National Instruments is hosting NIDays Conference and Exhibition, the ultimate learning experience that unites the brightest minds in engineering and science. This year, NIDays India will take place at ITC Gardenia on 26th October 2017.
At NIDays, scientists and engineers will learn about the latest technology to accelerate productivity for software defined systems in test, measurement and control, in a full day of interactive, technical and networking sessions from industry leaders and NI experts.
Hosted by National Instruments, NIDays is an event ideal for engineers, scientists and academicians, supplying the tools and knowledge to develop applications faster and smarter. This years Thought Leadership Keynotes aim to inspire, giving those in attendance a glimpse at the latest, cutting-edge innovations that demonstrate how engineers and scientists use NI technology to change and improve the world we live in.
The morning keynote Impacting Today’s Business, demonstrates how the NI platform is accelerating innovation in applications ranging from transportation safety, wireless communication, automated test and the IIoT. In the afternoon, see how NI continues the LabVIEW legacy with the evolution of the world’s most productive and efficient engineering software, in the keynote A Glimpse into The Future.
Attendees can tailor the event to their specific industry, application or interest and can choose from a vast array of Targeted Application Area Tracks including IIoT, Test & Measurement, Automotive, Academics and Software advancements. Test engineers and managers can take advantage of unique opportunity in form of a test leadership panel which will have leaders in test and measurement come and share their experiences and best practices for improving the impact of test.
Leading health and fitness start-up, HealthifyMe have unveiled the world’s first-ever conversational AI-enabled nutritionist Ria. The advanced AI coach, which has been under works for a while, will be launched in the coming months in BETA, and is expected to transform the way people manage their nutrition and fitness plans.
The unveiling was done at HealthifyMe’s annual event Ignite, where the company also announced that it has achieved a 4.6-star rating on Google Play Store, becoming one of the few Indian apps over 1 million downloads to have ever reached the landmark rating.
Developed under the code-name ‘Project Amadeus’, Ria uses key learnings obtained from HealthifyMe’s 150 million tracked meals [20 billion+ macro/micro nutrients] and 10 million message exchanges [1 billion+ words] between coaches and clients. Amadeus is the next step to ‘Jarvis’, the AI that has been assisting coaches to become more efficient by learning from their interactions with clients. Like fellow ‘intelligent assistants’ Siri and Assistant, Ria can answer questions around nutrition and fitness via both audio and text. It can do so in more than 10 languages and provides personalised responses based on the users’ lifestyle habits.
Speaking at HealthifyMe’s annual event, Ignite, Tushar Vashisht, CEO HealthifyMe said
Our vision is to make healthy living accessible for all. As a first step, we used mobile and cloud to cater to Tier 2/3 cities. Now with AI capabilities, we intend to refine Ria and Jarvis to the point where they can allow us to serve beyond India using qualified nutritionists working from their homes in India but catering to the world.
HealthifyMe has been talking about its data insights on HealthifyMeter and has run several campaigns in 2017 focused on improving public awareness around nutrition. Tushar also recently presented to Prime Minister Modi on behalf of Health & Nutrition group at an event organised by Niti Aayog.
The HealthifyMe app is available to download for free and enables users to keep a track of their calories, set personal fitness goals and measure progress. It boasts of the world’s largest database of Indian foods and syncs with all leading wearables including Fitbit, YuFit, MiBand amongst others besides its own fitness band RIST. As part of its subscription services, HealthifyMe connects users with elite nutritionists and trainers who review their progress, provide diet and exercise plans and work with the users to help them achieve their fitness goals.
The current HealthifyMe subscription plans cost from INR 999 ~ INR 1699 per month, depending on the number of coaches needed and other special packages for targeted programmes like weight loss, muscle gain, diabetes prevention.
HealthifyMe AI solutions team comprises of data scientists, ML & NLP experts with relevant degrees from IITs, Stanford, Georgia Tech, IIMs and experience of working with companies like Google, ZS Associates, McKinsey, Mu Sigma.
About HealthifyMe
HealthifyMe is a mobile health and fitness app that combines the power of technology with real human services to deliver measurable impact. Co-founded in 2012 by Tushar Vashisht and Sachin Shenoy, and incubated by Microsoft Accelerator, it today is India’s largest digital wellness platform catering to 3 million users with over 200 coaches. For more information, please visit HealthifyMe
Visa, the global leader in digital payments technology, announced an independent study, conducted by Roubini ThoughtLab and commissioned by Visa, examining the economic impact of increasing the use of digital payments in major cities around the world, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai could help these cities realize, USD 7.2 billion annual net benefits.
