When it comes to marketing your products or services, some of the more obvious options may come to mind. Things like social media, brand ambassadors and press releases. These are all good tools to help boost your visibility and attract attention to your company, but when you’re dealing with SaaS marketing your products and services look a little different.
A Killer Proposal
By using something like Qwilr’s Marketing Proposal Template, your company will win over clients and boost your business. Awe potential clients with embedded videos, social media posts, interactive estimates and more. You can create proposals that have features built-in that can alert you to when someone views your proposal, if and when they sign your contract and even when they send payment. Knowing this information the moment it happens will allow you to stay ahead of your growing business.
Email Marketing
Email marketing services nowadays tend to have fewer features, but the features that are available are well worth their salt. They are the features that get your business the best results. Features like auto responder allow you to automatically reply to customer emails with template emails that you customize. This allows you to spend that valuable time on another aspect of your business.
Search Engine Optimization
SEOgoes hand in hand with content marketing. You want your content to be easily picked up by search engines so that more eyes can see your business easily. There’s on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is in your hands. You control your content, and you want it to be engaging content that will get shared, read, and linked to. But the real key to SEO is choosing the right keywords, titling and descriptions. And off-page SEO involves mostly link building and a creative distribution strategy. But it is always better to use links that are from high-quality and authoritative entities.
Content Marketing
Here’s the thing about content marketing: its value grows the longer you employ it. It’s an investment that when handled properly can do wonders for your products or services. It can be used to attract visitors to your website, generate leads and build your brand. Content marketing includes things like podcasts, blogs, webinars, e-books and more.
Content marketing differs from pay-per-click advertising because the content is owned by companies. And advertising is more like rented space. It may not be accessible all of the time, but your business’ content is.
Retargeting
Regardless of the type of product or service you offer consumers/clients, most visitors to your site are not going to do what you want them to do, buy, sign up, etc. But re-marketing or retargeting can give you a second chance with site visitors. Retargeting tracks your visitors and will display ads for your business as they surf other web pages. This software can also be used to target specific demographics or users.
Each of these marketing tools is a tried in true SaaS marketing strategy that deserves a test run in your business. Remember that every business presents its own unique needs and clientele, so some tools may produce better results than others. With that in mind, research, test and optimize potential tools to see what gets you where you’re trying to go.
CASHe, India’s most preferred digital lending company for young salaried millennials, promoted by serial entrepreneur and private equity investor V. Raman Kumar, has crossed Rs 1,000 crore in loan disbursements since its inception in April 2016. Backed by strong demand the company is eyeing to disburse another Rs. 1000 crore in the current fiscal, thereby earmarking a cumulative loan disbursement of Rs. 2000 crore by FY19~20.
CASHe has till date cumulatively disbursed 380,000 loansto over 200,000+ customers accounting for an average daily disbursal of Rs 3 crore. Top 8 metros account for upto 85% share of the Rs 1,000 crore of unsecured loans disbursed through the platform. The company receives over 3000 loan applications in a day and the average loan ticket ranges between Rs 35,000 to Rs 40,000.
CASHe attributes its impressive growth to incremental demand from existing customers, attractive product portfolio, higher ticket loan offerings and faster credit decisions facilitated by its AI-powered alternate credit rating system – Social Loan Quotient [SLQ]. SLQ uses big data analytics through predictive modelling and machine learning-based techniques on its large customer base to create instantaneous credit decision for its users. Standing sturdy with over 3.5 million registered users and an impressive customer rating average of 4.3/5, CASHe enables quick and easy access to short-term loans with low interests and easy EMIs for young urban working millennials which eliminates the hassles that traditional banking brings with itself.
Speaking on the announcement, the Chairman of CASHe, V. Raman Kumar said
We are excited about crossing the 1000 crore milestone and feel that we have built a significant scale in this space in a very short period of time. Fostered by an overwhelmingly positive customer demand, attractive loan offerings and product extensions and a 100% digitized process making borrowing seamless, faster and convenient for our customers CASHe is confident to sprint across a promising growth path in the coming years.
Innovation is at the core of our operations and we will continue to offer attractively unique and diverse products to our customers whilst setting new benchmarks in customer satisfaction and operational standards. I would like to thank our customers for their trust and continued support in building CASHe the brand it is today.
