|In: e-commerce|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The 11.11 Global Shopping Festival held last week yet again surpassed expectations and continued its tradition of breaking records both in terms of the Gross Merchandise Volume [GMV] across Alibaba Group marketplaces as well as the number of consumers and merchants participating.

This was made possible by the technology leadership of Alibaba Group and provided a showcase for innovations in the areas of Artificial Intelligence [AI], Machine Learning & Cloud Computing that powered the elements of New Retail, which was central to this year’s Global Shopping Festival. One of the many highlights was the system’s ability to manage the spike of up to a staggering 325,000 orders per second at peak, coming through this 24-hour stress test.

Jeff Zhang, Alibaba Group’s Chief Technology Officer said

The annual Global Shopping Festival is the biggest test for our technology. This year we fully adopted cloud management and leveraged artificial intelligence on a much larger scale in our infrastructure and systems, resulting in greater operation efficiency while largely reducing IT costs. In addition, we offered innovative technology solutions to enable our partners in areas including product assortment, inventory management, payments and logistics to meet the huge spike in demand during the Global Shopping Festival. We will make these solutions  available through our cloud platform to benefit more enterprises and the larger society beyond this event.

Alibaba Group continues to leverage AI to empower merchants and engage consumers. For example, 95% of customer service inquiries during the Global Shopping Festival were handled by an Alibaba’s self-developed virtual customer service chatbot; in addition, more than 400 million customized online banner ads were generated for merchants by Alibaba’s AI-based marketing design platform; and over 60 billion personalized pages on the Taobao and Tmall Apps were developed for consumers and populated with AI-based product recommendations.

The Global Shopping Festival is a gigantic-scale project in terms of IT infrastructure. To support the unprecedented volume of computing tasks for browsing, ordering, payments and logistics arrangements securely and smoothly, Alibaba Group has leveraged data technologies in a number of ways to develop its robust infrastructure in a cost-effective manner

  • Colocation technology to enhance CPU utilization – Backed by the architecture of one of the world’s largest hybrid clouds with optimized computation and millions of containers, Alibaba Group has developed its own colocation technology. By colocating online services and analytics workloads, the daily average usage of CPU utilization has been increased to above 40% with peak utilization over 60%. The unitization rate went even higher during the Global Shopping Festival, reducing the cost of collocated clusters compared to last year by more than 30%.
  • Intelligent engine to optimize system usage – An intelligent engine was developed this year to automatically allocate computation resources in a timely manner in order to achieve optimal system usage and stability. The engine was used for the first time in this year’s Global Shopping Festival and it is estimated to cut down the number of servers required by approximately 30%.
  • Autonomous end-to-end load testing – Testing was performed multiple times to prepare for the predicted load increases at the peak traffic spikes on November 11. This intelligent, autonomous technology saved around 1,000 man-days worth of engineering work this year in comparison to previous years.
  • Patrol robot for datacenter monitoring – A patrol robot was developed for the first time to undertake round-the-clock monitoring of conditions within Alibaba Cloud’s North China data center during the Global Shopping Festival. It is estimated that the robot removed up to 30% of the repetitive operations tasks related to data center monitoring.
  • Alibaba Cloud’s CDN Node Deployment – Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, deployed over 1,200 Content Delivery Network [CDN] nodes on its expanding global cloud infrastructure to support the explosive amount of content on the Tmall and Taobao platforms. Using data centers in 15 locations worldwide, images, video and live streaming were distributed to multiple locations around the world quickly and smoothly without system bottlenecks.

|In: Finance|Last Updated: | 2 Comments

Purchasing a new car is indeed a dream for many. There are numerous aspects to take into consideration while buying a car. These include comparing various brands and models, selecting the right mode of finance, choosing the best dealer, and taking the car for a test drive, among many others. Once you have made the purchase, it is necessary to ensure that all legal formalities have been completed.

Image Source – Car Safety

Follow the below-mentioned steps after you have bought your dream vehicle.

