ICICI Bank Announces Winners of the ‘ICICI Appathon 2019’ Challenge

ICICI Bank announced the winners of ‘ICICI Appathon 2019’, the third season of its mobile and web application development challenge. The ‘Grand Finale’ of the ‘ICICI Appathon 2019’ saw Sreejith PP & Vivek Aithal from Bengaluru; Vaibhav Maheshwari & Ujjwal Kumar from Surat and Rishabh Singh from Chennai taking home the top honours for developing the next generation banking applications focusing on UPI 2.0.

Over 400 participants including developers and start-ups from across the globe took part in the contest which offered more than 100 APIs (Application Programme Interface) from the Bank as well as programme partner Experian Credit Information Company of India. The participants created innovative working prototypes of mobile and web applications around new features of UPI 2.0 such as pre-authorization of a UPI transaction, verifying details of an invoice before paying, linking an overdraft account to UPI and additional security in the form of signed intent/QR while making a payment. The eminent jury adjudged the winners on the basis of five criteria: innovation around UPI 2.0, functionality, business potential, relevance & scalability and user experience.

The jury comprised of Mr. Anup Bagchi, Executive Director, ICICI Bank; Mr. B. Madhivanan, Chief Technology & Digital Officer, ICICI Bank; Mr. Sai Sadagopan, Head - India Digital, TCS; Mr. Sunil Mishra, Head - Ecosystem Innovation Group, Infosys Finacle; Mr. Amey Mashelkar, Head, JioGenNext; Mr. Ashish Singhal, Managing Director, Experian Credit Information Company of India and Mr. Balaji V. V., Head – Business Technology Group, ICICI Bank.

The first winning application focused on bid and auction model for booking a cab via any ride hailing app. The first runner up emphasized on using feature of UPI 2.0 to link UPI to OD account while the second runner up focused on enabling UPI payments without internet.

Mr. B. Madhivanan, Chief Technology & Digital Officer, ICICI Bank said, “We at ICICI Bank continue to seek opportunities to partner with the wider fintech ecosystem to re-imagine, ideate and execute things which interest our customers and add value to them. In line with this vision, we have been conducting ICICI Appathon for the last three years. The programme has enabled us to tap into the minds of talented technopreneurs in the country as well as developers globally and helped us cater to our customers better.

We are extremely happy to note the interest that ICICI Appathon has garnered this year with over 400 participants. We have got some interesting ideas which we believe will enable development of breakthrough solutions using UPI 2.0 that will make banking simpler than ever before. We will continue to promote innovation in every aspect of our business and ICICI Appathon will continue to evolve as a perfect platform for the young and creative minds to come together and showcase their innovations.”

Mr. Venkatramana Gosavi, Senior Vice President & Global Head of Sales, Infosys Finacle said "Digitisation is transforming the banking business, enabling banks to augment and enrich their value propositions through ecosystem offerings. As the principal technology partner for ICICI Bank, we are happy to continue our support towards the ICICI Appathon, now in its third edition. It has proven to be a global platform to enable startups, independent developers and other players to convert their ideas into real world propositions”.

"TCS is delighted to be the title partner for the third edition of the ICICI Appathon. This collaboration with ICICI Bank harnesses the abundance of innovation talent available within India's start up ecosystem and developer community, and opens up entrepreneurial opportunities in the exciting world of next generation payments. Congratulations to all the winners”, said Mr. Ujjwal Mathur, VP & Country Head - India Business, TCS.

The top three winners will get the following rewards:

·         Total prize money of over Rs 10 lakh from TCS, Infosys EdgeVerve and Experian.

·         A potential engagement opportunity with ICICI Bank.

·         An opportunity for the finalists to get a fast-track entry to Finacle ‘Fintech Connect’, a programme for FinTechs to co-innovate with Finacle to accelerate banking innovation.

As ‘ICICI Appathon’ APIs were available on a developer platform, over 400 participants took part in it from across the globe. While nearly half of the participants were among the age-group of 20-29 years, nearly 20% participated from non - metro cities like Rae Bareli, Nagpur, Erode and other places. Further, it also witnessed significant participation from women technopreneurs also.

Trend Micro Delivers the Industry’s Most Complete Security Across Cloud and Container Workloads

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, today announced the availability of the industry’s most complete security from a single solution protecting across cloud and container workloads. This leadership has been achieved through newly launched container security capabilities added to Trend Micro Deep Security to elevate protection across the entire DevOps lifecycle and runtime stack.

