Manipal Swindling Case: Attempt Made to Launder Siphoned Off Funds by Investing in Startup

The Manipal swindling case, involving the embezzlement of INR 70 crore, which has ensnared quite a few people, is continuing to see more skeletons tumble out of the cupboards of the accused. The case has been revealing more gems with each passing day. The accused had managed to launder some of the money they swindled by investing in a startup that was sold off to a Europe Assistance French company profitably.

Sandeep Gururaj, the main accused, got associated with Norte Technologies India Pvt Ltd founded in 2015 by his associate Praveen Surendiran. In 2016-17 he invested INR 2 crore as an angel investor. Gururaj then joined the board of Norte and traveled extensively with Surendiran to build the business.

Surendiran later sold Norte to a French group Europe Assistance in May 2018 for $1 million (about INR 7 crore at the then foreign exchange rate). It has been reliably established through investigation of the interactions between Gururaj and Surendiran that it was indeed a case of profiting from the ill-gotten wealth that was siphoned off from Manipal Group.

Norte Technologies provides after-sales services of cars in India with brand 21North in at least 10 cities in India, including Chandigarh, Delhi-NCR, Jaipur, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, and Kochi. Norte Technologies was acquired by the French group’s subsidiary and is now completely-owned by them. Sandeep Gururaj was also appointed as Director in North Technologies in 2016 and holding shares as well.

The MD of 21North and ONB Technologies, a Singapore-based company, fully owned by Europ Assistance, Praveen Surendiran and other directors such as Sree Kumar, Madhu Jindal & Nitin Mehra are being investigated for their role in the case. Praveen was regularly in touch with the main accused Sandeep Gururaj and had financial dealings with him.

It may be recalled, a case of misappropriation was registered with the Cubbon Park police station, Bengaluru and the main accused has been in judicial custody since December 2018. Investigations are going on and new revelations are being unearthed every day.

It has been reliably learnt that Surendiran enjoys clout in the highest corridors of power and that he has been pulling strings to escape the morass he is in.

CRY Organizes ‘Shankara Buildpro Soccer for Child Rights’

Child Rights and You (CRY) one of India’s leading NGO’s working on child rights organised a soccer tournament to sensitize people on child rights issues. The event saw some of the top corporates from the city come together and play the ‘beautiful game’ all for a common cause- to uphold the rights of children.

There are 3 lakh + working children and adolescents between 5-19 years in Bangalore, of which only 35% attend educational institutions. The event is crafted to make people aware about sports being a great facilitator of change. It not only encourages children to go to school but alongside ensures they are not drawn into child labour and marriage.

The event, since its inception, has seen a lot of children embrace sports at a competitive level. From Nanda Kumar who has represented Indian team in Asian Football Confederation (AFC) to Bheemabhai who has received the prestigious Ashoka Youth Venture programme for she aims to empower slum children on child rights through sports. This event has far reaching impact - from nurturing individuals who go onto acquiring distinctive achievements in the sporting field to creating visionaries, who act out of deep empathy for their communities.

The 4th edition of the event had around 19 corporate teams and one team from the Vyasarpadi Children’s Empowerment Project battle it out as a mark of support for critical child rights issues. While soccer was the central theme, the event saw both sides of the society working towards a unified goal-to create aspirations for the marginalized children for a better future.

“Over the years we have seen lives of children change holistically around sports. Such events allow us to take the conversation to a larger audience as they share a day of their life with children and understand the barrage of issues they face. Awareness is a great facilitator for change and this event aims to do just that,” said Suma Ravi, Regional Director (South), CRY.

CRY:

Child Rights and You is an Indian NGO that believes in every child’s right to a childhood - to live, learn, grow and play. For 4 decades, CRY and its 850 initiatives have worked with parents and communities to ensure Lasting Change in the lives of more than 2,000,000 underprivileged children, across 23 states in India. For more information please visit us a www.cry.org.

Walking Tree Technologies Acquires Mumbai-Based Techease Systems

Walking Tree Technologies, a leading IT Solutions and Services company, announced that it has recently acquired Techease Systems, a Mumbai based IT Services company.

Techease Systems is a leading provider of Microsoft technology-focused solutions and they are one of the leading companies in providing digital content management systems for the enterprises. Effective 1st June 2019, Techease's associates and customers were transitioned to Walking Tree.Walking Tree Technologies, a leading IT Solutions and Services company, has acquired Techease Systems.

