Principal Secretary, GoK Appreciated Vedanta's Contribution of 1000 Ration Kits for Migrant Labourers to Combat Covid-19

Vedanta Iron Ore at Karnataka, to battle the widespread outbreak of deadly COVID-19, handed over 1000 dry ration kits to the Principal Secretary Office, Govt of Karnataka. The official handover of the ration kits was carried out by Ms. Meghna Ghosh, Chief External Relation Officer, Vedanta Iron Ore Business, Karnataka to Mrs. Uma Mahadevan, IAS, Principal Secretary, Rural Development & Panchayat Raj, Govt of Karnataka. These ration packets will be provided to the migrant labourers as they battle the Covid-19 pandemic in these exceedingly difficult and challenging times. This contribution will emerge as a big relief to the people who have suffered the most during this pandemic - the migrant labourers.

The dry ration packets consist of basic amenities viz rice, wheat atta, potato, onions, refined oil, turmeric, chilli, coriander powder, salt, sugar, tea etc. for the migrant labourers to survive this unprecedented crisis situation. Vedanta Iron Ore Karnataka is extending support to the communities and all other stakeholders to battle against this difficult situation through all possible means including support to State Government’s endeavours in this regard.  

Mr. Krishna Reddy, Director - Vedanta Iron Ore Business, Karnataka said, "This situation has united us all to help each other and I am hopeful that through our collective efforts, we will succeed in fighting this dreadful pandemic. Vedanta as a responsible corporate has been ramping up varied community outreach programs to reach out to the ones in need to battle against this pandemic."

Vedanta Iron Ore Karnataka, has initiated several on-ground support activities to overcome this difficult situation. Recently, Vedanta Iron Ore Karnataka provided the Office of Superintendent of Police with drone camera along with tablet that would help them monitor and keep a close track of the movement of the people in Chitradurga District. Vedanta Iron Ore Karnataka donated Rs. 1 Crore to Karnataka’s CM Relief Fund while also handing over 10 ICU cots and 10 Multi- Para Monitor to the District Administration to get these units installed at the Chitradurga COVID – 19 Relief District Hospital. Previously the company also provided Personal Protective kits, hand gloves, masks, sanitizer bottles, ration kits and an ambulance for emergency medical facilities to the Chitradurga District Collector’s office along with handing over 3400 ration kits to the Chitradurga District Administration Office to help them be well prepared in the current situation. Besides this, Vedanta Iron Ore Karnataka distributed hand gloves, masks, sanitizer bottles to police officers, health workers and the government officials across Chitradurga district. Also, Fumigation services were provided to police stations, Dy. DMG office and Forest office in the Chitradurga District. 

Vedanta has planned certain initiatives which will support the nationwide fight against COVID -19 pandemic. Implementation of most of the initiatives are already initiated at Goa, Karnataka and Jharkhand, respectively.

We wish everyone a healthy stay at home.

The Asia Pacific Predator League 2020 is Postponed to Spring 2021

SUMMARY

* The Asia Pacific Predator League in the Philippines has been postponed to Spring 2021 in the interest of the gaming community’s safety

* The same qualifying teams from the local preliminary competitions are expected to take part in the renamed Asia Pacific Predator League 2020/2021

Acer announced that the Asia Pacific Predator League 2020 will be postponed to spring 2021 in the Philippines due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The health and safety of the gaming community remains Acer’s primary concerns, and the company has been working closely with public health authorities and their advisories.

The same qualifying teams from the local preliminary competitions will attend the finale in Spring 2021, and the event has been renamed as Predator League 2020/2021 with a prize pool of US$400,000.

“The postponement of the Asia Pacific Predator League, instead of a cancellation, demonstrates Acer’s commitment to the gaming community,” said Andrew Hou, President of Acer Pan Asia Pacific Regional Operations. “With the ongoing Covid-19 situation, we made the decision to move the competition to Spring 2021 for the safety and best interests of the tournament’s competitors, fans, spectators and staff.”

SUMMARY

Ÿ* The Asia Pacific Predator League in the Philippines has been postponed to Spring 2021 in the interest of the gaming community’s safety

Ÿ* The same qualifying teams from the local preliminary competitions are expected to take part in the renamed Asia Pacific Predator League 2020/2021

Acer announced that the Asia Pacific Predator League 2020 will be postponed to spring 2021 in the Philippines due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The health and safety of the gaming community remains Acer’s primary concerns, and the company has been working closely with public health authorities and their advisories.