Ketan Patel, CEO, CASHe, said
We are proud to be able to process more than 380,000 loans for our customers so far and we are considering it as a fantastic response to our products translating into a 60% Y-o-Y growth. Having clocked an annual run rate of over Rs 500 crore in the last fiscal alone and backed by strong customer demand we are poised to achieve yet another Rs 1,000 crore disbursal target by 2019-20 fiscal.
On long-term however we are eyeing 10% share of the short-term unsecured lending market – a target we aim to achieve in the next 5 years. We will continue to offer our customers a superior user experience and instant access to credit wherever they are in India.
Recent analysis done by CASHe has found medical expenses was the top reason why millennials opted for digital loans and it accounted for almost 22% of the loan pie. While shopping for gadgets, electronics, wedding season, etc. also ranked among the top reasons. While 10% of the customers availed loans for travel, Christmas/New Year and Diwali were among the leading occasions when millennials opted for loans. Another interesting data point revealed that of the entire customer pie, females accounted for just 12% vis-a-vis 82% of their male counterparts
CASHe provides a range of short-term loan products ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 2,00,000 with a repayment tenure ranging from 15 to 180 days. Powered by its industry-first algorithm driven credit scoring platform, The Social Loan Quotient [SLQ], CASHe quickly determines a user’s credit worthiness by using multiple unique data points to arrive at a distinct credit profile of the customer.
SLQ is transforming the traditional credit rating measurements thereby providing immediate loans to the under-served young professionals who are kept out by traditional credit rating and banking systems. CASHe is completely digital and requires no personal intervention and no physical documentation. The average time taken for a loan to be disbursed is about 8 minutes, subject to proper submission of all documents.
In line with its vision to be a complete communication app, Truecaller, launched its voice call feature, ‘Truecaller Voice’ globally. The in-app voice over internet protocol (VoIP) based feature will allow users to make free, high quality [HD], low latency and quick to connect audio calls through WiFi or mobile data connectivity. The launch is the newest addition to the recent stream of updates, that is aimed to provide a full-fledged communication experience to Truecaller’s over 140 million daily active users globally.
The company has already begun the roll out of this feature in a phased manner to all its Android users from 10th June 2019. Truecaller users are making more than 180 million outgoing phone calls per day using the platform’s in-built smart dialer, of which more than half are between Truecaller users. The Truecaller Voice shortcut has been strategically integrated at relevant touchpoints in the app such as call logs, SMS Inbox, contact profile and after call screen. This enables users to seamlessly access the VOIP based call feature anywhere within the Truecaller app without switching to other applications.With this, Truecaller currently offers a one-stop integrated communication platform that hosts a range of key features including Caller ID, Intelligent dialer, Smart SMS inbox, Mobile Payments and Flash messaging. Commenting on the launch Rishit Jhunjhunwala, VP Product, Truecaller, said
We are ecstatic at the launch of ‘Truecaller Voice’. We have been working towards building a full communication suite for our users and voice calling is the next big step in line with this mission. Through this integration, we are looking forward to effectively provide an end-to-end communication experience, where users can call, text, chat, filter messages, block spam and even make digital payments, all in one app. We are also planning to expand this feature to iOS in a few weeks.
Photos have become an integral part of our lives since there are so many memories attached to photos. Though cameras in today’s smartphones come loaded with different camera sensors, multiple camera setup so that you can beautifully capture the moment, and different filters to edit the photos; there will always be a requirement for third-party photo editors to edit photos. There are a number of photo editors available for Android and the only factor that can keep the user hooked to one particular Photo Editor application is ‘Features Offered’.
Image Source
You can obviously edit photos captured using your smartphone by downloading on your machine and editing those photos using photo editing software like GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, etc. but that requires patience & expertise. If you are looking for photo editors on Android that use Artificial Intelligence [AI] and go an extra mile beyond editing photos, you should definitely have a look at Cut Cut – Cutout & Photo Background Editor by Barrier Reef Team. Cut Cut aims to Make Every Moment Count.
Cut Cut Features Set
As the name suggests, Cut Cut photo editing app makes editing photos simple, fun, and memorable. Below are some of the salient features of the Cut Cut app
You can edit existing photos which are in your gallery or you can edit while capturing the photo by hitting the Capture button in the app.
Cut Cut makes photo editing fun and interesting by providing users flexibility to cut photos and embed them in a different photo or background.
