UPL Announces Strategic Collaboration With TeleSense® To Reduce Food Waste And Increase Profitability For Farmers

UPL Ltd.  announced a strategic collaboration with TeleSense®, a California-based IoT (Internet of Things) innovator revolutionizing post-harvest grain storage and transport. UPL will help TeleSense strengthen its sales channel by introducing monitoring solutions for post-harvest commodity storage and transport to multiple stakeholders across the agriculture value chain.  

“Through our OpenAg Purpose, we collaborate with innovative partners to facilitate progress towards reducing food waste while enabling farmer resilience,” said Jai Shroff, CEO of UPL. “With around one third of global food production lost annually due to food waste, this is a problem our industry cannot ignore. Our partnership with TeleSense represents a new vision for how grain is stored, handled and transported by creating a more efficient, data-driven supply chain that will reduce food waste, improve food quality and increase sustainability.”

TeleSense uses scalable sensor technology on an artificial intelligence (AI) platform to monitor the temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels of stored grain. It leverages fixed and portable sensors to monitor the current and future condition of stored grain, while automating the detection and mitigation of potential issues such as hotspots, excess moisture, or pests. Machine learning algorithms provide users with alerts needed to effectively manage and predict grain quality, ensure safety, improve operational efficiency, and increase profitability. Adding TeleSense technology to UPL’s portfolio complements its robust range of gas monitoring, safety and detection devices as well as fumigants.

“Our partnership with UPL represents an unprecedented commitment to reducing food waste, ensuring food security, delivering supply chain sustainability, and increasing profitability for growers,” said Naeem Zafar, Co-Founder and CEO of TeleSense. “The food value chain continues to evolve and become more complex. It takes disruptive innovation to deliver solutions that will keep up with the rate of change, and TeleSense is uniquely positioned to lead the way in delivering the future of post-harvest grain management.”

Combining the strength of UPL’s global footprint with TeleSense’s innovative technology will provide new solutions to meeting the requirements of both developed and developing countries. The partnership aligns with UPL’s aim to support the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and its mission to make every single food product more sustainable.  

ABOUT UPL

UPL Ltd. (NSE: UPL & BSE: 512070) is a global provider of sustainable agriculture products & solutions, with annual revenue exceeding $5 billion. We are a purpose-led company. Through OpenAg, UPL is focused on facilitating progress for the entire agricultural value chain. We are building a network that redefines the way an entire industry thinks and works – open to fresh ideas, innovative ways and new answers as we strive towards our mission to make every single food product more sustainable. As one of the largest agriculture solutions companies worldwide, our robust portfolio consists of biologicals and traditional crop protection solutions with more than 13,600 registrations. We are present in more than 130 countries, represented by more than 10,000 colleagues globally. 

ABOUT TeleSense

TeleSense is digitizing the post-harvest grain supply chain. Utilizing advanced IoT, real-time environmental monitoring, and cloud-based AI technology, TeleSense provides grain managers with actionable insights about their stored grain, so that they can make storage decisions easily, quickly and accurately. The company’s easy-to-use sensors and app work together to continuously monitor grain and automatically send issue alerts to users, mitigating spoilage, infestation and grain quality degradation. TeleSense also retrofits traditional temperature cable systems to integrate them with its fully wireless software ecosystem. Backed by a collection of high-profile investors and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, TeleSense has offices in Europe and Australia. 

QuEST Global Appoints Lindsey Gauthier As General Counsel

QuEST Global, a global product engineering and lifecycle services company, announced the appointment of Lindsey Gauthier as its General Counsel. In this position, Lindsey will be responsible for managing all legal, regulatory, and compliance activities globally and will oversee the in-house legal team. Lindsey will report directly to Ajit Prabhu, Chairman & CEO.

Lindsey joins QuEST with a rich and diverse experience that spans multiple industries and countries. He has partnered with organizations to manage risks and formulate strategies to avoid litigation and comply with regulatory obligations. Lindsey also has extensive commercial transactional experience, especially in mergers and acquisitions, post-acquisition integration, and IPOs.

