Time Spent Binge-Watching Rises 23% in India According to New Limelight Networks “State of Online Video” Report

Online video streaming has now reached an all-time high as the world now watches them for 6 hours and 48 minutes weekly – with the same figure for Indians being 8 hours and 33 minutes or 1 hour 45 minutes higher than the global average. This is according to the new “State of Online Video 2019” research report by Limelight Networks (Nasdaq: LLNW), a leading provider of edge cloud services.

The report also found that the time spent on binge-watching is also on the rise in India, jumping more than 23 percent from last year to an average of 2 hours, 25 minutes at a time. In the global survey, Indians were also less apprehensive of pre-roll advertisements, with 84.8 percent being either affirmative or neutral if the content is free. The survey also revealed that Indians mostly watch online videos from home, followed by travel or commute. Since India is new to the digital bandwagon, it doesn’t come as a surprise that 89 percent are also subscribed to cable TV. This figure was observed to be the lowest for Japan, where the subscriptions turned out to be just 39 percent or less than half as compared to India.

The study also pointed out that the adoption of dedicated streaming devices is also gradually increasing in India. 27 percent of the respondents owned Google Chromecast and 34 percent owned Amazon Fire TV Stick. 18 percent of the respondents didn’t have any streaming device at all. Another key takeaway from the survey is that smartphones are the primary streaming device. Digital devices such as computers and laptops came next on the list followed by a connected device or a smart TV. The top spot as the most popular content in India was shared by both TV Shows and News, with Movies and professionally developed content on social media coming next on the list.

“India is quickly opening up to the idea of online video streaming,” said Mr. Ashwin Rao, Director - Sales, Limelight Networks, India. This ongoing trend has been highlighted time and again by our State of Online Video studies over the years. Now, as data costs are further lowering and smartphone penetration increasing, people living even in the remotest of regions are coming under the fold of digital technology and services. It is opening new avenues for India’s content creators and aggregators to tap the burgeoning market with quality programming and seamless user experiences. Limelight Networks enables them to do precisely the same, while also tapping the global market with its robust and highly scalable global infrastructure – leaving no stone unturned in terms of content delivery.”

Additional insights from the report include:

●        Broadcast viewing takes a hit as online videos become more popular: Broadcast videos are bearing the brunt of smartphone adoption in India as the users are looking towards them for their primary entertainment. Online video watching has now officially become the preferred go-to entertainment alternative for Indians. Global viewership for traditional TV remains higher than online video across every country except Singapore and India.

●        Price sensitivity is the deciding factor in video subscriptions. Increasing price continues to be the primary reason why people claimed (28 percent) they will cancel their cable subscription. 15 percent Indians said they will do so if all content they watch becomes available online.

●        Streaming advertisements shouldn’t disrupt the viewing experience. Global consumers are most accepting of ads during an online video if they can skip it (59 percent) or if it’s a short ad before a free video (57 percent).

●        Mobile phones are the preferred online streaming devices. Like the last year, smartphones continue to be the primary streaming device for Indians followed by computers. However, there was also an increase in video viewing via tablet this year. It needs to be also noted that smartphones have overtaken computers as the preferred streaming device for global consumers for the first time.

The State of Online Video report is based on responses from 4,500 consumers in France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the U.K., and the U.S. age 18 and older, who watch one hour or more of online video content each week.

LTTS’ AiKno Awarded Frost & Sullivan’s 2019 Indian Cognitive Automation Technology Innovation Leadership Award

L&T Technology Services Limited, a leading global pure-play engineering services company, was conferred with the Frost & Sullivan Indian Cognitive Automation Technology Innovation Leadership award at its 2019 India Best Practices Awards Banquet in Mumbai.

The 2019 award recipients were judged on various parameters including market share growth, product portfolio diversity, key achievements, go-to-market strategy, vertical and horizontal diversity, major customer acquisitions, efficacy of innovation process, product service and positioning.

Frost & Sullivan Awards are presented to companies that demonstrate best practices across industries. The Awards are recognition of their innovation, commitment, technological innovation, customer service, and successful business strategies required to advance in the global marketplace. Frost & Sullivan's intent is to help drive innovation, excellence, and a positive change in the global economy by recognizing best-in-class products, companies, and individuals.

Frost & Sullivan’s industry analyst team benchmarks market participants and measures their performance through independent, primary interviews, and secondary industry research to evaluate and identify best practices.

LTTS was recognized for its proprietary cognitive intelligence framework, AiKnoTM, which has been deployed globally at various customer projects. AiKnoTM was developed to host and integrate a range of intelligent solutions across multiple facets of engineering such as smart buildings, supplier management, energy optimization, documentation optimization, predictive maintenance and cognitive analytics.