Cut Cut has a wide range of ‘background templates’ that are neatly separated in different categories like Travel, Festivals, Luxury, Nature, Romantic, Trends, etc. The free version has a good number of backgrounds that can keep you hooked on to the app.
Cut Cut has a number of filters & photo editing tools that can make your smartphone camera smarter.
Cut Cut has a number of camera modes like Qunicy, Original, Hefe, Xpro, Romance, B/W, Inkwell, Pixar, etc. Using Face Swap feature you can digitally swap the faces with the subject and create a humorous effect.
Cut Cut follows the freemium model, there are a good number of features in the free version of the app. It is ad-supported hence, you can expect advertisements being displayed at strategic locations in the app.
Cut Cut detailed app review
In order to get started, you should download the Cut Cut app from the PlayStore from here. Once installed, the app runs in the background and the editing window would pop-up as soon as you capture photos using your native camera on your smartphone. We observed that there was not much increase in the overall CPU consumption even when it was executing in the background.
Once you open the Cut Cut app, along with the three major options – Edit, Cut Cut, Camera; there is a list of the popular designs so that you need not spend much time in exploring the designs. There is a larger placeholder that contains the link to the Cut Cut Tutorial and explains the app usage in a crisp manner
Step 1 – Choose your favourite background.
Step 2 – Use the Lasso Tool
Step 3 – Create Mirror Effects
Step 4 – Add Filter Effects
It would have been better if there was an option to mark ‘Tutorial section as Read‘ since it may not be useful for Cut Cut superstar users since they are already well-versed with the app. A better approach would have been to have another Card that showcases the latest features in the Cut Cut app since that would be helpful to all categories of users [pros, newbies, etc.].
The home screen is simple since three major options [already described above] are displayed upfront. Using the Edit option, you can Edit the existing photos and apply different filters, backgrounds on the photo. The Cut Cut option contains three major sub-options – Photos, Portrait, and Albums. The camera option lets you capture photos and edit them right in the Cut Cut app itself. Hence, you no longer need to leave the Cut Cut app to edit the photos.
There are different options for editing namely Adjust, Rotate, Text addition, Filter addition, Blur effect, etc. Using the Sticker feature, you can create funny stickers from your photos. You can directly upload the captured photographs to your social media and social messaging platforms.
Cut Cut Review – Pros & Improvements
Below are some of the positive points of Cut Cut photo editing app when compared to similar apps available in the market.
Cut Cut app is an easy to use photo editing tool. The app makes extensive use of AI to suggest backgrounds that can enhance the beauty of the selected photographs and portion of the photo that you should edit so that the elegance of the photograph is still retained.
If you are a good photographer, you can even submit your work (Background) to Cut Cut team and if shortlisted, your photos are added to the Backgrounds Gallery of the app. This is an excellent manner to build a quality database of backgrounds by involving the community.
You can add Watermark to your photos and using the Screenshot Window setting in the app, you can edit screenshots with a single click.
By default the Cut Cut app runs in the background [with minimal impact on the battery], Quick Edit opens up each time you click a photograph. This reduces the overall time spent in editing the photos.
Below are some of the improvements as far as the Cut Cut app is concerned
Needless to mention that the free version of the app uses advertisements [ads] for monetization. However, there are scenarios where a full-screen ad pops up after photo editing is done. We found a few cases where it prompted us to install other apps e.g. Memory cleaner app and such ads ruin the entire user experience. The Cut Cut app is developed by China-based Apus Group which has developed apps like Apus Browser, Apus Launcher, etc. Instead of ads on the home screen of the app, a better approach would be to feature other apps developed by the Apus Group in a card format. Though it is important that the app generates revenue, it should not come at the cost of usability.
In-App ads in Cut Cut app
The Premium version of Cut Cut app which is ad-free is not very costly – Rs. 70.70 for 6 months, Rs. 42 for 3 months, and Rs. 20.70 for 1 month. Users of the premium version can cancel the subscription anytime. Though there is a recurring billing option, it would have been better if they also added a one-time subscription model for regular user-base of the app.
Though you can connect the app to Instagram, there should have been a feature where users can upload the photos edited/clicked via Cut Cut app to the cloud. It could be Google Cloud for non-Chinese users and Apus Cloud for global users [including users in China] of the app.
The size of the app is around 180 MB which might be a bit heavy for smartphone users with limited internal memory. A Cut Cut lite app would have been an ideal app for users that have smartphones with powerful cameras but limited capacity.
