Naam: Truecaller’s challenger from India; Traditional Wales food

UPI to enter Sri Lanka and Mauritius.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Sunday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sri Lanka President Ranil Wickremesinghe, and Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth will witness the launch of UPI services in these countries today. 

Elsewhere, StartupTN, which is backed by the Tamil Nadu government, has launched Smart Card and other initiatives to meet the needs of aspiring entrepreneurs in the early stage of building their startups.

Speaking of startups, The government is examining foreign direct investment from China in Paytm Payments Services Ltd (PPSL), the payment aggregator subsidiary of One97 Communications Ltd, the Press Trust of India reported, citing sources.

Meanwhile, One97 Communications says it has received support from merchants, and that it has assured them of continuity of services without any disruption.

ICYMI: OpenAI head Sam Altman has a great ambition: raising trillions of dollars–as much as $7 trillion–to reshape the global semiconductor industry.

Lastly, we are now in the Year of the Dragon. Here’s the surprising 4,000-year history of the mythical creature. 

Fun fact: The oldest word for dragon–"ušum-gal”–was first written in ancient Mesopotamia, a region that is now part of modern-day Iraq. 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Naam: Truecaller’s challenger from India
• A taste of Wales through traditional food

Here’s your trivia for today: A key contributing factor to social media addiction, the infinite scroll was developed in which year?

Startup

Naam: Trucaller’s challenger from India

While the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is taking steps to implement a caller identification system to curb the menace of spam, private players are helping notify users of such calls. 

Jaipur-based startup Naam’s made-in-India app uses AI to flag potentially fraudulent numbers by scraping over 500 million phone numbers.

Who’s calling:

• Naam uses publicly available information to maintain its database and wants to serve as a homegrown alternative to the Swedish software company Truecaller.
• The startup also uses a privacy-first approach. Unlike Truecaller, which lets users search for virtually every number with just a name, Naam only lets users search for a mobile number.
• It supports nine Indian languages, including Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and Marathi.

Food 

A taste of Wales through traditional food

Wales is now recognised around the world as a “food nation”. Last week, the Welsh government revealed that TasteWales 2023–a food event–saw “a record high for Welsh food and drink businesses as confirmed and potential sales reached £38 million”. 

Packed with flavour and local ingredients, the traditional foods of Wales are a part of the country's history and heritage. The cuisine, like food worldwide, has a superpower: it brings people together. YS Life explores more.

Harmony of tastes:

• With great numbers of the workforce in Wales historically spending long, exhausting days, working in the mines or the fields, the food had to be hearty, resourceful, filling, and delicious.
• Cooked on a griddle or heavy skillet, Welsh cakes are slightly crisp on the outside and soft and moist on the inside.
• Long before the word was branded offensive, faggots were the poor man's meatballs! Derived from the idea of nose-to-tail eating, this inexpensive dish was a staple in the coal-mining villages of south Wales.

News & updates

• Climate crisis: A crucial system of ocean currents may already be on course to collapse, according to a new report, with alarming implications for sea level rise and global weather. The change could lead temperatures to plunge dramatically in some regions and rise in others.
• Offloading: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos sold around 12 million shares of the online retail and cloud services firm for roughly $2 billion, according to a company filing on Friday, soon after laying out a plan to sell his shares over the next year.
• Scrutiny: China's Xiaomi has told New Delhi that smartphone component suppliers are wary about setting up operations in India amid heavy scrutiny of Chinese companies by the government, Reuters reports. Xiaomi also asks in the letter dated Feb. 6 that India consider offering manufacturing incentives and lowering import tariffs for certain smartphone components.

What you should watch out for

• Economic data: Dalal Street will keep a close eye on major macroeconomic data starting with Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for January and India Industrial Production (IIP) data will be out on February 12. The Wholesale Price Index (WPI) data for January will be released on February 14. 
• Gold bonds: The Finance Ministry said that the Sovereign Gold Bonds 2023-24 (Series IV) will be opened for subscription from February 12-16, with a settlement date of February 21. The gold bonds will be issued by the RBI for Rs 6,263 per gram.

A key contributing factor to social media addiction, the infinite scroll was developed in which year?

Answer: 2006. The infinite scroll was developed in 2006 by engineer Aza Raskin, who has since expressed his regret over the addictive nature of the feature. 

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