Big Data company Gramener Opens R&D Office in Hyderabad

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March 18, 2022

Leading big data and storytelling company Gramener opens its new research and development facility along with a 250 seater center in Hyderabad, India.

KT Rama Rao, Minister of Information Technology and Industries, inaugurated Gramener’s new development and research office on Monday.

Rama Rao also stressed the importance of data science and how it can assist governments in making decisions that benefit individuals during the launch event. The new facility is located in SLN-One West in Hyderabad’s Nanakramguda Financial District.

According to the company, it plans to double its workforce from 250 to 500 in the coming years. Gramener’s Hyderabad office will have data science resources with a combination of statistics, design, and technology to expand Gramener’s vision and give value to organizations.

Co-founder and COO of Gramener, Naveen Gattu, said, “Gramener originated in Hyderabad in 2010 as the first data science and storytelling company and soon expanded to global horizons, enhancing decision-making process in enterprises, the public sector, and nonprofits.”

He further mentioned that they are pleased to invest in Hyderabad since the city offers them access to key talent, excellent infrastructure, and entrepreneur-friendly IT policies to help them grow quickly.

Chief Revenue Officer of Gramener Matt Ferry mentioned that the company is looking forward to expanding into the North American market as it sees great opportunities, and the newly established facility in Hyderabad will help the company in meeting the demands of North America.

Canvass AI Now Available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

By

Dipayan Mitra

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March 18, 2022

Artificial intelligence-powered platform designed for the industrial manufacturers, oil, and gas companies Canvass AI is now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Users across the globe will now be able to use the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to quickly deploy the Canvass AI platform and speed their AI time to effect.

Canvass AI plans to boost the adoption of artificial intelligence in the industrial sector by making the platform available on Azure marketplace, which is an online store that provides applications and services for use on Azure.

Canvass AI is a no-code artificial intelligence software that allows industrial engineers to enjoy the benefits of AI without requiring data science knowledge.

General Manager of Microsoft Azure Platform, Jake Zborowski, said, “Through Microsoft Azure Marketplace, customers around the world can easily find, buy, and deploy partner solutions they can trust, all certified and optimized to run on Azure.”

He also mentioned that they are excited to add Canvass AI’s solution to the Azure Marketplace’s growing ecosystem. Canvass AI, which is available as an AI Software-as-a-Service platform on Microsoft Azure, gives users all the tools they require to apply, scale and operationalize AI throughout their operations.

According to the company, its customers have reported using Canvass AI to successfully operationalize AI use cases and accelerate time-to-value by 4x. Interested users can check out the pricing plans of Canvass AI on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Canada-based artificial intelligence firm Canvass AI was founded by Courtney Deinert, Humera Malik, and Steve Kludt in 2016. To date, the company has raised $13 million from investors like BDC Venture capital, Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley, Gradient Ventures, and many others over three funding rounds.

CEO of Canvass AI, Humera Malik, said, “Launching on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace ensures that industrial companies worldwide can access Canvass AI and immediately drive impact across their operations.” She further added that Canvass AI customers are reaping the benefits of artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 because of their no-code AI platform.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Hints at Instagram’s Ambitions for NFT Marketplace

By

Preetipadma K

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March 17, 2022

instagram nft meta — Image Credits: Analytics Drift Design Team

Nonfungible tokens or NFTs are slowly becoming mainstream and there is no stopping. After Twitter allowed its users to customize their Twitter profile so that they can show off the NFTs they own in a hex-shaped profile picture on their Twitter account, Instagram might follow similar pursuit. Mark Zuckerberg said during a session at South by SouthWest that NFTs will be introduced to Instagram in the “near term.” While the Meta CEO and founder didn’t go into great detail, he said that non-fungible tokens will be integrated into the company’s photo and video sharing app if the Instagram team worked out some technical issues.

Zuckerberg said, “I’m not ready to kind of announce exactly what that’s going to be today. But over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment.”

Famously known for wearing the same grey t-shirt every day, Zuckerberg cited his personal purchasing habits as the rationale for expanding Instagram’s role as a shopping platform, stating that “probably most of the stuff that I wear, I probably bought through an Instagram or Facebook Shops or ads.”

This is not the first time there are rumors about Instagram venturing into the world of NFTs. Last year, Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri stated that the company was actively studying NFTs, but that no official announcements had been made. It was earlier reported that Facebook and Instagram teams were working on NFT integrations in January. According to the reports, development has been made on features that allow you to use an NFT as a profile and mint NFTs on the platform, as well as conversations about building a marketplace. When Zuckerberg verified the rumor, he was taking part in a conversation about the Metaverse and the changing environment of digital culture. He spoke about topics like NFTs and the potential, you know, long-term, and expressed his hopes that your avatar’s clothing in the Metaverse can be minted as an NFT and taking “it between your different places,” during the hour-long conversation.