Conclusion
Cut Cut is a good app for editing photos. Since the app is simple to use, it requires a minimal learning curve. In order to penetrate the mass market, app usability is of primary importance and annoying ads at random places in the app ruins the entire experience. The product & engineering teams at Barrier Reef Team need to put user experience first (especially in some sections of the app) and limit the number of ads to enhance the overall experience. The app does have stickiness and since the premium version is not so costly, regular Cut Cut app users would definitely migrate to the premium version sooner or later. You can download Cut Cut Photo Editor for Android fromhere.
If you have used the Cut Cut app on Android, do leave your experience or suggestions in the comments section…
Have you been compromising on your wedding preparations due to lack of funds? Then, why not look out for certain alternatives that can prove to be a saving grace?
For this, you can use a personal loan, also known as personal loan for wedding expenses instantly.
This financing service can be borrowed for dealing with your wedding related expenses anytime. A Wedding loan can cover every expense including, venue, food, decorations and more. Therefore, it makes it an ideal option.
Here are a few things that you should read about in advance before borrowing a wedding loan.
1. Processing Charges
When you apply for a financing service, you need to pay a processing fee for your application to be considered. However, these charges are different for every financing institute. Hence, getting in touch with the agency and knowing about the processing charges is highly recommended. It will help you save yourself from sudden expenses related to your wedding loan.
2. Repayment Facility
Although there are various repayment methods available when it comes to a wedding loan, gathering information about it is still important. It will help you choose a repayment method that best suits your preferences. If you want to find out more about the repayment facility available with your selected financing agency, then all you need to do is get in touch with lenders.
3. Interest Rate
The first thing to consider while borrowing a wedding loan is the interest rate that you would have to pay. Personal loan interest rates can be significantly high. As a result, shopping around for the best possible option is a must. For this, you can utilize online research method and visit the websites of different financing firms who offer a personal loan. Besides, you can even try meeting the agencies’ relationship managers in person if you wish.
4. Joint loans
Instead of taking a marriage loan on just your name, you can now consider doing the same jointly. One of the biggest reasons why taking a joint wedding loan is preferred is that the expenses related to repayment can be divided by the couple. It also makes it easy for the couple to deal with their wedding loan EMIs. Besides, it will not put too much financial strain on one person solely. Hence, keeping up with your monthly budget will not be that difficult.
5. Prepayment fee
There can never be enough things to remember while borrowing financing services. However, the last on our list is regarding prepayment fee. In case you decide to repay your wedding loan principal amount in full before time, then make sure that you do not incur any prepayment expenses. Although charging prepayment fee is not recommended by RBI, but there are still multiple agencies that do so. Therefore, getting in touch with your firm and knowing more about the same can come handy.
Bajaj Finserv can give you pre-approved loan offers for their financing services. You can borrow funds for services like personal loans, home loans, and business loans.
The reason why you should utilize these online deals is so that the loan processing time can be cut in half and made completely hassle-free. To unlock your special pre-approved loan offers, all you would need is submit basic details such as your name and mobile number.
According to a recent study done by KPMG and Google in India, the gaming industry is currently estimated at approximately $0.6 billion, of which online gaming is approximately $0.37 billion. This shows that online gaming segment has a great scope in India and more than 8% of the total games developed in India are casino based games like Online Rummy, Poker, etc. Rapid & affordable internet penetration with good data rates and advent of powerful smartphones in the sub Rs. 15K~20K range is adding more fuel to the online gaming sector.
Few months back, the lottery and gaming conglomerate Sugal & Damani Group, announced the launch of Khel Group, aimed at becoming India’s largest online gaming platform. Khel Group will be the parent company with two of its own online gaming portals called Khelplayrummy.com offering online rummy and the newly launched KhelChamps, offering fantasy sports and gaming. Khel Group also has Pokerstars.IN currently operated by Sachiko Gaming Pvt. Ltd., that has an exclusive partnership with the global entity – The Stars GroupKhel Group looks at acquiring a substantial market share in this segment in the country.
We had a telephonic interaction with Naveen Goyal, CEO of Khel Group regarding the online gaming market [KhelPlayRummy, PokerStars], player segmentation, etc. Below are the edited excerpts of the interview
Can you give a brief introduction of the Khel Group ?
