Ather Energy and Bounce Join Hands for Peer to Peer Scooter Sharing Program in Bengaluru

Continuing with its journey of introducing innovative ownership models to promote EVs, Ather Energy joins hands with Bounce, India’s fastest growing dock less shared mobility player for their ‘Peer to Peer’ (P2P) scooter sharing program.

To help COVID-19 frontline workers like healthcare workers, delivery partners, or civic authorities; Bounce had introduced ‘ScooterHero’ a P2P initiative where individuals could rent out their vehicles directly during the lockdown. Taking the P2P program a step further, the partnership with Ather enables new Ather 450 owners to monetize the idle time of the vehicle by listing their vehicle on the Bounce App for all their customers and earning an additional income. Unlike the typical dockless model Bounce offers, the P2P scooters are picked up and returned to the owner by Bounce customers.

Ather is the first brand to partner with Bounce to make their products available through this program. To opt for this model, consumers need to book the Ather 450 through the Bounce platform and on delivery the commercially registered vehicle is ready to be listed on the Bounce app. Bounce customers will now be able to rent the vehicle for hours or days, as listed by the owner. Consumers will be remunerated by Bounce when their scooter is rented.

Ather has introduced new post-purchase plans (Ather One), customized for the sharing model - including a new service & maintenance plan which will address the wear and tear of multi-rider usage. Although, unlike traditional two-wheelers, with the connected features on the Ather 450 and real time diagnostics, owners can rest easy as their vehicle is safe. They will be able to monitor the health of the vehicle and its usage via the Ather mobile app. These scooters will also be eligible for free fast charging at 38 Ather Grid points, for one year and will be delivered with a portable charger that can be used at any 5A plug point, anywhere in the city.

The pilot program launches in Bengaluru from May 2020. The Ather 450’s purchased via Bounce’s website can be booked for INR 499 and will be delivered on priority basis post the lockdown once deliveries resume.

Quote by Tarun Mehta, Co-founder & CEO, Ather Energy

“We have always offered unique purchase models that have been designed to make ownership hassle-free. This partnership with Bounce allows our owners to decrease their overall cost of ownership and break even on their investment faster. The Ather scooters are designed on a connected and intelligent platform and the transition to a rideshare use has been seamless. The connectivity will increase the confidence of Ather owners and Bounce renters both, to sign up for the program.”

Quote by Vivekananda Hallekere, Co-founder & CEO, Bounce

“The current way of owning a vehicle and using it only for few hours a day puts a lot of stress on the entire eco system including parking. Bounce brings in trust to enable people share assets. During times of COVID when public transport won’t be ideal, driverless solutions will help move people. It will also enable people to generate cost from existing assets.”

LTI Wins 2020 SAP Pinnacle Award as the Industry Innovation Partner of the Year

Larsen & Toubro Infotech (BSE code: 540005, NSE: LTI), a global technology consulting and digital solutions company has won the 2020 SAP Pinnacle Award as the Industry Innovation Partner of the Year. This award recognizes LTI’s contribution to delivering best-in-class industry solutions that complement the industry portfolio from SAP.

LTI has a long-term relationship with SAP, spanning over 20 years, and is uniquely positioned as a partner, co-Innovator and customer. LTI is a Global Strategic Services Partner, and this partnership enables its participation in the SAP S/4HANA Movement program to promote and accelerate adoption of SAP S/4HANA. In addition, this partnership enables LTI to work closely with SAP’s industry teams to deliver transformational industry specific solutions such as its Intelligent Construction Enterprise. With its deep industry expertise, gained through L&T heritage, LTI has successfully delivered ERP transformations for its Fortune 500 clients globally.

Sanjay Jalona, Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director, LTI, said “The recognition as ‘Industry Innovation Partner of the Year’ is an exceptional testament to the LTI team. LTI has proven innovation capabilities as well as deep technical knowledge and expertise with SAP S/4HANA. We use this expertise to design, build and implement SAP solutions creatively offering customers ways to increase value from their investments.”

Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, said “Our industry has seen a lot of change over the past decade, but what hasn’t changed is the strength and scale of our ecosystem. Our partnerships give us the ability to be a part of the broader conversation – and their impact is both evident and critical to our customers’ success. Partners are the heart and soul of our vision for the Intelligent Enterprise and play an important role in turning this vision into reality for our customers. We are looking forward to jointly delivering success to our customers with our vibrant and successful ecosystem – now and in the future.”

From more than 21,000 partners worldwide, only 27 partners were chosen to receive an SAP Pinnacle Award for their commitment to value creation, exponential growth, and simplification. These outstanding partners demonstrate the ability to understand customers’ business needs, deliver unmatched value, offer solutions that reduce complexity, and help every customer become a best-run business.

SAP Pinnacle Awards shine a spotlight on SAP’s partners’ remarkable contributions, acknowledging their dedication to teamwork, innovative approach and capacity to challenge what is possible to help customers achieve their goals. SAP presents these awards annually to the top partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers run better. Winners and finalists in 34 categories were chosen based on recommendations from the SAP field, customer feedback and performance indicators.

Lockdown 4.0: Five Must Have Tech Innovation Products At Your Workplace

With lockdown 4.0 announced, certain restrictions have strategically been eased for businesses to begin their operations. As per the latest guidelines 33% staff are allowed at workspaces, allowing India Inc to embark on a new voyage to build a self-reliant India. While various companies have begun taking cautious steps to restart machinery and operations, the need to maintain a safe and secure workplace for the workforce poses many challenges. Transforming these challenges into opportunities, various companies have undertaken multiple technological innovations to enable the best possible hygiene. The following are the five innovations that are a must have across sectors:
1. According to an Apple’s blog, across the world, governments and health authorities are working together to find solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic and software developers are contributing by crafting technical tools to help combat the virus and save lives. In this spirit of collaboration, Google and Apple have announced a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus, with user privacy and security central to the design.

2.  Chilli International : In our day to day activities, few items such as door knobs, switches and remote controls are some of the things that everyone ends up touching multiple times in a day, even amid the health scare we are currently witnessing. Keeping that in mind, Hong Kong-based Chilli International has launched for the first time in India, Killer 100 Blue Ray disinfection machine. A light weight, multipurpose machine, Killer 100 is ideal for home, workplace, mall, car, or personal use for unparalleled disinfection. Within 3 days of launch, Chilli International's Killer 100 has seen an increase of 10-12% in queries since the past 3 days across facebook and its ecommerce websites.

3. As the government has allowed various organisations to work with 33% workforce Candor TechSpace, managed by Brookfield Properties has brought in technology-oriented innovations to combat COVID-19 and to maintain a well sanitized workplace. The employees from Candor TechSpace have come up with innovations like contactless sanitizer dispenser for hand- free sanitization and automatic sanitization apparatus by Mr. Baljit Singh, VP Operations Head of Brookfield Properties that enables sanitisation of passenger vehicles, elevators etc. These innovations are playing a very important role in ensuring hygiene and safety at the workplace.

4. Milagrow Humantech has deployed imap9, a floor disinfecting robot that can navigate and sanitize the floors without any human intervention at various places, including homes, hospitals, offices, etc. The robot moves around autonomously without falling, avoiding obstruction while planning its own path, guided by LIDAR and advanced SLAM technology.

5. An authentic source of information to help you fight fake news, Dainik Bhaskar app has gained tremendous popularity amongst Hindi news readers. It offers 100 percent authentic real-time updates about the latest developments in your city as well as the national and global news that you care about. With the seamless use of AI and Machine Learning, Dainik Bhaskar app will provide you with high-quality analysis and insights as per your location and interest. It offers you to choose from interest categories like politics, sports, business, health, technology, entertainment and lifestyle.