Techease Systems a certified Microsoft partner for Sharepoint, Azure and Power BI, an Episerver Solution Partner, is a leading provider of Microsoft technology-focused solutions who are providing digital content management systems for enterprises. Techease’s associates and customers were transitioned to Walking Tree effective 1st June 2019.

Industry analysts believe that this addition deepens Walking Tree’s existing portfolio of niche existing UX Design, Application Development and Data Management offerings, thus creating the best-in-class complete solutions for medium to large enterprises.

According to Pradeep Lavania, Director and co-founder, Walking Tree, “Today, we’re not only growing our portfolio, we’re also thrilled to grow the Walking Tree family by adding to our team of experts who deliver innovative, industry-leading solutions for our customers,”. He added “The addition of Techease will further our mission of providing customized solutions through the powerful suite of business tools by Microsoft, including SharePoint, Power BI, and Azure. Walking Tree’s commitment to service is a consistent priority as we expand our industry expertise and work to provide impactful software solutions."

Alok Ranjan, Director and co-founder Walking Tree also commented “Techease is an ideal fit for Walking Tree as for the effective digital transformation we strive to provide the most comprehensive breadth of information management solutions in the industry.'' “We look forward to serving our new Techease customers by building long-term relationships and working together on their initiatives now and into the future, as we evolve our offerings. Strategic acquisitions enable us to align with the business needs of our customers and strengthen our competitive position while continuously innovating our solution offerings" he added.

Driving Cultural Transformation - Microsoft Hosts World’s Largest Private Hackathon

Microsoft India is hosting the sixth edition of its annual One Week Hackathon 2019, the largest private hacking event in the world. For the first time in India, the Hackathon will host customers and NGOs at Microsoft campus to hack and work on real-world challenges along with Microsoft employees.

In 2014, Microsoft started One Week, a series of events that bring employees together across the globe and across disciplines to inspire more organic connection and collaboration. The core event at One Week is the Hackathon, which invites all employees to hack to solve a problem, build a passion project, or simply develop a new skill.

Reena Dayal, Director Garage India, Microsoft said, “Hackathon enables employees to collaborate to solve a problem they care about, with a focus on the big picture. Employees take on challenges they feel passionate about or to come up with “the next big thing” for our customers and create experiences that are accessible to all.”

Reena further commented, “each year, we see more customer obsession, diversity and inclusion, and a drive to work together across Microsoft and with partners to make a difference. We are very excited about the latest edition of the One Week Hackathon 2019, for the first time in India, we have invited customers and NGOs to our campus to hack with Microsoft employees to solve challenges through technology.”

Hackathon reflects Microsoft’s unique culture and vision to empower every employee and organization on the planet to do more. At Microsoft, hacking is for all employees, technical and non-technical, who come together to find diverse and inclusive solutions. It’s now the largest private Hackathon in the world with 23500+ employees participating in 2018, 30% of who were non-engineers.

Hackathon focuses on empowering employees, teams, and the organization through upskilling, collaboration on a broader perspective, and building on new ideas of applying tech in interesting ways. Earlier hackathons have had great results, including products such as the Seeing AI app, Xbox adaptive controller, Kaizala and SMS Organiser.

The One Week hackathon is a flagship platform of The Garage, which fosters employee-led innovation, bringing together people across roles, skills, and experiences to lend their passion to create change in the world - to improve society, business processes, or for the sheer joy of hacking an existing project and making it better. It also offers the opportunity to learn new technologies and work closely with people from different backgrounds helping employees to integrate the cultural pillars of growth mindset, making a difference, diverse and inclusive, One Microsoft, and customer obsession into everyday work.

What customers and NGOs have to say-

“Marrying Microsoft’s mission to empower everyone to achieve more with Deshpande foundation’s grass root knowledge of the problems that Indian farmers face is the epitome of using technology for real-time Innovation” - Mohd. Innus Khan, Director of Agriculture, Deshpande Foundation.

“The hackathon was a great experience and opportunity to ideate and accelerate solutions for mass entrepreneurs in a very short period. Market discovery through tech enablement is much needed and we had a good outcome which has the potential to solve for market linkages and be a game changer. Looking forward to more such targeted events in partnership with Microsoft.” - Vidya Chandy, Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship.

"Eleven01 is happy to have been part of the Microsoft global Hackathon, which allowed us to work with Microsoft internal team. It helped us immensely to accelerate our idea and showcase a solution around Azure" Rama Iyer, President & CTO Eleven01.

