Seven Infra Projects Worth Rs 9672.12 cr Cleared By Indian Government

 A government panel has approved 7 infrastructure projects in road and port sectors envisaging an investment of Rs 9,672 crore.

 “The Public Private Project Appraisal Committee (PPPAC) and the Empowered Committee both chaired by Economic Affairs Secretary cleared 6 road projects and 1 ports sector project with estimated project cost totalling Rs 9,672.12 crore,” a finance ministry statement said on Wednesday.

Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das tweeted: “Quick clearances given”.

These include 4 National Highway projects, one each in the state of Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh and two projects in the state of Uttar Pradesh and one port sector project in the state of Goa cleared by the PPPAC.

Besides, the two road projects in Uttar Pradesh have been cleared for Viability Gap Funding VGF).

Under the VGF government support is provided to the infrastructure projects to make them viable and bankable.

The meeting of the PPPAC was held on Tuesday.

Agencies

Guru Bhat Appointed GM at PayPal Chennai Technology Center in India

PayPal, the global leader in online payments, today announced the appointment of Guru Bhat as the General Manager of the Chennai Technology Center in India.

In his role as the General Manager, Guru will be responsible for driving the PayPal’s technology strategy in Chennai, as the company builds on its next-generation payment solutions and services. The technologists in the Chennai center are part of a global team that is constantly innovating and driving software development initiatives that enhance and expand PayPal’s global payments platform.

Guru comes with more than 19 years of international experience in the technology sector, having served as a Lead Architect for Sun Microsystems and subsequently at Oracle, for a total of 12 years in Boston, Massachusetts.

“Guru brings to PayPal a wealth of experience in technology leadership and a passion that is well suited for our innovative, people-focused work culture. We are extremely delighted to welcome him to the PayPal family, and we strongly believe that his knowledge and commitment will be invaluable as we look to build payments for the future.” said Anupam Pahuja, General Manager, Technology of PayPal APAC.

On his appointment, Guru said, “I am extremely excited to join PayPal’s technology center in Chennai. Technology is responsible for the foundations of PayPal, and I look forward to working with the world-class technology talent in Chennai to bring to life our vision to be an everyday part of people’s lives.” 

Swiss Re India First 'My Personal Risk Advisor' Hackathon Won By IIIT – B Team

What if a mobile phone app could assess the risk of an individual and provide ideas to better manage that risk? Well, that thought helped IIT-B bag the first prize.

Swiss Re held an event entitled "My Personal Risk Advisor" Hackathon between January, 30-31. Where16 teams of 70 technologists comprising students, developers and entrepreneurs built applications that enable individuals or small business owners to assess their total risk.

Organised along with IBM, India’s first reinsurance hackathon offered a unique garage-like experience for its participants and provided an opportunity to develop ideas into prototypes. The prototypes were judged based on innovative technology integration, dimensions of risks that were considered while developing the solution, user experience and technical complexity. A panel of esteem judges, which included members from Swiss Re and IBM evaluated the apps.

“The reinsurance sector is at the cusp of a radical transition and the convergence of new technologies will help us manage consumer expectations and to better manage risk.” said Alok Kumar, Managing Director, Swiss Re Bangalore. "Such a platform enables exploration of emerging and disruptive technology to reduce the protection gap, besides further encouraging and nurturing entrepreneurs and start-ups in the sector,” he added.

Team IIIT-B represented by Abhijay Vuyyuru, Anubhav Bhardwaj, and Lijo Johny were adjudged as the winners for their solution. This WhatsApp-based application can click a picture of the food you eat and distribute it to a specific group. This application analyses the image of the food and highlights the calorie content and recommends healthier alternatives. The winning team was awarded a cash prize of Rs 3 lakhs.

Team IIIT-B represented by Amit Gupta, Daksh Varshneya, Tanmayee Narendra, Prerit Jain, Pawan Dhananjay bagged the second prize and were awarded Rs 2 Lakhs.

Manu Dwivedi, Chakshu Ahuja, Rahul Radhakrishnan and Saurav Tomar were declared as the second runners-up and were awarded Rs 1 Lakh.

    

Commenting on winning the hackathon, the first prize winners said, “We are thrilled to win. Being the second most populous nation, India is prone to high health risks and diseases. Our idea was to develop a solution that enable individual to assess and foresee their risk based on the individual’s personality and dietary profiling.”

