Microsoft India today announced the 4th edition of its worldwide Skype-a-Thon event. The annual 2-day event will be held on November 13 and 14, connecting an estimated half a million students from over 100 countries. Continuing its theme of ‘Open Hearts. Open Minds’, it will allow students to experience new cultures, go on virtual field trips, hear from guest speakers and learn from other students, educators and experts from around the world by traveling virtual miles over Skype over a 48 hour period. Schools located anywhere in India can join Skype-a-thon through a simple online registration process.
The India miles will be inaugurated by Anant Maheshwari, President- Microsoft India.Skype-a-Thon will dwell on diverse topics including conservation, history, computer science, in addition to sharing cultural experiences through song and dance, games, reading, stories, and virtual field trips, exchanging ideas and learning from each other. In India, the discussions will also focus on AI in education, cybersecurity, empathy and inclusiveness.
Microsoft also announced that for every 400 virtual miles traveled by Skype-a-Thon participants, the company will donate to WE, a non-profit organization that helps students internationally. WE’s holistic, sustainable international development model is built on five pillars of impact – Education, Water, Health, Food and Opportunity. Microsoft’s donation will support WE Village’s Education pillar to provide access to education for up to 35000*children and support UN Sustainable Development Goal #4 – Quality Education.
Manish Prakash, Country General Manager-PS, Health and Education, Microsoft India, said
Skype-a-thon is a celebration of the power of connecting students to each other globally, and an opportunity to teach greater empathy and compassion for our planet and for each other. Through sharing stories and projects, playing games, and collaborating on similar subjects, students’ hearts and minds are opened, allowing them to become more engaged global citizens. We invite schools from across the country to join this movement.
Skype-a-thon will also encourage students to engage in positive, safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or when using networked devices.
In 2017, the event saw students and educators participating from 90 countries around the world, travelling over 14.5 million virtual miles. For more information, please visit here.
Infosys Finacle, part of EdgeVerve Systems, a product subsidiary of Infosys and Efma, a global not-for-profit organization, launched the 10th Annual Study of Innovation in Retail Banking. The report is authored by Jim Marous, Publisher of the Digital Banking Report and Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand. Celebrating the 10th anniversary of the research, the report explores a decade of banking innovation and looks ahead at what’s in store for banking in 2022.
The research, in which over 300 banks globally participated, found that respondents see Open Banking APIs as the top technology for the future of innovation, with it being stronger than ’emerging’ areas such as machine learning, chatbots and RPA. The research found that in the short term, banks will leverage Open Banking for compliance such as the Payment Services Directive [Europe], Unified Payments Interface [India] and New Payments Platform [Australia].
The research also found that overall, organizations are taking a strategic perspective on the need for innovation ROI. In 2017, 31% of firms had an innovation ROI perspective of one year, compared to only 17% this year. In addition, 63% looked for an ROI in 1~3 years as opposed to 54% in 2017.
Respondents believe that retail banks consider digital commerce platforms [such as Alibaba] and technology giants as the innovation leaders for 2022. Similar to previous years, the greatest impact of transformation is expected to be in the areas of payments, mobile wallets and lending in the next three years.
Key findings include
Investment in banking innovation
With legacy technology being identified amongst the top three barriers for innovation, 74% banks are increasing investments in technology modernization.
50% of the organizations believe that product delivery channels followed by new product innovations will be where most innovation will take place in the next four years.
Impact of modern technologies
Open banking APIs are seen as the top technology impacting banking in the next year by 65% of the respondents
Banks rated only a moderate level of organizational readiness to leverage technologies to deliver expected business outcomes for open banking, conversational interfaces and cloud processing.
Deploying and measuring innovation
The need to collaborate with external partners continues to be the highest focus when sourcing talent for innovation.
Innovation over the next 12 months will be delivered through investments in co-innovation with other partners, a dedicated innovation team along with collaboration with large tech firms.
The presence of an innovation officer increased significantly over the past year. In 2017, only 37% of the organizations surveyed had a dedicated executive to lead the innovation process. In 2018, the number jumped to 48%.
Banking in 2022
After existing digital channels [mobile and online], digital assistants, social media and third party channels are expected to be the primary channels for banking by 2022.
Close to half of the respondents believe that less than 40% of the current workload would move to public cloud by 2022.
According to 70% of the respondents, AI is expected to have a significant impact in transforming customer service/support by 2022.