Study Indicates Email Attacks are Having a Major Impact on Businesses

Highlights:

74% of respondents say email attacks are having a major impact on their businesses.
78% of organizations say the cost of email breaches is increasing.
Spear phishing is widespread: 43% of organizations have been the victim of a spear-phishing attack in the past 12 months.
More than three-quarters of organizations say their employees aren’t good at spotting suspicious emails.
Barracuda, a trusted partner and leading provider of cloud-enabled security solutions, today released key findings from a report with the title 2019 Email Security Trends. Commissioned by Barracuda, the research surveyed global IT stakeholders to capture their experiences and attitudes about the current state of email security.

Read the full report: https://www.barracuda.com/emailtrends

The survey includes responses from 660 executives, individual contributors and team managers serving in IT-security roles in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. Companies surveyed include small, mid-sized, and enterprise businesses in technology, financial services, education, healthcare, manufacturing, government, telecommunication, retail, and other industries. A wide range of questions captured hard data about phishing, insider threats and Office 365, as well as the related business impacts, security spending and costs of breaches.

Overall, the study indicates that while most IT professionals are more confident about their email security systems than they were a year ago, email attacks continue to have a significant impact on businesses. Highlights include:

Email attacks are having a direct business impact — and impacting the personal lives of IT security professionals.
74% of respondents said that email attacks are having a major impact on their businesses.
The most common effects cited were loss of employee productivity, downtime and business disruption, and damage to the reputation of the IT team.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents reported experiencing higher stress levels, worrying about potential email security even when they’re not at work, and being forced to work nights and weekends to address email security issues.
Phishing and ransomware are top concerns.
43% of organizations have been the victim of a spear-phishing attack in the past 12 months.
Breach costs and monetary losses are on the rise.
78% of organizations said that the cost of email breaches is increasing.
66% claimed that attacks have had a direct monetary cost on their organization in the past year.
Nearly a quarter of respondents advised that attacks have cost their organization $100,000 or more.
Employees remain a major weak link in an organization’s security defenses.
More than three-quarters of organizations said their employees aren’t good at spotting suspicious emails.

There are growing concerns about insider threats and Office 365.
79% of IT professionals said they are worried about attacks and breaches stemming from inside the organization.
92% of Office 365 users have security concerns
Based on the success and proliferation of email-based attacks, IT security professionals will need to stay focused on the evolution and escalation of phishing, ransomware, and other threats and improve email security that goes beyond the traditional gateway. Barracuda offers a broad solution against email-borne targeted attacks and social engineering. For more information, please visit: https://www.barracuda.com/products/email_protection.

Six Deep Tech Startups Win Accenture Ventures ‘Applied Intelligence’ Challenge 2019

Accenture has announced the winners of the second annual Accenture Ventures Challenge in India, which this year recognizes deep tech growth-stage Indian startups with the most innovative business-to-business (B2B) use cases in five categories related to Applied Intelligence: artificial intelligence (AI), data, analytics, automation, and industrial AI.

“The Accenture Ventures Challenge helps us recognize the most disruptive technology startups in India and provides them with access to our Global 2000 clients,” said Avnish Sabharwal, managing director for Accenture Ventures and Open Innovation in India and the Middle-East. “This year’s competition scaled new heights with record participation from mature startups focused on Applied Intelligence. We’re excited about the possibilities that this creates for the winners, and for our clients globally.”

This year’s challenge drew over 370 entries from across India. Of these, 15 finalists were evaluated by a jury of Accenture executives and industry leaders from Indian businesses, multinational corporations and the venture capital community. The judges selected the following winners based on innovative edge, business value and scalability:

MMS.IND – for its GeoMarketeer platform, which delivers geo-location-based intelligence using micro market focused data and analytics functionalities, delivered as a service.
Numberz – for its secure, cloud-based insights driven enterprise platform, which helps streamline the accounts receivable process and accelerate collections by using AI, machine learning and robotic process automation.
Locobuzz – for its portfolio of software as a service-based offerings including social listening, AI, command centers and customer relationship management, to address core challenges related to customer experience management in the digital world.
Strayos – for its 3D visual AI platform for the mining and infrastructure industry. The platform utilizes imagery data to extract hidden insights about geology in mining for optimized drilling and pre-excavation object detection below the ground surface to enable the accurate inspection of job sites.
Niramai – for its AI-based advanced thermal imaging solution, Thermalytix, which provides a non-contact, radiation free, affordable and accessible way to detect early stage breast cancer in women of different age groups.

