Northstar APP Now Helps Safer Travel for School Children in Hyderabad

Magnasoft announced the launch of Northstar, a comprehensive child safety platform in Hyderabad. Magnasoft is a technology products company building cutting edge technology in smart wearable’s, mobile, IoT & cloud services were present during the launch.

Northstar, the first product offering of Magnasoft, is an integrated platform that protects children while they commute to, and from school. A web application designed specifically for schools empowers the school authorities to manage their transport related information, monitor their fleet and children in real time and take immediate action in case of any incidents. Northstar also has an App for Parents to locate and view their child’s journey in real time.

The launch witnessed the presence of Bobbie H.Kalra, CEO and Shyam Ramamurthy, CPO and CTO, both Co-Founders of the Magnasoft Products Business, including Northstar.

The Northstar safety platform integrates GPS and non-GPS locationing, video surveillance, and RFID technologies to facilitate school bus and child monitoring, school bus video surveillance, student attendance management, driver behavior analysis amongst others. Northstar provides a clean, simple and sophisticated mobile experience for parents on iOS and Android.  It provides a powerful web application and dashboard for schools to manage all of their transport information in a simple and reliable manner. Magnasoft runs a dedicated Command Center that ensures constant monitoring of bus fleets in case of exigencies. Northstar has already become the platform of choice for over 200 schools and 4,00,000 parents across India.

“Northstar is the #1 in-transit child safety SaaS platform in India that provides reliable and sophisticated web and mobile experiences to schools, parents and transport administrators. Today, we are proud to present the new Northstar, the third generation of the product since launch. It helps schools in managing their transport functions, reduces their overheads and keep a watchful eye on their children. With the Northstar Parent App, parents can track their child’s journey in real time. Northstar is the only platform that offers driver training and a sophisticated driver merit system to measure and incentivize good driving.” said Bobbie H Kalra, Co-Founder and CEO

“Northstar leverages cutting edge technology to capture millions of events across dozens of parameters to monitor, analyze and report in real-time, children and bus status, route adherence, transportation safety, driver behavior and aggregate reports.  We have brought together schools, drivers and parents, thereby creating a safe ecosystem for children.” said Shyam, Co-Founder and CPO/CTO.

Nine Percent of India’s Start up’s by Women Entrepreneurs: Reports NASSCOM Diversity and Inclusion Summit 2016

Indian startup’s culture has been mushrooming across the country over the years. So has the gender diversity when it comes to women entrepreneurship.  As per a recent Nasscom’s Gender Diversity and Inclusivity Trends, the report states that India out of the 4,200 startups in the country, 9% of them were started by women entrepreneurs. This is a 50% rise in share compared to the previous years in the country.

“India is changing and so are the aspirations of its 1.2 billion people. Our country, once regarded as a third-world economy, is today the hub of billion-dollar firms and a hot investment destination. In terms of providing a conducive ecosystem for the start-ups to thrive, India has moved up to third position and has emerged the fastest growing base of start-ups worldwide and likely to move up to No 2 position by 2020,” said Ashok Pamidi, Regional Head-Karnataka of Nasscom and National Lead Diversity and Inclusion Initiative.

Nasscom’s reports that India is one amongst the first five largest startup communities in the world with the number of start-ups crossing 4,200, a growth of 40 per cent, by the end of 2015, he adds. 

Women Outnumber Men in IT-BPM Industry 

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) share its findings from its report titled, “Gender Diversity & Inclusivity trends in the IT-BPM Sector”, stating that the industry is increasingly turning women centric, with women constituting 51 per cent of entry level hiring, and having a 50 per cent higher chance of getting IT-BPM job offers. The findings were shared on the sidelines of the 9^th edition of the NASSCOM Diversity and Inclusion Summit 2016 in Bengaluru.

To assess the gender diversity and inclusivity situation in the IT-BPM domain in India, NASSCOM and PWC conducted a survey of NASSCOM member companies to get a perspective on how the IT-BPM industry is strengthening its current practices and embracing new emerging trends. The study was aimed at understanding the role of women in the sector, and help companies formulate practices which can further accelerate inclusion in the industry. According to the industry focus is shifting from inclusivity & diversity to empowerment, stating that women are also moving away from support roles and growing in core business operations through added focus on training and development.

Over the years, NASSCOM has been working with various stakeholders across the industry to enable organizations to build a work environment that embraces diversity where employees, customers and other stakeholders thrive and succeed. NASSCOM has been instrumental in creating platforms of knowledge exchange across various forms of inclusion and across different cultural context for companies to share and learn best practices. The organization is also working with the government and the society to create a legal and commercial framework for support the same.

