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The Tech Panda takes a look at recent tech launches.
CIFDAQ, a new-age fintech company that offers integrated solutions spanning the blockchain layer 1, native coin, exchange services, MPC Wallet, DeFi, NFT, gaming, and other products, launched its India operations. CIFDAQ Blockchain Ecosystem Ind Limited is now officially registered in India and headquartered in Mumbai, with additional offices strategically located in Delhi, Bengaluru, and Kolkata. Its debut in the Indian market represents its commitment to advancing the blockchain landscape.
Himanshu Maradiya, Founder & Chairman of CIFDAQ, expressed his enthusiasm for CIFDAQ’s entry into India, stating: “We are thrilled to embark on this new chapter of CIFDAQ’s journey as we set foot in the vibrant and dynamic Indian market. Our innovative solutions are poised to address the unique challenges and opportunities present in India’s blockchain and digital finance ecosystem. We aim to empower businesses and individuals with enhanced security and efficiency, driving growth and innovation across various sectors.”
Rahul Maradiya, Co-Founder and Global CEO, CIFDAQ commented, “We envision CIFDAQ as a catalyst for change, empowering businesses and individuals with cutting-edge solutions that enhance security, efficiency, and accessibility in the digital finance space. Our goal is to revolutionize the blockchain ecosystem and unlock its full potential, paving the way for a more inclusive and prosperous future.”
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CIFDAQ’s innovative solutions bridge the gap between traditional frameworks and blockchain technology, empowering businesses to thrive in a rapidly evolving Web 3.0 landscape, ensuring a balance between centralized government, decentralized economy, and users’ interests, CIFDAQ prioritizes transparency, security, scalability, and synergy with centralized economies.
IntrCity SmartBus, an Indian inter-city mobility platform, launched the industry’s first Digital Luggage Tag feature. This innovation is set to redefine luggage management by streamlining the process. With this new feature, over 200,000 passengers traveling on IntrCity SmartBus across more than 630 routes in 16 states can enjoy a seamless and stress-free journey.
The Why
The importance of luggage for passengers cannot be overstated. Luggage serves as a vital component of the overall travel experience, ensuring that passengers can transport their belongings safely and conveniently to their destination. With the Luggage Tag feature, the aim is to communicate accountability and build passenger confidence in bus travel. The Digital Luggage Tagging system reduces the likelihood of luggage getting lost or mishandled, ensuring passengers can travel smoothly without worrying about misplaced belongings. This advanced system simplifies luggage handling and gives passengers peace of mind about the safety of their possessions.
Manish Rathi, Co-founder & CEO of IntrCity SmartBus, expressed his enthusiasm about the new feature, stating, “We recognize the challenges and anxieties that come with managing luggage during travel. The introduction of the Digital Luggage Tag feature is our way of addressing these issues, ensuring our passengers enjoy a smooth and worry-free travel experience. Furthermore, our dedication to innovation and passenger convenience has been unwavering. From introducing personalized assistance onboard—SmartBus Captains to pioneering the installation of urinals inside our buses, alongside comfortable boarding lounges for seamless boarding experiences, we have consistently aimed to redefine the standards of intercity bus travel in India.”
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Using cutting-edge technology, IntrCity SmartBus provides a secure and effective solution that meets the changing demands of today’s travelers. Additionally, by reducing the use of paper tags, IntrCity SmartBus is actively promoting a more environmentally friendly future. This sustainable approach not only reduces waste but also plays a role in the essential sustainability efforts of today’s world, showcasing the company’s dedication to ecological responsibility and improving customer service.
The Digital Luggage Tag feature is ingeniously designed to simplify luggage handling for travelers using IntrCity SmartBus services. As passengers board, they hand over their luggage to our dedicated Bus Captains, who then quickly capture essential details about the luggage’s appearance and destination through a secure digital system. What sets this feature apart is its use of advanced technology to generate a unique One-Time Password (OTP) linked to the passenger’s contact number. This OTP acts as a secure verification of the luggage’s status, significantly enhancing efficiency and eliminating the uncertainties commonly associated with traditional luggage handling methods.
Upon departure, passengers simply provide the OTP to their Bus Captain, confirming their luggage and setting the stage for a safe and comfortable journey ahead. With safety as a paramount concern, the Digital Luggage Tag feature adds an extra layer of security, offering passengers peace of mind as they travel.
Qlik®, a company in data integration, analytics, and AI, announced the AI Accelerator. This service is designed as an initial foray for companies looking to explore the possibilities AI can offer, acting as an entry point into the broader landscape of AI-driven analytics.
“Reflecting on our momentum with customers using AI, we see a pivotal shift towards scalable AI, deeply anchored in strong data foundations,” remarks James Fisher, Chief Strategy Officer at Qlik. “Successful AI implementations hinge on exceptional data management, a principle driving our strategy and evidenced in sectors from healthcare to finance. Our focus is on enabling businesses to leverage AI effectively, underpinned by quality data, ensuring AI’s transformative potential is fully realized.”
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Qlik’s AI Accelerator, available to new and existing customers, offers a direct path for rapid integration, simplifying businesses’ initial forays into AI. Designed for swift deployment within existing Qlik applications, this service allows companies to practically apply and experiment with AI’s capabilities in a low-commitment manner. It reflects Qlik’s dedication to making AI accessible, helping businesses to demystify AI technologies and explore their potential impact on operations without substantial upfront commitments.
Qlik’s AI Accelerator is just one element of a comprehensive ecosystem designed to empower businesses at every stage of their data journey. From data integration and analytics to advanced AI-driven insights, Qlik offers a suite of solutions that work together seamlessly, helping businesses to not only understand their current state but also to predict trends and automate decision-making processes.