The same qualifying teams from the local preliminary competitions will attend the finale in Spring 2021, and the event has been renamed as Predator League 2020/2021 with a prize pool of US$400,000.

“The postponement of the Asia Pacific Predator League, instead of a cancellation, demonstrates Acer’s commitment to the gaming community,” said Andrew Hou, President of Acer Pan Asia Pacific Regional Operations. “With the ongoing Covid-19 situation, we made the decision to move the competition to Spring 2021 for the safety and best interests of the tournament’s competitors, fans, spectators and staff.”

Almost 20,000 tickets have already been sold for the tournament, which was originally scheduled to take place in Manila, Philippines in February 2020 at the SM Mall of Asia Arena, Pasay City in Manila. A total of 17 regions entered the local qualifier competitions held from October 2019.

The inaugural Asia Pacific Predator League was held in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2018 to reinforce the Predator brand's commitment to supporting the gaming industry in the region. The second edition in 2019 was held at Nimibutr Stadium in Bangkok, Thailand, watched by over 10,000 fans in real-time. It garnered 4.3 million views online and the peak concurrent viewership reached 123,000.

All contestants will be directly contacted with notices of important updates and when a new date has been established. Follow Acer’s social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to keep updated on the latest developments Asia Pacific Predator League 2020/2021.

Esper and Bluebird Announce Android Partnership to Modernize Logistics & Transportation

Esper announced a  strategic alliance with Bluebird during the last week of May. The partnership will focus on accelerating innovation in India’s logistics and transportation sector. Companies connected to India’s supply chain can now quickly launch and optimize devices and apps with Bluebird and Esper’s full-lifecycle solutions for devices, OS, apps, and updates. 

Esper, a Bangalore and Seattle based startup, is a leading cloud platform that automates application deployment and management for Android devices. Bluebird Inc is a well known global provider of rugged handheld mobile computers for warehouses and last mile delivery. They have a dedicated R&D center in Bangalore and some of their key target markets include Southwest Asia, Middle East and the African markets. Together, Esper and Bluebird plan to transform the supply chain with the most powerful, sophisticated IoT solutions

Commenting on the partnership, Shiv Sundar, COO of Esper, said “Customer experience and agility are the new competitive battlefield for the supply chain. Currently, the industry is facing operational challenges due to unpredictable supply, demand, and capacity. By adding our custom OS, Esper Enhanced Android, to Bluebird’s data capture devices, logistics and transport firms can connect devices, OS and apps to the cloud. It’s a powerful approach to IoT fleet management that helps customers adopt streaming analytics and process automation.”

Jang Won Lee, CEO of Bluebird, Inc, said “Our immediate vision is to help logistics and transport firms automate workflows across warehouses, fleets, and last mile deliveries. Going forward, we plan to continually innovate on new products and solutions for this sector. Mutual customers can use Esper and Bluebird to remotely deploy and manage Android IoT fleets across the supply chain, from rugged smartphones and tablets to handheld scanners and mobile point-of-sale systems.”

The future of Android IoT for India’s supply chain is streamlined and scalable with Bluebird and Esper’s solutions for devices, cloud tools, and custom OS.  Esper Enhanced Android is now offered as a free feature out-of-the-box on Bluebird’s rugged devices. Access to Esper’s DevOps platform and cloud APIs is free for fleets with 100 devices or fewer. Subscriptions for larger fleets are offered at an unbeatable, low price. 

About Esper

Esper is the industry’s most powerful cloud tools for Android device deployment and application management. Our platform and cloud APIs help organizations across industries go beyond traditional mobile device management to Android DevOps with support for rugged devices, kiosks, handhelds, mPoS, and more. Esper’s partnerships with Bluebird, Lenovo, Zebra, and MediaTek are creating waves of change across logistics, transport, and other industries.

About Bluebird, Inc

Bluebird is a leading global provider of enterprise IoT device solutions, with operational headquarters in Seoul, South Korea and Bengaluru, Karnataka. Worldwide, over 3,000 companies in logistics, transportation, and other industries trust Bluebird’s rugged handheld mobile computers and IoT devices to transform their businesses.

Zendesk Lauded by Frost & Sullivan for Delivering Seamless Omnichannel Digital Customer Engagement across Platforms

Based on its recent analysis of the North American omnichannel digital customer engagement market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes San Francisco-based Zendesk with the 2020 North American Competitive Strategy Innovation and Leadership award. One of the earliest providers of customer relationship management (CRM) tools, Zendesk has evolved into a premier provider of customer service and engagement solutions. Its visionary innovation in messaging and other interaction channels, strong partnerships, and solid roadmap bolster its provision of seamless customer journeys that improve the customer experience (CX).