Check if all the paperwork is in order

Upon purchase of your car, make sure that you have the necessary paperwork from your dealer. Some of the documents include registration certificate, receipt of payment, tax receipt, and delivery challan, among others. You may also make sure to receive all the original documents in case you have borrowed a loan from a bank.

Insurance

According to the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, it is mandatory to have a car insurance policy. Such an insurance policy

Accessories for your vehicle

If you have just bought a new car, you may make small value additions to enhance the look and safety features of your car. If your car does not come fitted with reverse cameras, mobile docks, or Bluetooth kits, install them upon purchase. You may also invest in a gear lock, mud flap, steering wheel cover, remote central lock with security alarm system, and GPS navigator, among others. Such accessories turn to be very useful, at times.

Proper maintenance of your car

Vehicle maintenance is very important for numerous reasons. It helps to reduce repair costs, maintain the car’s value, and also optimizes your car’s performance. Take your car to your local service center for regular servicing. You may make regular checks on your car’s engine, tire pressure, transmission, battery, emission system, and brake system, among others.

Roadside assistance

In an event of a breakdown such as a flat tire or engine failure, you may be left in a desperate situation. In order to avoid such a situation, purchase a roadside assistance cover that comes as an add-on on most auto insurance policies. You may seek emergency towing services, replacement of a flat tire, replacement if your keys are lost, and may also avail of coverage against minor repairs.

Take the aforementioned tips into consideration upon purchase of your new vehicle. Ensure to have all car-related documents such as registration certificate, 4-wheeler insurance, and Pollution Under Control [PUC] certificate. Once you have all your documentation in place, drive the car of your dreams without any hassle.

|In: SocialMedia|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Social media is truly a phenomenon. No longer than fifteen years ago, social media as we know it today had not even been thought of, most likely. Myspace was the first true social platform as we know it, and started gaining popularity around 2005, though it was originally released in 2003. After Myspace came Facebook in the years prior to 2010. Twitter came shortly after, then begat Instagram.

Image Source – Social Media Screening

Facebook has more than two billion – that’s 2,000,000,000 – regular users that log on at least once every month around the world. As you might imagine, it’s the largest social platform.

While most people use social media to keep in contact with friends, family, coworkers, and even meet people they’re not already familiar with IRL – in real life – another leading use of social media is for businesses, organizations, and other entities to connect with their customers and potential consumers.

Yet another purpose of social media – although it wasn’t originally intended to work as such – is exercised by employers. A majority of employers engage in social media screening to help weed out unqualified candidates. Here are several tips for screening applicants at your organization – take notes, and don’t try to tackle it without help – it’s OK to ask.

Reach out for help

Not every organization is experienced at hiring new employees. Even if an organization and its constituents are, in fact, seasoned in scouting the job world for ideal applicants, they might not be ready to screen them on social media. Besides, not outsourcing social media screening responsibilities forces employees to focus on responsibilities that they might not be passionate about, prepared for, or trained in.

Seek out social media screening agencies on the world wide web. We recommend trusting reputable agencies in assisting your organization with screening applicants on social media, including the likes of Fama.

Apply screening procedures equally across all applicants

In hiring, it’s important to subject all applicants to the same treatment. Not doing so can potentially result in organizations being accused of discriminating against those that they didn’t hire. Even if legal problems like this don’t pop up – they won’t, a vast majority of the time, although in today’s politically correct world, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Delegate the actual browsing of social profiles to others

While you should keep this responsibility within the walls of your organization, the person or people that make the final calls regarding hiring decisions should never be the ones that screen social media profiles.

If the entity you work for is large enough to have a human resources department, delegate digital job screening responsibilities to HR. If not, ask someone outside of the hiring process to look through applicants’ pages and provide a summary of all pages to the person making such decisions. Remember to never include any information regarded protected characteristics like age, sex, or race.