In recent years, banking institutions have been facing disruption head-on, with advancements in customer service, personalization and mobile applications through a combination of Open APIs, AI and machine learning. The 10th edition of this report highlights advancements made in the last decade but also predicts a dramatic transformation in payments, mobile wallets and lending.
Sanat Rao, Chief Business Officer and Global Head, Infosys Finacle, said
The 10th edition of the Innovation in Retail Banking report strongly illustrates the pace at which the traditional banking model is evolving. The need to invest in a solid platform strategy focused on business benefits and more compelling experiences for customers, employees and partners is central to remain competitive. This report will help banks sharpen their digital vision and benchmark their plans with the industry peers.
Jim Marous, Owner and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report and author of Study, said
More than ever, the importance of an innovation culture became apparent for organizations that want to become leaders in both digital transformation and customer experience. There is a significant shift occurring in the banking industry, with more organizations looking to innovate in areas directly impacting the consumer, as opposed to building innovations that only impact efficiency and technology improvements.
Agriculture plays a vital role in India’s economy. It contributes around 17% to GDP and employs more than 50% of the total workforce. Despite this, agriculture growth has been sluggish and farmers have failed to get fair value for their produce. The Green and White Revolution have helped India attain self-sufficiency in food-grain and milk respectively but subsequent governments have failed to address the systemic issues prevalent in the agriculture sector. Instead, governments have relied on subsidies and farm loan waiver to achieve short-term goals without any concrete policy measures to make farming sustainable. These short-term measures help farmers but have a cascading effect on the overall state of the economy. With growing dependence on monsoon, the state of agriculture and farmers continues to be dismal thereby making agriculture non-profitable.
The problems in agriculture are many but the current government’s emphasis on technology towards making agriculture sustainable and profitable will go a long way in addressing some of the key components.
In Agriculture, availability of real time information at the right time is a major issue. Lack of information at proper time causes huge loss to farmers. Keeping in mind the need to make farming more sustainable and viable, technology is one of the top priorities of the government. There still exist large productivity gaps in the potential and the realized farm output and with development and infusion of new technologies our farm production will go up to meet the rising domestic food demand.
Technology can help improve farmers’ lives in a number of ways – to know the health of the soil and help him choose from a variety of crops that can be grown; forecasting the seasonal conditions in advance; intensification and diversification of farming in order to increase productivity and farmers’ income; diversify towards other allied occupations as well like dairy and forestry; conservation of water, rain water harvesting, construction of check dams, drip and sprinkler irrigation; infrastructure like rural roads, dependable quality power, godowns, cold storage facilities, refrigerated vans and market yards; food processing; timely credit facilities at reasonable interest rates and farmer-friendly insurance policies.
Many experts believe that the future of sustainability relies mainly on the agricultural sector’s ability to continually develop and improve technology. Types of Agriculture Technology:
Development of nutritional efficiencies
Farming equipment
Software for feed processing, farm management, and production
Development of pesticides
Genetic modification techniques
Electronic Marketing
Over the centuries, as farmers have adopted more technology in their pursuit of greater yields, the belief that ‘bigger is better’ has come to dominate farming. Keeping an eye on it, Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare has initiated technological intervention in various aspects of agriculture like Soil health card, animal husbandry, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna etc and also launched five major mobile apps for the welfare of farmers which can be downloaded from google play store as well as from MKisan.
Skill Development in Agriculture
For the first time during 2016-17, skill training programme are being conducted by DAC&FW from Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojna [RKVY] funds in collaboration with Extension Division of ICAR and Agriculture Skill Council of India [ASCI]. Also, the government is promoting Geo-Tagging of agriculture assets created under RKVY. More than 1.5 Lakh infrastructure/assets have been created under this scheme in horticulture, fisheries, dairy and livestock breeding. With the help of space technology, farmers will be able to utilize pesticide/residue testing labs, storage infrastructure and market-related information on time.
Agriculture Marketing
Towards this, the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare has initiated and is implementing various schemes for our farmers. For strengthening the Agricultural Market Information System [AMIS] in India using innovative methods and digital technology, e-NAM is a live example of Agricultural Technology in India. eNAM is a device to create national network of physical mandis which can be accessed online. It seeks to leverage the physical infrastructure of the mandis through an online trading portal, enabling buyers situated even outside to participate in trading at the local level.
