India’s government has stepped away from its plan to require manufacturers of PCs, tablets, and servers to secure an import license.

The plan was announced in early August without prior consultation. Apple and Samsung reportedly responded by halting shipments to India. US-based tech trade associations later chided India’s government for its lack of advance notice or consultation.

Last Friday, Indian commerce secretary Sunil Barthwal reportedly told a press conference that laptops will be exempt from the regime, and that work on a new import monitoring scheme had commenced. It’s hoped those rules will be in place by November 1.

Secretary Barthwal said the proposed scheme was never about restricting imports to encourage manufacturers to do more work in India, but was merely a monitoring scheme.

Barthwal’s remarks aren’t the end of the matter, though. He only mentioned laptops – but the government order announcing the license scheme also listed servers and even mainframes.

– Simon Sharwood

Private model claimed to have bested Singapore’s COVID predictor

Wai Mun Lim, CEO of Singapore-based telehealth biz Doctors Anywhere said his modelling of COVID-19 better predicted the virus than the country’s health ministry.

“We have a model that is as accurate, if not more accurate than our own Ministry of Health (MOH),” declared Wai, speaking at a Tech Week in Singapore last Thursday.

Prior to COVID, the wait time for patients to see a doctor on the online telehealth app sat at an average of 38 seconds. During the pandemic, as both doctors and patients grew sick, that extended to between seven to eight minutes. This unpredictable nature led Doctors Anywhere to build a prediction model of the disease with historical data.

According to the CEO, the model was able to predict the end of a wave accurately as coming in October, despite the health minister declaring it would go on until November. The minister eventually conceded he had overestimated the length of the COVID wave.

“It used to be we were buying medication at more than one week in advance and so forth. But today, we don’t do that anymore because, based on our predictive model, we are able to tell what type of demand we have, for certain types of events,” Wai explained.

TSMC chips away at China restrictions

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) has received an extension of a waiver to supply semiconductor equipment to its Nanjing, China factory, according to Taiwan’s official news agency.

The Nanjing factory manufactures works on a 28-nanometre process and produces run of the mill products that don’t use TSMC’s most advanced tech.

The chipmaker is also reportedly in the process of applying for permanent authorization of China operations in what is known as the Validated End-User (VEU) program. The semiconductor giant e