Speaking on the rise of women participation in the sector,  BVR Mohan Reddy, Chairman, NASSCOM said, “I am extremely proud of the progress that the industry has made to promote gender inclusivity.  At NASSCOM, we believe that development is never complete unless it is across all sections though participation and inclusion of people irrespective of their gender, creed or color. Today’s summit is part of our continued efforts to build an inclusive work environment in the sector, I hope that we will continue with this trend in supporting more women to break the glass ceiling.”

While the trend of diversity and inclusion is promising in the sector, we still have a long way to go to become a fully inclusive sector. While gender equality has been established at entry levels, women still constitute a far lower share of CXO roles; the trend of women resigning at a higher rate than men as their personal priorities change is hampering this growth.

The summit also witnessed the announcement of The NASSCOM Corporate Awards for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion 2016, aimed at celebrating best practices of companies in Diversity and Inclusion. This year, NASSCOM honored winners under 6 different categories who have made an effort to create an inclusive environment within their company.

Winners

Best IT BPM Company less than 500 employees

Goldman Sachs Services Private Limited

Best IT BPM Company with more than 5000 and less than 10,000 employees

SAP Labs India Pvt Ltd

Best IT BPM Company - more than 10,000 employees

Wipro Limited

Best program for excellence in inclusion of PwD

ANZ Bengaluru Hub

Most Innovative Programme

EMC India Center of Excellence

Excellence in Leadership for Promotion of Diversity &Inclusion

Bhuvaneswar Naik

SAP Labs India Pvt Ltd

Tableau Software Acquires HyPer High Performance Database System

Tableau Software has announced it has acquired HyPer, a high performance database system initially developed as a research project at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). As part of the technology acquisition, Tableau will add key technical personnel and plans to establish a research and development center in Munich and expand its research into high performance computing.

 HyPer is a fast main-memory database system designed for simultaneous OLTP and OLAP processing without compromising performance. It also unifies transactions and analysis in a single system, and when coupled with Tableau will help customers take visual analytics closer to the transactional systems that underlie most businesses.

 HyPer grew out of a research project started in 2010 by professors Dr. Thomas Neumann and Dr. Alfons Kemper, chair of TUM’s database group. Four of the project’s Ph.D. students, Tobias Muehlbauer, Wolf Roediger, Viktor Leis and Jan Finis, will join Tableau, focused on integrating HyPer into Tableau products.

 “HyPer was born at TUM, similarly to how Tableau was founded out of Stanford,” said Muehlbauer. “We have similar approaches to innovation and a shared vision to help the world see and understand data. We’re thrilled that Tableau customers will benefit from our research, and we now have the opportunity to make a big impact in the data analytics space.”

 The HyPer team will be based in Munich. Tableau plans to invest additional resources in Munich to leverage the talent from TUM for further innovation that will enhance future Tableau products.

 “This news is in line with Tableau’s vision to help more people to see and understand their data. Speed-to-insight is a key differentiator across all sectors in India and we have already seen how customers like Eveready, Marico and others experience exponential returns with what Tableau offers. We look forward to exciting our customers even more, with faster data analytic capabilities and a host of other enhanced features at the level of their databases. User experience has always been at the forefront of Tableau’s efforts and with HyPer’s technologies we intend to build upon that,” said Deepak Ghodke, Country Manager India, Tableau.

HyPer will be integrated into Tableau’s product lines and bring a host of new capabilities to Tableau customers:

• Faster analysis of data of all sizes
• Enhanced data integration, data transformation and data blending
• Richer analytics, such as k-means clustering and window functions
• Expanded support for Big data efforts with semi-structure and unstructured data
• Unification of analysis and transactional systems 

Viacom18 Digital Ventures Partners with Technical Partners’ for its Digital Platform VOOT

Viacom18 Digital Ventures, has announced the lineup of technical partners for its soon-to-launch digital VOD platform VOOT. Viacom18 has been working with ‘best-in-class’ partners with extensive international experience to build and roll out its Over-the-top (OTT) streaming service VOOT.

Kaltura, one of the global majors in OTT and video streaming services, is on-board as the platform provider. Kaltura is building several customized features for VOOT, which will be totally unique and relevant for the Indian market.

For the User Experience and User Interface design, Viacom18 has roped in US based ‘A Different Engine’ (ADE), a company which has extensive experience & specialization in building UX/UI for large multi-platform video streaming services.

While Web Dunia is on board for web services and website development, the company is also playing the critical role of a system integrator.

The mobile applications are being developed by one of India’s leading developers - Robosoft Technologies,

Speaking on the partnerships, Gaurav Gandhi, COO, Viacom18 Digital Ventures, stated, “In this business, product and technology play a pivotal role.  While we work towards bringing popular and engaging content in this space for our viewers, we were equally focused on working with the best technology & design partners to build a world-class, differentiated product with superlative user experience.”