The journey began in 2012 with the intention of providing interesting online platform for players of Rummy. It is one of the most preferred card games of the nation, played extensively within family and friends. The idea was to make this available on the online space where more and more people could join to play and network. The market dominance was in the South, so we promoted there first.
Over the last 5~6 years, the company has grown steadily and has put a lot of emphasis on value creation and entertainment for its users. KhelPlayRummy now has a brand presence and players recognize it, and love to play on the platform. The trust and brand loyalty are the key things we have created since the launch. In 2018, we did a joint venture with Pokerstars and launched online poker in India Pokerstars.in. In January 2019 we launched fantasy sports app KhelChamps and are in the process of launching some more games within the real money gaming space very soon. All our operations are based out of Mumbai and we have a tech team based out of Delhi.
What are some of the core USP’s of KhelPlayRummy and how different is it from other platforms with respect to pricing, the interaction with the players, etc. Can you throw light on how do you sustain player interests and loyalty on a long-term basis ?
There are several players in the market and we are not competing with the biggest players. We believe that great product and focus on player’s experience will create more value addition. We have therefore focused onconsumer entertainmentrather than extracting more money from players. There is also a large emphasis on responsible gaming.
We have the fastest withdrawal process in the market – next day withdrawal, that doesn’t exist with any of the competitive brands. For players that have completed KYCs and have built a play history with us, we have instant withdrawals as well.
The third distinct advantage that we have are the ‘large amount tables’ that only exist with KhelPlayRummy and not with others and the kind of user-stickiness systems, decision making, Unb systems which is also unique. This involves a lot of statistical, analytical and decision-making processes. These are few things we have implemented which are unique from the market perspective.
Over the course of time we were the first company to launch rummy gaming in an app and after that all others followed.
Can you comment about user segmentation and how multiplayer gaming is helping to maintain the stickiness ?
Rummy players always used to play offline in a multiplayer format setting from a very long time. With the advent of online gaming, multiplayer format has led to consumption pattern changes. It has become a way of entertainment or passing the time, say while travelling in train for instance. So this becomes the mode of entertainment and getting some thrill out of it by, say, depositing some money and playing.
Having said that, we do a lot of innovation on how to design a game where people can play with one hand. This is because mostly people stand and travel in the train with one hand holding the handle, so the one-hand game is preferable.
In terms of segmentation there are various ways of looking at it, Geographic is one. Predominantly Rummy is majorly in the South market. North is developing and so is Gujarat and West Bengal [having said the East market is still very small compared to the others].
There is a small percentage of players who are on iOS devices and playing but they generally play bigger amounts. Within the Android range the biggest segment of players would come from people using phones within the Rs. 15K-20K range. Xiaomi and the mid-segment phones have penetrated very well in India and this is where most of the consumers are coming from.
Are player interactions possible i.e. Can an expert player interact with other players and provide them guidance or vice-versa ?
It is important to be cautious and avoid any kind of fraud that may happen if players interact while the game is on. There are initiatives that can be encouraged where the experts or brands can educate the novices. Practice games are available on our app. If you start our app you will notice three options to start with – Cash game, Practice game, & Tournaments. Another advantage of our app is that, we tend to analyse the games of players who play practice games and on and off we do pick up players, connect with them and educate them.
We also pickup games of players who are losing amount above a certain benchmark. Our back operations team then connects with them and educates them. This is also a part of responsible gaming.
Is there anything you do with respect to content since the game exist in multiple languages e.g. education via content, etc.
Firstly, our app is not yet in regional language but the regional language app would be launched soon. But all the content is in regional dialects – all the communications with the regional players, the marketing communications, retention communications etc. is generally in regional language. The reason why the move of the regional language app was delayed is because it is more of an action-based rather that a content-based app. Basically, we all know what a drop, sought or play button is. Hence it is more action based as all the content is language driven.
Educating the players via email in vernacular is not something that we are doing currently, but it is an idea we can always think about. The way we have been thinking is it is best to connect them in an interactive manner whether through WhatsApp or through a call. We have operations setup for outbound calls where we connect with players and explain them about how they have done.
Since you already have the user statistics, how exactly you try to retain the user to the platform across both professional and novice users ?
Retention is looking at the behaviour of players both in terms of amount they are playing, the time they are investing, the number of games generally played by them, the number of times they play the game, etc. Everyone has their own frequency in terms of day and time and this is something we capture in our system.