As an AI platform dedicated to Industry 4.0, AiKno’s unique capabilities have the potential to change the product engineering and manufacturing landscape globally. Last year, AiKnoTM  won NASSCOM’s AI Game Changer Award for its prowess in meta data extraction.

AiKno’s credentials include some of the world’s first-of-its-kind applications built on its framework – an interactive cognitive repository of geo-spatial data that was built from legacy documents for an oil and gas major. AiKno’s image processing capabilities have been used to build a pneumonia detection solution to help radiologists identify the symptoms and detect the disease in its initial phase.

Abhishek Sinha, Chief Operating Officer and Board Member, L&T Technology Services said, “AiKnoTM has the potential to change the way businesses operate by successfully navigating the industrial engineering challenges. This prestigious recognition of our AiKnoTM framework validates the potential of this technology to pave the way for new innovations and positive transformation stories across sectors. LTTS’ multi-vertical industry expertise ensures that AiKnoTM can be deployed across a range of sectors from oil & gas, medical devices, transportation, telecom to aerospace.”

Anand S, Vice President, Frost & Sullivan said, “LTTS has become a high-growth company and has gained over 250 high-profile customers within a short period of time. As a subsidiary of conglomerate Larsen & Toubro, which has over 80 years of experience in the field of engineering, manufacturing, and information technology among others, LTTS’ parentage has enabled it to devise solutions that are revolutionizing the AI and automation space across industry sectors.”

Gartner Identifies Top 9 Digital Experience Trends for 2020

Gartner, Inc. has identified nine digital experience trends that organizations need to explore in 2020. CIOs should consider these trends in their strategic planning over the next 12 months as the span of digital touchpoints continues to increase.

Gartner’s digital experience trends fall within two broad categories — how digital technology is experienced and how digital experiences will be built. The way in which engaging digital experiences are crafted is becoming increasingly formalized, which means that delivering a digital experience that ensures a measurable outcome will require both creative excellence and consistent process execution.

Speaking at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Australia today, Brian Prentice, research vice president at Gartner, said digital experience is a key aspect of workforce digital dexterity — the ability and desire to use new and existing technology for better business outcomes — to close the skills gap and drive competitive advantage.

“Willingness to engage with digital technology will become a key factor in determining any IT system’s ability to successfully deliver business outcomes,” Mr. Prentice said. “Digital experience is no longer limited to the domain of born-digital companies or outlier enterprises in specific industries. CIOs must ensure that their organization puts as much effort into understanding how people interact with and experience digital technology as they put into tracking technology itself.”

Gartner’s top digital experience trends for 2020 (in no particular order) are:

1. Multiexperience

Multiexperience refers to the various permutations of modality (touch, voice and gesture), device and app with which users interact on their digital journeys. A multiexperience strategy involves creating fit-for-purpose apps based on touchpoint-specific modalities, while at the same time ensuring a consistent and unified user experience (UX) across web, mobile, wearables, conversational and immersive touchpoints.

2. Interfaceless Machines

Manufacturers across industries are abandoning on-machine controls or traditional interface models in favor of apps that run on their customers’ mobile devices. Larger screens on mobile devices, high resolutions and rich device APIs allow for device control experiences far beyond what can be achieved with on-machine interfaces. This opens up whole new avenues for advances in a product’s industrial design, while still allowing manufacturers to compete on new functionality made possible by added microprocessors.

3. Agent Interfaces

Agent interfaces employ artificial intelligence (AI) to predict what users intend to do from user input and other contextual cues. This information is then used to assist by either easing or automating the execution of those efforts. It shifts the attention of users from how a tool works to what they want to achieve with the tool. Agent interfaces represent a whole new paradigm of human-computer interaction and have broad implications that will greatly influence how enterprises interact with customers, offer services and provide tools to employees. Conversational UIs (or chatbots) are good examples.

4. Facial Recognition Payment

This is a digital experience trend emerging in China, which will disrupt the widespread use of QR code payments and further diminish the use of bank cards and cash. Facial recognition payment is already happening outside China, particularly through Apple’s Face ID with Apple Pay, with the trust existing between the user and the ecosystem provider (such as a bank). In China, however, consumers are required to give up privacy for an added level of convenience, with the trust primarily between the organization taking payment and the ecosystem provider. Facial recognition payment offers CIOs a whole new perspective on enhancing digital CX and driving business growth.

5. Inclusive Design

Inclusive design is the principle that the best way to serve the needs of the broad community is to consider the special needs of all possible communities. Originating as an approach to design for people with disabilities, inclusive design will expand to accommodate cultural sensitivities and behavior patterns. Designers need to consider features and capabilities that accommodate all segments that are potential customers or users of their products.

