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Accenture to Cut 19000 Jobs as IT Spending Slows

In the coming 18 months, Accenture PLC will eliminate around 19,000 employees, or 2.5 percent of its staff, as the professional services company strives to reduce expenses and increase operational efficiency in the face of a slowdown in IT spending.

In a statement on Thursday, the firm, which provides IT consulting as well as other business services, stated that the majority of the workers anticipated to be impacted will be in nonbillable corporate functions. To meet its “strategic growth initiatives,” Accenture stated it is currently hiring.

Also Read: Amazon to Cut 9,000 More Jobs, Deepening Biggest Pullback Ever

The corporation stated that it anticipates spending around $1.5 billion on its business optimization plan between the remaining months of the present fiscal year and fiscal 2024, primarily from employee termination.

According to Chief Financial Officer KC McClure, Accenture employs around 738,000 employees worldwide and has grown by 28,000 over the past two quarters. Beyond what it stated in a 10-Q filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), the corporation declined to comment on the cutbacks.

The consultancy business “recognized a chance to pursue more fundamental costs as per The Chief Executive of Accenture Julie Sweet. She added that Accenture has been addressing the issue of accumulating pay escalation through pricing, cost-saving measures, and digitalization.

The IT consultancy firm’s layoffs are associated with a recent wave of job losses as businesses in tech, manufacturing, and some other areas seek to reduce costs in the midst of concern over higher interest rates, ongoing inflation, and other economic issues.

However, until now, large technological businesses such as Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc., & Meta Platforms Inc. mainly shielded IT positions from the massive job cuts.

For the very first time in over two years, the employment market for IT experts fell in January, an indication that as businesses cut spending, IT staffers are receiving the same level of scrutiny as employees in other jobs and industries.

Also Read: Google begins opening access to its ChatGPT competitor Bard

According to Victor Janulaitis, the CEO of consultancy firm Janco Associates Inc., a notable portion of the IT jobs getting eliminated or digitized are in data center operations and telecommunications, while there is still a significant skills deficit in fields such as cybersecurity & software development.

“What we are seeing is still a big demand for IT skills,” said Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at IT consulting firm Constellation Research Inc. “While Accenture is managing to its shareholders, there are a large number of firms with 20% to 30% attrition that is happy to pick up folks from Accenture.”
Source: wsj.com

Suhani Jain

I am a student pursuing my bachelor’s in information technology. I have a interest in writing so, I am working a freelance content writer because I enjoy writing. I also write poetries. I believe in the quote by anne frank “paper has more patience than person

Twitter to Begin Culling Legacy Verified Marks From April 1

Next week, Twitter will start removing the legacy verified marks from user profiles. The company is moving towards a system where only paid subscribers and people who are part of approved organizations have that status.

Since November 2022, Twitter Blue members may also show the blue “verified” checkmark on their profiles. “Legacy verified” accounts on Twitter are those that had already been verified under the prior system. Twitter announced in a tweet on Thursday that the move to eliminate legacy verification will start on April 1.

According to the website, on April 1st, it “will start winding down [its] legacy verified program and removing legacy verified checkmarks.” It was always clear that the company wanted to do this.

Also Read: U.S. SEC threatens to sue Coinbase over some crypto products

Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, stated that “far too many corrupt legacy Blue’verification’ checkmarks exist” and that the business is going to eliminate them in the upcoming months shortly after Twitter Blue was first introduced in November 2022.

The blue verification mark has become a key component of Twitter’s Twitter Blue subscription service, which Musk initially priced at $8 per month and now touts as the best method to use and advance the service. More paying subscribers, according to Musk, would also help to fix Twitter’s bot issue. According to the company, paying Blue users receive greater priority in searches and replies, which helps combat spam and scams. Additionally, they can edit tweets and get receive much fewer ads.

Just as Twitter Blue subscriptions went global, Twitter made a statement regarding legacy verified users. With this rollout, the service will be available to more people than it was previously. Paying subscribers will also receive a blue tick, have access to 4,000-character tweets, be able to edit their tweets, and benefit from better reply rankings.

If the company wants to reach Musk’s objective of having half of its income come from subscriptions, it must increase the availability of Blue. We’ll just have to see whether or not there are enough customers ready to pay the $8 monthly fee (or $11 if they pay via the iOS app) for its benefits.

Numerous journalists and public personalities are among those designated as verified without the Twitter Blue subscription. During the years that Twitter operated without Musk, this blue tick system assisted in establishing the veracity of assertions and reports emanating from those profiles and elevated Twitter to the status of a reliable news source.

Also Read: Trump returns to YouTube and Facebook after a two-year ban

Musk’s hatred for the old system has frequently been expressed in light of his contempt for journalists, who have frequently been the busiest verified users on Twitter. After largely ignoring journalist inquiries in previous months, Musk this month set the press@twitter.com email account to automatically reply with a poop emoji.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Google begins opening access to its ChatGPT competitor Bard

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc began the official launch of its chatbot Bard on March 21 Tuesday, attempting to find users as well as reviews to make headway on Microsoft Corp in such a speedy race in the field of artificial intelligence.

