Indore Based Start-Up Indian Threads Sold their Shirts in Atlanta, USA

Indore based start-up Indian Threads is changing the fashion industry for men.  Starting from a small city in Indore, Indian Threads is presented and sold in USA (Atlanta) as well.

In offline market, they are majorly working in 3 states Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan and in online, they have been selling their shirts nationwide. Few months back they have shifted down to bigger & better office in the heart of the city in Indore.

Abhishek Rawal, founder of Indian Threads said that “Recently we have received a lot of enquires of our brand presence in Pakistan and in UAE. We do plan to start shipping services in UAE and in Pakistan. We have been offered an investment of Rs 10 cr in Sep, 2017 but we are looking for the right investor to join our team and not just the numbers are putting on table”.

“It all started with a simple idea – to design fresh high-quality items at nominal price range we wanted ourselves. What started as an online webstore for our passion and entrepreneurial experiment quickly grew into much more than just selling a few shirts.” said Vishi Porwal.

Founders of Indian Threads, Abhishek Rawal & Vishi Porwal, further said that currently fashion industry has more than a 50 percent share of the B2C e-commerce market, which is likely to come up with online retail gaining prominence. They believe that the online retail sector in India is here to stay. This confidence comes from the much better eco-system that prevails in terms of consumer acceptance and the infrastructure to deliver. And there are successful examples of Myntra, Jabong & Koovs, where online shopping has permeated across socio-economic strata.

Abhishek & Vishi, also point out that with the huge mobile subscriber base and fast increasing base of mobile internet users, the Indian online retail market could potentially take a non-linear growth in the years to come, which will surely help us to push Indian Threads in market.

METRO Cash and Carry Announces Their Strategic Alliance with Uber

India’s leading player in cash and carry segment, METRO Cash and Carry and Uber, the world’s largest ridesharing company, announced their strategic alliance today at Bangalore. Starting from Bangalore, this alliance will soon be extended PAN India to all METRO and Uber driver partners.

As part of this partnership, commercially licensed Uber driver partners in Bangalore will be offered a membership at METRO Cash and Carry which will eventually be extended to all driver partners across India. This membership will include special offers and discounts that will be made exclusively available to all Uber driver partners. Also, existing customers of METRO will be benefitted by this alliance with special offers and promos from Uber exclusively for METRO.

To mark the commencement of the initiative, 15 Uber driver partners were handed over their very own METRO card by Pieter Boone, COO, METRO AG along with Christoph Winterer, Operating Partner, Asia Region, METRO Cash and Carry and Arvind Mediratta, CEO & MD, METRO Cash and Carry, India. Christian Freese, General Manager - South, Uber India were present to grace the occasion.

Says, Pieter Boone, COO, METRO AG, “We are extremely pleased to welcome Uber to the METRO family. India is a very important market for METRO and we are glad to kick-off this prestigious initiative from here. Uber has a growing base of commercially licensed drivers across top cities in India, each of whom is a successful entrepreneur. Through this partnership we aim at providing them access to the wide range of car accessories, oils, lubricants, confectionery and beverages at our wholesale outlets which will be instrumental towards making their business more profitable. This alliance benefits our customers too. They can enjoy the ease of carrying the usual bulk purchase made at our store in an Uber, at a discounted price.”

“At Uber, we are committed to building partnerships that will enhance the lives of our driver partners. We understand how important it is to have the required resources available when driver partners need them the most and we aim to make it easily accessible through our partnership with Metro Cash and Carry. Whether its accessories for their cars or other daily needs, we believe driver partners will benefit a great deal from this membership,” added Christian Freese, GM - South, Uber India. 

Accenture’s Connected Digital Hackathon with Expo 2020 Dubai to Develop Digital Solutions that Improve Urban Living

Accenture, in collaboration with Expo 2020 Dubai, is challenging participants from 11 cities around the world to develop prototypes of human-centered digital solutions that help improve the quality of urban living through its first global digital hackathon.