Animal Husbandry
Agriculture technology advances and methods of modern farming focus on efficiency and increased output. Farming technology helps address a variety of problems livestock farmers face, including water scarcity, pollution from manure and the animal’s access to nutrition. The goal of Agricultural Technologies area: Reducing pollution; managing water consumption; maintaining the health of livestock and crops; and Promoting biodiversity.
Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna
The inclusion of technological interventions will address the issues of large number of Crop Cutting Experiments [CCE] being conducted during short harvesting window with limited manpower. Such technology based solutions will help in achieving the objective with limited resource, more accuracy, resulting in timely settlement of claims and will further facilitate to reduce the unit area of insurance to a level lower than the present village/village panchayat level.
Soil Health card Scheme [SHC]
Through the help of technology, Soil health card is providing information to farmers on nutrient status of their soil along with recommendation on appropriate dosage of nutrients to be applied for improving soil health and its fertility.
Dissemination of technology to farmers and stakeholders
Radio and Doordarshan has been a key partner in the dissemination of Information and Communication Technology to farmers and other stakeholders. Through this, it has been working for providing information to farmers for decades. India is going through a phase of Digital Revolution and Mobile Revolution. A farmer can get his all queries answered by calling free on Kisan Call Center [18001801551]. If the farmers are illiterate or less educated they can also receive recorded messages.
The apps have helped farmers access a wide range of information.
Kisan Suvidha – The farmers can obtain information sitting at home about weather, market prices, crop diseases, identification & treatment of pests along with the advice from agricultural experts.
PUSA Krishi – Information about improved verities of agriculture and horticulture as well as latest techniques.
Agri Market – Information about prevailing prices in the mandis spread within 50 kms.
Crop Insurance – All information related to crop insurance.
Crop Cutting Experiment [CCE] – For conducting crop cutting experiments.
We have reliably learnt how technology in Agriculture can help in the production and marketing for the benefit of farmers and consumers. The prime power to decide when, to whom, where and at what price to sell the produce should lie with the farmer. The system that exists between the farmer and the end-consumer is slowly being scrapped through the use of technology.
About the Author
Bidwan Kishore Raymohapatra has Master of Business Administration in Management from Biju Patnaik University of Technology, Orissa. He has more than 8 years of experience in research and methodology, out of this around 4 years experience in Agriculture Sector. He possesses good knowledge on Business Management of Publication and Information System work in Agriculture Ministry.
Ather Energy, India’s first locally designed and manufactured intelligent scooter brand, has added additional subscription plans for the Ather 450 & 340, based on the success of Ather One, the complete hassle free ownership plan. The new plans will offer more flexibility to the customer to choose services of their choice based on their usage. Public charging at AtherGrid will remain free till 31st of December 2019 for all Ather customers.
Ather One, Ather Energy’s flagship plan, will continue being available, and customers will enjoy its free services for a year from their date of delivery. Ather One has been designed to manage all the hassles of the current automobile ownership. The plan covers all expenses & scooter maintenance, including data charges, public fast charging, home charging expenses, periodic service including consumables and roadside assistance.
Upon completion of their the first year, customers will be free to migrate to any other plan of their choice. Since flexibility in choosing services basis usage and individual preference was a pertinent ask, Ather Energy’s new plans will cater to requirements on demand. Ather scooters being intelligent mobility solutions, data will be a constant feature across the plans that will help the auto company understand individual’s ride, scooter’s health, riding conditions and subsequently, push over-the-air updates, provide ride recommendations and run services like navigation.
For individuals intending to pre-order from today, Ather Service plan will be applicable for free for a limited period. Free Ather One plan for pre-order customers stands discontinued from 31st October, 2018.
About Ather Energy
Co-founded in 2013 by IIT Madras graduates – Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain, Ather Energy is one the few automotive startups in India. The company has designed India’s first truly intelligent electric scooters – Ather 450 & Ather 340 and is backed by the founders of Flipkart, Tiger Global and Hero Motocorp. Ather Energy has filed 43 patent applications along with 11 international patent applications and 122 design registrations of their products that have been designed and made in India.
We all know that website load times must be as fast as possible, but everyone has a second or two to spare, right? Online, a second or two might as well be a year. Web surfers don’t have the patience to give you those couple of extra seconds that it takes your site to load.
That depends on the person checking out your site. That said, page loading time had better be five seconds or less. If it takes more than that, you’ve lost 74% of your visitors already. The stats are sobering – just a single second delay in load time means you’ve lost about 11% of your views.