The study estimates that relying more on electronic payments, such as cards and mobile payments, could yield a net benefit of up to US$D 470 billion per year across the 100 cities studied ~ roughly the equivalent to 3% of the average GDP for these cities. For instance
Mumbai, with a population of 19,547,000 and GDP 0f US$104.1bn, could gain USD 2.9 billion annual net benefits. Estimated catalytic impacts for the city over the next 15 years include 4.4 basis point increase in GDP growth rate and 1.3% increase in employment.
Delhi, with a population of 17,266,000 and GDP of USD 74.4bn, could gain annual net benefits of USD 2.2 billion. Estimated catalytic impacts for the city over the next 15 years reflect 8.4 basis point increase in GDP growth rate and 1.5% increase in employment.
Bangalore, which has a population of 9,394,000 and GDP of USD 44.7bn, could realize USD 1.3 billion annual net benefits experienced by consumers, businesses and governments in the city. Estimated catalytic impacts for the city over the next 15 years translate into 7.7 basis point increase in GDP growth rate and 1.4% increase in employment.
Chennai, with a population of 959,4000 and GDP of USD 30.9bn, could save an estimated annual net benefit of US$0.8 billion through the cashless transition in the city. Estimated catalytic impacts for the city over the next 15 years include 9.8 basis point increase in GDP growth rate and 1.7% increase in employment.
Cashless Cities: Realizing the Benefits of Digital Payments, is a unique study that quantifies the potential net benefits experienced by cities which move to an ‘achievable level of cashlessness’ – defined as the entire population of a city moving to digital payment usage equal to the top 10% of users in that city today. The study does not look at eliminating cash. Rather, it seeks to quantify the potential benefits and costs of significantly increasing the use of digital payments.
By reducing reliance on cash, the study estimates the immediate and long-term benefits for three main groups—consumers, businesses and governments. According to the study, these benefits could add up to combined direct net benefits of approximately U.S. USD 470 billion across the 100 cities that were analyzed:
Consumers across the 100 cities could achieve nearly USD 28 billion per year in estimated direct net benefits. This impact would be derived from factors including up to 3.2 billion hours in time savings conducting banking, retail and transit transactions, in addition to a reduction in cash-related crime.
Businesses across the 100 cities could achieve more than US$D 312 billion per year in estimated direct benefits. This impact would be derived from factors including up to 3.1 billion hours in time savings processing incoming and outgoing payments and increased sales revenues stemming from extended online and in-store customer bases. The study also found that accepting cash and checks costs businesses 7.1 cents of every dollar received compared to 5 cents of every dollar collected from digital sources.
Governments across the 100 cities could achieve nearly USD 130 billion per year in estimated direct benefits. This impact would be derived from factors including increased tax revenues, increased economic growth, cost savings from administrative efficiencies and lower criminal justice costs due to reduced cash-related crime.
TR Ramachandran, Group Country Manager, Visa, India & South Asia, said
Cities are the new engines of economic growth. To unlock their true economic potential, and become globally competitive, cities must embrace digital payments. This global study shows how becoming more cashless delivers real benefits to governments, businesses and consumers, stimulating long-term economic growth. Each of the surveyed cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai could achieve, on average, USD 7.2 billion in annual net benefits – roughly the equivalent to 3 percent of each city’s average GDP.
As cities increase use of digital payments, the positive impacts can extend beyond financial benefits to consumers, businesses, and government. The shift to digital payments also may have a catalytic effect on the city’s overall economic performance, including GDP, employment, wage, and productivity growth.
The use of digital technologies – from smart phones and wearables to artificial intelligence and driverless cars – is rapidly transforming how city dwellers shop, travel, and live. Without a firm foundation in electronic payments, cities will not be able to fully capture their digital future, according to our analysis.
Cashless Cities: Realizing the Benefits of Digital Payments offers 61 recommendations for policymakers to help their cities become more efficient through greater adoption of digital payments. Recommendations include undertaking financial literacy programs to help move the unbanked into the banking system, implementing incentives to stimulate innovation focused on scaling new payment technologies, implementing secure open-loop payment systems across all transportation networks and more.
Visa and Roubini ThoughtLab created an online data visualization tool as a companion to ‘Cashless Cities: Realizing the Benefits of Digital Payments’. Using the data visualization tool, individuals can increase or decrease the level of digital usage in each of the 100 cities included in the study to better explore the benefits of a world, less dependent on cash. Visit the online data visualization tool and download the report from here.
Each one of us come up with ideas, be it whether you are working in a corporate environment or you already have a business. However, it all depends on how well the idea is executed, the team, timing, funding, etc.