·  24-hour global hackathon will tap best thinking from 11 cities across four continents

·  Teams challenged to find innovative solutions that improve urban living conditions, support more inclusive populations, promote sustainable urban practices

·  Expo will shortlist its favourite project for the Expo Live “Innovation Impact Grant Programme

The 24-hour hackathon will take place simultaneously in Chicago, Bangalore, Dubai, Istanbul, London, Manila, Mexico City, Monterrey, Rome, Shanghai and Singapore on November 11 and 12, 2017.Registrations are open to recent graduates, undergraduates, entrepreneurs and individuals from start-ups with expertise in technology development, design and marketing, at accenture.com/digital by November 06.

Inspired by Expo 2020 Dubai’s theme of “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future,” participants will compete on finding digital solutions that organizations can use to address urbanization challenges. Over half of the world’s population currently lives in cities and urban areas.² This trend, which is expected to continue, is raising challenges such as creating truly inclusive environments, improving work and travel conditions in cities areas, and adopting a more sustainable approach to urbanization.
 
The proposed solutions need to meet two requirements:

·  Putting human beings at the heart of the experience;

·  Using latest digital technologies including wearables, artificial intelligence, analytics, augmented and virtual reality, blockchain and the Internet of Things.

Mike Sutcliff, group chief executive, Accenture Digital, said: “We are asking people with digital talents to apply their creativity and ingenuity to two game-changing trends – urbanization and digitization. With both, it is people who should come first. Accenture strongly believes that digital experiences have the power to make cities more livable for customers, patients, workers, students, and citizens, but these experiences can only be successful if they are truly human.”
 
Gillian Hamburger, Senior Vice President of Commercial at Expo 2020 Dubai said: “World Expos have always been a showcase for innovation. This hackathon, with our Official Digital Services Partner Accenture, is another example of Expo 2020 encouraging innovation and connecting people from around the world to exchange ideas and contribute to the future.”
 
Accenture was named Digital Services Premier Partner and Systems Integrator of Expo 2020 Dubai earlier this year to provide technologically advanced and innovative experiences to participants and visitors.
 
Why participate in the Accenture Global Digital Hackathon?

·  Accenture will award prizes worth up to a total of US$ 80,000 to the top teams in each city, region (Europe & Middle East, North America & Latin America, Asia), and globally. The best works will be determined by a panel of judges of experienced practitioners from Accenture, Expo 2020 Dubai and local sponsors.³

·  Expo will select its favorite project from among the three regional winners and shortlist it for the Expo Live “Innovation Impact Grant Programme.” The program is expected to provide winning projects with grants of up to US$ 100,000 and a chance to showcase their innovations at the next World Expo.⁴

·  Individual participants demonstrating exceptional teamwork, problem-solving and goal orientation skills whose profiles are in line with Accenture’s recruitment plans, may be interviewed for roles in Accenture Digital, or elsewhere in the company.

Cisco Announces World’s First AI-Powered Voice Assistant for Meetings

AI-powered voice assistants are changing the way we live. Hundreds of millions of people use these assistants regularly to check the weather, wake up on time, and find their way around town. Yet there have been no virtual assistants to help us at work— until now. Today at Cisco Partner Summit, we announce Cisco Spark Assistant. It is the world’s first enterprise-ready voice assistant for meetings. It will be available first on the Cisco Spark Room Series portfolio, including the new flagship Cisco Spark Room 70, which we also announce today.

Cisco Spark Assistant is the latest innovation on the Cisco Spark platform. Unlike all-purpose voice assistants, Cisco Spark Assistant has one goal: to help you have great meetings that run more smoothly.  

“During the next few years, AI meeting bots will be joining our work teams. When they do, people will be able to ditch the drudgery of meeting setup and other logistics to become more creative than ever,” said Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM, Applications Group, Cisco. “The future of great meetings is Spark with AI and our partners have an incredible opportunity to help customers take advantage of this game-changing technology.”

We will release Cisco Spark Assistant in phases, starting early next year. In the first phase, a small group of customers will use select features.

Here is what you will be able to do in phase one:

·         Start your meeting without any typing or dialing:

o    “Hey, Spark. Join the meeting.”

o    “Hey, Spark. I want to start the meeting.”

o    “Hey, Spark. Let’s get started.”
 

