Apps
PayPal to shut-down domestic payments operation in India
Will focus on cross-border transactions
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PayPal will shut down its payments operations in India this year. The company has announced it’ll undertake a restructuring exercise from February 6, informing its merchants that it intends to terminate contracts by April 1, 2021.
The decision isn’t shocking because PayPal lost the Indian payments market long ago. Instead, the company plans on focusing on its cross-border trade business. Indians send a lot of remittance from other countries, and with the world gradually recovering from the Coronavirus pandemic, the demand is bound to grow.
They added that the company has looked at ways to “protect business and optimize growth here since early days of the pandemic” and “decided we are best placed focusing on enabling cross-border trades and exports.”
PayPal was a payments options on many Indian online apps like MakeMy Trip, BookMyShow, and Swiggy. Simultaneously, the service is very relevant in the US and other markets due to Venmo (P2P transfers) and its payment gateway service on third party merchants. Adding to this, the user can also use the account as a digital wallet.
However, PayPal never really took off in India due to a cumbersome sign-up process and government compliance issues. While its technology had an edge, PayPal became irrelevant in India when UPI (Unified Payments Interface) was launched by a consortium of Indian private and public sector banks.
The technology made P2P transfer possible across any major bank in India. The interoperability offered by UPI is considered the best in the world. Why would one need a digital wallet when your bank account is directly accessible within a minute? The transfers are also real-time; hence there’s no settlement time or banking hours. This push ended the dream of many companies similar to PayPal, including Alibaba-backed Paytm.
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Archiving social media is a real problem today. Because most of public discourse happens through social media platforms, a single break in infrastructure can easily wipe out entire conversations and milestones in the modern era. Over the weekend, that exact scenario happened. A glitch on X reportedly erased most images and links from 2014 and beyond.
As spotted by Tom Coates on the platform, images from before December 2014 disappeared from the site. Likewise, links from the same period are also broken and lead nowhere. Among those that disappeared, one of the most notorious losses was a photo taken by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars — a tweet that garnered an enormous amount of retweets at the time.
More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. Thats – so far – almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service.
For example, here’s a search of my media tweets from before 2014. https://t.co/FU6K34oqmA
— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) August 19, 2023
X has not publicly commented on the supposed glitch. However, after the deletion was noticed, the platform restored the iconic Ellen DeGeneres photo to its full glory. It’s not a complete restoration, though. A lot of content are still missing.
The single photo’s restoration suggests that the content wasn’t outright deleted but rather misplaced. As some have pointed out, a few instances are still directly available from the servers. Users have also speculated that the glitch was intentionally done to free up valuable server space.
Regardless, the glitch — intentional or accidental — opens up an important issue on how the world can archive content on social media platforms. Despite how inane our conversations can be from day to day, losing a section of social media also means losing entire swaths of public discourse to the ether.
SEE ALSO: Twitter is rebranding to 𝕏
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Quickly sharing smartphone photography can be a chore. Not every messaging platform allows lossless media sharing. Often, a platform will sacrifice image quality for speed. Finally, WhatsApp is getting with the program and allowing users to send HD photos on the app.
Today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially announced a new feature coming to WhatsApp. Starting now, the messaging platform is rolling out an update to enable HD image sharing.
According to WABetaInfo, the feature will bump up image quality to 4096 x 2692 resolution. Now, an upper limit naturally implies that there’s still compression going on, especially for photos taken at much higher resolutions. WhatsApp has not explained how compression will work under the new HD feature. However, it’s still a good improvement.
Alternatively, if users don’t want to handle the increase in storage or bandwidth use, they can continue to send images in standard quality. The option, once the app is updated, can be accessed by an HD icon when sending images.
Besides image sharing, WhatsApp is also working on adding HD sharing for videos. However, Zuckerberg did not share a timeframe for the improved version of the feature. The update should be rolling out now for WhatsApp users.
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X is continuing its arduous trek to become an all-in-one app. This time, after reintroducing native livestreaming, the platform is moving towards the next natural evolution: video chat. X CEO Linda Yaccarino has officially announced that the feature will come to the platform soon.
In an interview with CNBC, Yaccarino, who took the reins from Elon Musk earlier this year, announced that “soon, you’ll be able to make video chat calls without having to give your phone number to anyone on the platform.” As if that’s not enough, Andrea Conway, a designer at the company, also posted that she “just called someone on X.”
Given Conway’s post, the feature should be in a relatively stable part of the development process. However, it’s not clear when and how the platform plans to launch video chats for the public. It’s also unclear whether the feature will be available to all users or only to those who pay for X Premium, formerly known as Twitter Blue.
With the evolution of all social media platforms (and not just X), it’s not a surprising development for the company. The industry is dedicated to creating the next “everything” app or a hub where users can find everything they’ll need for their digital world: social media, communication, commerce, and other functionalities. TikTok, for instance, recently started tests to support podcasts.
SEE ALSO: X is bringing back livestreaming
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