It all gives new meaning to the phrase, “Make every second count.” You can learn more about how exactly a slow low time impacts your web traffic in the infographic from Hosting Tribunal below.
Have a look and see exactly how much impact those extra few seconds have. For now, though, let’s look at ways that you can improve your website’s load time.
Improving Your Website’s Load Time
A website is essentially little more than a digital file. The more information contained in the file, the bigger the file is and the longer it will take to load. Photos, videos, and animations are the ‘gas guzzlers’ of the digital world.
A high-resolution photo or video that has not been web-optimized significantly impacts the size of your ‘file’. It’s a bit of a catch-22 situation. We know that visual media are better for capturing the attention of web surfers, but there is a danger that they could bloat our websites. How do we overcome this issue?
Start with the photos that you want to post. Make copies of all of the photos, and work with the copies. That way, if something goes wrong during the editing process, the originals will still be fine. Using a program like Photoshop, resize them so that they have smaller dimensions. Try cutting the size by at least half. This won’t impact the photo quality, and they will still display fine, but they will require less bandwidth to be displayed on the end user’s screen.
While you’re at it, check the quality of the image. Now, for many years all the advice out there has been to use high-quality images. Do we throw this advice out of the window? Not really, we just amend our idea of what is meant by a high-quality image.
If you save a photo at a medium quality level rather than a higher setting, it won’t make much difference to the viewer. You will, however, save a lot of megabytes by doing this and reduce the file size significantly. The same applies to the resolution that videos are saved at, but here you’ll need to play around a little to see what looks best. Take a look at all the visual elements of the site and make sure that the file sizes are reduced as much as possible. That will help you speed up a slow load time substantially.
To understand the real impact speed has on online presence, go through this insightful graphic
CLOUDSEC India 2018,hosted by Trend Micro Incorporated, attracted more than 650 business and technology leaders this year, making it one of the most important cybersecurity conferences in India. During the event, Trend Micro highlighted security-as-code and security automation as two important trends defining the future of cybersecurity. These two trends are in line with application development in the cloud computing era. By moving security into the early stages of the development lifecycle – or implementing DevSecOps, bugs can be discovered and fixed quickly before they make it to production.
Trend Micro has seen tremendous growth in India this year, especially in its cloud security business, which now contributes to nearly 40% of its overall revenue in the country. The company observes strong uptake of private cloud from the banking, financial services, and insurance [BFSI] sector; and that of public cloud from manufacturing, e-commerce, IT and IT-enabled Services [ITeS] sectors, and born-in-the-cloud businesses. New local customer acquisitions from 2017 to 2018 include the State Bank of India (SBI], the Syndicate Bank, Lupin Pharma, Bandhan Bank, PolicyBazaar, and Capillary Technologies, to name a few.
Addressing the crowd, Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro said
India presents a huge and strategic opportunity for our business, and we will continue to invest in the country. In fact, early next year, we will be launching a Certification Program in IT Security [CPITS] in India. The program aims to equip recent computer science graduates with hands-on experience and skills, helping them kickstart a career in the cybersecurity industry with Trend Micro. We have successfully run CPITS in Egypt and Brazil, and India will be the first Asian testbed for this exciting initiative.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary this October, Trend Micro has always evolved with the industry andconsistently expanded into new growth areas. Today, the company operates three major solution categories: hybrid cloud security, network defense, and endpoint security. At the same time, Trend Micro keeps a close pulse on emerging threats with the help of its threat research teams located across the world. For the next ten years, the company’s mission is to secure the connected world, giving enterprises the agility and freedom for adopting new technologies.
About CLOUDSEC
Founded in 2011, CLOUDSEC has established itself as a global community for cyber security experts and professionals. The CLOUDSEC tagline ‘Have a Safe Journey’ aims to inspire technology professionals and users to embark on a continuous learning journey to explore and learn about industry trends, best practices, and new technologies to secure the digital infrastructures, and manage the technological risks of their organizations in safely supporting their corporate goals. For more information, please visit CLOUDSEC.
About Trend Micro
Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, helps to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Our innovative solutions for consumers, businesses, and governments provide layered security for data centers, cloud workloads, networks, and endpoints. All our products work together to seamlessly share threat intelligence and provide a connected threat defense with centralized visibility and investigation, enabling better, faster protection. With more than 6,000 employees in over 50 countries and the world’s most advanced global threat research and intelligence, Trend Micro enables organizations to secure their connected world. For more information, visit www.trendmicro.com.