From virtual servers and data centers to public and private cloud workloads, containers are increasingly used and demand protection. Leading enterprises are bringing together their application development teams, IT operations and their security team to help the business deliver automated, secured applications to market quicker. Trend Micro connects teams with technology tools that bake security into the process while meeting compliance needs and reducing risk.

“While customers have been securing their containers with our technology for a couple of years now, we are proud to significantly expand our offering,” said Steve Quane, Executive Vice President, Network Defense and Hybrid Cloud Security for Trend Micro. “Unlike many of the one-off point solutions crowding the market, our offering provides automated build-pipeline container image scanning, and extensive runtime protection providing full visibility and control. What is strikingly unique is our consolidated tool for container plus workload security in every environment.”

Senior analyst and group director Doug Cahill at Enterprise Strategy Group believed, “Developers might be surprised by the scope of this new offering. The on-going deployment of application containers into production environments requires that the entire build-ship-run continuum be secured. As such, protection across the CI/CD pipeline for container environments must include the ability to the detect vulnerabilities, secrets, malware, and misconfigurations for early protection at build time, while delivering critical threat protection across on-prem and cloud host, orchestration and container layers at runtime.”

The new features available now in Trend Micro’s container security solution include:

1) Securing across the complete DevOps lifecycle
Within the software build-pipeline, Trend Micro has extended its container image scanning to include pre-registry scanning, providing earlier detection of vulnerabilities and malware over and above scanning the trusted registry for any future threats. Deep Security will now also scan for embedded secrets such as passwords and private keys and provide compliance and configuration validation checks, along with image assertion for digitally signed images.

2) Securing across the entire stack
At runtime of the container, Trend Micro has boosted container platform protection across Docker and Kubernetes. Deep Security has long ensured protection for the host and containers at runtime. This includes intrusion prevention system (IPS) rules, integrity monitoring to detect compromised instances of the platform, as well as log inspection.

To ensure complete protection, Trend Micro inspects all lateral and horizontal traffic movement (east, west, north, south) between containers and platform layers like Kubernetes and Docker.

3) Securing while granting full control
To increase automation and decrease manual tasks, security and operations teams using Trend Micro can now use any command shell to execute the application program interfaces (APIs). This additional option ensures full control of deploying policies, automation of monitoring, reporting and more. This completely new set of representational state transfer APIs have been written to automate security for application development and operations teams across the container orchestration tools and runtime environments.

Atos Selected as Major Google Cloud High Performance Computing Services Partner

Looking ahead to the 4th Atos Technology Days co-located with VivaTech, Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, today announced Google Cloud selected the company as a major high-performance computing services partner, expanding the global partnership with new services for enterprise customers. Leveraging Atos’ Center for Excellence in Performance Programming (CEPP), customers will have the computing power needed to get the most out of their data when addressing large issues in science, engineering and business.

Immense amounts of information spanning across complex, global entities requires a large aggregation of computing power in order to turn data into valuable insight. Atos helps companies ensure their applications make the most of Google Cloud’s high-performance cloud computing technologies to get optimal application performance.

Customers within the partnership will benefit from expert services, including:

* New parallel technology recommendations for developers including accelerators, co-processors, hybrid systems and many-core processors
* Enhancement of commercial and open-source applications, including input/output and network
* Proof of Concepts (POCs) to demonstrate performance gains
* Expert workshops to initiate customer porting, optimization and acceleration of simulations
* Application and solution benchmarks
* Access to specific compute resources and tailored training.

“To provide customers with the most advanced cloud infrastructure, we are focused on supporting their high-performance needs, and in partnership with partners like Atos, we can address HPC scale, speed, agility and security,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem at Google Cloud.

Atos and Google Cloud customers are some of the largest global companies with highly demanding workloads that are paralleled across hundreds or thousands of machines. Leveraging the skilled workforce, speed and scale of the CEPP from Atos, customers’ workload management will be supported by key analysis and optimization for their application performance on Google Cloud.

“We’re thrilled to continue to build our partnership with Google Cloud,” said Pierre Barnabé, Chief Operating Officer, Big Data & Security at Atos. “In our role as a leader in high performance computing, Atos brings its expertise and experience to enterprise customers to ensure that they have the computing power and support needed when moving from on-premise to Google Cloud.”

For its 4th edition, The Atos Technology Days are co-located with VivaTech, the world’s rendezvous for start-ups and leaders to celebrate innovation, with over 100,000 attendees.