VOOT, an ad-supported VOD service, will aim to cater to the constant content consumption cravings of the always-on digital generation. In addition to exclusively showcasing the content produced and aired by Viacom18 channels, VOOT will also have a big focus on Originals – content created only for the service.

New Trend of Metal body Emerges in Budget Smartphones

Metal has long been associated with premium high-end design and style on a mobile phone. However, metal body options in smartphones were only restricted to flagship phones but the trend is changing now. LeEco was the first to change this industry norm and disrupted the market with its flagship killer Le 1s – the all-metal body smartphone at a sustainable price of Rs 10,999.

LeEco’s Le 1s Superphone flaunts a "trendy full-metal body", which only few brands in the market worldwide offer. The metal unibody is sturdy and is made from Aircraft grade aluminium. Furthermore, the Le 1s is the world's only metal unibody phone featuring a screw less industrial design leaving no trace of the industrial assembling on the design. LeEco’s Le 1s was the first smartphone to offer Indian users a premium looking all-metal body phone which not only looks stylish to behold but is also a power-packed performer.

The use of metal in smartphones not only enhances the look and design of the phone but also ensures that heat generated by the phone’s internals is dispersed quickly to the surroundings. Metal body aids in dispersing heat generated by the processor and internals which it’s plastic counterparts fail to some extent. The perceived temperature of a metal is higher than plastic at the same surface temperatures (what this means is that metal feels hotter or colder to touch than plastic at the same temperatures). Though the device body might feel warmer to the touch during heavy usage it’s important to note that this is normal and the device is functioning as it is designed to perform. The fact about metal phones is that it gets hot fast and cools down quickly as well.

Furthermore, the metal design of the Le 1s not only enhances the looks but also strengthens signal receiving capability. With unique features the Le Superphones have created new industry records and set new benchmarks for the Indian smartphone sector, having sold 200,000 Superphones in just 30 days. Under intense competition in the Indian smartphone market, LeEco has managed to stand out and won the hearts of many Indian users, with the breakthrough technology, comprehensive ecosystem and disruptive pricing lower than the industry BOM cost.

Here are few reasons that causes a phone to heat-up and tips for users;

Compact size - Smartphones being small in size and given that they are multipurpose, with a heavy workload, the absence of a small fan or proper ventilation will cause the little processor to heat up in the extreme of cases. Also, as the battery tries to support more resources, heating up will be the outcome. Given that the battery is located near the processor, as the phone is designed to accommodate a lot of hardware in a small case, it leaves less space for ventilation which could be ideal for cooling the system as is for example the case is for laptops.

Excessive Gaming - While constantly playing games with heavy graphics, we put too much stress on the “mother board” of the smartphone and it pushes electronic inputs at a much faster rate. Playing a game requires a lot of resources from the phone and it represents the most obvious cause for overheating.

Heat dispersion - If your phone is already overheating, take your case off. If your phone is hot, your case traps the heat. Taking the case off will allow the phone’s heat vents to do their job fully without being blocked. This will help your phone cool down quicker.

Acer India Flagship Lounge at Jayanagar Caters for both New Products & Service Centre

Acer India, one of the largest PC vendors in the country, announced the launch of its first flagship store in Bangalore. The lounge will showcase the entire range of newly launched Acer products across notebooks, smartphones, desktops, monitors, projectors and tablets. The lounge manifests Acer’s promise of cutting edge tech products for everyone, housing all the latest models, showcasing upcoming launch or previews. The best in class Predator gaming series will also debut there. The lounge is part of a new wave of Acer flagship store imbibed with a new brand philosophy and path breaking retail design concept.

On the occasion, Chandrahas Panigrahi, Senior Director-Consumer Business, Acer India said, “Inline with our growth strategy, we are excited to unveil the first Acer flagship store in Bangalore. The store has been designed to provide consumers with an immersive experience of Acer’s vast range of products and services under one roof. We intend to provide a unique retail experience to our customers and enable them to browse, touch, feel and experience Acer’s latest product portfolio crafted to appeal to the needs of all segments.” He further added, “We want people to walk away with a powerful and memorable buying experience. The lounge has been created keeping in mind the company’s approach towards innovation and is a step in its continuing journey to be responsive to changing user’s needs.”

The brand which is home to innovation and creativity will ensure the store delivers an unmatched hands-on experience across the wide range of Acer products. With a wide array of 16 models and product categories spanning the gamut of Phones, Tablets, Convertibles, Displays and Projectors, the lounge is a technology haven even for the uninitiated.