·         Effortlessly join your own Cisco® WebEx® personal meeting room or one of your co-workers’ rooms:

o    “Hey, Spark. Call my meeting room.”

o    “Hey, Spark. Call Victor’s PMR.”

o    “Hey, Spark. Call Michael’s meeting room.”
 

·         Quickly call anyone in your organization without lifting a finger:

o    “Hey, Spark. Call Sydney.”
 

·         Control your Cisco Spark endpoint without getting out of your chair:

o    “Hey, Spark. End the meeting.”

Cisco Spark Assistant will use feedback from this trial to make itself smarter. Eventually it will be able to do much more; for example, it will be able to assign action items and create meeting summaries.

We know a lot needs to go right for voice assistants to be truly helpful in meetings. The response needs to be lightning fast and super accurate every time you say “Hey, Spark”. To make sure this happens we built Cisco Spark Assistant with:
Machine-learning technology from MindMeld, which we acquired earlier this year

·         Speech recognition technology

·         Natural language understanding

·         Question answering

·         Dialog management

Then we applied our deep knowledge of meetings, honed over time because we deliver 50 billion minutes of meetings every year. With this, we optimized the AI for the conference room.

Coming Soon to the Whole Portfolio, First on the New Room 70 
Cisco Spark Assistant will first be available on the new Cisco Spark Room 70, which replaces one of our top-selling video systems, the MX800. Just as Cisco Spark Assistant will take on more tasks over time, it will also be available across all Cisco Spark clients and hardware devices over time.

Part of the Cisco Spark Room Series, Cisco Spark Room 70 features:

- 70” 4K screens. We offer both single and dual screen models.
- Beautiful, award-winning industrial design and great audio and video.
- Quad 5k cameras. We have packed double the cameras into half the space (compared to the MX800). One of the cameras captures the entire room at all times, making intelligent framing and best overview highly responsive and human. The cameras also enable face recognition and people count.

- You can register the system on the premises or to Cisco Spark through the Cisco Collaboration Cloud.

At its heart is the NVIDIA Jetson platform. This lets our engineers use AI to build intuitive and intelligent capabilities.

Spark Assistant takes advantage of our meeting room endpoints’ industry-first advancements such as intelligent proximity, speaker tracking and real-time face recognition. These let it see and hear. As a result, Cisco Spark Assistant knows who enters the room, who leaves the room and who is speaking.

We are hosting an invitation-only event for media and analysts in San Francisco on November 13.  Attendees will hear more about our collaboration group’s AI vision; get a behind-the-scenes look at what we are working on; and meet some of the amazing engineers working on our AI strategy.

“As Cisco continues to innovate across its collaboration portfolio, it has significant and positive impact in how we expand our collaboration practice here at WWT.  Cisco Spark Assistant adds a lot of value to the meeting room experience, and will ultimately enable WWT to tap its extensive software and app development capability  to customize applications and use cases for enterprises. With the new Cisco Spark Room 70, Cisco has rounded out its collaboration portfolio and continues to provide us with the ability to expand customer choice in deployment models, both on-premises and in the cloud,” says Joe Berger, Collaboration Practice Director, World Wide Technology, Inc.

Genpact, Sequoya Team to Help CPG Cos Transform Trade Promotion and Pricing-Related Investments

Genpact, a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation, today announced a new strategic relationship with Sequoya, an analytics firm specializing in multi-source data modelling and predictive analytics solutions.  With this relationship, Genpact will integrate the Sequoya 20/20 analytics platform into its analytics and digital portfolio to optimize the trade promotion operations for its consumer packaged goods (CPG) and life sciences client base.

CPG and life sciences companies are under increasing pressure to optimize their return on their investment in promotion and pricing-related activities to provide an exceptional customer experience.  Most continue to struggle to generate the insights from data that can best determine future outcomes and generate positive returns. To help clients leverage advanced and predictive analytics, Genpact will augment its automation to artificial intelligence (AI)-based Genpact Cora platform with the Sequoya 20/20 application. The net results for clients will be the ability to generate pricing algorithms faster and more accurately, allowing better pricing strategy and decision making.  This new relationship will also dramatically increase Genpact’s speed of data-to-insights-to-action, leveraging both technology and a managed service analytics center of excellence.