Be consistent in subjecting applicants to screening procedures

If you look through the top ten posts of a particular applicant’s Facebook page, then use a program to sort through every tweet that person has on Twitter, you should hold every single applicant to those same standards.

Not doing so, whether you recognize it or not, is not being fair to those seeking jobs at your organization.

|In: CleanTech|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

The Indian School of Business [ISB] and Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation have joined hands to launch the Clean Energy Lab, a uniquely designed incubation programme to support early stage non-profits working on creating policy impacts in clean energy.

Image Source – ISB CleanTech

Supported by DLabs, the incubation and acceleration arm of ISB, the Clean Energy Lab invites entries from non-profits, working in the areas of renewable energy, climate change and energy efficiency. The Lab aims to identify individuals and thinkers with big, audacious ideas to create research based policy impact in India and build their concepts into scalable institutions.

Talking about the need and importance of such an initiative, Professor Rajendra Srivastava, Dean, ISB, said

Clean energy is the need of the future and India is already making a mark globally for its initiatives in this space. The government has drawn up an ambitious agenda to become self-reliant in generating renewable energy by 2022. Against this backdrop, research focused non-profits can play an important role in influencing policy and pushing India towards a cleaner environment in the years to come. Through the Clean Energy Lab, ISB is excited to partner with Shakti Foundation to support non-profits who are seeking to create large scale policy impact in building and scaling their ideas and contribute to the larger goal of nation- building.

The Clean Energy Lab will identify and incubate five exceptional ideas to create policy action on clean energy. The selected participants will have access to the following

  • Sustenance Support of up to INR 4.8L
  • Dedicated Mentorship by an Expert Panel consisting of energy and non-profit experts
  • Access to infrastructure at the ISB Campuses
  • Strategic advisory support and access to networks
  • Impact Measurement Support to determine milestones and assess growth
  • Access to Organizational Development Services

Sharing his views on the rationale for developing the Lab, Krishan Dhawan, CEO, Shakti  Sustainable Energy Foundation said

One of Shakti’s roles as the only foundation focused on India’s clean energy sector is to build and strengthen the capacity of civil society in order to participate more effectively in policy dialogue and action. Platforms like the Clean Energy Lab are an important part of the solution. The Lab is India’s first incubation programme to support high potential ideas that can be built into scalable institutions as well as create evidence-based policy impact in the area of clean energy. Given India’s increasing energy demand and urgent development priorities, outcomes from the Lab can make a very important contribution.

Who can apply and more details

Early stage non-profits including NGOs, community based organisations, think tanks, foundations, research institutions working in this space and individuals with potential ideas are eligible to apply. The last date to apply is November 15, 2017. To know more visit this page

The yearlong incubation programme commences in January 2018 and will include dedicated mentorship with assigned experts, capacity building and training sessions and a multitude of opportunities to network and partner with potential collaborators.  The Lab would conclude in December 2018 by which the all the non-profits would be registered entities culminating in a Showcase Pitch Session where the non-profits would pitch to philanthropic organisations for funding.

DLabs is the incubation and acceleration arm of the ISB set up in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. It aims to support the creation of a vibrant and high impact entrepreneurial ecosystem focused on innovation in key sectors including technology commercialization. DLabs leverages the vast resources, expertise and networks of Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at ISB through mentorship, education and investor connect.

Further details about the program are available here

|In: Fintech|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Synechron Inc., the global financial services consulting and technology services provider, announced the launch of a set of InsurTech Accelerator solutions. Synechron’s InsurTech Accelerator Program combines Synechron’s expertise with digital innovation, business consulting, and technological capabilities to deliver firms end-to-end solutions to insurance business challenges through transformative digital initiatives and solutions.

Image Source – InsurTech

Synechron has built a suite of InsurTech Accelerators applications, each based on a unique business case, that allow organizations to leverage innovative technologies to enhance business operations, reduce operating costs, and create better client experiences. Synechron’s InsurTech Accelerator applications have taken a business challenge that can be best solved through technology and re-architected business processes to build a solution to those challenges.

The Accelerators focus on business consulting and use techniques like Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation [RPA], Mobile Solutions, Digital Strategy/Customer Experience Design, and the Internet of Things [IoT]. This set of Accelerators is Synechron’s third accelerator program in FinLabs to date following the large success of Synechron’s Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Accelerators.

Along with the InsurTech applications, the Accelerator Program offers access to Synechron’s team of consultants who are experts in insurance business processes, products, regulation, operating models, and data architectures and models which are critical to constructing effective insurance applications.

The InsurTech Accelerators broken down by their core underlying technology include:

Blockchain

Synechron’s Blockchain InsurTech Accelerator focuses on two use cases:

  • Insurance Claims Processing, which leverages Blockchain’s Distributed Ledger Technology [DLT], smart contracts and digital capabilities combined with the IoT to assist with asset provenance, reduction of fraud, and a straight-through process around high volume, low-value insurance claims.
  • Trade Finance, bringing banks and corporates like insurance companies together on a single distributed ledger to minimize fraud and increase transparency around the supply chain.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning

Synechron’s AI/ML Accelerator for Visual Risk applies machine learning to analyze 70+ data sources and provide predictive risk analytics with detailed visualizations and simple risk queues to equip the underwriter with easy access to critical information, automating up to 80% of applications, leaving just the most complex for manual review. The AI/ML InsurTech Accelerators also include use cases for Intelligent Underwriter Scoring, utilizing historical policy data, real-time policy data, and predictive modeling to help underwriters prioritize based on work-to-reward ratio and Automated Natural Language Processing [NLP] for Account On-boarding.

Robotic Process Automation [RPA]

Synechron’s most functionally rich and advanced InsurTech Accelerator is RPA focused and addresses a wide variety of automated process orchestration with a fully customizable suite of pluggable Insurance components.  From front-end forms capture and OCR thru claims processing our high function accelerator allows disparate systems to be tied together with a light footprint, even working seamlessly with other automation tools.

Mobile Solutions

The InsurTech Accelerators focus on Mobile Solutions to allow insurers to tap into the functionalities built into mobile phones whether it’s geo-location, the camera, or simply the App Store to create 1:1 customer experiences.

Customer Experience Design

In today’s world of advanced digital, Customer Experience is what distinguishes an insurance company from another. The Accelerators allow Insurance companies to transform their business to create a new and transformed customer experience through effective user experience design related to their direct to customer, or insurance broker channel strategy.

Internet of Things [IoT]

An IoT solution gives insurers the capability to collect vast amounts of data that can be combined with other technologies to create powerful solutions. IoT can also allow insurers to use drones to access real-time damage assessment related to natural catastrophes, for example, to better anticipate future claims, create a device network that will better align insurers with customer needs or to better understand and control their losses.

For more information, please visit Synechron-InsurTech

|In: IOT|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Hitachi Ltd. and Hitachi Vantara, jointly announced Hitachi’s first commercial Lumada Internet Of Things [IoT] platform offering. Now in its v2.0 release, the Lumada IoT platform has been fully updated with an elegant, portable architecture that enables it to run both on-premises or in the cloud and to support industrial IoT deployments both at the edge and in the core.

Image Source – Lumada IoT

The new software stack is designed to help customers quickly and easily gain insights, predictions and recommendations from their data, and can be easily adapted to support mid-to large-scale environments. Lumada’s integrated advanced analytics have also been enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) functionality at scale. The result is a highly intelligent and flexible platform that accelerates superior outcomes for enterprise and industrial customers, such as increased operational efficiencies and cost savings, enhanced operational safety and reliability, improved asset utilization, performance management and product quality, and the creation of new business models.

