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<ul><li>Shares of <keyword id="6368261" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="raymond" source="Orion">Raymond</keyword> surged more than 5% in early trade on Tuesday on the company's announcement to consolidate some of its businesses.</li><li>The company’s tools &amp; hardware and auto components businesses will be merged into an engineering business.</li><li>Its real estate business will be formed into a wholly owned subsidiary.</li></ul>Textile-to-engineering conglomerate Raymond announced a restructuring plan to merge some of its businesses into one and monetise its assets. <br /><br />With this, the company will consolidate its segments of business with the parent company wherein tools &amp; hardware and auto components businesses will be merged into a new segment for engineering business. Meanwhile, the real estate business will be formed into a wholly owned subsidiary.<br /><br />The consolidation plan will improve synergies and provide an opportunity to monetise businesses and pare debt. <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/cons-products/garments-/-textiles/raymond-board-approves-business-consolidation-to-explore-monetisation-and-deleverage-business/articleshow/86568004.cms">Reportedly</a>, Raymond had a gross debt of ₹2,470 crore as of 31 March, as per Crisil research.<br /><br />This resulted in price gains for Raymond’s stock, on Tuesday, which gained 5% in the early trade. Later at 3:00 p.m., shares of the company were up 2.7% at ₹460 per share.<br /><br />    <div type="image" title="raymond" height="900" width="1200" msid="86582730" hostid="261"></div><br />With a focus to fast track recovery after the coronavirus outbreak, the firm will be consolidating its business-to-consumer business by transferring its apparel business into parent company Raymond, said the company.<br /><br />The company said, “the move will strengthen efficiencies, streamline and simplify processes and bring in synergy benefits in terms of design and innovation, sourcing and retail network.”<br /><br />“We are consolidating the business to explore all options available to us for monetisation, which will enable deleveraging leading to value creation,” said Gautam Hari Singhania, chairman and managing director at Raymond in a statement to BSE.<br /><br />Raymond had reported a consolidated loss of ₹157 crore in June quarter as compared to loss of ₹242 crore in the same quarter previous year.<br /><br />SEE ALSO: <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/news/finolex-cables-shares-trade-lower-after-two-advisory-firms-accuse-the-firm-of-poor-corporate-governance/articleshow/86580654.cms">Finolex Cables under pressure after two advisory firms accuse the firm of poor corporate governance</a><br /><br /><a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/business/news/take-a-deeper-look-at-the-meteoric-rise-of-glance-that-may-have-caught-mukesh-ambanis-eye/articleshow/86579569.cms">Take a deeper look at the meteoric rise of Glance that may have caught Mukesh Ambani’s eye</a>