The philosophy behind this new format of store is to make consulting and troubleshooting a smooth experience. Not only will the employees consult the customers in making a wise purchase decision but they will also power the demo zone for educating the customers about the unique features of the Acer range of products. The skilled and certified tech specialists in-charge of test and repair makes the after sales support experience a delight.  Sudheer Goel, Chief Customer Support Officer, Acer India remarked “Apart from intensive training to the tech specialists in the outlet, we have also invested in adequate stocks of spare parts to make the resolution turnaround time much faster”.

The lounge also have a rich expression of Acer brand philosophy with the right combinations of brand colours, fonts, layouts etc. and immersive lighting, which together contribute to a wonderful shopping experience. Acer has invested considerable amount of time and energy in understanding the art and science of consumer buying experience which is reflected in the elegant layout making navigation effortless.

PNB Housing Finance Expects 30% Jump in Revenues during 2016-17 With 35% Contribution from South India

By Manu Sharma

PNB Housing Finance Limited, a leading housing finance major expects a 30 percent jump in revenues to touch Rs 38,000 or Rs 40,000 crore during the next fiscal (2016-17). The finance company recorded Rs 27,000 during the last fiscal (2015-16) with a 32-35 percent contribution from the south Indian states.

Speaking to the media, Sanjaya Gupta, Managing Director of PNB Housing says, “The last five years say a lot of re-engineering in our set up and also owe the positive results mainly due to the contribution from the southern states. In fact, in 2010 the southern states contributed just 10-12 percent of our business but saw a 3X jump in 5 year’s time. Now we are focusing a lot on technology and also setting up more branches in all four states in the south.”

Gupta remarks that they have also moved away from being just a subsidiary of PNB, a leading PSU bank and have gone in for Public Private Partnership (PPP), where in a new professional management now runs the housing finance company since 2009.

PNB Housing Implements ESS Technology

 On the technology front, PNB Housing has implemented Enterprise System Solution (ESS) on a single platform and one database across all branches. “We have invested a sum of about Rs 60 crore to 65 crore during the last five years and the result is this software which is very scalable and build in-house with partnership from leading vendors like Microsoft. Today we are also on a private cloud so customers can access our services any time anywhere and on any device,” remarks Gupta.

PNB Open More Branches in South

PNB Housing has inaugurated its Zonal Office and Regional Processing Centre in Bengaluru to tap high-growth cities and regions in South Indian market and to garner a larger pie of the business from these zones fuelling its business expansion.

Located at BTM Layout, which is one of the prime locations, the zonal office was inaugurated by Sanjaya Gupta, Managing Director of PNB Housing. The celebration was graced by the promoters of many reputed Real Estate Companies from across the region and various business partners of the company.

Gupta said, “Business expansion is an important element for PNB Housing to carry on the growth momentum and it is essential that we stand closer to where our target customer base is. There are enormous opportunities available in South India and we have aptly honed our efforts to make this zone operationally robust which are now giving rich dividends. To continue with our commitment to support inclusive growth, we plan to strengthen the network in our existing markets and expand in untapped regions simultaneously. We believe that the key to gain optimum output from diversely spread network is decentralization of operations. Bengaluru Zonal office will cater to this growing demand and will serve as the decision making centre for our branches in South India.”

Gupta further explains that at PNB Housing, the primary objective of each member is to meet customer expectations, improve their relationships and foster customer delight. The organization’s wide focus on ensuring highest level of service competency is fuelled by their ambition to be the most admired housing finance company in the country. This zonal office will cater to the entire South Indian market while the regional processing centre will serve the state of Karnataka reaching out to cities like Mysore, Mangalore etc. This will fasten the process of loan disbursement and make it hassle free, smooth and pleasant for the customers in these regions. The new office will also augment operational efficiencies performing as the nerve centre for the state territory.

PNB Housing currently operates with 4 Regional Offices supported by a network of branches in South India. As of Sept 30, 2015, 29% of their total loan book was contributed from South India amounting to Rs 6,222 crore. The company plans to take the total number of branches in South to 14 in the next fiscal by adding 5 more branches.

The company has been registering Y-o-Y growth of over 50% since last many quarters and is now ranked 5^th in terms of Loan Assets Size and 2^nd in Deposits Book. The company displays high level of ethics, integrity and transparency with a robust delivery model including easy online access, doorstep services and a host of other conveniences that make the experience memorable. 

The company enables the people to realize their dream of owning a home by offering customized loan solutions to fit emerging needs of the customers. PNB Housing also offers fixed rate of interest for variety of term 3, 5 and 10 years to insulate customers from macroeconomic volatility and sudden rate of interest fluctuations. The company also introduced 30 years loan repayment term which allows customers to pay lower EMIs and continue the loan for a longer period.