"The company continuously refines its portfolio by creating new solutions as well as by adding third-party applications through rich application programming interfaces (APIs)," said Nancy Jamison, senior research director, ICT. "To extend its market advantage, Zendesk launched its next-generation customer engagement platform, Zendesk Sunshine. This open, flexible CRM platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps businesses connect and understand customer data to build next-generation customer experiences.  In a move to refine its strategy further, the company leapfrogged development by approaching Smooch, a provider of omnichannel digital engagement. With Smooch becoming a part of the Zendesk family in 2019, the platform was rebranded as Sunshine Conversations."

Smooch's first product was in-app messaging, which allows mobile app developers to integrate a chat or messaging experience directly into their app, thereby providing users with mobile-friendly customer and product support without needing to leave the app. The second part of Smooch's mission was to unify conversations across consumer channels and within the enterprise. Previously, those conversations had required two separate systems and platforms with two different bots. With Zendesk, the combination of Sunshine and Sunshine Conversations enables businesses to de-silo marketing, service, and sales to access a single view of the customer and shared conversation across platforms.

In a truly omnichannel landscape, smoothly integrating data across touchpoints and customer journeys and then surfacing that data to supervisors, agents, and other stakeholders will significantly impact both the customer and the employee experience (EX). In addition, the platform automates rich message translation across channels, thereby normalizing message content and optimizing the representation of that message for each channel, including support for conversational commerce.

"With the adoption of the rebranded Sunshine Conversations platform, Zendesk's omnichannel service delivery and conversational business engagement story have been strengthened," noted Jamison. "It is a testament to the strength of the platform that leaders in customer contact, which are firmly committed to investing in areas such as AI, natural language interfaces, and other technologies, have chosen Sunshine Conversations to enhance their product portfolios. As solution providers continue embracing these technologies to improve the CX and deliver on omnichannel customer contact, Zendesk's solutions will continue to grow in prominence."

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has leveraged competitive intelligence to successfully execute a strategy that results in stronger market share, competitive brand positioning, and customer satisfaction. 

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

Some of the startups include:      

* Wellmo

* WIMWISURE

* Zimyo

* Tradebeat

* Purpletrades

* WhatsLoan

* Credochain

* Mudra Circle

Unlock-1: With Shopping Malls, Restaurants Reopening; Contactless Devices to Surge Post COVID World

With Shopping malls, offices, restaurants all set to re-open from today onwards, hygiene practices are likely to be the norm in the post-pandemic public spaces. Masks, disinfectants, scans will be followed regularly to avoid any infection. Many have installed hand-sanitising stations and thermal scans at entrances as well as tables, and some are posting daily temperatures of staff. The entrances will be secured in such a way that if a human who is measuring the temperature fails, the systems installed therein must alert and identify people even if they have moved ahead.

Many are deploying robots to reduce human interventions, Milagrow Humantech – a leading manufacturer of Humanoid Robots and leader in products like window, floor cleaning, disinfectants etc, has witnessed demand from public places. Thermoplegic cameras installed in robots can take care of the hygiene requirements of floor, doors, windows, walls, air-conditioning and air. Founder, Rajeev Karwal, says "For social distancing we have reception, concierge , patrolling, salesperson, food delivery robots which can interact with visitors and customers in a contactless and virusload free manner.The retail scene is going to change forever with this pandemic." 

As offices are opening, many employees are showing reluctance to join without any safety measures being practiced. To provide relief to such organisations, wherein employees have started joining in, Zesta recently launched the Wall Mounted Automatic Thermometer which is the need of the hour at the workplace. To remove human infection while measuring the temperature, Zesta’s Wall Mounted Automatic Thermometer, offices can just install it at the entrances and let everyone scan themselves with zero physical contact.  

XPay.Life Records 60,000 Transactions in May with 142% Growth in Revenue

XPay.Life, a NPCI-approved multi-utility bill payment platform providing one-stop solution to consumers, has clocked INR 3 crore in revenue in May with more than 60,000 transactions. The company, which is powered by a blockchain-based transaction framework, noted that most of these transactions were made towards the payment of electricity bills. Among other categories, transactions worth INR 23 lakhs were generated from the mobile vans.