Our operations team tries to connect with the players at an appropriate time using the relevant channels which has the highest probability of them seeing those messages or picking up the call. We have also developed our own system where we capture such behaviour. We see that some of the players potentially will draw and capture some other events and connect with them appropriately. Being in touch with players in real time and connecting them in real time is the key. For example, the moment someone is depositing and their deposit is failing, we immediately try to connect with the customer and see what has gone wrong and help them. So it is these small things that we look into in order to make the experience seamless.
Do you use Machine Learning algorithms to understand user behaviour and decide what action needs to be taken ?
We are not yet at the machine learning stage, but yes, that is where we want to be. But we are doing the basic statistics and data churning. We aspire to keep improving each day and use machine learning algorithms to understand players and their behaviour in the future in order to give them the best experience.
Does KhelPlayRummy team use Robotic Process Automation [RPA] for testing the game ?
We have robots which simulate players for testing purpose. Robots help us in gauging the system tolerance in case of heavy usage. For instance, in case 1000 or 10,000 players start playing at the same time, we need to understand the system’s capacity and functioning.
Events may happen at the cusp or within a fraction of a nano-second and these things need to be checked constantly. We undertake some manual testing too, where there are scenarios which cannot be automated.
There’s an interest for Poker in India, but not many people are well versed with it, how do you plan to educate people as audiences are different for Rummy and Poker ?
Pokerstars has a learning platform called PokerStars School where online and offline initiatives are undertaken to educate people on how to play Poker. There are a lot of things in the pipeline in terms of getting into real education, creating and nurturing the market. Because of the regulatory system in India and the way people perceive poker, which is changing quite rapidly, we are hopeful that in the next couple of months we would be rolling out few of the strategies.
Do you think there would be any regulatory hurdles as far as poker is concerned and when exactly do you think those will be resolved ?
From a regulatory perspective, it is neutral which is why all companies are flourishing in India. We strongly believe that poker is purely a game of skill and it is fairly accepted that way in India. We aren’t worried at all from a regulatory perspective. It is more about how to launch strategies in a manner that are expected and perceived by the market and stakeholders.
Under Khel Group, you have Khel Champs that would be offering games of cricket, Kabaddi tennis, football etc. How do you plan to stay ahead of competition in this highly competitive segment ?
We at Khel Champs give amazing user experience to the customers. As we move forward, we would be integrating functionalities in terms of new variations of games that do not exist in India. Some exist in international markets but not in India. We are doing innovations combining close variations within the sports fantasy genre. So there would be newer variations coming up in the future.
At the restructuring level our vision is to create one singular platform where we will be able to offer all sorts of games to the player. Such a platform doesn’t exist in India.
How do you plan to market the cricket or the other apps that are in the pipeline since there are other brands with huge funding and large fan following ?
For KhelChamps, there is a particular budget allocated for branding that needs to run specially during the World Cup. KhelPlay, on the other hand, is already existing in the market and players are already aware of the brand in the gaming community. In the past 5~6 years, we have extensively invested in the brand in terms of player acquisition.
When we do player acquisition and go out in the media, there is a small percentage that convert into players and remaining do not. People know that the brand exists, they know that we are a stable company, hence it is easy for us to go out in the market and explain that we are a trusted player.
Do you plan to have a single app strategy where users/players can download Rummy, Poker, Cricket, etc. games on the click of a button ?
When we say platform, it is a single platform where the player management is seamless which means the player has one wallet whether they are playing on sports fantasy or rummy app they will be using the same wallet profile, login, and everything else will be done only once. I do not know if we would have a single platform with different apps, but there could be a possibility of doing so at a later stage.
Since we have started the restructuring with the thought of single platform, we would be coming up with ways in which we would make player experiences easy in terms of downloading the app and letting them know that this is one company and one platform.
We thank Naveen Goyal for his time and sharing the insights with our readers. If you have any questions for The Khel Group, please leave them in the comments section…
Advancing its commitment to building a future-ready workforce, Microsoft announced the launch of AI Digital Labs in collaboration with 10 higher educational institutions in the country. The institutes covered under this program include BITS Pilani, BML Munjal University, ISB, Kalpataru Institute of Technology, KL University, Periyar University, Karunya University, SRM Institute of Science & Technology, SVKM [NMIMS] & Trident Academy of Technology. With the edge of the Intelligent Cloud Hub program, these institutions will emerge as learning centers of intelligent technologies and innovation hubs of path-breaking solutions.