“Trade promotion spending for CPG and life sciences companies has moved far beyond cost, and is now focused on driving outcomes that create a competitive advantage, by way of optimizing trade spend, getting better return on sales impact, improving forecast accuracy, and providing outstanding customer service,” said Ajay Kapoor, growth leader, CPG, Genpact. “This strategic relationship with Sequoya allows us to better harness data flows and leverage our automation to AI-based Genpact Cora platform along with our analytics capabilities to make the algorithms far smarter and more real time to provide deeper insights and a better user experience for our clients.”

“Successful Revenue Growth Management (RGM) is driven by optimal trade and pricing strategies. CPG companies are building global RGM organizations to harness these strategies and build consistent analytic processes and capabilities across markets,” said Richard Althoff, Founder and CEO, Sequoya. “This strategic relationship with Genpact gives us the global reach to deliver and execute these strategies locally.”

Mamaearth Partners Kalki Koechelin, Sumeet Vyas Starrer ‘Ribbon’ to Strengthen Consumer Connect

India’s 1st Madesafe certified brand Mamaearth, today announced its partnership with upcoming Hindi film‘Ribbon’, starring Kalki Koechlin and Sumeet Vyas, becoming the film’s ‘Official Mama's Partner’.The film is releasing across the country as well as in USA and Singapore this Friday (November 3).

The partnership is part of the brand’s philosophy to constantly seek and use new, engaging ways in order to strengthen the connect with its partner moms and consumers.

Directed by Rakhee Sandilya, ‘Ribbon’ stars Kalki Koechlin in the lead, along with the millennial heart throb Sumeet Vyas.  They play a career oriented, loving and happy couple whose life gets completely transformed after they find out about their pregnancy. Ribbon is the journey of a young couple living the great Indian urban dream who discover that it takes a lot more than love and commitment to stick together through all of life’s knotty turns and loose ends.

Welcoming the alliance, Ghazal Alagh, Co-founder and Chief Mama, Mamaearth, stated: "The partnership with Ribbon marks a great start to an exciting new journey that will help us to promote Mamaearth's well-differentiated product and service offerings in innovative ways, via the silver screen."

Commenting on the association, the producers of the film - Swathi Mondal & Prakash Mondal said, “The mutually beneficial arrangement will allow Mamaearth to leverage the power of a new age family film about the young and new parents. It'll help us communicate important aspects of its brand story, while allowing the producers to access and directly promote the film to a wider audience."

Vivo Opens India’s First Experience Centre of 36,000 Sqft in Bengaluru

Marking another important milestone in Vivo’s India journey, the premium global smartphone brand, today announced the opening of its first ever offline Experience Center in Bengaluru. Sruthi Hariharan, a popular name from the Kannada film industry was present at the grand opening of the Experience Center along with the Vivo management in the heart of this bustling city.

Spread across 3600 sq. ft. with two floors, the Experience Center is located at Brigade Road, one of the most popular high-street retail hub and business district of the city. Both the floors of the Experience Center have retail community zones that provide customers access to the entire range of Y and V series of Vivo smartphones. The maiden Experience Center will offer customers an opportunity to gain first-hand experience of the entire portfolio of Vivo products in an engaging and stimulating environment.

Commenting on the occasion, Kenny Zeng, Chief Marketing Officer, Vivo India said, The launch of our first Experience Center in India demonstrates our commitment to create compelling and immersive opportunities for our customers to experience our products before making a purchase decision. We will be launching additional Experience Centers across key markets in India in the coming months.

The company has over 80,000 retail stores across India and sells through all Vivo exclusive stores, e-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon, and all the modern retails stores.

Vivo, a premium global smartphone brand, entered India in late 2014. With a strong focus on "Camera and Music", Vivo has established itself as one of the top smartphone brands in India. Manufacturing in Greater Noida, the company has a robust distribution network across the country both online and offline, catering the best in class quality services to over 400 cities, in 22 states backed by 400 service centers in India.

Dedicated to the youth, Vivo became the title sponsor of the Indian Premier League (IPL) for 2016 & 2017 and recently bagged the title sponsorship of Pro Kabaddi in 2017 for five years. Conquering the global stage, Vivo became the official sponsor of the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups.