SpaceX Space tourists Land on Earth after Spending three days in orbit

Four space tourists of the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission have safely landed off Florida's coast. They have completed the first of its kind three-day mission in Earth's orbit without professional astronauts with them. The SpaceX Dragon capsule's in-built heat shield helped them to withstand the descent before the spacecraft was slowed down by four large parachutes, after which it splashed into the ocean.

The return of space tourists from the orbit followed a plunge through Earth's atmosphere that generated a frictional heat which increased the surroundings outside of the capsule spiraling to 1,927 degrees Celsius (3,500 degrees Fahrenheit). But, the space tourists had unique ventilation systems designed to keep them cool if the cabin heated up.

SpaceX, one of the leading private rocketry companies founded by tycoon Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla electric carmaker, had supplied the spacecraft, which launched from Florida and flew to the Earth's orbit from the company's suburban Los Angeles headquarters. It is reported that Isaacman paid an undisclosed sum for all four space tourists on the mission.

 

 

HDFC Bank, Paytm to Launch Co-branded Credit Cards

HDFC Bank and Paytm have announced a partnership to launch co-branded credit cards. These cards will be powered by VISA. The offering will especially focus on millennials, merchants, and business owners.

These co-branded credit cards will cater to the needs of retail customers, which will include new users and also seasoned users. These cards will also have one of the best-in-class rewards and cashback for users. It will also help small business owners.

The companies are planning to launch the co-branded credit cards in October this year, just in time for the Indian festival of Diwali.

"As India’s largest card issuing and acquiring bank, we are committed to accelerate the adoption of digitization in the country. We believe India's growth story is robust and this partnership is an effort on Bank's part to enable consumption, particularly, during festive season, which will further fuel the economic growth of the country. As a leader in the cards space, our objective is to help enlarge the eco-system through such collaborations, which ultimately offers a differentiated experience for customers," said Parag Rao, Group Head – Payments, Consumer Finance, Digital Banking & IT, HDFC Bank.

The credit cards will offer a host of benefits for merchant partners from the smaller cities and towns of India and enable them to get easier access to credit with instant and paperless approvals. The launch of the credit cards will be Paytm's foray into the credit card segment for merchants.

STT GDC Thailand Opens its STT Bangkok 1

ST Telemedia Global Data Centres has launched STT Bankok, the city's first and largest data center. The data center will offer a differentiated data center colocation services model to improve the design and operational excellence to companies in Thailand.

"The launch of the STT Bangkok Data Centre Campus marks the first milestone for our company and a new era of digital infrastructure in Thailand. With a CAGR of 26.5% projected for the industry1, we are seeing a fast-growing demand for colocation services in Thailand from enterprises and cloud service providers that are continually expanding their business platforms to meet customers' evolving demand for digital services, particularly during this prolonged COVID-19 situation," said Supparat Singhara Na Ayutthaya, Chief Executive Officer, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (Thailand).

STT Bankok 1 is the first two buildings in the STT Bangkok Data Center Campus. It is located at Hua Mak, Bangkok.  The data center delivers up to 20 megawatts of total IT load capacity to support customers' business expansion with the ability to scale to 40MW. The data center has been awarded both the TIA-942 Certification Rated-3 and Uptime Institute Tier III Certification of Design Documents and Constructed Facility.

 

 

 

IKEA x ASUS ROG Latest Gaming Gear to hit the USA Markets Soon

In a recent announcement IKEA has stated that its most anticipated IKEA x ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) gaming gear will be available in the US market from this October 2021. It will have latest gaming accessories, lighting, and furniture collection were in an earlier preview in February. IKEA x ASUS is also launching new LED strips, mouse, USB bungee, and a wooden hand that holds headphones to improve the gaming experience.

It will also include special features like the IKEA UPPSPEL collection and has a limited set of attachments that are specially made to hold your gaming gear while not using it. There's also a UPPSPEL glass-door cabinet, which will be sold with two other accessory sets. In all, the UPPSPEL set has the drawer Pegboard, CPU stand with castors.

It also includes a new storage unit on wheels. It also has well-built neck pillows and multi-functional cushion combos. As mentioned earlier, all these items will be released to IKEA stores in the month of October. The price will range from less than $10 to a few hundred dollars.

 

 

Data center-as-a-service solution from Mirantis is all set to make its debut

Mirantis, a popular OpenStack startup, pivoted toward cloud-native techs a few years ago and started focusing on microservices, Kubernetes, and containers. Recently, Mirantis made an announcement regarding its latest offering, Mirantis Flow. An open-source set of services that were curated for companies to manage their cloud-native data center and environment irrespective of infrastructure type. Co-Founder and CEO of Mirantis, Adrian lonel, has stated that the company is gearing up to deliver its clients a cloud-to-cloud experience on the edge, public cloud, and data center.

He furthermore added that several big companies like Netflix, Apple, and Facebook have managed to figure out how to manage their data in the hybrid cloud-native world, but there are various companies out there who lack the basic resource needed to manage their cloud. Mirantis’ new offering will focus on giving capabilities that were exclusive to big companies to everyone. Lonel stated that there are other big names in the segment like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google who tend to focus on this very problem, but the issue is that their offerings tend to focus more on being proprietary. This eventually leads to a lock, and various companies at the global level are trying their best to avoid this.

 

Unicommerce improves its Southeast Asia Portfolio, Onboards over 10 companies

Unicommerce has expanded its Southeast Asia client portfolio by onboarding over 10 clients to its network. These clients are from Singapore, Philippines, and Malaysia. The e-commerce focused supply chain SaaS technology platform will help these companies with their order management, warehouse management, and inventory management.

"Our journey in South East Asia started in December 2020. We spent the initial six months on extensive research to understand the pain points of e-tailers in the region and to enhance our product to cater to companies in Southeast Asia. We are confident that our learnings will help us with our aggressive expansion plans. Our team is continuously working to add more clients across multiple sectors and sizes. With our proven success record in our home market- India, brands in South East Asia are showing immense interest to partner with Unicommerce in their e-commerce journey," said Mr. Kapil Makhija, CEO, Unicommerce.

Unicommerce is currently working with a few leading brands in Southeast Asia, including Edamama, and PayoAsia. Focused on expansion in Southeast Asia, the company is looking to increase its workforce in Singapore, Malaysia, and Philippines. Unicommerce will also look to achieve 400%+ business growth in the region this year.

 

Pine Labs Raises another $100 Million in Funding

One of Asia's leading merchant commerce platform Pine Labs has raised another $100 million in funding weeks after raising $600 million in a financing round. This funding came from Invesco Developing Markets Fund.

"Over the last 18 months we have scaled our Prepaid Issuing stack, Online Payments, and also the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) offering. We continue to make progress in the larger Asian markets with our BNPL platform. Very excited to have a marquee investor like Invesco join us in the journey," said B. Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs.

Pine Labs counts Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, Actis, PayPal and Mastercard as its investors. The company offers a range of payment solutions and BNPL offering at the POS. The company recently started focusing on the consumer side of business with the acquisition of fintech platform Fave in April this year.

"The Invesco Developing Markets Fund is pleased to invest in Pine Labs, a leading fintech services company in India that fits our strategy of seeking high quality companies that have durable long-term growth potential," said Justin Leverenz, CIO of Developing Markets Equities at Invesco.