TCL and Segun Life Joined Hands to Launch Infrared Thermometer in Offline Market Across India

Facts

* TCL partnered with Segun to launch IR thermometers
* Launched on Amazon.in and Segunlife.com
* Products will also be available in the offline market of metros across India by June

Segun Life, a homegrown brand in wearables and healthcare devices working towards various COVID-19 Helplines and non-profit initiatives, has partnered with TCL to launch infrared thermometer to aid COVID-19 in India. The thermometer comes with HD LCD display with vibration alert and accurate ergonomic measurements. It will be available on Amazon.in and the company’s website at 3999 INR.

The thermometer is non-touch 3-in-1 digitally equipped for different levels of temperature. It can measure temperature in the room for food, objects and liquids also. The thermometer comes with 1 yr warranty support.

The device comes with no-touch digital sensors to measure temperature from a distance to avoid contact risk. It is provided with a switch option between Celsius and Fahrenheit. The non-touch 3-in-1 digital infrared LED changes its colour basis temperature between High, Normal and Low. It changes backlight colour while detecting fever to red. The thermometer is equipped with high accuracy ergonomic and automatic power-off features. The detection time is 1 second. The LED comes in three colours white, Green and Red. The device is priced at 3,999/-.

On the launch, David Huang, Senior Vice President, TCL says, “We are delighted to partner with Segun Life at this hour where there are massive requirements for these sensor thermometers. Through this strategic partnership, we are looking forward to serving customers with the best innovation at an affordable price bracket.”

Shalini Puchalapalli, Director – Category Management, Amazon India said “We are delighted to add TCL-Segun product line on IR thermometers to our Covid-19 supplies on Amazon.in. This is in line with our efforts to enable easy access to healthcare products for customers across the country.”

CP Khandelwal, CEO - PR innovations (Managing Business SegunLife) says, “To serve people with the best innovations, we have partnered with TCL to make sure people should get the best quality products at a promising price bracket. The newly launched IR thermometer is equipped with the latest features of the LCD screen and high accuracy measurement. Consumers have always accepted our products, and like earlier, we are hoping for the same kind of response from them.”

The product is available on segunlife.com & https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/B087PWJ9JW

Q Blocks Aims to Bring Revolution in Computing by Making Supercomputers on Demand Available

What would it be like if supercomputers could be available to the public? Just like the revolution that cloud computing – or using another’s computer to store your data, or for your computing applications – has brought in, the founders of Q Blocks believe their innovation could usher in another one.

There is no surprise for them thinking on these lines, for Saurabh Kumar Vij, is a scientist with experience working for CERN and his brother Gaurav Vij is an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher. Together, they have already developed a business model for making supercomputers available for scientists, engineers, and designers to further their research.

Q Blocks aims to provide access to affordable supercomputer experience and has built on technologies such as distributed and peer-to-peer computing. Such an access will especially be useful for high performance computing applications such as ML model training, running simulations, or big data analytics, among other computer intensive applications.

This secure supercomputing environment is powered by crypto-mining setups and gaming machines.

The founders aim at bringing supercomputing access to more than 5 million data scientists and designers and they expect that this affordability would further expand this market.

Saurabh shares the story of Q Blocks, saying they founded this company “to help the world transition to affordable supercomputing.” Building on the history of how it all came together, he adds that during the gold rush of crypto-mining in the year 2017, many miners invested heavily in infrastructure to mine crypto like Bitcoin and Ether. But, the crash of the crypto space rendered these powerful machines useless and almost 2mn powerful GPUs idle.

“On our way to developing exa scale-level capabilities, our first stop was to make high performance GPUs virtually stackable and remotely accessible by others. Though the idea of using someone’s else’s computer to fund own research is not new in the scientific world, with The Folding@Home project leading the race with our 1Exaflops of computing power,” shares Saurabh.

So why isn’t everyone doing this already? Q Blocks shares that creating an access to a network of distributed GPUs is not an easy task. First, it is required to build a reliable connect to such remote machines and then to provide a secure developer environment and then a capability to manage the GPUs on remote machines.

Q Blocks has gone a step ahead and developed outage protocols. They emphasize on this service being affordable, as the benchmark tests they have done with 60,000 images shows their system performed the same task in 1/3rd the time and at 1/10th the cost of AWS-powered GPU.