AI and intelligent technologies are becoming all-pervasive today, driving change across businesses and communities. The evolution of AI and other emerging technologies is expected to create new jobs. Workers at all levels of organizations will need to be skilled for these jobs. These shifts in the talent landscape will require new ways of thinking about skills and training to ensure that the new workforce is prepared for the future and there is sufficient talent available for critical jobs. According to a recent Microsoft and IDC Asia/Pacific study Future Ready Business: Assessing Asia Pacific’s Growth Potential Through AI, lack of skills, resources and continuous learning programs emerged as one of the top challenges faced by Indian organizations in adopting AI to accelerate their businesses.
As AI becomes mainstream, organizations will require talent with skillsets that are very different from what exist now. Educators and institutions are integral to the skilling revolution taking root in the country. With the right technology infrastructure, curriculum and training, we can empower today’s students to build the India of tomorrow.
Microsoft is helping to prepare students and the nation’s workforce to move effectively from the classroom to 21st century careers. This collaboration with colleges and universities will ramp up institutional setup along with educator capability, and provide relevant educational choices for students, helping them acquire the skills needed to fill the wide skills gap emerging across India and the global economy.
As part of the three-year program, Microsoft will support the selected institutions with best-in-class infrastructure, curriculum and content, access to cloud and AI services as well as developer support. The company will facilitate setting up of core AI infrastructure and IoT Hub as well as provide access to a wide range of AI developmental tools & Azure AI Services such as Microsoft Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning and Bot Services. Training programs for faculty will include workshops on cloud computing, data sciences, AI and IoT. Additionally, the faculty of the institutions will receive assistance in strategizing content and curricula for project-based and experiential learning.
Naukrigulf, a leading jobsite in the Middle East market, has made its platform more user-friendly and comprehensive for job seekers with Microsoft AI and data powered language translation solutions. The AI translator deployed by Microsoft has made the website multilingual for global users, thereby helping employers and job-seekers to explore the platform with ease and seize greater opportunities.
Naukrigulf attracts thousands of employers and job seekers interested to work in the Gulf region. With most of the users being fluent either in Arabic or English, the content on the portal needed to be available in the job seeker’s preferred language. The implementation of Microsoft’s Arabic language translator has eliminated the language barrier that existed amongst the job seekers and employers.
The AI and data powered translator has opened countless doors for job seekers to search for the right prospects. On the other hand, it has given companies access to a larger pool of talent that was earlier not visible to them. The deployment is providing a quick turnaround at a lesser cost, and leading to a substantially enhanced consumer base for Naukrigulf.
Sharad Sindhwani, Senior Vice President & Product Head for Naukrigulf said,
Naukrigulf.com has been a pioneer in adopting technology to offer improved experience to all the users. We regularly evaluate the needs of our customers and work towards building solutions that optimize job search and recruitment processes. With Microsoft Translator Text API, the language gaps that existed amongst the forum and its users have been filled and the portal has more tangible approach now. With this technology we have cut down almost half of the cost and we are very happy with accuracy of the automated translation.
Rajesh Rege, Country GM & India Lead – Clouds, Solution & Customer Success, Microsoft India said
Microsoft is committed towards aiding businesses optimize their processes and enhance their customer experience. The AI powered translator will enable Microsoft and Naukrigulf.com to achieve their unified vision of empowering the end users by enabling them to seamlessly connect, browse and exchange data. By leveraging this technology, we aim towards dissolving any form of language barriers that might exist amongst the job seekers and employers.
Microsoft is relentlessly working towards making technology accessible and productive for all, irrespective of the language they may speak or read. This is one of the examples of Microsoft’s efforts on local language computing and using the power of AI to improve the lives of people around the world.
Info Edge India Ltd., the parent company of Naukrigulf.com, Naukri.com, 99acres, & jeevansaathi, has dynamically leveraged data and AI solutions from Microsoft to streamline their workload and bring in superior quality services for its customers across the globe.
With this, Truecaller currently offers a one-stop integrated communication platform that hosts a range of key features including Caller ID, Intelligent dialer, Smart SMS inbox, Mobile Payments and Flash messaging. Commenting on the launch 