Dengue Patients in Bangalore Can Avail Platelets Through Donor Helpline ‘7878782020’

Dengue cases are only going up in India. From less than 60,000 cases in 2009, dengue cases in India increased to 2,89,575 in 2018, almost 500 % spike, as per the data from Health Management Information System 2018. Dengue patients face a decline in blood platelets count leading to internal bleeding and eventually death in extreme cases. Thus, this drop in platelet count requires quick platelet transfusion to save lives. However, platelets are not readily available as they cannot be stored for more than 5 days. On this National Dengue Day, India’s first platelet donor helpline ‘7878782020’ by Godrej HIT is committed to assist citizens in Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai, avail platelets through a ready pool of platelets donors.

In 2017, Godrej HIT established an online community of platelets donors with an intent to build a base of donors big enough to save lives.  This online donor community with a dedicated 24X7 helpline ‘7878782020’ has now grown to 1.25 lac registered donors. The helpline has successfully saved lives of 5 critical dengue patients till now. 

Dengue patients or their relatives seeking platelet can call on HIT Platelet helpline ‘7878782020’. On receiving requests, 1.25 lac registered donors are updated through calls and SMS. The platelet donor visits the patient directly at any hospital where he/she is admitted or the platelets are sent to the patient. They can also avail platelets transfusion at their nearest Apollo Hospital, the medical partner for the helpline, even if they are not admitted there. People  can register themselves as platelets donor through the website .

Commenting on the India’s First Platelet Donor Helpline, Mr. Sunil Kataria, CEO – India & SAARC, Godrej Consumer Products Limited, said, “Platelet donor helpline is India’s unique platform bringing donors and dengue patients together to help each other crowd source platelets. It helps patients get platelets which cannot be stored. We are happy to see that over the last one year more than 1 lac people have registered to be platelet donors resulting into 5 lives being saved. Though this is a good start, we consider it as our responsibility to create mass awareness around how platelets are crucial during dengue and encourage more platelet donations.”

Speaking on the initiative, Ms. Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals Group, said, “Vector borne diseases like dengue are emerging as a threat to public health in India. To address this issue, we at Apollo Hospitals, have tied-up with Godrej HIT to build a platelet donor community. Through this initiative, we are trying to bridge the disparity in awareness and provide ready resources to manage diseases like dengue.”

A survey conducted by Godrej HIT found 94% citizens are unaware about the critical level of platelets count below which platelet transfusion is required in dengue cases. Unlike blood, platelets can't be stored for more than 5 days. The report also informed that 80% of the citizens are unaware of this fact.  Due to a short shelf life of platelets, there is also a high demand for platelet donors. Platelets are extracted from a donor through a process called apheresis which allows extraction of large amounts of platelets from a single donor. The procedure is safe and one can return to normal activities soon. In fact, the body replaces the platelet count back to normal within 24 hours.

As part of the platelet donor community, Godrej HIT wanted to educate masses on platelet donation and threats posed by loss of platelets in dengue cases.  Over the last one year, an awareness program reached out to over 5 million citizens across India.

Karnataka to Witness Affordable Housing Boom by 2022: Credai Report

Karnataka is set to witness boom in affordable housing by 2022, Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (Credai) said on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters, here on Wednesday, R Nagaraj, Vice President, Credai- National, said construction of affordable houses on the outskirts of Bengaluru will gather pace, where Namma Metro connectivity is coming up. The areas will include Bidadi, Whitefield near Hope Farm, Chandapura, Mysuru Road, Hosur Road and Sarjapura Road. Here not only connectivity, but also floor space index and government initiatives will also be a factor for the increase in construction and demand, he said.

He said that construction of houses in these areas will range between Rs 45 lakh and Rs 60 lakh and will start by 2020. Construction of houses, where rentals will range between Rs 10,000 to 12,000, will also pick up. By 2020, the real estate market will see further boom in Bengaluru. The new central government will encourage real estate, by reducing the GST on construction materials which will also be beneficial to buyers and the market.

The members pointed that in Bengaluru there was a boom in the commercial segment when compared to the residential segment.

Bentley Systems Announces the Acquisition of Keynetix, Provider of Geotechnical Data Management Cloud Services

Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading global provider of comprehensive software and digital twins services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure, today announced the acquisition of Keynetix, a UK-headquartered provider of cloud-based software for capturing, visualizing, modeling, and sharing of geotechnical data. The addition of Keynetix software expands Bentley’s geotechnical offerings and accelerates Bentley’s vision of enabling subsurface digital twins for infrastructure projects and assets.

Subsurface digital twins can be vital for assessing and managing risks in infrastructure projects, and to the planning, design, construction and operations of infrastructure assets. The creation and curation of subsurface digital twins involves modeling the underground environment (geology, hydrology, chemistry, and engineering properties, and the underground infrastructure), and utility networks, structures, and tunnels – and then analyzing and simulating the subsurface behavior. Supplementing borehole reports managed by Bentley’s gINT software, Keynetix’s cloud-based geotechnical knowledge management system captures and manages underground environment information for Bentley’s geotechnical analysis applications, PLAXIS and SoilVision.