Wrike, a project management information systems software company that has various products in the project management software area has come up with a very precise and handy infographic titled – ‘Top 10 reasons startups fail‘
Infographic brought to you by Wrike project management information systems software
What according to you are some of the reasons, startups fail? Do leave your thoughts in the comments section…
Bengaluru based home maintenance services start-up, Gapoon Online Consumer Services Pvt. Ltd, has raised USD 250,000 in a Pre-Series-A round. The investment is led by Vida Ventures and other independent and seasoned investors including Snehal Mantri, Anshu Bahadur, Partner at Cognizant and angel investors from their previous round Pankaj Kapoor, Director at one of the leading investment banks and Chandrasekhar BV, a veteran in the telecom industry.
Founded in 2015 by IIT Kanpur graduates Apoorva Mishra, Ankita Asai, Ankit Bindal and Nikhil Gupta from IIT Delhi, Gapoon is a one-stop shop for maintenance services. The company has pioneered subscription packages offering annual maintenance cover for homes & businesses resulting in long term partnerships with house owners, developers, property management aggregators, restaurants & retail outlets. It also operates on an on-demand basis for handymen services like plumbing, electrical, deep cleaning, pest control, mason/civil work, etc.
This investment comes at a crucial point; Gapoon is very close to becoming the first start-up in the industry to achieve net profitability while maintaining the growth targets. The in-house developed, intelligent mapping algorithm and fully automated system has helped us achieve the favourable unit economics and offer superior service quality to our customers. This investment will be used for new initiatives towards product and technology enhancements. In the coming months, we are focused on penetrating deeper into market segments and replicate the success in other cities as well.
While customers [both homes and businesses] avail the benefits of our subscription product, the vendors earn up to 40% higher compared to other aggregators. This model drives a favourable unit economics which is easier to replicate in multiple cities. I believe this win-win-win model for customers, service providers and aggregators in the only way towards sustainable organisation of this market.
Lead investor, Ankit Solanki, Advisor at Vida Ventures, said,
We have always believed in the opportunity in the on-demand and subscription-based services for property maintenance. It was a question of finding the right balance. Gapoon’s technology optimizes all elements of the equation, which are cost of acquiring supply, clients and the cost of servicing clients. This round of investment will enable them to expand their lead in Bengaluru and replicate their model in other demand hotspots across the country.
Apart from the convenience of offering a wide range of services under one umbrella, Gapoon’s key features include its year-long warranty on all services, exceptional service quality owing to proprietary attribute mapping algorithm for vendor allocation, and the exceptional vendor training and loyalty program that drives vendors to give their best.
About Gapoon
Gapoon is a Bengaluru-based startup that operates an on-demand as well as subscription-based model for services such as deep cleaning, electricians, appliances maintenance, plumbing, civil, painting, pest control and carpentry. Gapoon has pioneered maintenance subscription packages in India – Gapoon Maintenance Cover [GMC]. It offers a comprehensive solution to any property with unlimited scope of services, trusted professionals, cashless transactions and yearlong convenience.
Flytxt have announced the availability of an intelligent voice interface for NEON-dX, its digital customer engagement product. NEON-dX will use analytics and Artificial Intelligence [AI] to personalize conversations on any digital touch point that supports Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
More than a quarter of all mobile searches in 2016 were done over voice. With speech recognition accuracy reaching over 95%, more and more consumers will adopt voice as the preferred medium to interact with their service providers. With this interface, our enterprise customers can now engage their consumers in natural conversations using voice. This will significantly improve consumer experience and generate higher returns for enterprises.
NEON-dX has out of the box analytics and AI capabilities to translate data to actionable insights reflecting consumer’s persona, intent and contextual needs. Enterprises can leverage these insights and recommend right offers and actions during voice conversations seamlessly just like how a human agent will do. The interface will start supporting other voice platforms like Siri subsequently.
Flytxt has partnered with more than 100 enterprises including some of the largest Telcos and other enterprises in their digital customer engagement initiatives across the globe.
About Flytxt
Flytxt provides NEON-dX, an enterprise class software product for intelligent digital customer engagement automation. The product enables Artificial Intelligence based autonomous customer value management, helping enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation journey and generate measurable economic value faster and more efficiently. The solutions powered by Flytxt’s products and services help enterprises to grow revenues, reduce churn and enhance customer experience.
IT security researchers have discovered a new spear-phishing campaign that intercepts an active conversation and hijacks them to spread malware using highly-customised emails designed to look as if they are coming from the original sender.