Investors cheer Raymond’s restructuring plan to reduce debt

<p class="drop-cap">Earlier this week, another product contending for the future of AI companionship made its debut: an eavesdropping necklace called Friend. The device was introduced in a glossy, A24-style promotional video in which fresh-faced Zoomers speak to an AI pendant that provides emotional support, commentary, and playful jabs in the form of canned text messages. "This show is completely underrated," it texts a woman while she's watching a show and eating falafel on her lunch break. Then it texts, "How's the falafel?" The woman is seemingly heartened by this. "It's dank," she tells her necklace, "I could eat one of these every day."</p><p>The internet, however, has found Friend to be less than dank.</p><p>Unlike Siri, <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-healthcare-one-medical-billion-loss-cost-cutting-profitability-2024-7">Alexa</a>, and their brethren, Friend is not an ask-and-tell robot assistant. Instead, the $99 device aspires to take the place of human companionship, capitalizing on a culture in which nearly 10 percent of Americans say they have no close friends. With Friend, you're never alone — which, depending on how much you value solitude and privacy, is either extremely comforting or extremely creepy.</p><p>If any of this sounds bleak or dystopian, then you'll understand the vitriolic reactions to the product across the internet. A sampling from X: "Friend strikes me as a product for losers, which is a totally valid market," and "One of the more depressing things I've ever seen…Do whatever the opposite of this is." Many compared Friend to a "Black Mirror" episode.</p><p>The online commentary grew only more heated when Friend's founder, a 21-year-old Harvard dropout named Avi Schiffmann, revealed that he spent $1.8 million of Friend's $2.5 million funding to buy the website domain "Friend.com."</p><p>"People think it's outrageous that I would buy a domain like that, but this is the point of VC money," Schiffmann told me in an interview. (He is not the first entrepreneur to purchase an expensive domain — Elon Musk, Schiffmann was quick to point out, spent some $11 million to acquire Tesla.com.) Friend's investors include Caffeinated Capital's Raymond Tonsing, <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/perplexity-ai-forbes-wired-explained-2024-6">Perplexity AI</a> CEO Aravind Srinivas, and Morning Brew cofounder Austin Rief. "People think my investors hate me, but they could not love me any more," he said.</p><p>Still, Schiffmann admits that the online reaction to Friend is not what he expected. "I honestly think it's because the video was too good," he said."That, maybe, was my biggest mistake. There hasn't been a video this high quality about AI companionship since 'Her,'" — the Oscar-winning 2013 film in which Scarlett Johansson plays an AI voice assistant so transfixing Joaquin Phoenix's human character falls in love with her.</p><p>Schiffmann's original vision for an AI hardware device was a pendant that would act as a more standard-fare AI assistant called Tab — he once described it as a "<a target="_blank" href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/12/3/avi-schiffmann-wearable-ai/">wearable mom</a>." But after spending a lonely night in Tokyo, he began considering a more intimate version, a "friend" that could offer camaraderie and emotional support. "A good friend that sends you a text like 'Good luck on the interview' is more productive than reminding you that you have a meeting in five minutes," he said.</p><p>A venture-funded AI friendship necklace is something of a hard pivot for Schiffmann. In 2020, when he was 17, he built one of the first COVID-tracking websites. Anthony Fauci presented him with a Webby Person of the Year award. He went on to build a tool that tracked Black Lives Matter protesters and a website that helped refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine find people offering spare rooms and couches around the world. But Schiffmann sees a throughline in all these projects: "These are all really just big art projects to me," he said. "I haven't been able to come up with a stronger intrinsic [reason] why it's worth doing anything like this at all. It's just something to do and I'm bored. But maybe I've just read too much Camus."</p><p>"I'm building friends for myself, but I also have a ton of friends," he added. "I don't think it's a complete substitution. If one of your five close friends is an AI, it's a good thing, especially if you fear judgment from other people. It can fill in gaps when you're traveling and it's late at night and you want to talk to someone."</p><p>Of the many AI hardware devices that launched in recent months, such as Humane's AI pin, Meta's smart glasses, and Rabbit's AI-powered R1, Friend is the most personal contender. Not only does it aspire to be a close confidante, but it's privy to all its users' conversations. As in, it <em>never</em> stops listening. The incessant eavesdropping that people fear when it comes to devices like Siri and Alexa, is a selling point to allay Friends' users who fear being alone. Friend needs to have access to every aspect of your life in order to work, says Schiffmann. "You wouldn't put headphones over your dog," he said. "It makes it feel like it's actually there with you. It's nice to be with a sentient entity."</p>          <p>Schiffmann is not the only tech founder building an AI companion in the form of a pendant. In fact, on the day Friend launched, a competing AI hardware founder named Nik Shevchenko released <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/kodjima33/status/1818452878018646369">a diss track</a> — as any self-respecting 23-year-old AI hardware founder would do — insinuating that Schiffmann stole his idea. Shevchenko is also building an open-source competitor AI pendant, which he wears in his rap video, that looks a lot like Friend's. It is, in what seems to be more than a coincidence, also named Friend. "For those who don't know / I built Friend / renamed your Tab/ jacked my style," Shevchenko raps.</p><p>When I asked Schiffmann about Shevchenko's claims, Schiffmann told me it was the opposite: Shevchenko had copied <em>him</em>. (It would not be the first time that Shevchenko built an open source competitor that closely resembled another AI hardware device. In March, the AI pin company Humane <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/kodjima33/status/1764472814353183199">sent Shevchenko a cease and desist</a> after he launched a similar device called Whomane.) "There are a lot of people building open source competitors," said Schiffmann. "[Shevchenko] is the most annoying one."</p><p>"Maybe I am annoying," Shevchenko said when I reached him for comment. But he disagreed with at least some of Schiffmann's claims. He actually had been copying <em>another</em> AI companion pendant, he said. "The project that we built was indeed fascinated by another project but it was not Avi's Tab. It was an open-source wearable called Adeus." There are nearly as many upstart AI companion pendant necklaces, it seems, as there are Taylor Swift friendship bracelets.</p><p>At least from the world's initial reaction to it, Friend appears to be a long way from product/market fit in that people do not want this product.. Schiffmann disagrees. "People underlyingly want this," he told me. As for Friend's online detractors, they are just "being Twitter tech people and, like, yappin'," he said.</p><p>Schiffmann is unbothered by the vitriol, he says. When it comes to creating Friend, "every decision I made was guided by personal vibes."</p><p>"I'm just chilling at my house smoking cigarettes and continuing to work," he continued. Schiffmann says he has big plans for Friend. "I fully plan on winning the industry," he said. "If this is what I can do with 2.5 million dollars, wait till you see what I can do with $100 million."</p><p><a target="_blank" rel="" class="" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/author/zo-bernard"><em><u>Zoë Bernard</u></em></a><em> is a feature writer based in Los Angeles. She writes about technology, crime, and culture. Formerly, she covered technology for The Information and Business Insider.</em></p>