AMD Offers Thermal Solutions & New Processors for Reliable, Near-Silent Performance

AMD  has launched new thermal solutions, including the flagship AMD Wraith Cooler, as well as the new AMD A10-7860K and new AMD Athlon X4 845 desktop processors.

New AMD Thermal Solutions

Designed for the consumer who cares about how their desktop PC runs, sounds, and looks, AMD now offers new thermal solutions that generate less than one-tenth the noise of their predecessors running at a near-silent 39 decibels. The new AMD thermal solutions are included with seven AMD processors (see table below).

The new AMD Wraith Cooler combines near-silent operation with unique styling via a sleek fan shroud and LED illumination. Providing superb cooling, the new design delivers 34 percent more airflow and 24 percent more surface area for heat dissipation than its predecessor.

“AMD’s new high quality, robust thermal solutions for select processors provide a great out-of-the-box experience at no additional cost to the consumer,” said Merle McIntosh, Newegg Inc’s SVP of Sales and Marketing.  “The Wraith model has attractive styling with LED lighting and runs exceptionally quietly – features we expect will impress our tech savvy consumers.”

Introducing the AMD A10-7860K Desktop Processor

Quiet, efficient and an incredible value, the new AMD A10-7860K APU is powered by 4 CPU cores clocked at 4.0GHz turbo boost and 8 GPU cores running at 757MHz. Smoothly play popular online games like Dota 2, League of Legends, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive with integrated Radeon R7 processor graphics. The A10-7860K is the first unlocked desktop A10 processor to feature 65W TDP (Thermal Design Power) and includes a 95W TDP near-silent thermal solution to ensure quiet operation. In addition, the AMD A10-7860K supports AMD FreeSync technology that puts an end to choppy gameplay and broken frames with fluid, artifact-free performance at virtually any framerate.

“Customers can build a capable, near-silent online gaming PC in a surprisingly small form factor for an unexpectedly low price” said Don Woligroski, Product Marketing Manager at AMD. “The low power requirements mean you can build a tiny system perfect for a small dorm room, for use in the living room as a home theatre PC (HTPC), and portable enough to take to a LAN party.”

The New AMD Athlon X4 845 Desktop Processor

The AMD Athlon X4 845 is the first desktop processor featuring the AMD “Excavator” x86 architecture technology. The quad-core CPU is clocked at 3.8GHz boost and offers AMDs highest IPC core x86 architecture to date. When paired with a discrete graphics card, the AMD Athlon X4 845 enables great gaming and multi-threaded processing performance for an attractive price. The new Athlon X4 845 is a 65W TDP class processor and also comes complete with new AMD 95W thermal solution that provides excellent cooling performance and near-silent operation.

Ambiga Dhiraj Takes Charge as New CEO of Mu Sigma

Mu Sigma, a leading pure-play provider of decision sciences and analytics solutions, announced today that Ambiga Dhiraj, formerly Chief Operating Officer, will assume the role of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) effective immediately. Founder and former CEO, Dhiraj Rajaram, will continue in a full-time capacity with the company and remain as chairman.

Ambiga has been with Mu Sigma for more than eight years, having led functions of talent management, marketing, innovation and product development before assuming the role of COO in February 2012. In that role she drove major improvements to the company’s India operations and the global delivery of products and services to the market. Now she joins an exclusive and short list of female CEOs to lead privately held companies with billion dollar-plus valuations.

“Mu Sigma is moving from its adolescence into its prime,” said company founder Dhiraj Rajaram. “The rate at which we’ve added new clients, combined with the amount of help that our clients demand in realizing the potential of Big Data, led me to this decision to work with them more closely. Ambiga is one of the most design-oriented and operationally strong leaders that I’ve ever worked with. The company had planned for this possibility, and the time is right.”

While Ambiga will lead the company out of Bangalore, Dhiraj will spend more time across the U.S. and other parts of the world to engage more directly with Mu Sigma clients – more than 140 of the Fortune 500. He’ll also spend time designing new offerings for the company’s man-machine ecosystem, forge strategic alliances, and explore options for using the company’s healthy balance sheet to further cement its position as market leader.