This isn’t Meta’s first foray into the crypto world. In 2019, the company announced plans to launch “Libra” (later renamed to “Diem”), a USD-pegged stablecoin that failed owing to regulatory licensing issues and community opposition. Following criticism from US Senators Sherrod Brown and Brian Schatz, some initial members of the so-called Libra Association quit the initiative within months of its launch. Meta eventually sold the cryptocurrency project for $200 million in January, and Zuckerberg’s comments on NFTs suggest he’s hoping for a breakthrough in the blockchain industry. Although Silvergate Capital bought the project, several former Meta personnel are currently attempting to resurrect the open-source stablecoin by establishing their own network.

Senator Jones introduces bill to ban tech mergers over $5 billion

By

Osheen Jain

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March 17, 2022

Senator Warren Introduces PAMA Bill to Stop Big Tech Mergers

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mondaire Jones (House Representative) have introduced Bicameral Legislation in their respective congressional chambers to ban large technology mergers effectively. Warren has long made it clear that she’s no fan of Big Tech and her latest legislation proves it. According to her and House Representative Mondaire Jones’s bill, the Prohibiting Anticompetitive Mergers Act (PAMA) would make it illegal to pursue mergers that are worth more than $5 billion or provide market shares beyond 25 percent for employers and 33 percent for sellers.

With PAMA, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be able to ban most anticompetitive mergers, break up harmful mergers, reject deals without court orders. Antirust regulators will get more power to halt and review mergers with this bill. They could ban unions with companies with track records of antitrust violations or other “corporate crime” instances in the past decade.

Crucially, PAMA would include procedures for reviewing past mergers and breaking up future “harmful deals” that allegedly hurt competition. Despite approving similar tech mergers earlier, the Federal Trade Commission has signaled a willingness to split up tech giants like Meta. With PAMA, it’ll become easier to unwind such acquisitions and force brands like Instagram and WhatsApp to operate as separate businesses.

However, this act isn’t entirely focused on tech, but Warren clarified that industry was a target. Earlier, she cautioned the FTC on Amazon’s proposed buyout of MGM Studios and even challenged Lockheed Martin’s attempt to buy Aerojet Rocketdyne.

If PAMA becomes law, it will ban huge deals like the Amazon-MGM union (worth over $8.4 billion), Microsoft’s Activision deal ($68.7 billion), and relatively modest acquisitions like Google’s planned buyout of Mandiant ($5.4 billion). Tech firms would essentially have to focus on acquiring ‘small’ companies and forego deals meant to exert dominance in a given market or expand market share.

However, PAMA will face some obstacles before reaching President Biden’s desk. The first is that both the House and Senate bills have no Republican cosponsors. Even if the bill clears the House, the Senate bill could fail unless the sitting Democrats support it.

You.com launches YouWrite, an AI-powered writing tool powered by OpenAI

By

Osheen Jain

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March 17, 2022

You.com has launched YouWrite, a new tool that uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 model to generate snippets for documents when given a prompt. Socher, CEO/founder of You.com, says that this new tool is a personal AI writer. You.com is a search engine that leverages natural language processing and artificial intelligence to understand search queries, parse them into different languages, and rank results. It was launched by Bryan McCann and Richard Socher just a few months ago.

You.com co-founder and CEO Richard Socher claim that the company uses technology to help people “live better and more productive lives.” The platform summarises search results from web pages and is extensible with built-in search apps, so users don’t have to leave the results page. This new tool, called YouWrite, leverages OpenAI’s GPT-3, an AI system that can generate human-like emails, recipes, poetry, movie script, short stories, and more.

Users can type a query like “How to write an essay,” and also specify the length (e.g., paragraph), tone (e.g., persuasive), the audience (e.g., students, teachers, or marketers), and the content of the text (e.g., “two paragraphs on the Cold War”). YouWrite will generate the content according to the specified information.

Socher demonstrated how YouWrite could write paragraphs explaining ‘why dogs are awesome’ or a boilerplate rejection letter for a job candidate in a demo.

However, there’s a risk of the system becoming susceptible to bias and toxicity because language systems such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 learn to “write” by analyzing vast chunks of text from websites, including problematic sources that advance misinformation, conspiracy theories, racism, ageism, sexism, and ableism. Socher claims that YouWrite can prevent problematic outputs using filters and other techniques, like human feedback, on the backend.