Meet the 21-year-old Harvard dropout behind Friend, the creepy new AI necklace 

<p></p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>In the early nineties, when Microsoft was still working on Windows 95, the pressure was high.<p>And so, when programmers weren't performing up to snuff, Microsoft's managers would&#xa0;threaten to throw them to the dogs.</p><p>Specifically, that they'd be reassigned to work on Microsoft Dogs, an obscure 1995 CD-ROM the company made to inform dog owners of the proper care and feeding for 500 different breeds of dogs.</p><p>"That's the threat you would use if you wanted to tell someone that maybe this operating system stuff isn't cut out for you," says Raymond Chen, a long-time Microsoft Windows engineer who joined the company in 1992.&#xa0;</p><p>This story comes from <a href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-143-Raymond-Chen-Microsoft-Archives-Part-1">a video posted by Microsoft this week</a>, chronicling a walkthrough of Microsoft's massive <a href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Tags/ms+archives">Microsoft Archives</a>&#xa0;- where the company&#xa0;stores products, memorabilia, and one-of-a-kind curiosities from its 40-year history.</p><p><span>Chen, along with fellow Microsoft veterans Andrew&#xa0;Richards and&#xa0;Chad Beeder, take an hour-long look at the company's history, reminiscing over artifacts from the company's history.</span></p><p>Microsoft Dogs&#xa0;was absolutely a real thing. Check out this video:</p><p><div></div></p><p class="embed-spacer">&#xa0;</p><p>Other tidbits from the walkthrough video:</p><ul><li>In the early nineties, Microsoft had two competing operating system groups: The ambitious, enterprise-focused Windows NT, codenamed "Cairo," and the more consumer-focused&#xa0;Windows 95, codenamed "Chicago." According to Chen, "Chicago" was chosen because "We might not make it to Cairo, but we can make it to Chicago."&#xa0;</li><li>Similarly, when Windows NT 3.51 came out in 1995, it carried the internal codename "Tukwila," a town located just outside Microsoft's hometown of Redmond, because that's as far as they thought it had come toward the Cairo vision.&#xa0;</li><li>Windows ME, a stopgap release between Windows 98 and Windows XP released in 2000, was so notoriously dead on arrival that even Microsoft employees dissed&#xa0;it. When Microsoft employees lined up to get their complimentary copy on release day, one employee quipped to Chen that "I bet this is the longest line of people ever waiting for a copy of Windows ME."</li><li>Microsoft Neptune, an attempt at completely reinventing Windows back in 1999, had interesting features that&#xa0;most operating systems still don't have&#xa0;- for instance,&#xa0;it saved files automatically as you were working on them.</li><li>The collected Microsofties agreed that the development of Windows Vista, Microsoft's most&#xa0;prominent flop ever, was "troubled." But they also think it could have really taken off "if it had been released two years later, on slightly bigger hardware." Chen jokes that "[Vista] is&#xa0;going to be the subject of a VH1 Behind the Music documentary someday."</li><li>Chen shared a story he had heard from Microsoft's early days: Back when the company sold software printed on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape">paper tape</a>, a customer placed an order for Microsoft Focal, a programming tool. But when they went down to ship the order, they couldn't find the master, and couldn't even make a copy. Which means that there's at least one Microsoft product lost forever.</li></ul><p>It's a fascinating look at the company's history. If you want to watch the whole hour-long extravaganza, here you go:</p><p><div></div></p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/smart-mirror-evan-cohen-2015-10">This Microsoft developer built a voice-controlled smart mirror in 20 hours</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="1iOTVkeDqqvx_2bw6UMm2VMGBAJpl6Xc" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

Microsoft used to threaten to send weak programmers to work on a bizarre app about dogs

Peter Diamandis explains how he's working toward a future where humans can freely explore space and live forever

You Searched For "raymond s tools hardware" and got 4 results

Investors cheer Raymond’s restructuring plan to reduce debt

Bhakti Makwana

Meet the 21-year-old Harvard dropout behind Friend, the creepy new AI necklace

Zoë Bernard

Microsoft used to threaten to send weak programmers to work on a bizarre app about dogs

Matt Weinberger

Peter Diamandis explains how he's working toward a future where humans can freely explore space and live forever

Richard Feloni,Anna Mazarakis

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