“I am honored and excited at the opportunity to lead Mu Sigma in its purpose to help clients adopt a fundamentally new approach to decision sciences and problem solving,” said Ambiga. She began her career in 1998 as a research lead at Motorola, followed by a stint at mobility service provider Kirusa. She holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering, with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence, from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan; and a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Anna University in Chennai, India.

Shailendra Singh, Managing Director at Sequoia Capital – an investor in Mu Sigma – said, “We support and recognize this change as yet another sign of Mu Sigma’s growth. This move will unleash Dhiraj to help large enterprises capitalize on the incredible amount of change they’re facing.”

Founder Dhiraj added, “It’s been a privilege to lead the Mu Sigma team, but I know in my heart that this new role is how I can add the most value to both the company and its clients. Our purpose as a company will never change, but we must occasionally change how we pursue that purpose.”

Google’s Alphabet Replaces Apple as World’s Most Valuable Firm

Google-parent Alphabet snatched Apple’s crown as the world’s most valuable firm based on the value of shares that leapt with better-than-expected earnings.

At the official close of trade, Alphabet was worth $530.1 billion based on its share value, compared to $534.7 billion for Apple, but shares in the Internet search colossus soared in after-hours trading to reach $791 shortly before 0400 GMT.

If those gains hold in official trading when the Nasdaq opens in New York City today, Alphabet would officially overtake Apple as the world’s biggest company by market value.

Alphabet’s reported quarterly profit rose 5 per cent to $4.92 billion on the back of strong online advertising revenue, particularly from searches done by holiday season shoppers using smartphones or tablets.

“This holiday season, we found that shopping moments replaced shopping marathons,” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said during an earnings call.

People made purchases online when time allowed, with Google powering many of their searches and serving up related ads.

Google ad revenue climbed globally, gaining on both mobile devices and desktop computers, according to Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat.

The California-based Internet colossus said its revenue topped $21.3 billion in the final three months of last year.

Prime revenue drivers in Q4 were mobile search ads and ads on YouTube, where people watch “hundreds of millions” of hours of video daily.

Porat said the strong revenue growth was a return on years of investment in mobile search, YouTube and so—called programmatic advertising, which involves ads being sold automatically using software.

The earnings report was the first in which recently formed parent corporation Alphabet separated money made by Google from what it calls “Other Bets” such as its work on self—driving cars or delivering Internet using high-altitude balloons.

The new structure under Alphabet is expected to offer more transparency for investors worried about Google investing in money-losing projects.

“Essentially, what they have now is a big advertising business and a venture capital business,” Forrester analyst Frank Gillett said of the new earnings presentation.

Agencies

Apply for 291 Scholarships Worth Rs 1.5 Crore at Top UK Universities

A scholarship programme called the GREAT Britain Scholarships was also announced. Under this, 291 scholarships worth around Rs 150 million (Rs 15 crore) will be on offer. Out of these, 59 will be undergraduate scholarships and 232 postgraduate scholarships in fields like engineering, law, business, art and design, biosciences and IT across 45 institutions in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

British Council Partners with Two Private Universities in City

Under the programme, students from the UK will spend two to four weeks in India and engage in various activities ranging from cultural immersion, placements, internships, teaching assistantships etc.

“Jain University and Christ University are the two institutions that have been selected under this initiative in Bengaluru. In other parts of the country, we have partnered with institutions like Hyderabad University. Applications for the programme start in  June-July,” said Leighton Ernsberger, assistant director, Bengaluru and Skills, British Council India. He was speaking at a press conference on Monday.

As many as 1,000 internships with Indian IT services company TCS are also on the anvil as part of this year’s programme which aims to help 25,000 people from the UK gain experience in India in the next five years.

Although around 1.6 lakh Indian students have studied in the UK since 2005, a Times Higher Education Report points out that the number of first- year enrolments fell by 10 percent in 2014-15.

Dominic Mcallister, British Deputy High Commissioner, Bengaluru, said that while visa regulations in the UK might seem cumbersome, it was “not actually the case”. “Students can convert their student visas to Tier 2 visas. However, they must make preparations for it before their course ends,” he said. A student can apply for a Tier 2 visa if he/she is offered a skilled job in the UK.