Prior to joining QuEST, Lindsey was Vice President and Associate General Counsel at DuPont de Nemours Inc., where he was lead associate General Counsel for their Safety & Construction business. Lindsey received his bachelor's degree from New York University and holds a law degree (JD) from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Welcoming Lindsey to QuEST, Ajit Prabhu said, "Lindsey brings to QuEST invaluable experience of three decades helping organizations strategize and deliver large-scale global initiatives that have been instrumental in driving revenue, margins, efficiency, and market expansion. His experience in mergers and acquisitions, streamlined legal processes, mitigated regulatory and anti-trust compliance risk, and expertise in leading large legal teams will help us to accelerate our growth plans further and continue to be a trusted thinking partner to our customers."

Commenting on his appointment, Lindsey said, "I am excited to join a fast-growing company like QuEST that has, over the years, emerged as a truly global player in the product engineering services industry. It has an excellent track record of helping OEMs and Tier1 suppliers to create the frontier in their respective domains. I look forward to helping QuEST enhance its growth strategy by partnering with cross-functional teams, solving complex challenges, and creating cultures of empowerment and engagement to make a sustained difference for the organization."

Silicon Valley Of India Overcomes Stress; Avails Buy Now Pay Later For Hair Loss Treatments: Mswipe Data

* City sees rise in Hair loss and thinning treatments availed on EMI~

* Guitar and Piano are popular instruments being bought on BNPL ~

The ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) trend, which has primarily been popular in purchase of smartphones, has made inroads in newer categories with the EMI economy finding relevance in products such as garments, musical instruments, mechanisation of kitchen to even hair treatment products in a stay at home, work from home scenario.

According to the findings, people in the ‘Silicon valley of India’ are availing BNPL for personal care, especially hair loss and thinning treatments. Besides Bengaluru, Mswipe’s merchants are also seeing high adoption in Mumbai and Delhi, indicating continued anxiety levels in metro cities owing to COVID- 19. Musical instruments is another category being availed on EMI by the people in Bengaluru with Guitar and Piano being popular amongst all other instruments.

These insights have emerged during an assessment of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) transactions across different merchant categories of Mswipe, India’s leading end-to-end digital enabler of SMEs and the largest POS acquirer in the country. Mswipe offers BNPL  or checkout finance through its Brand EMI offerings to SMEs across Mobiles, Consumer Durables, Education, Health, Furniture, Wellness and Luxury segments.

Manish Patel, Founder and CEO, Mswipe said, “The insights reveal a fundamental shift in the behaviour of consumer both in terms of their lifestyle choices and their financing preferences. The growing EMI economy creates opportunities for small businesses that have not been using checkout finance as an incentive for their customers up until now. Mswipe’s Brand EMI empowers retailers to offer the freedom to choose payment terms, thereby giving a fulfilling shopping experience to their customers.”

The average transaction size observed for hair thinning and hair loss treatment was INR 43,000 indicating a receding hairline troubling people living in metros. Whereas, Musical Instruments with an average transaction size of INR 40,000 are being purchased on BNPL using the instant checkout finance option offered on Mswipe POS Terminals.

Mswipe had launched Brand EMI late last year as a value added service which enables merchants to offer zero interest EMI financing from over 30 brands in less than 15 seconds. This drastically improves the checkout process, and reduces cart abandonment due to lack of suitable financing options, thereby helping small businesses drive sales.

About Mswipe

Mswipe aims to be India’s largest financial services platform for SMEs and merchants by providing seamless mobile POS and value-added Services. It is the largest independent mobile POS merchant acquirer and network provider with 6.75 lakh POS and 1.1 million QR merchants across the country. Mswipe offers a host of POS solutions for all types of payment acceptance - cards, wallets, mobile payment apps and bank apps, contactless and QR payments. Headquartered in Mumbai, Mswipe began operations in 2011. Its key investors include B Capital, UC-RNT, Falcon Edge Capital, Matrix Capital Partners, DSG Partners and Epiq Capital.

75 Million Hours Of Content Delivered Across Vedantu Platforms In 2020

* 6.3 million students attended Live Classes in 2020

* Highest revenue growth of 350 %

Vedantu, a pioneer in LIVE online learning, has sustained robust growth with students attended 75 million hours of content across Vedantu platform in the year 2020, a testimony of the wide adoption of LIVE online classes. While growing acceptance and changing mindsets for LIVE online learning have contributed towards category growth, Vedantu's superior pedagogy and user experience have made it the most preferred K-12 learning platform amongst students and parents in India. 