6. Insourced Digital Design Services

Digital design is the process organizations use to create the best digital experience for their customers, employees and other stakeholders. It has been undergoing a shift from being a service delivered almost entirely by external agencies to a capability provided by internal digital design teams. This trend is most pronounced in industries facing a rapid rate of digitalization. As digital touchpoints increase, insourcing digital design reduces costs and supplier complexity while increasing operational efficiency and digital experience innovation.

7. UX Research Renaissance

UX research and associated testing methodologies uncover human insights that are essential for successful design, development and innovation initiatives. Increasingly, the value of understanding users, what they do and why they do it is seen as a differentiator for organizations. UX research identifies both the features and the designs that products or experiences should have to drive usage, customer satisfaction, loyalty and ROI.

8. Design to Code

A new generation of digital design tools is emerging that allows designers to generate presentation layer code directly from screen designs and interactive prototypes. Design to code enables the dynamic and ongoing creation of templates, modules and components — both as design patterns and reusable code.

9. Design Ops

The need to define and implement design systems in the business has led to the creation of the design ops process and the emergence of tools to implement governance over the design process. Design professionals can create and deploy design standards, such as layouts, color palettes, typefaces, controls, components and other elements, and control them across multiple business units, applications, endpoints and other design variables.

“Compelling digital experiences are ultimately functions of digital design,” Mr. Prentice said. “This process contextualizes both existing and emerging technologies in ways that are relevant and meaningful for people. A whole new set of digital technology to support both the individual tasks of designers and the efficiency of the overall design process is emerging. This combination of process formalization and technology will allow digital design to scale significantly.”

India Meditronic is Now Great Place to Work-Certified from October 2019 to September 2020

India Medtronic Private Limited, wholly owned subsidiary of Medtronic plc (NYSE: MDT), today announced their certification as a Great Place to Work. India Medtronic Pvt Ltd earned this acknowledgement by surpassing the threshold of Trust Index© and Culture Audit© framework under the category of ‘Large Organizations’ (more than 500 employees). The certification is valid for the period of October 2019 – September 2020.

Great Place to Work Certification is considered as the Gold Standard in identifying and recognizing Great Workplace Cultures. It reflects the High-Trust, High-Performance Culture within the organization. The certification, which is a two-step process involves:

1.    Participation in the Trust Index© employee survey.
2.    Culture Audit© that captures data on various aspects of organization’s culture and people practices.

Some key highlights from the survey:

1.    India Medtronic Pvt Ltd achieved a score of 83 under the category ‘Pride’ which measures employees' sense of pride in their work by assessing the feelings employees have toward their jobs, team or work group and the company.

2.    India Medtronic Pvt Ltd scored 91 on parameter for Top 50-best companies to work

* Top areas of strength identified-
* Contribution to Society
* Fairness regardless of race, caste, gender

“Tenet 5 of the Medtronic Mission talks about our most important asset — our people. The broad range of ideas and diversity of experiences brought by our employees is what drives our innovation and problem-solving approach, which ultimately results in better outcomes for patients,” said Madan Krishnan, vice president and managing director, India Medtronic Pvt Ltd. “The Great Place to Work® Certification is another milestone in Medtronic’s 40th year in India and to be validated by our employees is gratifying.”

This Certification has also earned India Medtronic Pvt Ltd the chance to feature on the ‘Best Workplaces’ list - the world’s largest and most respected study of workplace excellence and people management practices.

TCS iON’s Digital Marking Hub Expands its Evaluator Ecosystem

TCS iON, a strategic unit of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, announced a partnership with The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) to train and certify its faculty and senior students on the TCS iON Digital Marking Hub platform. This further expands the large ecosystem of professional evaluators that TCS iON uses to offer location-independent marking services to customers across the globe using its Digital Marking Hub platform.

The TCS iON Digital Marking Hub is a first-of-its-kind platform that digitizes the subjective answer script evaluation process, leveraging digital technology along with the expertise of professional evaluators to make the process location-independent, scalable, faster and more efficient. The platform allows markers to perform video, audio, and paper-pen based answer book marking.

With a growing demand for English language literacy, institutions in non-English speaking countries have increased their focus on English language education. However, the absence of sufficient numbers of local evaluators proficient in English has proved a bottleneck in the timely and accurate assessment of students. By making the process location-independent, TCS iON enables the use of a global pool of expertise to help these institutions improve the scale and quality of their student evaluation process.

“Our Digital Marking Hub takes answer script evaluation into the digital era, helping educational institutions and exam bodies gain immense speed and efficiency, while freeing them from the administrative, operational and logistical hassles involved in the traditional manual process,” said Venguswamy Ramaswamy, Global Head, TCS iON. “Our partnership with EFLU will offer opportunities to certified evaluators in India to participate in marking students across the world in English and other foreign languages.”