The vans deployed by XPay.Life travelled across remote locations of Jharkhand such as Ranchi, Ramgarh and Hazaribagh to dispense cash under the RBI guidelines. On an average, 50-60 transactions took place every day through these vans. With 253 XPay billers in tier-I and tier-II cities, the company also has a strong presence in tier-III and tier-IV cities with a wide reach of 50000+ pin codes.

The platform has recorded Punjab State Power Corporation (PSPCL) as the highest biller with maximum transaction amount clocked at INR 55, 790.

As per the data, there has also been a rise in state wise consumption. Punjab topped the chart, accounting for 28% of the total consumption, followed by Rajasthan, West Bengal, Gujarat and Karnataka.

As lockdown restrictions for essential services were lifted in non-contaminated zones in May, there was a steady increase on the NPCI approved platform of 73K users with transactions clocking up to INR 5.4 million.

Sharing his insights, Rohit Kumar, Founder and CEO, XPay.Life, said, “In these unprecedented times, our aim is to make life simpler by providing a one-stop solution to the consumers as one of the fastest-growing bill payment platforms in India. We have partnered with NPCI to bring the benefits of digital payments to the unbanked pockets of the country and further our mission of financial inclusion.”

About XPay.Life

Founded in June 2019, XPay.Life is a BBPS/NPCI approved agent institution driven with a vision of making life simpler by providing one-stop digital solutions in the bill payment sector. The USP of XPay.Life is Bill Payment through Touch Screen ATP Kiosk, PoS machine and Mobile Van which accepts cash as a digital payment along with accepting credit/debit cards. The XPay Life also provides online digital solutions to cater the urban quanta through the Mobile Application and Online Web accepting payment through all the popular modes of payment such as UPI, credit/debit card, internet banking, mobile banking and QR codes. XPay.Life has integrated Block chain-based payment gateway for ensuring the complete security of the transactions. The company follows the highest security based on the AMBIC Model i.e., Artificial Intelligence, Mobility, Blockchain, IoT and Cloud providing the transparent and secure platform for bill payment through a multitude of digital solutions.

Hero Motocorp Intensifies Digital-First Approach with Launch of Integrated Online Sales Platform eShop

Further strengthening its industry-leading digital initiatives for enhanced customer experience, Hero MotoCorp, the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles and scooters, has launched an integrated online sales platform – eSHOP.

eSHOP enables a seamless buying experience for the customers – completely digital. All the purchase related information and actions are built into the system, allowing customers to purchase their preferred motorcycle or scooter directly from the company website, in an easy and transparent manner.

Customers can visit the official company website (www.heromotocorp.com) and access eSHOP through the tab on the homepage, which redirects them to the online buying/ booking channel.

The intuitive system then guides the customers through all the relevant steps of making a decision, buying the vehicle and taking delivery – including Latest On-Road Price, Live Stock Status, Online Document Submission, Instant Dealer Intimation, Finance options, Sales Order preview & confirmation, VIN Allocation, and Delivery. 

On the page, once the customer selects the product, variant, color, and city, the system displays the list of dealerships and SKU availability. Customers can then select the dealership as per convenience and make the payment. Prices, both Ex-Showroom and indicative On-Road, are presented with cost elements.

Once the payment is made, the customer is provided an e-receipt with a unique OTP number for verification. Once verification is completed in the system, the selected dealer assigns a Sales Assistant. In case the customer is interested, a retail finance option is also provided during payment process. The Sales Assistant handles all the customers’ queries and guides them through the remaining steps like documentation, finance, invoicing, insurance, registration and delivery (optional Home delivery).

Once the order is created, the customer receives a SMS with a link that directs him/her to the document uploading section. Upon verification a preview of the sales order is sent to the customer and post consent from customer invoice is created, application for registration is made by the dealer and vehicle is delivered as per the option chosen by the customer. During delivery, physical signed documents required by RTO are collected from the customer.

Keeping the safety and wellbeing of everyone as top-most priority, the Company has also launched multiple digital Aftersales services. These include the industry first initiative of digital service job card and acknowledgment receipt, app-based service booking and increased hours of workshop operations.

Using the Hero App, customer can pre-book their service appointment at their nearest workshop. They can also avoid physical contact with any kind of paperwork at the workshops by raising their own service job-card and receive a digital acknowledgment. This also reduces the amount of time spent at the workshop by customers during vehicle pick-up and drop.

Apart from encouraging customers to pre-book appointments, dealers/ service centres are also using their tele-callers to inform and handhold customers in the digital appointment booking process.

To avoid excessive rush, and maintain social distancing, many workshops have staggered/ extended their hours of operation.