Among the notable advancements to the Lumada IoT platform are asset avatars, Hitachi’s unique approach to what is commonly referred to as ‘digital twins.’ Asset avatars provide a digital representation of physical assets and rich metadata for analytics, serving as a digital proxy for business and industrial assets and providing rapid data-driven insights into their health and performance, with continuously updated sensor values. This approach helps to eliminate ‘blind spots’ in operation-critical systems by providing improved access to – and insights from – business, machine and human data, which can help users move more rapidly from measurement to management to improvement.

The newly enhanced software stack also provides IoT developers and architects with powerful design tools and features that simplify the creation and deployment industrial IoT solutions, with faster time to insight. Since introducing Lumada to the market as a co-creation platform in May 2016, Hitachi has hardened and optimized its Lumada IoT platform. These improvements are based on numerous deployments in Proof-Of Concept [POC] and co-creation project engagements with its customers and partners, as well as in its own factories.

Hitachi worked with customer Daicel Corporation to co-create an image analysis system using Lumada that improves product quality and increases productivity by detecting signs of facility failures and deviations in front-line worker motions. This system has allowed Daicel to improve the in-process guarantee rate for products.

Another customer, Okuma Corporation, worked with Hitachi to co-create an advanced high efficiency production model with Hitachi to support mass customization in its manufacturing plants. The target of this joint demonstration experiment is to double productivity and reduce production lead time by 50%.

Based on the best practices developed throughout projects like these, Hitachi has enhanced Lumada’s functionality to simplify management of business and industrial assets, support greater  asset utilization and accelerate the time to value of IoT deloyments. Its next generation architecture is highly flexible, composable and adaptable to support customers’ existing business and IT environments and help them to more rapidly achieve highly optimized outcomes.

Customers looking to accelerate their IoT initiatives using Lumada will benefit from engaging Hitachi’s co-creation services, tapping its expansive expertise in both operation technology [OT] and information technology [IT] to create customized IoT solutions that are tailored to their unique requirements.

Keiji Kojima, Chairman at Hitachi Vantara & SVP and Exective officer at Hitachi Ltd said

Our next-generation Lumada IoT platform demonstrates Hitachi’s unparalleled expertise in both OT and IT, and reinforces Hitachi’s commitment to being an innovation partner for our customers in the IoT era. With the powerful advancements delivered today, our customers and partners can now choose to harness the full power of Lumada’s AI, advanced analytics and asset avatars capabilities to simplify their own IoT solution development or to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives in co-creation projects with Hitachi. In either case, we believe Hitachi is delivering a highly intelligent and unique solution that challenges the industrial IoT platform market status quo.

Hitachi’s next-generation Lumada IoT platform architecture has been fully updated with five major layers to form a flexible, portable and composable software foundation with comprehensive security capabilities and expanded support for unstructured data uploads. IoT developers and architects will also benefit from Lumada’s dynamic design features, rich analytics and robust asset management capabilities, including:

  • Lumada edge: Allows any variety and velocity of data to be easily ingested, transformed and analyzed in close proximity to physical assets.
  • Lumada core: Provides asset registry, identity and access management and simplifies the creation of asset avatars.
  • Lumada analytics: Blends OT and IT data to uncover patterns with powerful analytics, machine learning and AI.
  • Lumada studio: Delivers predefined widgets to simplify the creation of dashboard applications; issues alerts, notifications or just straight-through processing.
  • Lumada foundry: Offers foundational services to ease deployment on-premises and in the cloud, as well as security, micro-services and support features.

Product Availability and Information

Hitachi’s Lumada IoT platform software is generally available now for purchase and in co-creation engagements with Hitachi and select partners. Some features may not be immediately available in all markets. For more information and a complete list of product and feature enhancements, visit here.

Experience Hitachi’s Lumada IoT Platform at NEXT 2017

Hitachi’s new Lumada IoT platform software and related solutions will be on display at the company’s user conference, Hitachi NEXT, in Las Vegas, September 19 and 20, 2017. Event attendees can see live demonstrations of the software and the innovative IoT solutions Hitachi and its customers and partners are developing with it.