The launch is an important step for Alphabet Inc as it seeks to expand its presence in the AI space. The company has been investing heavily in AI research and development and has made significant progress in developing machine learning algorithms and natural language processing technologies that can be used to power chatbots like Bard.

Beginning in the United States and the United Kingdom, users can join a waitlist for English-language availability to Bard, which was formerly restricted to authorized testers. Google defines Bard as a collaborative project or experiments with generative AI, a technology that uses previous information to generate rather than recognize content.

Also Read: Amazon to Cut 9,000 More Jobs, Deepening Biggest Pullback Ever

“We’re beginning with the U.S. and the U.K., and will expand to more countries and languages over time,” the company said in a blog post-Tuesday.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

The launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot from a startup OpenAI powered by Microsoft, last year sparked a race in the tech industry to put AI in the palms of more customers. The goal is to transform how people are working while also winning business.

Bard additionally had a feature that displayed three distinct versions or “draughts” of any given answer, which users could toggle between, as well as a button that said “Google it” if a user wanted web results for a request.

“Bard is designed so that you can easily visit Search to check its responses or explore sources across the web. Click “Google it” to see suggestions for queries, and Search will open in a new tab so you can find relevant results and dig deeper. We’ll also be thoughtfully integrating LLMs into Search in a deeper way — more to come,” the company added.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

According to Google, Bard is not capable of producing computer code, unlike ChatGPT. Google also stated that it has restricted Bard’s recollection of previous chat interactions and that it is not currently utilizing Bard for marketing, which is central to Google’s business strategy.

During the illustration, Google pointed out a couple of errors to Reuters, such as how Bard incorrectly asserted ferns needed bright, ambient lighting in reply to one query.

Also Read: Twitch CEO Emmett Shear to step down

Google said it was focused on users and that internal and external testers have turned to Bard for “boosting their productivity, accelerating their ideas, really fueling their curiosity.”

“We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post last month.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

Suhani Jain

What’s behind bitcoin’s latest surge?

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Sandhya Gupta

In the midst of a gloomy winter at the beginning of the year, bitcoin was in bad shape after 2022 marked by falling cryptocurrency prices, company scandals, and bankruptcies.

In fewer than three months, bitcoin has regained its luster. It has outperformed other significant commodities this year with gains of over 70%, and on Wednesday, it was trading close to its highest level in nine months.

The first and largest cryptocurrency has been through this before; over its 15-year existence, it has experienced both dizzying price increases and drops. Interest rates are driving the increases.

Also Read: Why Google suspended China’s Pinduoduo app?

According to six investors and analysts from the crypto and conventional finance industries who spoke to Reuters, markets anticipate that central bank increases in the cost of credit are reaching their peak, which is expected to support risky assets like bitcoin.

Other factors are also in play, such as the banking industry’s unrest and persistent but unfulfilled hopes that bitcoin will become a widely accepted method of payment. On Sunday, Bitcoin recorded its greatest week in four years and has since increased by 45% in just 12 days.

Suggestions that bitcoin is an asset resistant to risks in conventional finance have gained momentum as the failure of American firms Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank served to prompt the takeover of 167-year-old Credit Suisse by competitor UBS on Sunday.

According to Usman Ahmad, CEO of Zodia Markets, a cryptocurrency exchange run by the venture arm of Standard Chartered and Hong Kong-based BC Technology Group, “It’s rather narrow-minded to say that bitcoin is going to succeed because a bank failed. But confidence is almost a critical factor – confidence in the banking system has been damaged.”

Significant changes in bitcoin’s price in the past have been closely related to changes in global monetary policy. Stay-at-home investors fueled a six-fold gain for bitcoin between September 2020-April 2021 as stimulus measures inundated the worldwide financial system during the COVID-19 pandemic.

These actions, combined with growing interest in cryptocurrencies from bigger investors and businesses, led proponents of the technology to proclaim that there was less chance that it would experience the violent crashes that have historically occurred after bitcoin rallies.

Bitcoin, however, fell by over fifty percent from the all-time high of $69,000 in merely 75 days as rates started to rise as signs of rogue inflation late in 2021 drove central government agencies and banks to curtail stimulus packages.

Also Read: With GPT-4, are we one step closer to losing our jobs?

The decline of a significant crypto token in 2022, brought on by higher interest rates, caused the closure of significant hedge funds and crypto lenders, and a drop in bitcoin of over 65%.

Regulatory issues and the abrupt collapse of the FTX market further battered it. Despite the claims of its supporters that bitcoin is a secure haven asset in periods of economic and political stress, the disastrous year served as another warning of its susceptibility to outside shocks.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Why Google suspended China’s Pinduoduo app?