Their vision is to expand their network to include Xbox and gaming stations in the future, while their long-term goal is to provide a reliable service to handle problems such as weather forecasting, synthetic data creation for hedge funds, fraud detection, deep fake detection, computational fluid dynamics for governments, among various other things.

The company is on the way to launching subscription packages, using which users can instantly launch their Jupyter Notebooks with pre-configured AI frameworks. This would include information on learning and testing more data science models.

Going forward, the focus markets for Q Blocks are US, Canada and India – especially Bengaluru in India, where they have connected with multiple data scientists and ML engineers.

Q Blocks is one of the ten startups that successfully completed the mentorship-driven Techstars Bangalore Accelerator's 2020 programme recently. “Techstars Program helped us in meeting people and companies which would have otherwise taken years to connect with. Helped us for an early beta. They also gave us mentors we are still working with. Some of the mentors helped us in bringing more clarity about the B2B environment and norms we should follow,” added Saurabh. “It's truly an accelerator from a networking and growth standpoint.”

The intensive programme provides support to the startups through an investment of $120,000 in each company, mentorship, and support resources as they develop and refine aspects of their businesses to enhance product-market fit and position themselves to scale.

https://www.qblocks.cloud/

Snapchat Launches India’s First ‘Lensathon’ in Partnership with Skillenza

Snapchat is partnering with Skillenza to bring the first ever Lensathon to India - an online hackathon open to national participation** to create augmented reality experiences using Lens Studio. The Lensathon ends on Saturday 6th June 2020.

Lens Studio is a free desktop app launched by Snapchat in 2017, that provides the tools and templates needed to build digital skills, create Lenses and share them on Snapchat. Since its launch, over 900,000 Lenses have been made by the community all over the world. The Lensathon is an opportunity to add to this growth and breadth of experiences available on Snapchat.

Participants can build multiple lenses with the limitation that the last 5 lenses submitted will be evaluated against the criteria. All the Lensathon participants have the opportunity to attend webinars to learn Lens creation from the experts from the Lens team at Snapchat. The most creative and original Lenses will stand a chance to join the Official Lens Creator program, alongside winning other cash prizes, swag and Snap Spectacles.

“We’re thrilled to host our first Lensathon with Skillenza this summer. Snapchat is all about self expression and we truly believe that everyone can be creative if they have access to the right tools. In the past year, we’ve worked closely with high schools and colleges across India, teaching digital skills to students through Lens Studio workshops. The Lensathon is another step in that direction, and we’re excited to see all the incredible AR experiences people will create for our growing community here in India,” said Juhi Bhatnagar, Strategy and Business Development Lead, India at Snap

"We are very excited to partner with Snapchat India for Lensathon. This hackathon is India’s first Augmented Reality lens creation competition and a unique opportunity for the AR developer community in the country to showcase their skills. In fact, the lens creation process is so simple and intuitive that participants with limited or no knowledge of Augmented Reality are able to create exceptional lenses in no time. We are confident that this competition will spark creativity in a lot of developers and build a larger community of AR creators in India. With Snapchat, we are elated to be building one of the largest AR communities in the country in the days to come,” said Subhendu Panigrahi, Co-Founder & CEO, Skillenza.

To register to take part, download Lens Studio and get more information on the judging criteria and prizes, follow the link here:  https://skillenza.com/challenge/snap-lensathon 

Interesting facts:

* Since the launch of Lens Studio in 2017, Snap has seen over 900,000 lenses created by the global community
* Over 75% of Snap’s daily active users engage with augmented reality every day on average.
* On average, Lenses made by the community via Lens Studio make up over 30% of the total Snaps sent every day with a Lens.
* Top-performing Community Lenses reach billions of views.
* Snap now has 5 OLCs in India and over 100 globally
* Also, take a look here at some of the exciting Lenses built until today by our Official Lens Creators

**Read Terms & Conditions for participating in the Lensathon here. 

Peter England & Ayushmann Khurrana Launch a Video Film to Raise Awareness About Wearing Face Masks

Bollywood Actor Ayushmann Khurrana in association with Peter England posted a short video emphasizing the importance of wearing face masks while stepping out during this pandemic. This video marks the beginning of the versatile actor’s association with Peter England, India’s largest menswear brand from the house of Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited.