Additionally, this year a sixth winner was chosen by the audience at the grand finale event on July 25 in Mumbai. This award was won by CropIn for its platform which uses big data analytics, AI and remote sensing, to enable clients in the agriculture ecosystem to analyze and interpret actionable insights on crops, such as stress levels, yields and cycles based on both historical and real time data.

Anindya Basu, senior managing director, Accenture India, added, “Competitive edge in the age of disruption demands rapid, shorter innovation lifecycles. At the same time, emerging technologies are more important than ever, often requiring ecosystem partnerships in order to fully harness their capabilities. Our Open Innovation program connects the startup community with clients from around the world, enabling them to collaborate, create new ideas more quickly and implement them at scale.”

The winners will join Accenture Ventures’ Open Innovation partner program, through which they will be able to collaborate with Accenture and co-create solutions for enterprises across the globe. The winners will also be mentored by Accenture leaders, introduced to top industry forums, and have access to the Accenture Innovation Hub in Bengaluru where they can further scale their solutions.

The Accenture Ventures Challenge was open to B2B startups in the deep tech space with operations in India, and an annual revenue of at least USD 100,000 in the last reported financial year. This year, nearly 50 startups with more than USD one million revenue participated.

A key component of the Accenture Innovation Architecture, Accenture Ventures is a bridge to the global innovation ecosystem that unlocks growth opportunities for our clients by bringing them together with best in class emerging enterprise startups. In India, Accenture Ventures tracks more than 1,300 startups and has engaged with nearly 200 that have technologies relevant to Accenture’s enterprise clients.

Synechron LIBOR Accelerator Uses Data Science to Address Industry Benchmarking Challenge

Synechron Inc., a leading Digital Consulting firm for financial services, today announced the launch of its newest Accelerator solution, the Data Science Accelerator for LIBOR Impact Analysis, the latest addition to Synechron’s existing AI Data Science Accelerator program. The Accelerator will help financial services firms solve complex benchmarking challenges approaching the 2021 London Interbank Offer Rate (LIBOR) phase-out deadline as well as to tap into a robust digital and data science toolkit to help drive larger, global enterprise transformation initiatives.

The Accelerator for LIBOR Impact Analysis enables financial institutions to identify and quantify their LIBOR exposure at either a contract level or across all contracts within an institution.  It delivers a powerful digital tool to address complex regulatory changes related to the transition from LIBOR to alternative rates and leverages a powerful combination of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and three levels of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify and quantify LIBOR exposure at the contract level, or across all contracts within an institution. The Accelerator then allows contracts to be revalued using alternative rates and valuation models for a dramatic reduction of manual LIBOR impact assessments and enhanced productivity making the overall contract review process 30x faster and reducing costs by 80%. The Accelerator joins over 60+ Digital Accelerator solutions built for banks, asset managers and insurance companies through Synechron’s Financial Innovation Labs (FinLabs) in the last three years.

Additionally, Synechron’s AI Data Science program is continuing to gain momentum in the year since its launch with a number of global projects underway. Synechron has been selected in a highly-competitive field to implement large-scale engagements in email and document classification; the application of AI to customer interactions; customer behavior prediction; system failure prediction; model lifecycle management architecture; Data Science strategy and organizational design; and AI application development.  There is also a strong demand to apply Data Science to LIBOR benchmarking, which has driven the creation of the new Accelerator added to the program.

To bolster its offerings, Synechron has activated several strategic alliances, including a partnership with Infer for intelligent lead scoring, as well as DataRobot and Squirro, which focus on predictive analytics, machine learning, and cognitive insights. The Data Science program, overall, has contributed significantly to the global industry innovation agenda with these Applied AI for banking solutions having receiving three industry awards for leadership, innovation and excellence in the last six months, including the Business Intelligence Innovation Awards, the FTF Innovation Awards, and a Stevie Award for Synechron U.S. Head of Data Science, Robert Huntsman as Innovator of the Year.

“Synechron’s Accelerator Programs are business-driven solutions to complex problems our clients are facing every day. They provide strategies to address rapid changes in the regulatory landscape and digital transformation,” said Faisal Husain, Co-founder and CEO of Synechron. “Given the tremendous feedback we have already received for our AI Data Science program, I am confident that the LIBOR Impact Accelerator will be a great addition to help arm our clients to advance their digital strategies with transformative, powerful innovation.”