Instagram’s Mosseri to appear before US Senate; BigBasket to open 800 stores; and a chat with the co-founders of Bizongo

Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, will testify before America’s top lawmakers in a senate subcommittee hearing in early December about the platform's harmful impact on young users, CNN reports. Mosseri is the most high-profile executive from Meta, as Facebook is now called, to agree to testify since Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen released hundreds of internal company documents, according to CNN.

Apple will be switching to its own 5G modems in 2023 instead of using technology from Qualcomm, Nikkei reports. Apple’s modems will be made by TSMC—the chip maker that already supplies Apple’s A-series processors and M1 system-on-chip semiconductors. Apple has been working on reducing its reliance on Qualcomm for vital semiconductor components for several years. The two companies have also contested court battles.

Coinbase, America’s biggest crypto exchange, has acquired crypto wallet startup BRD, to get the founders on to its own wallet team, the company said on Twitter. The BRD team will help accelerate web3 adoption and BRD’s founders bring deep expertise in self-custody for crypto wallets, Coinbase said in its tweet. BRD has millions of users including in India.

BigBasket, India’s biggest online groceries company, is entering offline retail and has opened its first store in Bangalore, the company said in a press release. The company acquired by the Tata Group this year, expects to open 200 stores by 2023 and 800 by 2026.

TomTom, a geolocation technology company, has opened a 100,000 square feet state-of-the-art facility in Pune that can accommodate up to 1000 employees, the company said in a press release. The centre is one of TomTom’s largest offices worldwide and a strategic engineering hub, according to the company. Staff can decide if they need to use the office based on the type of work at hand.

NASA has launched a spacecraft that will intentionally collide with a distant asteroid in the world’s first full-scale mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazards, the US space agency said in a press release on Wednesday. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), launched on Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from a base in California.

DART is part of NASA’s larger planetary defence strategy. It is built and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Its goal is to slightly change the asteroid’s motion in a way that can be accurately measured using ground-based telescopes. It will show that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it—a method of deflection called kinetic impact.

Interview: Ankit Tomar, CTO and Sachin Agrawal, COO at Bizongo on plans to make the company an exports facilitation platform

Bizongo started as a simple way for small manufacturers to find orders more efficiently. Today it has evolved into something of an ‘operating system’ for manufacturers of custom-designed goods to manage many of their supply-chain needs. In today’s interview, Ankit Tomar and Sachin Agrawal, two of the three co-founders at Bizongo talk about how their tech platform will eventually catalyse and facilitate exports from India.