Vedantu's YouTube channel saw a 9X growth with yearly views of 510 million hours making it one of the largest YouTube platforms for K-12. The interaction with Master Teachers, Study Material, Tests & Assignments, LIVE Doubts feature has seen a massive increase in the past year as students continued learning from home. The number of students attending LIVE classes on the platform grew exponentially to 6.3 million across the K-12 category & competitive exams such as JEE & NEET. Further, Vedantu recorded its highest growth collectively, and revenue grew by 350% in 2020.

It was observed that Indian learners mostly resort to YouTube for lectures, tips, and special launch series on grades. Vedantu's 23 YouTube channels for every learner and the most-watched ones include NEET made Ejee, 9th & 10th, and JEE. Vedantu has increased the number of sessions and launched focused pods for seniors and juniors on its YouTube channels month on month and has crossed a watch time of 5 Billion Minutes across its platform & YouTube channels. Vedantu also scaled its unique users on the app with 24.1 million users in 2020 which is 9x growth from 2019.

Vamsi Krishna, Co-founder and CEO, Vedantu, said, “Driving impact at scale is our singular vision, and we want to be the brand that solves every student’s learning needs beyond courses and exams. We have launched early learner category, new product experiences and non-academic courses keeping in mind the vision and potential that we can create. With 210 million traffic generated on the platform, we are humbled that students have made Vedantu their unanimous choice, and we want to provide them an inspiring experience at every touchpoint. Keeping student interaction and engagement at the core; we strive to make Vedantu the most loved EdTech brand in India.”

Vedantu also saw exciting results from students across the country at the end of the academic year with:

•  37% of students in Class X scored more than 90%.

•  Highest score in the 12th C.B.S.E. board was at 98%.

•  69% of students scored more than 90% in Class XII

•  3 students came in Top 50 in JEE advanced

While the EdTech sector is witnessing a paradigm shift and is at the cusp of the digital revolution, the implementation of technology in the education industry has facilitated companies to offer innovative solutions with customized content through trending technologies like A.I. & ML. Designed by technology experts, Vedantu’s W.A.V.E. platform is India’s revolutionary and patented platform, which caters and prepares students for competitive exams and enables student-teacher interaction in an engaging and gamified manner with LIVE quizzes leaderboard, hotspots & doubt solving.

Students can easily access Vedantu's LIVE classes and the entire program at home from their mobile, desktop, or tabs.

About Vedantu: 

Vedantu is India’s leading online education company which specializes in LIVE interactive classes for students across grades K1-12. It offers individual and group classes delivered by experienced Master Teachers in a LIVE real-time, virtual learning through their patented platform. The indigenous platform built for revolutionizing online learning captures 70+ parameters, helps drive high engagement and interaction in a virtual class, and give students their personalized learning reports to help them understand the knowledge gaps. Students can also access free content, take tests, and play LIVE quiz every day. 1Million+ students study LIVE every month on the platform and more than 25 Million users every month from 1000+ cities and 40+ countries access free content, tests, doubts, videos on Vedantu's platform, and its channels on YouTube. To know more about Vedantu log on to www.vedantu.com or download the App on your Android or iOS device.

GitHub: npm 7 Is Now Generally Available Across Indian Market

After much anticipation, the npm CLI version 7 is now generally available! In addition to new features and some breaking changes, we have made a significant impact on the performance of npm 7 as compared to npm 6 including:

Increasing our development velocity/tempo to a weekly release cadence, most notably: we shipped 45 releases since August (an average of ~two a week)

Reducing dependencies by ~54% (67 in npm 7 and 123 in npm 6)

Increasing code coverage by ~17% (94% in npm 7 vs. 77% in npm 6)

Seeing significant performance improvements in various benchmarks across various examples

Please note, npm 7 is now published as latest to the npm registry and will be the default version installed when you run npm install --global npm. If you want to install npm 6, please run npm install --global npm@6.

Breaking changes

Despite the massive overhaul to the internals of npm, we have worked tirelessly to ensure that there will be minimal disruptions to most workflows. That said, some changes are necessary to improve the overall developer experience. You can read up on the breaking changes in the announcement blog.

Changes to the lockfile

One change to take note of is the new lockfile format, which is backwards compatible with npm 6 users. The lockfile v2 unlocks the ability to do deterministic and reproducible builds to produce a package tree.

In prior versions, the yarn.lock files were ignored, the npm CLI can now use yarn.lock as the source of package metadata and resolution guidance. If a yarn.lock file is present, then npm will also keep it up-to-date with the contents of the package tree. Running npm install with npm 7 in a project with a v1 lockfile will replace that lockfile with the new v2 format. To avoid this, you can run npm install --no-save.

Peer dependencies

Automatically installing peer dependencies is an exciting new feature introduced in npm 7. In previous versions of npm (4-6), peer dependencies conflicts presented a warning that versions were not compatible, but would still install dependencies without an error. npm 7 will block installations if an upstream dependency conflict is present that cannot be automatically resolved.

You have the option to retry with --force to bypass the conflict or --legacy-peer-deps command to ignore peer dependencies entirely (this behavior is similar to versions 4-6).

Since many packages in the ecosystem have come to rely on loose peer dependencies resolutions, npm 7 will print a warning and work around most peer conflicts that exist deep within the package tree, since you can’t fix those anyway. To enforce strictly correct peer dependency resolutions at all levels, use the --strict-peer-deps flag.

Indian Aviation Sector A Critical Enabler For India’s Endeavour Towards US$ 5 Trillion Economy: Hardeep Singh Puri

* Govt to develop 200 airports in the next 4 years: Secretary, Civil Aviation

Mr Hardeep Singh Puri, Union Civil Aviation Minister, Govt of India today said that COVID-19 has provided new opportunities to the Indian civil aviation sector. “Today, India is the third largest domestic aviation market and poised to become third largest in the overall civil aviation market very soon. The Indian aviation sector has grown exponentially in last few years and is one of the critical enablers as well as an indicator for India’s endeavour towards a US$ 5 trillion economy,” he added.

Addressing the virtual session ‘The Future and Dynamics of Civil Aviation Sector: Making India an Aviation Hub’, organized by FICCI during the ‘Aero India 2021 – 13th Biennial International Exhibition & Conference’, Mr Puri said, “The PM’s vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat is not just about manufacturing for the world, it is also about creating jobs and the aviation sector has significant multiplier effect on job creation,” he said.

Talking about the government’s vision of 2040, Mr Puri said that the vision talks about India as an aviation hub. India’s aviation infrastructure has been benefited with recent upgrades in recent years and India has the capacity to develop effective infrastructure. To fully realize its potential, the government is focusing on policies to add remote and regional areas to the map of Indian aviation, added Mr Puri.

Elaborating on the expansion of airports in the country, Mr Puri said that we will be adding 100 new airports by 2024 and the figures indicate a mammoth opportunity in Indian civil aviation sector. Highlighting the importance of air cargo sector, he said that the resilience shown by Indian air cargo sector despite challenges posed by the pandemic drives home the benefit that has been brought through policy changes and recalibration of business models. “We expect that we may close the year 2021 at the same level of 2019-20,” added Mr Puri.

Speaking on the potential of air cargo, Mr Puri said that the resilience shown by Indian air cargo sector despite COVID-19 challenges drives home the benefit that has been brought through policy changes and recalibration of business models. We expect that we may close the year 2021 at the same level of 2019-20.”

He further said that currently the helicopter potential in India is well below the potential of the country as large as India. There is a growing requirement of helicopters for civil use in tourism, mining, corporate travel, air ambulance, homeland security. Similarly, efforts are on to establish India as an MRO hub. To promote MRO services, he said the government has taken many measures like reduction of GST on MRO services reduced. This will not only allow foreign partners to establish in India but benefit our Indian companies as well. “India now stands poised to enter US$ 5 billion aircraft spares market in a significant way,” he added.

