Ather Energy Begins Setting-Up 50-55 Charging Points Across Chennai by End of 2019

Ather Energy today announced the installation of their fast charging network, Ather Grid in Chennai. The city will see 50 - 55 Ather Grid points up and running by the end of the year. The fast charging network can be used by all electric two-wheelers and four-wheelers and this facility is being offered free of charge till the end of the year.

Chennai has 7 active fast charging Ather Points installed and is the second city in India to have Ather’s charging network. The company has partnered with progressive hosts including cafés, restaurants, tech parks, malls and gyms to reduce range anxiety and ease the adoption of electric vehicles in Chennai. The charging stations can today be found at Forum Vijaya mall, AtWorks and Bikes and Burgers, and other restaurants. The company continues to partner with more hosts which can offer EV owners easy accessibility and fit into their lifestyle.

With the installation of the charging network, Ather Energy officially makes its foray into the Chennai market. Following Ather Grid, the city will have its own experience centre - Ather Space - and pre-orders for Chennai will open in June. In the meantime, consumers can express pre-order interest on the company’s website to get early access to test rides and priority deliveries.

The charging network is supported by the Ather Grid app which allows all EV owners to locate and check the availability of the nearest charging stations in real-time. Ather Energy in its accelerated expansion phase targets to set-up 6500 charging points across the country by 2022.

Quote by Ravneet Phokela, Chief Business Officer: “Ather Grid has seen steady adoption in Bengaluru and we believe that accessible charging infrastructure is critical before launching our products in any market we enter. We have already signed up with multiple partners and will add 50 charging points by the end of the year. Chennai was a natural choice for our expansion as the auto hub of the country and as the birthplace of Ather in IIT Madras. We are working on setting-up the charging network and our experience centre - Ather Space - in time for the launch of the Ather 450 in the coming weeks.”

About Ather Grid: Ather Grid, solves the critical need of public charging of electric vehicles. As of May 2019, the Ather Grid network spans across 31 charging points across 24 locations in Bengaluru and 7 locations in Chennai. The company has plans to expand the network and set-up charging Points at 6500 EV charging Points in 30 cities by 2023.

The charging Point locations have been selected to reduce the hassle of public charging can be found in key locations in both the cities e.g. the malls, cafes, restaurants, gyms and tech parks.

The charging network can be used by all electric four wheelers and electric two wheelers through the Ather Grid App, which can locate and check the availability of the Points in real time. The company aims to have an Ather Grid Point no more than 2 km driving distance from the next one.

Chennai locations as of May 2019: Forum Vijaya Mall, AtWorks (@works), Bikes & Burgers, Soul Garden Bistro, CocoJaunt 1728 & Kriyates

Bengaluru locations as of May 2019: Phoenix Market City, Godrej Nature’s Basket Sadashivnagar, Forum Shantiniketan, The Only Place, ELCITA, ITPB Park Square Mall + 17 more.

About Ather 450: The Ather 450 is designed for city riding conditions, it comes with a top speed of 80 km/hr, a range of 75 km and one of the quickest accelerations for the scooter category of 0-40 km/hr in 3.9 seconds. Also, for the first time in the category, Ather 450 comes with parking assist, which allows riders to reverse into tight parking spots. The key differentiators of the Ather 450 are its intelligent features, seamless charging and ownership experience. The Ather 450 has a 7” touchscreen dashboard that allows onboard navigation with options of alternate routes and saved locations. It comes with the Ather app that enables push navigation from the phone to the vehicle dashboard, remote monitoring of the vehicle’s health and charge status. Finally, with the over-the-air (OTA) updates functionality, the vehicle is capable of improving over time with continuous upgrades and the addition of new features and functionalities.

About Ather Energy: Ather Energy, India’s premium, smart electric vehicle company was founded in 2013 by IIT Madras alumni, Tarun Mehta and Swapnil Jain. Backed by founders of Flipkart, Tiger Global and Hero Motocorp, Ather Energy has designed India’s first truly intelligent electric scooters - Ather 450 & Ather 340 - powered by a comprehensive public charging network, Ather Grid, built and designed in India.  With 31 charging Points in Bengaluru, Ather Grid is the largest fast charging network for two wheelers in the country. With over 42 patent applications, 127 trademarks and 122 design registrations to its name, Ather Energy aims to provide consumers with the best possible ownership experience. The company currently operates in Bengaluru and will be entering the Chennai market in June 2019, followed by other major cities across the country.  

