The World Obesity Federation recognizes obesity as a "chronic, relapsing, progressive disease process, associated with comorbidities such as diabetes, sleep apnea, high blood pressure and infertility.” A recent study also linked morbid obesity to 13 types of cancer. In Karnataka, obesity is growing rapidly across both men and women, and across rural and urban areas. The proportion of men who are obese has doubled in the last decade. Increasing urbanization can be a contributing factor to these trends - lack of physical activity and growing consumption of fast food are proven to fuel obesity. But obesity is no more confined to urban areas. Even in rural areas, nearly 20% of men and women in Karnataka are obese. Widespread awareness of obesity as a serious medical condition is the need of the hour, so that patients consult doctors in time to benefit from the full range of available treatment options.
Dr. Shivaram H V, a surgeon in Aster CMI Hospital,observes that obese patients usually do not consult a medical professional promptly, “In the Indian scenario, more than 60% of individuals wait more than 6-10 years to seek out clinically proven weight-loss methods. By that time, such patients may have two or more comorbidities – such as sleep apnea or type 2 diabetes. Amongst residents of Bangalore, particularly among software professionals aged less than 30 years, the incidence of obesity is rising rapidly. Based on clinical experience, I would estimate the growth to be as high as 15% per annum. It is imperative that as soon as patients observe a steady and uncontrolled weight gain, they consult a medical expert who can identify the cause and advise corrective measures.”
Obesity treatment plans aim to limit weight gain, and eventually help patients reach and stay at a healthy weight. Treatment plans usually include diet and lifestyle recommendations, medications and bariatric surgery for eligible patients. Dr. Shivaram H V added, “When obesity is treated effectively, many comorbid conditions also show improvement. For instance, bariatric surgery is proven to help control Type 2 Diabetes in obese Indian patients. In my experience, this benefit is long-lasting. With simple habits and routines implemented by the patient post-surgery, glycemic control persists for at least 10-15 years. Similarly, I have observed sustained improvements in patients with high blood pressure, cholesterol and PCOD.”
Worldwide, of the four million deaths attributed to excess body weight in 2015, nearly 40% occurred among those whose body mass index (BMI) was above the threshold of obesity, i.e., 30 or above. To help ensure that severe obesity is treated with proven methods, insurance coverage of obesity treatment is a key step. Dr. Shivaram H Vemphasizes, “About 40% of patients visiting our hospital had previously avoided seeking obesity treatment due to financial concerns. Some even question whether they should spend money on a ‘cosmetic’ need. They discover later the reality that obesity is not just a matter of appearance, but also a serious health issue.” Recently, the IRDAI panel clarified that obesity, if contracted after buying a health cover, cannot be excluded from coverage. Dr. Shivaram applauded this step saying, “Covering obesity treatment with insurance will reinforce the seriousness of the condition, its potential to drive related lifestyle diseases and the need to seek appropriate medical treatment.”
Arena Animation, the leading animation institution in India recently organized the Creative Minds - Bengaluru 2018 — an opportunity for over 400 students to showcase their talent.
Creative Minds is Arena’s flagship student competition, where students produce and showcase some brilliant work. Students conceptualise and produce films under the guidance & mentorship of their faculty. These films and projects are judged by industry experts, who then guide and nurture them. This competition which happens across the country, judges students on various categories such as digital illustration, character design and animation, visual effects scene, 3D architectural visualization to name a few. It creates a platform for the students that provide them opportunity to learn teamwork and showcase their work within a strict timeframe, thus improving their capability, capacity and efficiency.
Congratulating the winners, Pravir Arora, Group Chief Marketing Officer, Aptech Ltd said, “Creative Minds is an initiative that offers a holistic benefit to the students. On one hand they receive quality insight including tip and tricks while using software, and on the other, they receive quick and comprehensive feedback on their work. With such competitions we want to create a stage for students to network with the industry experts. I would like to heartily congratulate the winners of Creative Minds, Bengaluru 2018”.
The industry stalwarts consisted of leading studios in India. These industry experts lent their guidance to students and also provided them useful career tips, in order to nurture industry-ready individuals. In this way, students were exposed to the latest industry trends, while at the same time they learnt to apply the learnings to the work they had presented. Along with the competition, a masterclass was conducted by industry leaders such as:
Pranay Agarwal, Head of Compositing, DNeg Studios, Mumbai
Dijo Davis, Head of L&D at Technicolor Academy & Sachin A.A. Learning Lead Compositing - Technicolour Academy by MPC Studios, Bengaluru
Arena Animation believes that a better future for the Indian animation and VFX industry can only be fueled by skilling the youth and nurturing creative minds and make them industry-ready. Initiatives like Creative Minds by Arena Animation always aim towards creating a strong community of skilled animators.
Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, now provides comprehensive protection to Motilal Oswal’s endpoints, network, and servers via one unified platform. The cybersecurity solutions securing Motilal Oswal include Trend Micro Apex One for endpoints, Trend Micro Deep Discovery Inspector for network, and Trend Micro Deep Security with anti-malware and intrusion prevention modules for servers.
Motilal Oswal is one of India’s leading financial services companies. With more than 2,200 branches in 500 Indian cities serving more than ten million customers, Motilal Oswal needed solutions that could provide comprehensive security without further complicating its IT environment.
The company first deployed Trend Micro’s Apex One endpoint security suite; then expanded the deal to include security solutions for its network and servers. Trend Micro Apex One protects the endpoints from unwanted and unknown applications. Trend Micro Deep Security provides emergency virtual patching to safeguard the servers from zero-day malware, network-based attacks, and operational impact from resource inefficiencies. Trend Micro Deep Discovery Inspector provides comprehensive threat detection and 360-degree visibility into the network, by monitoring all ports and protocols to identify attacks.
As a result, Motilal Oswal is able to monitor lateral movement within its network, reduce unscheduled downtimes, gain greater visibility into its IT assets, and decrease the time needed for security operations through one single-window management.
Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro said, “Motilal Oswal’s all-inclusive deployment of our security solutions allows the company to achieve what we call connected threat defense, an integrated and layered approach to cybersecurity that gives enterprises better control over their IT environment.”
“Trend Micro’s solutions enable us to offer our customers a truly secure environment that doesn’t compromise on performance. Our organization has benefited immensely from the reduced downtimes and real-time protection from threats,” said Pankaj Purohit, CIO, Motilal Oswal Financial Services.
Amit Ghodekar, CSO, Motilal Oswal Financial Services said, “One of the reasons we selected Trend Micro solutions over other vendors’ is for their unique virtual patching capabilities. Virtual patching shields our systems from zero-day vulnerabilities until a patch becomes available.”
Vijendra Katiyar, National Sales Manager, Trend Micro said, “Trend Micro’s robust security solutions have increased operational performance and provided Motilal Oswal enhanced protection against threats.”
“We gained an excellent solution in Trend Micro’s comprehensive security suite. The main benefits of improved protection and enhanced visibility, without compromising on performance enabled us to gain a safe environment within a cost-effective budget,” said Sehul Shaht, VP - IT Infrastructure Motilal Oswal Financial Services.
Trend Micro has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms since 2002, along with earning the rank of ‘most effective recommended breach detection system’ for two years running by NSS Labs.
Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, today announces a major 3-year contract with the C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), an organization within the MeitY (Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, India) to supply its BullSequana supercomputers. This contract is part of the NSM (National Supercomputing Mission), a 7-year plan of INR 4500 crores (~650M$) led by the Government of India which aims to create a network of over 70 high-performance supercomputing facilities for various academic and research institutions across India.
This project will see Atos deploy its BullSequana supercomputers, with a cumulative computing power of more than 10 petaflops. These supercomputers, including the recently announced BullSequana XH2000 will be installed in various academic and research institutions, making Atos a leading supercomputing provider in India for this segment.
“We are honoured to be given this opportunity by the Indian Authorities to be part of the NSM initiative and to become the technology partner of C-DAC for HPC-related platforms. We’re proud to be supporting India as one of the major markets with its strong growth expectations. The choice of the Indian government is testament to our experience and expertise in high-performance supercomputing and I am delighted that our BullSequana, with its unique Direct Liquid Cooling platform, will be enabling Indian academic and research institutions to accelerate their research” said Pierre Barnabé, Chief Operating Officer, Big Data & Security at Atos.
“We would like to thank the Hon’ble Minister MEIT, Secretary MEIT and the Director General of C-DAC Dr. Hemant Darbari for giving this opportunity to participate in such a prestigious program. We are very excited and looking forward to this unique technology partnership with C-DAC. Besides delivery of the Make in India Supercomputers, the partnership will bring to bear cooperation in many emerging areas, including exascale computing, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.” said Arvind Bajaj, Vice President and Head Big Data & Security at Atos in India.
This new contract illustrates the strategic relationship and partnership between the two countries and marks India’s ambition to be a leader in HPC. Delivery is expected to start early 2019.
MT Educare, one of India’s largest coaching companies has launched a revolutionary book that uses digital technologies to combine the best aspects of a textbook, work book and classroom teaching into an innovative learning experience.
Captioned R+ Notebook, the said book is prepared by highly qualified teachers, instructional designers and top design professionals, and addresses the problem of students forgetting critical concepts at the time of revision. This is often a result of lack of a systematic approach where students tend to write in multiple notebooks, which a student may or may not find while revising before assessments.
The R+Notebook not only covers all the concepts and problems from a textbook along with space to solve these problems, but most importantly, each concept and problem comes with an embedded QR code. If a student has trouble recalling the concept or the approach to solve a particular problem, all he/she has to do is scan the QR code using R+Notebook’s companion app and he/she will be able to see a video of the teacher solving the problem in the classroom.