Mark Bevan, associate director, ground investigation data systems for UK-based Structural Soils, Ltd., a member of the RSK Group Ltd., said, “Bentley’s gINT and Keynetix’s HoleBASE software platforms are core, business critical tools within our ground investigation (GI) businesses, and have been so for more than 20 years. The acquisition of Keynetix’s modern and innovative software into the Bentley portfolio, alongside the mature and proven gINT platform, is a breath-taking and exciting landmark moment within the GI digital landscape. The rapidly growing Bentley geotechnical platform is helping to maximize the potential positives of the digital shift we are experiencing within the GI workplace. Ground investigation is truly going digital.”

Bob Mankowski, vice president and business unit executive of digital cities for Bentley Systems, said, “Infrastructure professionals know that the geologic, hydrologic, chemical and engineering properties of a potential project site, and the infrastructure assets buried beneath the soil, roads, and other structures represent some of the greatest risks to infrastructure project safety, budgets, and schedules. Having a subsurface digital twin – a 3D representation of the subsurface coupled with models to analyze and simulate behavior – will be immensely valuable in all phases of the asset lifecycle. The Keynetix team and their technology bring decades of experience and cutting-edge cloud services to Bentley’s already strong geotechnical portfolio – gINT, PLAXIS, and SoilVision – and will accelerate the progress of our vision for subsurface digital twins.”

Roger Chandler, managing director of Keynetix, said, “Today's announcement provides our team, customers, and partners with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance digital engineering in the geotechnical industry. At Keynetix, our mission has always been to make geotechnical data more broadly accessible and valuable. Today’s announcement will truly open up geotechnical data collaboration across Bentley, Autodesk, and other platforms.”

Greg Bentley, CEO for Bentley Systems, said, “My colleagues and I welcome our new teammates from Keynetix, led by principals Roger Chandler, Gary Morin, and Carl Grice, who for many years have envisioned the potential and necessity of geotechnical and geoenvironmental data management to enable better designs and more successful projects. The geotechnical and infrastructure professions will benefit from their continued and expanded leadership, now within Bentley Systems!”

Fast&Up Announced as the Official Energy Drink Partner for Procam International Running Events in India

Fast&Up, the flagship sports and active nutrition brand of Aeronutrix Sports Products Private Limited, has announced its partnership with Procam International, India’s leading sports management company, as the official energy drink partner to the Tata Consultancy Services World 10K in Bengaluru and all their other IAAF Labelled races.

Fast&Up has inked this prestigious partnership for these nationally proclaimed events within 3 years of its inception. As the energy drink partner to these runs, the brand has successfully placed its name amidst the top brands of India. This association will aid the brand to create awareness and cater to more than 1250,000 runners nationally. The brand will provide energy drink support with its flagship product Fast&Up Reload to the runners during their run that will provide them with energy and help enhance performance. The partnership is a step forward towards the brand’s aim to revolutionize the way sports nutrition is administered in India.

Fast&Up is spearheading the sports nutrition revolution in India with its wide range of effervescent products. It is the only Indian nutrition brand to be certified with 'Informed-Choice' across its flagship products. Effervescent nutrition renders enhanced bioavailability that is an essential element aiding as a performance booster, making it an intelligent and better format compared to traditional supplements.

The professional running community in Bengaluru were the forerunners in adopting this technology, Fast&Up had become their first choice for sports nutrition since it launched. Running groups such as Soles of Bangalore, Jayanagar Jaguars & Pacemakers have been the brand’s source of support & their enthusiasm for fast&Up became the USP of the brand. Also, coaches such as Neera Katwal, Anubhav Karmakar and Bhumika Patel are part of Fast&Up Fit Squad Athletes and have recommend Fast&Up products to many leading athletes.

Vijayaraghavan Venugopal, CEO, Aeronutrix Sports Pvt. Ltd, said, “We are proud to be associated with Procam. It is a prestigious moment for our entire team to achieve this feat within 3 years of our launch. We are excited to fuel runners in Bengaluru for this 10K race and across the country in the next year. We thank the running community for showing support to Fast&Up, making it a trusted brand for sports in India”

Vivek Singh, Jd. MD, Procam International, said, “For us at Procam International, runners are our biggest stakeholders. We are constantly striving to ensure an enhanced running experience for our runners and we believe it is the same for Fast&Up. We are delighted to welcome Fast&Up as our energy drink partner and look forward to growing this partnership.”