could jolt several industries, including in India, in the same way that Amazon once disrupted retail.
“In retail, while things like the size of the catalogue, advertising and other stuff might play a role in success, at Amazon, I think success is largely technology driven,” said Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels.
The ecommerce giant is using advances in technology to disrupt several sectors outside of retail though — medicine, banking, logistics, robotics, agriculture and much more. Interestingly, some of that work is happening in India.
Initially, the thinking was around allowing enterprises in these sectors to grow by using its cloud storage and computing capabilities.
Now, Amazon’s reach has become more nuanced and it has moved up the value chain.
For example, no longer is Amazon offering banks a place to securely store information, it is going beyond by offering tools to detect fraud, making it unnecessary for the lenders to build expensive data science teams in-house.
It is a similar story in other industries, made possible due to the massive amounts of data that Amazon collects and processes.
“We give people the software capability, so they no longer need to worry about that side of things. Most of our services are machine learning under the covers (and) that’s possible mostly because there’s so much data available for us to do that,” Vogels said.
Jeff Bezos’ big tech bets Medicine
Hospitals in the United States have to save imaging reports for years. Earlier these were stored on tapes, since doing so digitally cost millions of dollars.
The advent of cheaper cloud storage meant new scans could be saved digitally, making them accessible to doctors on demand.
Now, doctors could refer to a patient’s earlier CT scan and compare that with the new one to diagnose an ailment, said Shez Partovi, worldwide lead for healthcare, life sciences, genomics, medical devices and agri-tech at Amazon.
The power of cloud and AWS’ own capabilities in medical technology have only expanded since.
Healthcare and life sciences form rapidly scaling units of AWS, which is building a suite of tools that allow breakthroughs in medicine — from hospitals using the tools to do process modelling or operational forecasting, refining the selection of candidate drugs for trial or delivering diagnoses through computer imaging.
Developed markets will be the first to adopt such technologies, but AWS is seeing demand surge from the developing world, including India.
“Not everyone is within a mile of a radiologist or physician, so diagnostics through AI could solve for that. Further, there’s a lack of highly trained people, but when all you have to do is take an image, it requires a lot less training,” said Partovi.
Space
Jeff Bezos’ big tech bets Bezos, in his private capacity, is now looking to connect remote regions with high-speed broadband. He is building a network of over 3,000 satellites through “Project Kuiper”, which will compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Airbus-backed OneWeb.
The bigger bet is in outer space though. His rocket company Blue Origin has already done commercial payloads on New Shepard, the reusable rocket that competes with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The capsule atop the New Shepard can carry six passengers, which Bezos looks to capitalise on for space tourism, a commercial opportunity most private space agencies are looking at.
It is also building a reusable rocket – Glenn, named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth — which can carry payloads of as much as 45 tonnes in low earth orbit.
Bezos’ aim, however, is to land on the Moon. His Blue Moon lander can deliver large infrastructure payloads with high accuracy to pre-position systems for future missions. The larger variant of Blue Moon has been designed to land a vehicle that will allow the United States to return to the Moon by 2024.
Robotics
Image Source: Jeff Bezos/Twitter Image Source: Jeff Bezos/Twitter
Amazon’s take on robotics is grounds-up.
The company has been part of an open-source network that is developing ROS 2 or Robot Operating System 2, which will be commercial-grade, secure, hardened and peer-reviewed in order to make it easier for developers to build robots.
“There is an incredible amount of promise and potential in robotics, but if you look at what a robot developer has to do to get things up and running, it’s an incredible amount of work,” said Roger Barga, general manager, AWS Robotics and Autonomous Services, at Amazon Web Services.
Apart from building the software that robots will run on, AWS is also making tools that will help developers simulate robots virtually before deploying them on the ground, gather data to run analytics on the cloud and even manage a fleet of robots.
While AWS will largely build tools for developers, as capabilities such as autonomous navigation become commonplace, the company could look to build them in-house and offer them as a service to robot developers, Barga said.
With the advent of 5G technology, more of the processing capabilities of robots will be offloaded to the cloud, making them smarter and giving them real-time analytics capabilities to do a better job. For India, robot builders will be able to get into the business far more easily, having all the tools on access, overcoming the barrier of a lack of fundamental research in robotics.
Enterprise Technology
Jeff Bezos’ big tech bets AWS might be a behemoth in the cloud computing space, but cloud still makes up just 3% of all IT in the world. The rest remains on-premise. While a lot will migrate to the cloud, some will not. In order to get into the action in the on-premise market, Amazon has innovated on services that run on a customer’s data centre, offering capabilities as if the data is stored on the cloud.
With Outposts, which was announced last month, AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools will be able to run on a customer’s data centre.
Essentially, this will allow enterprises to run services on data housed within their own data centres, just like how they would if it had been stored on AWS.
The other big problem that AWS is looking to solve is not having its own data centres close enough to customers who require extremely low-latency computing. For this, the company has introduced a new service called Local Zones, where it deploys own hardware closer to a large population, industry, and IT centre where no AWS Region exists today.
Both these new services from AWS could be valuable in India given the lower reach of cloud computing among enterprises as well as stricter data localisation requirements.
Artificial Intelligence/Machine learning
Jeff Bezos’ big tech bets Amazon is moving up the value chain in offering services backed by artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate repetitive tasks done by human beings.
Enterprise customers will simply be able to buy into these services with minimal customisation and without a large data science and artificial intelligence team.
In December, AWS launched its Fraud Detector service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent activity online, such as payment fraud and creation of fake accounts. Even large banks in India have struggled to put together teams to build machine learning models for fraud detection, but with such a service they can train their systems easily.
Code Guru is another service that uses machine learning to do code reviews and spit out application performance recommendations, giving specific recommendations to fix code. Today, this is largely done manually, with several non-technology companies struggling to build great software for themselves due to bad code.
Transcribe Medical is a service that uses Amazon’s voice technology to create accurate transcriptions from medical consultations between patients and physicians. Medical transcription as a service is a big industry in India, and India’s IT service giants hire thousands to review code. These services are expected to replace mundane manual tasks, freeing up resources for sophisticated tasks, and could lead to disruption.
Dktopzone 