YouWrite could also detect when its output might contain sensitive content, such as references to violence, and append a warning label. YouWrite will be free to start, but users who generate more extended outputs will eventually have to pay for the service.

Microsoft partners with Synaptiq to launch Machine Learning vision tool in Hospitals

By

Dipayan Mitra

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March 17, 2022

Microsoft Synaptiq Machine Learning vision tool

Global technology giant Microsoft announces that it has partnered with actionable artificial intelligence services and solutions providing company Synaptiq to launch a new machine vision tool to reduce infections in hospitals.

The collaboration aims at addressing a challenging medical issue of infections caused by central lines inserted into the body to deliver chemotherapy or other drugs.

Microsoft identified central line infections as a major issue, which led to the commencement of this new project of developing solutions for the problem. It has been a long-standing problem in the United States as infections cause countless deaths every year.

The prime reason for the spread of such infections is inefficient and improper care of lines, allowing pathogens to enter the body.

Therefore the newly launched novel machine vision tool will considerably help reduce those numbers. The competent tool uses cell phone photographs to analyze and evaluate the condition line dressings to help identify risks.

The machine vision tool sends an alert to designated users when it identifies an issue in the lines using Microsoft Teams application, enabling workers to quickly fix it to minimize the chances of infection spreading.

Additionally, the tool also uses Microsoft Power BI for its dashboards collating the data. Synaptiq is now looking for healthcare partners for the pilot to train and evaluate the tool, which could be used in hospitals in the future.

United States-based actionable AI firm Synaptiq was founded by Sklarew and Tim Oates in 2015. The company specializes in building AI-powered apps in partnership with its customers.

Sklarew said, “We especially look for clients and partners that are interested in more strategic relationships where we have an opportunity to co-develop, co-market, and/or co-sell solutions or products. This includes creating spin-offs to bring new, leading-edge innovations to market, faster, as new products.”

Tesla Fires Employee for Posting Driverless Tech Review on YouTube

By

Dipayan Mitra

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March 17, 2022

Tesla Fires Employee Posting Driverless Tech Review YouTube

Self-driving vehicles manufacturer Tesla recently fired one of its employees for posting driverless tech reviews on his YouTube channel AI Addict.

According to a CNBC report, the employee named John Bernal was a part of Tesla’s autopilot division.

Bernal, in the video, showed his subscribers how Tesla’s Full Self Driving Beta system worked in different locations around Silicon Valley.

According to him, his senior officials told him that posting such videos was against the company policy stating the act to be a conflict of interest, which led to job loss in the second week of February 2022.

As per a copy of the company’s social media policy provided by a Tesla employee, it does not mention anything regarding publicly criticizing the company’s products. The policy notes, “Tesla relies on the common sense and good judgment of its employees to engage in responsible social media activity.”

It mentions social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, LinkedIn, WeChat, and personal blogs, but not YouTube. Therefore it is hard to judge the actual implication of the policy.

John Bernal did not speak about the reason behind his termination during the time of his release, but the matter came into the limelight once his videos started surfacing on social media.

“A manager from my Autopilot team tried to dissuade me from posting any negative or critical content in the future that involved FSD Beta. They held a video conference with me but never put anything in writing,” said Bernal.

He began his career with Tesla in August 2020 as a data annotation specialist in a San Mateo, California office and was recently put into the role of advanced driver assistance systems test operator before being fired.

Bernal claims that he has always been transparent with his job, as he has mentioned even on his LinkedIn profile about his YouTube channel and his association with Tesla.

Snowflake acquires Streamlit for $800 million

By

Osheen Jain

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March 16, 2022

A fully managed data warehouse-as-a-service platform, Snowflake has acquired Streamlit for $800 million. This company helps customers manage data in the cloud without cloud vendor lock-in. Streamlit developed a popular open-source project for building data-based apps.

Benoît Dageville, co-founder and president of products at Snowflake, said that Snowflake became familiar with Streamlit because their customers and in-house people were using it. “We have both the same vision — Streamlit and Snowflake — which is all about democratizing access to data. I would describe it very simply as making it super easy to interact with data,” Dageville said.

He also said that Streamlit fills in a big missing piece in the Snowflake platform by allowing data scientists to build apps that bring data to life for non-technical users. Snowflake has all the technical elements for accessing and managing the data in the cloud, and Streamlit fills the native data visualization piece that they lacked.