Kolkata’s Diverse Non-Veg Menu Makes it a Meat Lovers Food City. However, Meat procured from butcher shops, local vendors & supermarkets is often from animals raised under the unhygienic and inhumane condition of common feedlots, and grossly overburdened slaughterhouses.
Finding fresh and chemical free meat has now become a challenging task. Those who don’t have secret local butchers or nearby delis who sell cold cuts and special cuts of meat, have to make do with frozen packaged goods. However, there’s a new service in town called Kolkata Meat, which can deliver the 100% fresh meat right to your doorstep.
With a mission and aim to change the meat buying experience for the meat lovers, Kolkata Meat has come up with a technology integrated platform to solve all the issues of finding safe and 100% halal meat. The startup aims at delivering the best quality of meat through an e-commerce based platform, making it convenient for the customers to get quality meat in any place.
From the past 2 years, the team of Kolkata Meat was indulged in their research and analysis on how to deliver the best quality meat to their customers. Therefore, they are confident that their products will be fresh and preservative free and also free from all kinds of antibiotics and hormones, which are sourced from the farms daily.
Kolkata Meat’s products include fresh chicken in a variety of forms, mutton chops and cuts, kebabs, seafood, sausages, and cold cuts.
How the service is Impeccable?
Kolkata Meat partners with high quality farms to bring the freshest meat from only the best breeds, bypassing local mandis, wholesalers and butcher shops. Meats are delivered hygienically through a unique end-to-end cold chain supply that ensures consistent freshness from farm to table without freezing or exposing meats to any preservatives or water. Kolkata meat guarantees same day stock delivery within 2 hours or on prescribed schedule.
With the strong ties to a network of expertise, we are able to distribute the higher level of value and freshness. Therefore, our products that arrive at your doorstep are the best quality and most delicious obtainable, where every product of ours are being examined, tasted, and then screened by our teams having a couple of years of experiences. So when it comes to your dining plate you enjoy each bite of it with great satisfaction.
The distinguishing factor about Kolkata Meat is, it will deliver the meat in a vacuum pack where the meat will remain fresh and in a hygienic form. Kolkata Meat is the first exclusive online meat delivery company in Kolkata which is having an android and iOS for the convenient consumers, who can order meat on their fingertip.
About the Founders
Startup founders Alam Brothers built their business using hard-won survival skills not only in Indian railway water projects but is all set for the Kolkata meat with their different strategy and business tactics.
Blockchain implementations are mostly POCs being done in the hope to convert them to fully fledged projects. The main real world implementations are still not mainstream. There are many factors in play but one of the most prominent one is positioning of technology itself.
Image Source – BlockChain
Satoshi Nakamoto and his Bitcoin are for sure the reason for the popularity of the Blockchain or DLT in general. Blockchain technology professionals understood the problems with Bitcoin technology, its positioning and moved on with furthering the idea with new innovations.
The activists and enthusiasts are however still fixated with promises of the Bitcoin’s whitepaper, and would want to eliminate the intermediary with Blockchain technology. One should acknowledge that the activists helped a lot to keep Blockchain active in public memory for a decade when there was no real impact on the ground. One can understand their enthusiasm and motivation.
The problem is with good intention people in business and technology community who are still in the awe of the promises of Bitcoin. They are now hurting the cause and becoming the burden by forcing the one thought or one defined checklist for any Blockchain implementation. I think technology should be allowed to evolve organically and is not made the prisoner of the ‘original idea’.
I believe ‘Identifying the business problem you want to solve‘, and will be the key to the success of any Blockchain implementation [rather than the phrase ‘Blockchain implementation’ it should rather be ‘Blockchain network setup’ and ‘application implementations’ on that setup].
Eliminating intermediaries is Utopian idea where one is asking to get into business transaction wherein one has to believe set of programmers of Blockchain platform rather than entity that can be dragged in the court of law in the situations of dispute.
I think the right approach is to eliminate the frictions in business processes where multiple parties are involved. Intermediary could still be there as entity to ensure accountability, but Blockchain could minimize the inefficiencies by redesigning the business processes where entire chain is acting on same platform as a distributed workflow. And this workflow is not owned by a single entity but by all in the network.
One also has to start thinking of building capacity within organization to setup the necessary infrastructure so that business processes can be redesigned. The second good thing one has to attempt is to choose the ‘right platform’ to setup Blockchain network and build applications.
