Philippa Kaur

Visitors to Bangalore, India’s tech hub, quickly learn why locals measure distances in minutes and not kilometres. The city’s clogged streets turn every outing into a test of patience. Other large cities in the country are just as bad. So it is no surprise that Indians are getting everything from biryanis and books to mangoes and mobile phones delivered straight to their doors—often in under ten minutes. “Quick commerce” is a booming business in India. Zomato, the largest company in the industry, is valued at $26bn; its share price has nearly doubled this year. Swiggy, its closest rival, is expected to go public on November 13th at a valuation of $11bn. Zepto, another competitor founded in 2021, is now worth $5bn. More

When Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, releases its latest smartphone this month, techies will strip it down to figure out how it works. The semiconductors powering the Mate 70, as the device is called, will reveal how much progress China has made in building its own chips and breaking its reliance on foreign technology. But the software in the phone may prove more important than the hardware. Huawei is expected to install HarmonyOS NEXT, its new homemade operating system, on the devices. This would be China’s first clean break with the Western-backed systems on which it and the rest of the world rely. More

For investors concerned that America’s tech giants are making recklessly large bets on generative artificial intelligence (AI), big tech’s latest quarterly results have offered some reassurance. The growth in demand from companies for the cloud services of Amazon, Microsoft and Google was red hot. Andy Jassy, boss of Amazon, put it most strikingly. He said that AI revenue for Amazon Web Services (AWS) was growing at triple-digit rates—three times faster than AWS itself grew in the early years after it pioneered cloud computing in 2006. More

The spectre of deindustrialisation has long haunted Germany. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 caused energy prices to spiral. The economy of Germany’s biggest trading partner, China, has slowed. And as competitors, Chinese carmakers are proving more than a handful for Europe’s biggest, Volkswagen (VW). Now the apparition looks worryingly solid. “The signs of deindustrialisation are becoming clearer,” warned Martin Wansleben, head of the German chamber of trade and industry (DIHK), on October 29th. More

ADAM SMITH would be baffled by microelectronics. When the great economist died in 1790 James Watt’s two-cylinder steam engine passed for the height of technological sophistication. If he recognised the prefix “nano”—a fair bet for a precocious classicist proficient in dead languages by 14—it would be as a derivation of the Greek word for “dwarf”, not as a reference to the billionths of a metre in which modern semiconductors are measured. The word “billion” had entered the English language by Smith’s time but the number it denotes would have seemed unfathomable. Some 200bn transistors etched onto a few halfpennies in Nvidia’s latest Blackwell artificial-intelligence (AI) chip? Black magic, even for an enlightened Scottish rationalist. More

To decarbonise the global economy and build the data centres needed for ever smarter artificial-intelligence models, the world will need lots of minerals. China wants first dibs. Last year its companies ploughed roughly $16bn into mines overseas, not including minority investments. More

The past century has been one of relentless innovation. But in the West the humble toilet is a curious exception. By the early 20th century, free-standing flush toilets with U-bend plumbing were being installed in homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans and Europeans seem to think that the model is still more or less good enough. More

“You want to know the secret to surviving air travel?” the man sitting next to Bruce Willis on the plane asks in “Die Hard”, a film from 1988. “After you get to where you’re going, take off your shoes and your socks, then you walk around on the rug barefoot and make fists with your toes.” More