“It will make it easier for Snowflake customers to put their data-driven applications into production, which has been a consistent challenge in the data science and machine learning space,” Adam Ronthal, a research VP in Gartner’s ITL data and analytics group.

Streamlit was the brainchild of Google X and Zoox employees that wanted to build an open-source project that made it easier for users to build custom applications that interacted with data.

The co-founder and CEO of Streamlit, Adrien Treuille, started talking to snowflake last fall, and both the companies were a great fit both technologically and culturally. The company was working on a commercial cloud service that has become part of the Snowflake platform. Treuille said that thousands of people are using the platform to build applications, and millions are using apps built on top of Streamlit.

Impactsure Technologies has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program

By

Dipayan Mitra

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March 16, 2022

Impactsure Technologies Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program

Strategic consulting and technology services providing company Impactsure Technologies announces it has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program.

Impactsure, which is built on Google Cloud, will enable financial institutions and corporate customers to introduce AI and ML solutions to drastically increase operational efficiency while reducing compliance risks.

Recently the company was awarded Best Trade Finance Implementation Award in the best adoption of tools and governance category by IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Innovation Awards 2021.

Impactsure’s Trade Finance solution would enable banks, financial institutions, and corporations to manage critical processing and compliance-related requirements through advanced intelligent data analytics and document processing.

CEO and Founder of Impactsure, Dharmarajan, said, “Being a technology partner to Google Cloud is a significant development for Impactsure. It will enable us to expand our market presence through advanced data security tools that support compliance and data privacy.”

The Secure Unified Responsive Engine (SURE) of Impactsure scans, processes, classifies, and extracts structured and unstructured data from documents in various file formats, which streamlines complex corporate banking and trade finance operations that are labor-intensive, error-prone, and subject to stringent compliance regulations.

Mumbai-based technology consulting organization Impactsure was founded by Ashish Mohan Jha, Dharmarajan S, and Subramaniyan Neelakandan in 2019. The company specializes in providing artificial intelligence solutions to enable users to examine documents used as supporting documents for bank guarantees, letters of credit, credit operations, remittances, collections, mortgages, discounting, treasury documents, and many others.

Its customer base includes clients from various industries such as legal, education, BFSI, pharma, shipping, healthcare, manufacturing, and more. Impactsure’s products have helped its clients save more than 80% on human labor by allowing them to process complex documents in less than 10 minutes.

“Our products help human operators reduce the time taken to inspect complex documents by identifying different types of discrepancies, highlighting exceptions, and uncovering hidden patterns,” said Founder Director and CTO of Impactsure, Subramaniyan Neelakandan.

Cybersecurity Insurance provider Cowbell Cyber raises $100 million in Series B Funding Round

By

Dipayan Mitra

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March 16, 2022

Leading cybersecurity for insurance providing company Cowbell Cyber announces that it has raised $100 million in its recently held series B funding round led by Anthemis Group.

Many investors, including Permira Funds, PruVen Capital, NYCA Partners, Viola Fintech, and other existing investors, also participated in the company’s latest funding round.

Cowbell Cyber plans to use the fresh funds to increase investment in data science, underwriting, risk engineering, claim management and to increase support for its reinsurance captive unit named Cowbell Re.

The COVID-19 pandemic had ignited the demand for cybersecurity as most businesses across the world started adopting a digital approach. Moreover, the current ongoing crisis between Russia and Ukraine has further fueled the need for cybersecurity.

According to Cowbell, one out of five medium-to small-sized businesses has remained uninsured in recent times. Therefore, the company plans to change the scenario and responsibly grow its cyber insurance business.

Co-founder and CEO of Cowbell Cyber, Jack Kudale, said, “Cowbell is known for closing insurability gaps, bringing transparency in risk selection and pricing, and offering relevant and customizable coverage, all while extending the value of cyber insurance with risk management solutions that enable organizations to strengthen their resilience to cyber attacks.”

He further added that they intend to be at the forefront of this second wave by revolutionizing cyber risk underwriting. Cowbell Cyber will primarily focus on three critical areas, including funding risk-bearing capabilities to augment reinsurance, investing in closed-loop risk management for policyholders, and improving broker efficiencies in the distribution of cyber insurance.

San Francisco-based cyber insurance firm Cowbell Cyber was founded by Jack Kudale, Prab Reddy, Rajeev Gupta, and Trent Cooksley in 2019. The company specializes in offering standalone, individualized, and easy-to-understand cyber insurance for small and medium-sized businesses. To date, Cowbell Cyber has raised more than $123 million over three funding rounds.