The malware dubbed as FreeMilk is used by the hackers to infiltrate the computers using malicious codes and retrieve confidential information without even getting noticed.
The attack leverages CVE-2017-0199, a remote code execution vulnerability in the way Microsoft Office and Wordpad parse specially crafted files – which was subsequently patched in April this year.
How does FreeMilk affect the victim’s system ?
Upon successful execution of a FreeMilk phishing attack, two payloads named PoohMilk and Freenkin gets installed on the targeted system
PoohMilk’s primary motive is to run the Freenki downloader. Freenki, on the other hand, performs two different task -the first is to collect information from the host and the second is to act as a second-stage downloader which further downloads sophisticated malware.
Information collected by the malware include username, computer name, ethernet MAC addresses, and running processes. Besides this, Freenki can take screenshots of the victim’s system, with all the information sent to a command server for the attackers to store and use.
Who is behind this ?
As of now the actors behind this attack have not been identified. However, the security researchers have found out that ‘PoohMilk’ tool has been previously used in January 2016 in which the phishing emails were disguised as a security patch.
Attackers also attempted to distribute ‘Freeniki’ in an August 2016 watering-hole attack on an anti-North Korean government website by defectors in the United Kingdom.
How does this affect India ?
Due to the massive number inactive, un-patched and outdated windows machines especially in the government & small-medium scale organisations, these series of attacks can be deadly for India. All machines that aren’t updated with the patch that was released in April are at a severe risk and can aid cyber criminals and state actors in gaining access to even the most sophisticated networks.
Comments from Ankush Johar, Director at HumanFirewall.io, a leading provider of human information security awareness and preparedness solutions.
Freemilk is exploiting the CVE-2017-0199 vulnerability in Windows which was patched in April 2017. Therefore, ensure that any computer that has not been patched since before April, 2017 is not allowed to go on your the network.
First Things First, Patch all your computers using the official security update if not done already. Patch available here
General Hygiene for Protection
Defending against this kind of attack is rather simple. Following are some key points.
For Consumers
Use the latest Operating System.
Make sure automatic updates are enabled, and downloaded regularly.
Ensure Firewall is enabled to block all network based attacks.
Never Click/Download anything on Emails from untrusted sources. Make sure the mail is from a trusted party, only then download the attachments.
Use a proper, regularly updated Antivirus.
For Organizations
Latest patches must instantly be deployed across the company.
All pirated/un-patched/outdated devices to be removed [read unplugged] from the network instantly.
Employees to be trained to detect and protect against Phishing and other such scams.
With the vision to bring more ‘energy’ to the Indian startup community, Shell India is inviting all energy and IT startups to enter its pan-India programme, Shell E4 [Energizing and Enabling Energy Entrepreneurs].
Through the Shell E4 programme, Shell will be scouting for startups and businesses in early, pilot, or post-pilot stages to collaborate and work together on ideas that have the potential to impact the future of energy. Shell will work with the selected cohort for a period of six months and provide them with access to Shell’s Technology and IT labs in Bengaluru, technical and commercial mentorship from within and outside of Shell, access to potential customers through its network of partners and a fixed sum investment of USD 20,000 per startup.
The Shell E4 programme builds upon the company’s global vision to support the energy sector’s evolving ecosystem. Shell has a rich history of working with entrepreneurs across the energy value chain globally. For cleaner energy solutions, Shell also introduced Make The Future campaign, under which #makethefuture Accelerator India 2017 was concluded in March this year. The programme was a platform for millennials to showcase their bright energy ideas to build solutions for the future energy challenges both globally and in India.
Commenting on the launch of the programme, Nitin Prasad, Chairman, Shell Companies in India, said
At Shell, we believe that the answers to energy challenges lie in the power of innovation. With this programme, we aim to provide a platform to energy startups that have the potential to impact the future of energy. The Shell E4 Programme provides a platform for collaboration and conversation around valuable energy transitions, offering startups an opportunity to bring their ideas to life with Shell’s guidance and support.
Shell E4 will be located at the Shell Technology Centre Bengaluru [STCB] and, is well positioned to leverage the vibrant Bengaluru ecosystem.
Important Dates for Shell E4
Following the evaluation, the selected startups will form the 1st cohort and will be incubated with Shell for a period of 6 months at their campus in Bengaluru. As part of the incubation, the cohort will gain exposure to Shell’s advanced infrastructure and IT facilities; technical and commercial mentorship; an opportunity to pitch their ideas to other potential investors and an access to Shell’s network of partners and customers in India and abroad. In addition to this, Shell will also make a fixed amount of investment. For more details and to apply visit Shell India
