In Brief: Walmart, Microsoft partner to bid for TikTok, hours after CEO Mayer quits

Retail giant Walmart on Friday said that it will partner with technology company Microsoft to bid for social media company TikTok's US assets, The Economic Times reported. ByteDance is expected to enter exclusive talks with a bidder in the next 24 to 48 hours and ink a deal by September 15, a Reuters report said. The announcement was made hours after Kevin Mayer, three-month-old CEO of the Chinese company, said he would step down from his position, the financial daily said. 

Facebook exec Das apologises to employees for islamophobic post

Ankhi Das, the director of public policy for Facebook India, and south and central Asia, has apologised to the company’s employees for labelling Muslims as a “degenerate community” in a post last year, as per a report on Buzzfeed News. The post, which also said that “nothing except the purity of religion and implementation of Shariah matter,” has been deleted, the report said.

Read: Facebook hate speech controversy

Keysight, IIT Madras to aid with 5G standards development

Technology firm Keysight Technologies on Thursday partnered with IIT-Madras to help the Telecom Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) develop 5G standards. The Department of Telecommunications will fund a large-scale project, dubbed 5G Testbed, to help startups and the telecom industry take the lead in 5G, a statement said. The project will build a 5G prototype and testing platform, which will be developed under 50 researchers and engineers based in the IIT Madras campus, using equipment developed by Keysight, it said. 

Park Place Technologies launches ParkView business unit

Cleveland, Ohio-based hardware maintenance firm Park Place Technologies on Friday introduced the ParkView business unit and a full suite of managed services on its flagship ParkView platform. The suite helps customers discover, monitor, support and optimise their information technology (IT) infrastructures and cloud computing environments, the statement said. The services under ParkView unit include a managed service platform that provides customers an accurate listing of all infrastructure center assets within their IT environments, as well as a managed solution for server and storage monitoring at the software level.

Cutting Edge Group backs yoga and wellness startup Sarva

Yoga and wellness platform Sarva has raised an undisclosed amount in a fresh funding round from full-service provider of music provider Cutting Edge Group. The capital will help the company add over 20,000 minutes of music and meditation content to its catalogue, a statement said. Last month, Sarva bagged an undisclosed amount from Aishwaryaa R Dhanush, daughter of film actor Rajinikanth.

Persistent Systems gets AWS Service delivery designation 

IT services firm Persistent Systems on Friday announced that it has received the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Service delivery designation for its serverless compute service. The tag for AWS Lambda recognises that Persistent has followed best practises and delivered AWS services to end customers, a statement said. This also makes Persistent an AWS Partner Network (APN) member, it said. 

NASSCOM inks deal with Adobe India

IT industry lobby group  NASSCOM has partnered with San Jose-based computer software company Adobe’s India unit to launch the UX foundation programme. Available on NASSCOM’s FutureSkills platform, the programme is free of cost for all its 300,000 subscribers, a statement said. It aims to skill students and reskill professionals by 2021 to meet the industry demand in user experience design, it said. Cognizant has been chosen as the industry partner for this initiative.