Leave a Comment / Story, Tech Story / By Sandhya Gupta

After malware problems were discovered on versions of the Chinese e-commerce application outside Google’s app store, Google suspended the Play edition of PDD Holdings Inc.’s Pinduoduo app for security reasons, a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.

The spokesperson said in a statement that “Off-Play versions of this app that have been found to contain malware have been enforced on via Google Play Protect,” adding that the Play version of the app has been suspended for security reasons.

Pinduoduo, a well-known e-commerce app in China, frequently gives users discounts when they purchase several items. Users were advised by Google on Tuesday to remove any Pinduoduo apps that hadn’t been downloaded from the Google Play Store.

Also Read: Trump returns to YouTube and Facebook after a two-year ban

Websites that enable users to download mobile apps without visiting official stores frequently have downloads of Android and even iOS apps available. According to Google’s statement, the enforcement of Google Play Protect has been configured to prevent efforts to install the aforementioned malicious apps.

Users who downloaded malicious copies of the app to their devices are notified and asked to uninstall the app. Pinduoduo was still available for download from Apple’s iOS store on Tuesday, but it was unclear whether there were any comparable security issues with the app for Apple users.

With the help of Google Play Services, Google Play Protect scans Android-based gadgets for possibly harmful apps and works to stop the downloading of malicious apps.

A Pinduoduo spokesperson told Reuters in an email that “Google Play has informed us this morning that Pinduoduo App has been temporarily suspended as the current version is not compliant with Google’s Policy, but has not shared more details.”

According to Pinduoduo, there are a number of additional apps that Google Play has temporarily suspended. He added that there are numerous causes for this.

Pinduoduo, which is primarily used in China, has been suspended amid heightened tensions between the United States and China over Chinese-owned apps like TikTok, which some American lawmakers claim pose a danger to national security.

According to their claims, these applications could be utilized to surveil American users. TikTok is at an impasse as legislators appear nearer than ever to taking the historic step of completely blocking the app.

The U.S. app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, may be compelled to sell it to another business under duress from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which examines transactions that might have an impact on national security.

The RESTRICT Act, a bipartisan legislation introduced in the Senate this month, empowers the US Commerce Secretary to impose sanctions against foreign technology firms and urges the intelligence community to make risk assessment information publicly available.

Also Read: Amazon to Cut 9,000 More Jobs, Deepening Biggest Pullback Ever

On Tuesday, shares of PDD Holdings decreased 1.8% in premarket trading. The development coincides with U.S. government efforts to strengthen its cyber security measures in response to a constant rise in hacking and other cybercrimes targeting the nation. China and Russia were cited as the two biggest threats to the USA in the government’s newly released cybersecurity strategy.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Trump returns to YouTube and Facebook after a two-year ban

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

The Facebook and YouTube accounts of the previous president of the United States Donald Trump were recovered on Friday after they were disabled just after his followers’ attack on January 6, 2021, on Congress.

Ever since his supporters attacked the US Capitol since Congress was declaring Joe Biden’s triumph in the 2020 election for president, Trump’s YouTube was blocked for breaching its policy against incitement to violence.

Trump declared his entrance on the Facebook and Youtube platforms once again by posting “I’m Back” on Friday.

Also Read: New Zealand to ban TikTok on devices linked to parliament

A clip on his page also depicted Trump’s election as president in opposition to Hillary Clinton in 2016. The display then tends to fade toward a ‘Trump 2024’ screen.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Trump could be seen saying in the video.
Source: indiatoday.in

“Starting today, the Donald J. Trump channel is no longer restricted and can upload new content,” YouTube said in a statement.

“We carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, while balancing the chance for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election.”
Source: france24.com

Republican politicians slammed Trump’s removal from Facebook, whereas a community of congressional Democrats pressured parent company Meta to prolong the ban to maintain threatening and baseless electoral rejection material off from its platform.

In January, both Instagram and Facebook declared that Trump’s accounts would be reinstated with new guardrails.

Trump’s lawyer, Scott Gast, wrote to the corporation, which is centered in the Bay Area of California, asserting this had significantly altered and hindered political discussion.

Following the violent protest, the former president’s Twitter account was also banned and at that time it had 87 million followers, forcing him to interact via his site Truth Social, which seems to have very few than five million followers.

Elon Musk, the new acquirer of Twitter, restored Trump’s account last November, just days ever since Trump declared his second White House bid, although he has yet to tweet on the platform.

Meta’s decision was commended by the American Civil Liberties Union, one that has filed over 400 court actions in opposition to Trump.

Also Read: Twitch CEO Emmett Shear to step down

“Like it or not, President Trump is one of the country’s leading political figures and the public has a strong interest in hearing his speech,” executive director Anthony Romero said in a statement.

“Indeed, some of Trump’s most offensive social media posts ended up being critical evidence in lawsuits filed against him and his administration.”
Source: france24.com

Suhani Jain

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