Mr Pradeep Singh Kharola, Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation, Govt of India while highlighting the potential of Indian aviation sector said that people now want to travel from point to point and is an opportunity for carriers. “We are working on the air services agreement to provide a level playing field to our carriers.”

He further said that currently, we have over 100 operational airports in India and the government is targeting to develop 200 airports in next 4 years including airport, heliports, seaports and advanced landing grounds. “The unique feature in this would be inviting public private partnership. We had very successful PPPs and we are looking for more private investment which will make airports a hub of economic activity,” added Mr Kharola.

Mr Remi Maillard, Chairman, FICCI Civil Aviation Committee and President & MD, Airbus India said COVID-19 has given an opportunity to India to turn into an international hub. Indian carriers have a competitive advantage, and we must leverage to developing long haul flights. “We have discovered that resilience is very important. We have never compromised on safety as aviation means safety,” he added.

Ms Ashmita Sethi, Co-Chair, FICCI Civil Aviation Committee & President and Country Head, Pratt & Whitney India said that India will continue to grow as fastest growing market and we need to nurture innovation and start-ups and skill development. “We should incentivize manufacturers and OEMs to scale-up in India,” she added. 

Ms Usha Padhee, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation; Mr Amitabh Khosla, Country Director, IATA; Mr Wolfgang Prock-Shauer, COO, Indigo; Mr Salil Gupte, President, Boeing India; Mr D Anand Bhaskar, MD & CEO, Air Works also shared their perspective.

Hero MotoCorp Sets Up Dedicated Vertical For Harley-Davidson Business; To Be Headed By Ravi Avalur

Hero MotoCorp, the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles and scooters, has set up a separate vertical to drive its new business of Harley-Davidson products and merchandise distribution in India.

Global automotive expert Ravi Avalur has been appointed as the Business Unit Head of the new vertical. Ravi will report to Dr. Pawan Munjal, Chairman & CEO, Hero MotoCorp.

Ravi has joined Hero MotoCorp from Engines and Engine Components manufacturer Cooper, where he was the Head of Strategy and International Business. Prior to Cooper, Ravi was the Managing Director at Ducati India.

The Team in the new Business Unit also includes four executives from Harley-Davidson’s erstwhile India operations, bringing in years of competencies in the areas of sales, marketing, customer experiences, service and logistics.

The Company has also commenced wholesale dispatches of Harley Davidson products to the dealers from January 18.  

Meanwhile, Hero MotoCorp has on-boarded 11 existing Harley-Davidson dealers in key geographies across the country.

H-D DEALERS NAME CITY

* BENGAL SPEED AUTOMOBILES PVT LTD (Bengal Harley-Davidson) KOLKATA

* BAFNA MOTORCYCLES PVT LTD (Seven Islands Harley-Davidson) MUMBAI

* CONCEPT MOTORBIKE COMPANY PVT LTD (Nine Bridges Harley-Davidson) AHMEDABAD

* MOKSHA MOTORBIKE COMPANY PVT LTD, (Two Rivers Harley-Davidson) PUNE

* TUSKER MOTORCYCLES PVT LTD (Tusker Harley-Davidson) BENGALURU (LAVELLE ROAD)

* EAST COAST MOTORS (Marina Harley-Davidson) CHENNAI

* EXCELSIOR MOTORS PVT LTD (Spice Coast Harley-Davidson) KOCHI

* JYOTE AUTOMOTIVES PVT LTD (Konark Harley-Davidson) BHUBANESHWAR

* STERLING MOTORBIKES PVT LTD (Capital Harley-Davidson) DELHI (MATHURA ROAD)

* UTTAM SONS PVT LTD (Foothills Harley-Davidson) DEHRADUN

* SRIJAYALAKSHMI AUTOMOBILES PVT LTD (Banjara Harley-Davidson) HYDERABAD

Hero MotoCorp will also expand the service, parts and accessories business beyond the 11 cities currently covered by the newly appointed dealers, to a pan-India level through its extensive dealer network.

With customer-centricity and commitment to globally benchmarked sales and aftersales service as their focus, Hero MotoCorp and Harley-Davidson are committed together to providing a smooth and hassle-free ownership experience to the existing and future Harley Davidson customers in India.

Details of new model launches will be shared closer to launch dates.