Prof E Suresh Kumar, Vice Chancellor, EFLU, said, “This is one of the most significant partnerships that the University has entered into in the past two years. TCS iON’s training and certification in marking will empower EFLU’s teachers and senior students to expand their horizons and become part of a larger marking community, while also providing them the opportunity to connect with learners from different parts of the world.”

TCS iON offers location-independent marking services to a number of customers including Sapix Yozemi Group (Yoyogi Seminar), a cram school in Japan, for assessment of spoken English tests. TCS iON has also on-boarded qualified and certified teachers of English and other domain subjects in India, who have been meticulously trained to evaluate textual and spoken (audio) responses.

Paysquare Rolls Out Highly Scalable, Centralised Solutions Suite for Global Payroll Operations

Payroll outsourcing giant Paysquare has added yet another jewel to its crown with the unveiling of trend-setting global payroll processing solutions and services suite for enterprises with multi-country presence.

In a bid to answer cut throat competition, business complexities and uncertainties, enterprises today are zeroing in on innovation, upskilling of the workforce and comprehensive restructuring measures to stay profitable.

In such a scenario, enterprises with global presence witness frequent hiccups owing to the absence of stringent compliance with local and global payroll regulations. Inducting local human resources across borders not only incurs hefty expenditure but also induces complexities in payroll management.

Moreover, with no stringent data security measures in place, the likelihood of a breach of employee confidential information escalates significantly.

Paysquare’s global payroll processing solutions suite ensures centralised management of payroll operations across the globe utilizing cutting edge technologies like Artificial Intelligence for a seamless, user- friendly payroll experience to the global workforce of an enterprise.

Furthermore, any updates related to payroll compliance are instantly synchronised with the system ensuring zero scope for errors and avoiding hefty regulatory penalties.

Some of the industry-leading features of the solutions suite include :-

●       Monthly payroll calculation and delivery
●       Employee specific income tax management and submission to local tax authorities
●       Employee payroll data maintenance
●       Electronic pay-slip reporting

 ‘’Our team at Paysquare is committed to ensuring an end to end payroll management for our esteemed clientele. The industry-leading global payroll processing solutions suite features comprehensive migration support; a highly scalable, cutting edge back-end payroll system and a multi-layer data security mechanism. All of this ensures a distinctive payroll experience to multinational enterprises,’’ said Rakesh Jain, CEO and founder, Paysquare.

 Right from disbursing salaries to analysing operational costs or generating performance metrics of employees, outsourcing payroll has come as an end to end service for enterprises, eyeing to tap on new opportunities and streamline revenue centric operations.

 With rapid advancements in technology, the payroll landscape has now transformed from legacy on-premise system towards a cloud-based service. Emerging technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Chatbots are empowering payroll processes to automate repetitive, tedious manual tasks which consume significant work hours of professionals.

NOFILTR.GROUP Launches the Influencer Community ‘Creator21’

NOFILTR.GROUP, a leading social media label, and influencer incubator has launched its new influencer community – ‘Creator21’. Creator21 is a community of innovative thinkers and creators who will collaborate to reshape the future of content creation in India. It aims to reach out to a wide audience of creators across the country offering them a platform to meet likeminded people. They can share creative ideas that will help them build a better world and a stronger career path.

Being at the forefront of the influencer marketing space, NOFILTR has always come up with ground-breaking work in the creator and influencer segment. Launch of Creator 21 aims at building a community that focuses on creating meaningful and inspirational work for the next generation of creators to carry forward or build on.

Talking about the launch of this community, Mr. Sumedh Chaphekar, Founder and CEO, NOFILTR Group addressed the audience of creators, “I am very excited to begin the journey Creator21 and extremely grateful to all the creators for inculcating trust in us and believing in our ideology. Over the past few years, social media has evolved drastically. We engaged in a thorough discussion of over 6 months and went through various challenges that are faced by the creative minds, that is what germinated the idea of having a community that binds us all. Creator 21 aims to organize collaborative events for the creators from every platform such as YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and much more.”, he added.

The launch event was followed by various innovative activities where the guests enjoyed the elaborate photo booth setup. Top influencers and creators were invited for the launch. Four spectacularly scintillating photo-booths were set up where the creators could come together and generate some quirky, innovative content.  The community event of Creator21 helped the creators to meet like-minded people and expand their network to collaborate with each other. It will serve as an avenue for all the creators to grow together in the wake of making meaningful content and relationships. With this event, the platform aims to foster offline as well as online community building and help members nurture deeper and professional relationships.

Nearly 35 influencers attended the launch event such as Awez Darbar, Nagma Mirajkar, Angry Prash, Mrunu, Sanket Mehta, Aashna Hegde, Sunny Chopra, Funcho and Anam Darbar to name a few.