The event also features a full track of IoT developer breakout sessions, providing attendees with an opportunity to engage directly with Hitachi product management executives and development teams. The developer breakout session will provide a deep dive on the latest architectural advancements, design features and best practices for building industrial and commercial enterprise IoT solutions with Lumada.

About Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., helps data-driven leaders find and use the value in their data to innovate intelligently and reach outcomes that matter for business and society. Only Hitachi Vantara elevates your innovation advantage by combining deep information technology (IT), operational technology (OT) and domain expertise. We work with organizations everywhere to drive data to meaningful outcomes. For more information, please visit HitachiVantara

|In: Mobile|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Times Internet Ltd. has entered into a partnership with Sweden-based communications and mobile identity platform Truecaller, to make sign-ups and phone number verifications easy for its users.

The tie-up is in line with TIL’s unique ‘Single Sign On’ initiative, the objective of which is to increase user convenience by providing a homogeneous sign-up and log-in interface across all TIL web and mobile properties.

Times Internet, with its 37+ digital properties, already offers unified logins [SSO] and loyalty. However, this new tie-up with Truecaller will further smoothen the sign-up and authentication processes for TIL’s customers, of whom 75% access the portals through their mobile devices.

Truecaller’s mobile number based identity solution – ‘Truecaller SDK’ innovation has made mobile authentication exclusively number-based since mobile numbers are highly personalized and user-specific. This enhances security and convenience by eliminating the hassle of repeated OTP SMS-based logins.

Commenting on the partnership, Gautam Sinha, CEO of Times Internet said

Consistent to our flywheel strategy, and catering to a mobile first customer base in India, TIL understands the need to reduce friction and make the experience seamless  across properties.

Commenting on the partnership, Priyam Bose, Director & Head, Global Developer & Startup Relations, Truecaller said

Mobile number has become the primary identity in India. We are excited to partner and integrate Truecaller SDK, our mobile identity solution into TIL’s web and mobile platforms to bring ease of access to our diverse audience across its properties. The more touch points we can bring to our users, the more value we can add to their lives in India’s fast-maturing mobile-first market.

About Truecaller

People use Truecaller to stay ahead. It helps them know who’s getting in touch, filter out unwanted calls and SMS, and focus on what really matters. The company provides a suite of unique services such as a dialler that offers caller ID, spam detection, messaging and more. For more information, please visit Truecaller

|In: Technology|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

With the merger of DABFI [Digital Assets and Blockchain Foundation India] with IAMAI [The Internet and Mobile Association of India], the internet industry body now has the mandate to represent blockchain startups in India.

Leading former members of DABFI such as Zebpay, Unicon and Coinsecure will now become a part of IAMAI FinTech Council. The new group, led by Zebpay Co-Founder, Sandeep Goenka, would focus on the following

  • Popularizing blockchain based technologies in the financial sector.
  • Suggest innovative regulatory practices for adoption of block chain technologies among government and industry.
  • Promote blockchain based startups and
  • Build and advocacy platform for adoption of crypto-currency.

Commenting on the developments, Sandeep Goenka said

With Banks, and other digital financial services under it, IAMAI provides the right home to this emerging group. Promoting and evangelizing crypto-currencies and digital assets would be our first major goal of this group.

T he IAMAI Fintech council is chaired by Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, Deputy Managing Director and Chief Information Officer at State Bank of India. IAMAI has now opened up its membership for all the blockchain and crypto-currency companies in India.

About DABFI

DABFI was formed by 3 companies namely Unocoin, Zebpay and Coinsecure. DABFI was an association of people interested in Advocacy of use of Digital Assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc within India. Their objective was to educate people about risk involved with investing and trading crypto tokens. They also wanted to actively create and propagate best practices that Digital Asset businesses must follow in India based on consultations within industry, regulators other stake holders. For more information, please visit DABFI