Walmart’s PhonePe launches India mobile app store to rival Google

A general store advertises the use of the PhonePe digital payment system in Mumbai, India. MUST CREDIT: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg
Walmart Inc.-owned fintech PhonePe Pvt. launched a mobile application store for consumers in India, the world’s biggest market for downloads. The Android-based store is called Indus Appstore, PhonePe said in a statement Wednesday, as it pits the product against Google’s Play Store. The store will have more than 200,000 mobile applications and games in 12 Indian languages. The move comes as PhonePe capitalizes on growing mobile usage in the world’s second-largest smartphone market. The group is also trying to forge partnerships with smartphone makers and expects to be live on most major phone brands by the end of the year, Chief Executive Officer Sameer Nigam told reporters in New Delhi. Developers will not have to pay any application listing fee until April 2025 and can use any third-party payment gateway of their choice, the release said. PhonePe Group also runs a payments business that competes with Ant Group-backed Paytm and Google’s GPay.Walmart’s PhonePe launches India mobile app store to rival Google
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Liverpool is Building the World’s Largest Tidal Power Project to Power a Million Homes

The Rance Tidal Power Station, which Mersey Tidal Power are studying to inform the construction of a similar plant for Liverpool.
The River Mersey and the Bay of Liverpool are the largest assets this famous English city possesses, and attempting to beat the British government to a net-zero economy, Liverpool City Region have entered phase 3 planning stage to build the largest tidal power plant on Earth. Schemes to harness the predictable power of the tides in Liverpool Bay date back to 1924, and with one of the largest tidal ranges of any coastal city in the UK, government utility Mersey Tidal Power believe that they can power 1 million homes and protect the city from floodwaters, all without disturbing the local estuarine ecosystem. Mersey Tidal Power have released precious little information on the plans thus far, but Eletrek reports that a large dam would be a barrier between the Irish Sea and a tidal basin. Underneath the dam would be large turbines and sluice gates which would open as the tide comes in, pulling water onto the turbines to generate energy. The gates
would close as the 10-meter-high tide finishes, and as the gravity of the moon begins to pull on the water four hours later, the gates would open, causing it to rush past the turbines a second time, generating more clean energy. “I think that we have a unique opportunity to harness the power of our greatest natural assets—our river and our people—to deliver a cleaner, greener, more prosperous future for our children,” said Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham. Tidal power projects are few and far between in both scale and reliability, but like geothermal power, they offer an alternative to sun and wind power which can be interrupted by weather conditions. The multibillion-dollar project is in Phase 3 concept development and is about to enter the formal planning stage. Mersey Tidal Power has consulted with experts at the Rance tidal power plant in France, in operation since the 1960s, as well as K Power, which runs the largest tidal plant in the world at Sihwa Lake in South Korea. Concept imagery from Liverpool City Region Combined Authority shows a similar design to the installation at Rance. The top of the dam would serve as a causeway with green spaces and bike paths that would connect the city of Liverpool to the Wirral Peninsula, the way Rance is connected to St. Malo. Liverpool City and Mersey Tidal Power are under no illusions as to the complexity and challenge of the project, but they estimate that the capacity of a River Mersey Tidal station could power 1 million homes—essentially the whole of Liverpool—for 120 years. Liverpool is Building the World’s Largest Tidal Power Project to Power a Million Homes - Good News Network
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