Rapid Adoption of Extended Reality Creates Urgent Need for Responsible Design and Deployment of Immersive Tech

Despite its potential to provide tremendous economic and social benefits, extended reality (XR) carries new physical, mental and social risks that require business leaders to proactively design, build and deploy XR tools and business models responsibly from the start, according to a new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN).

Waking Up to a New Reality: Building a Responsible Future for Immersive Technologies,” published in collaboration with the G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance (G20 YEA), examines how extended reality (XR) — which includes virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and a growing range of other immersive tools — is already creating new value well beyond the worlds of gaming and entertainment. In addition to delivering enhanced customer experiences, immersive tools are being used to augment workforce productivity, provide training and deliver mental health treatments.

In fact, industry expenditure on XR is overtaking consumer spending and is set to reach triple the level of consumer usage by 2023, reaching US$121billon, according to IDC. Accenture analysis shows that the number of patent applications for AR and VR rose almost five-fold between 2014 and 2016, to more than 6,000, and start-up funding grew 237% in the same period.

Despite the opportunities, the report notes that the power and intimacy of XR tools pose new dangers to the wellbeing of individuals and society that are far greater than those experienced as a result of today’s technologies. These new dangers include:

Misuse of personal data: Going beyond people’s personal information, or social media activity, XR could expose their feelings, behaviors and judgments to cyber-theft and manipulation.
Fake experiences: When consuming news and information through immersive experiences, it will be harder to separate reality from fiction, making it easier to profoundly influence behaviors, opinions and decisions.
Cybersecurity: Not only could avatars be used to create new forms of identity-related crime, but critical tasks, like surgery, that become dependent on immersive technologies, could be at risk of extortion.
Anti-social behavior: Trolls could go from intimidating with words on social media to physically intimidating people in a virtual world with avatars.  And antisocial behavior that is normalized in a virtual environment can creep into real-world behaviors.

“We believe the best experiences are those that sit at the intersection of purpose and innovation to improve lives,” said Rori Duboff, head of content innovation, Accenture Interactive. “There is a tremendous opportunity with XR to learn from past mistakes and design more inclusive and accountable worlds and experiences. Ultimately, for XR to succeed, strategy and creative teams must have diverse mindsets, and experiences need to be accessible to everyone.”

The report also points to the greater risks of tech addiction and the disengagement of people from real-world societal problems and shows how unequal access to XR could amplify social divisions through exclusion from consumer and working opportunities.

“We are entering a post-digital era where emerging technologies such as XR are driving the next waves of innovation and growth,” said Marc Carrel-Billiard, senior managing director of Accenture Labs and global lead of Accenture’s Extended Reality group. “XR will be core to enabling these opportunities, but we must address the risks posed by today’s technologies and design XR tools and immersive experiences responsibly.”

Priority actions for businesses include:

Build your early-warning system: Rather than creating rules that cannot keep up with rapid innovation, business leaders must instil a culture of responsibility that integrates ethical questions into the habitual behaviours of everyday work and key decisions.
Draw on diverse experts for responsible design: Businesses must extend their ecosystem of partners to include neuroscientists, mental health experts, sociologists and behavioural theorists to aid the responsible design and use of XR tools.
Supercharge your workers: Target XR investments to improve worker productivity, training and creativity. The very roles that are most exposed to automation are often those that will be augmented by immersive technologies, helping to turn jobs at risk into jobs of the future.

“XR is rapidly moving beyond virtual reality and augmented reality to include a wide range of tools that use and enhance our human senses, including touch, smell, taste and even our thoughts. Used correctly, these promise incredible improvements to the way we live and work,” said Armen Ovanessoff, principal director, Accenture Research. “We have a duty to ensure that safeguards keep up with technological innovation. We’re calling on business leaders, policymakers and civil society to act now, together, to proactively design a responsible future for XR.”

The report also recommends actions for policy makers:

Ensure inclusive and affordable access: extend powerful new infrastructure (like 5G networks) to make XR experiences widely available, at appropriate prices, especially for the provision of health, education and social services.
Incentivize local innovators and entrepreneurs: enable small businesses to not only use XR tools and experiences, but also participate in their development, ensuring locally-relevant solutions.

Stimulate research and discussion: convene relevant experts from across sectors and disciplines to build the necessary understanding and principles that allow XR innovation to flourish amid appropriate safeguards.

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.