Ayushmann in this video is seen highlighting the importance and necessity of wearing face masks to contain the spread of the pandemic. This initiative by the talented & successful actor, who is admired and loved equally across age groups and demographics, would go a long way in spreading the message of “wearing masks as a part of our everyday routine” across the country.

Link of the Video Campaign:
 https://wetransfer.com/downloads/51a7a646f91f53bae5b817a88d9afecc20200525114354/afcafde45bd65012778f1be6cee5805220200525114612/6e0e5b

Speaking on this novel association, Ayushmann Khurrana says, "As a socially conscious citizen of India, I wish to spread constructive messages on matters that require vital and urgent attention, like health and safety measures during the coronavirus pandemic. I‘m glad to be a part of a campaign where a hugely important message is being communicated by Peter England which aims to make people aware about the importance of wearing face masks. With face masks taking centerstage in this pandemic, it is a thought in the right direction to raise awareness on how we should be conscious of our health and in turn also take care of the health and safety of the community-at- large. I'm glad to begin my association with Peter England, an iconic brand that has redefined the men’s fashion industry, with this social video. The brand's persona and attributes appeals to me and makes this association something I dearly look forward to.”

Commenting on this collaboration, Manish Singhai, COO, Peter England said, “As a responsible brand, we have strived to do our part in this collective fight against this global pandemic. Various studies show that wearing face masks as part of everyday routine is now crucial to contain the spread of COVID-19. Hence we have leveraged our strengths and skillset to produce high quality cloth-masks which are the need of the hour. We have collaborated and begun a long journey with Ayushmann Khurrana and our association marks the union of two iconic brands that are synonymous with honesty and authenticity. Our journey starts with a message for a special cause, to raise awareness about the importance of wearing cloth based face masks. We believe that Ayushmann, being a popular style and youth icon, will help in getting this social message delivered to large set of Indians across the country”

Peter England has announced Ayushmann Khurrana as brand ambassador to augment the brand’s continuous growth in the menswear sector. Ayushmann Khurrana is widely known for his extraordinary performances in the Indian film industry. He, being a style icon among millennials, would complement the legacy of the brand Peter England to connect with young consumers.

About Peter England:

Peter England is one of the most loved  and largest menswear brands in India. It sells more than 14 million garments every year across 1000+ exclusive stores, 3500+ Multi‐brand outlets and across 800+ towns. The brand also holds a strong e-commerce presence. Peter England has been voted as India's Most Trusted Apparel Brand for 7 consecutive years by the Economic Times Brand Equity Survey. The brand is committed to offering varied styles across categories starting at an attractive price point of Rs. 999. Peter England was first launched in India by Madura Fashion and Lifestyle (previously known as Madura Garments) in the mid‐price segment in 1997; the company acquired the world rights for the brand in 2000. What began as a brand of honest shirts in 1997, in India, is today a complete lifestyle brand with merchandise available for every day and for all special occasions. The brand’s formal wear range of crisp formal shirts, well-tailored suits, jackets & trousers combines high fashion, impeccable fits along with a wide selection of highly curated looks for modern professionals. The casual wear range is a highly eclectic line of washed cotton shirts, denims, cargo bottoms, graphic tees, polos & winter-wear. The ‘Select’ line brings together premium formal wear with emphasis on fine detailing with a hint of color, comfort and panache. While the assorted collection of ties, pocket squares, belts, wallets and footwear assert a distinctive style statement, the finely crafted vests, boxer shorts and briefs from the newly launched innerwear line ensures highest comfort and great fit. While the brand continues to expand across India, they introduced a brand new retail identity called the Peter England Men’s Obsession, which is a large format store housing over 2000+ unique designs at an unmatched value, all the while delivering a young, vibrant shopping experience for all.