This innovation thus eliminates last minute stress that students often feel when they can’t recall a concept, or approach to a problem solution while revising the concepts closer to the assessment.
Mahesh Shetty, founder of MT Educare and the Company’s Wholetime Director said, “This is the first time in the world that a ‘traditional’ notebook has been morphed into a multi-media learning book combining textbook, notebook, classroom learning and digital technologies to create a wholesome experience for students.”
The concept was test-marketed in the week of Children’s Day and was met with resounding success. Most of the students who thronged to MTEducare centres to experience this innovative approach to learning have signed up for the Class IX & Class X (2019-21 academic session).
Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, is questioning whether the promise of public cloud may be confusing India’s enterprises and hindering their growth, rather than helping it.
Nutanix is challenging conventional cloud thinking by outlining how organizations can redefine their business and business models by taking back control of their cloud environment, rather than simply adding to it.
Modern organizations are rapidly embracing multiple cloud services and providers, attracted by the prospect of simplifying operations, improving efficiencies, driving speed and flexibility, and liberating themselves from expensive on-premise vendor solutions.
But is this race to the cloud actually holding back India’s businesses? Enterprises often end up replacing one vendor with another or opting for alternating systems to provide redundancy and business resiliency. This can end up trapping them in exactly the same inflexible, costly and complex infrastructure environment they were looking to escape.
So, what is the solution? Nutanix suggests that better management and visibility into cloud operations holds the key to realising all the promises of cloud.
“The future is not cloud. The future is managing multiple clouds.” said Nutanix Neville Vincent, Head of Nutanix, India, ASEAN and ANZ. “Cloud complexity and clutter is a challenge threatening to overwhelm IT departments drowning in reactive problem-solving. Businesses are looking for the freedom to invest and create. Instant access and control of the ever increasing cloud networks, provides that freedom. The result is a software driven IT department free to focus on enhanced customer experience and shaping the future of the business.”
It’s a timely solution and comes at a time when enterprises are seeing an explosion in IoT and other connected devices which is driving an increase in cloud deployments designed to intelligently manage these devices at the “edge”. Ensuring consistent performance and governance whenever and wherever, from the datacentre to the edge, becomes critical to future business success.
“The cost and complexity of Cloud is costing Asia’s businesses” added Vincent “Instead of focusing on growing their business and adding value for their customers, today’s leaders are instead spending most of their time trying to understand and manage their cloud environment. We change that by putting companies back in control of the cloud.”
Nutanix’s Enterprise OS mitigates the risk and restrictions of public cloud lock-in by allowing customers to move data and workloads securely and seamlessly between public and private clouds with full and immediate visibility of costs. It also provides a single point of control for managing infrastructure and applications in any cloud, from datacentre to the edge, and delivers multi-cloud governance via new SaaS offerings.
The company has been growing rapidly in India as the hyperconverged market become mainstream.
Syska Group, a leading FMEG company announces the launch of ‘Reverb C2 Wireless Earphones’. Syska Reverb is a perfect light weight, comfortable hands-free mobile companion and is powered by really long-lasting battery to make sure that your days are filled with music you love. It features high definition speaker and multifunction button with IPX4 water resistance, long lasting battery and magnetic earbuds. Syska Reverb Wireless Headset comes with HDAB Technology for rich bass and clear sound to deliver best music experience to the consumers.
Commenting on the launch of Syska Reverb earphones, Gurumukh Uttamchandani, Executive Director, Syska Group said, “New technologies are replacing the wired earphones with the wireless ones and consumers are now fond of bluetooth earphones because of the ease to carry them. By launching Reverb C2, Syska is not only looking at providing a seamless music experience to the user but we also want the consumers to experience comfort in the communication aspect too. We believe in bringing new and innovative products that will benefit the consumers and change their perception from using just a normal earphone to a classic earphone. Syska Reverb is esthetically designed to provide comfort and style at the same time and it is an all-day wear with great features”.
Syska Reverb C2 is engineered for high definition sound with HDAB Technology combined with high precision auto level equalizer ensures that the music is played in right cord to give world class sound. The Syska Reverb Earphones is compatible with all types of smartphones, tablets, PC or Mac book and music players. It also seamlessly integrates the in-built equalizer function of Google Music and iTunes, without having any need of any additional app. It is designed ergonomically for long term wear; these headphones feature flexibility to wear around your neck and the stabilizing silicon ear gels provide in-ear comfort. These ensure a perfect fit for long term wear. It is built with polyurethane joints to keep it light weight and easy to carry around whole day.
Syska Reverb C2 is also a perfect companion for outdoor or indoor activities as the earphones are certified as sweat resistant and that makes them a perfect workout companion. The product is available at an introductory price of INR 2849/- in black, blue and green colors. It is also available on leading e-commerce portals Flipkart and Amazon.