Confluent, Inc. (NASDAQ:CFLT), the data streaming company, announced Accelerate with Confluent, a program for systems integrators (SIs) that prioritizes excellence in Confluent Professional Services to empower partners to deliver comprehensive data streaming solutions.
“Creating a real-time central nervous system has become an imperative for every organization in order to compete and offer differentiated experiences,” said Paul Mac Farland, SVP of Partner and Innovation Ecosystem, Confluent. “Accelerate with Confluent reimagines our SI partner program, enabling our mutual customers to get to their business outcomes faster. Now, partners can more easily expedite repeatability, profitability, go-to-market efforts, and new service offerings, meeting customer demands.”
The Why
Businesses hoping to thrive in today’s digital-first world need a modern platform for data in motion, in order to provide stellar customer experiences and seamless business operations. Apache Kafka® has become the industry standard for data in motion and is used by more than 150,000 organizations including over 75% of the Fortune 500.
Confluent provides a truly cloud-native experience, completing Kafka with a holistic set of enterprise-grade features to unleash developer productivity, operate efficiently at scale, and meet architectural requirements. Underpinning the platform is a 99.99% uptime SLA and committer-driven expertise, providing support and services with over five million engineering hours of technical experience since 2018. This is coupled with the recent announcement of the general availability of Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink®, a fully managed service for Flink that enables customers to process data in real time and create high-quality, reusable data streams. Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink® enables users to build streaming data pipelines and Confluent integrates with leading vector database vendors to simplify and accelerate the development of critical generative AI initiatives. Confluent allows customers to experience Kafka and Flink as a unified, enterprise-grade platform to connect and process data in real time, wherever it is needed.
With Confluent, customers can accelerate their real-time data streaming journey across any industry and use case, helping teams be more efficient and focus more on productivity. However, Confluent SI partners don’t always have the resources they need to bring data streaming to their applications and end users without direct support from Confluent. Business and technology leads at these companies encounter a wide range of challenges with building and bringing to market new data streaming capabilities that offer their customers the best experience for working with real-time data.
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To help more organizations harness the power of data streaming, Accelerate with Confluent redefines the dynamics of Confluent’s partnership model. It is designed to meet the ever increasing requirements of customers by building, expanding, and innovating through the support of SIs. Partners will be able to choose from multiple avenues for Partner engagement with Professional Services. These paths include:
To address this ongoing challenge, Accelerate with Confluent includes new capabilities to drive higher efficiency with Confluent’s SI ecosystem.
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company added a new media-optimized offering based on NVIDIA GPUs to its growing cloud portfolio. With the NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation GPU, the new cloud-based service provides better productivity and economics for companies in the media and entertainment industry that are challenged with processing video content faster and more efficiently.
“Media companies need low-latency, reliable compute resources that maintain the portability of the workloads they create,” said Shawn Michels, Vice President of Cloud Products at Akamai. “NVIDIA GPUs provide superior price performance when deployed on Akamai’s global edge platform. Together with our Qualified Compute Partners and open platform, we give our customers the capability to architect their next-gen workloads to be cloud agnostic and support multicloud architectures.”
The Why
In a market hyper-focused on using NVIDIA GPUs to support large language modeling, Akamai’s media-tailored GPU service homes in on an industry underserved by current industry offerings, which can be expensive. Building on its rich heritage and deep experience in the space, Akamai fine-tuned its new GPU offering to meet the demanding and specific requirements of the media and entertainment industry.
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Cropin Technology, a global Agtech company launched ‘ak?ara’, the sector’s first purpose-built open-source (Apache 2.0 License and with no restrictions) Micro Language Model (µ-LM) for climate smart agriculture, built on Mistral’s foundation model. ‘Ak?ara’ is designed to address the problems faced by the underserved farming communities in the Global South by removing barriers to knowledge and empowering anyone in the agriculture ecosystem to build frugal and scalable AI solutions for the sector.
Krishna Kumar, Founder & CEO, Cropin said, “In an era where Large Language Models are reshaping jobs, businesses, and customer interactions, the spotlight is now on industry-specific models trained on niche and comprehensive domain data as the ‘next big thing.’ These models can potentially transform agriculture, paving the way for a new era of tech-driven farming in a sector that has traditionally seen limited technological advancement. Domain-specific AI models for agriculture are expected to attract significant investments, offering a practical and economically viable approach to food systems transformation. Ak?ara reinstates our commitment to leading the tech-driven agricultural movement in the years ahead, significantly impacting small-scale farmers’ lives.”
The Why
With the goal of democratizing access to digital technologies and modernizing agriculture for the 21st century, Cropin aims to empower agricultural stakeholders, developers, and researchers to tackle global challenges like food security, climate change, resource conservation – water and soil, regenerative agriculture practices amongst others by providing access to contextual, factual, and actionable information.
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Physics Wallah (PW), an Indian EdTech platform, launched a tech-enabled offline Vidyapeeth Centre in Preet Vihar, Delhi.
PW Offline CEO Ankit Gupta stated, “With the launch of every offline centre, we get closer to our vision of establishing educational hubs across India, making quality education more accessible and alleviating financial burdens on parents. These centres are set to transform the educational landscape of the country.”
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Axis Communications, a network video surveillance platform, launched Axis Cloud Connect, an open cloud-based platform designed to provide customers with more secure, flexible and scalable security solutions. With two decades of experience in cloud connectivity and over a million cloud-connected Axis cameras in use today, Axis Cloud Connect is tailored to work seamlessly with Axis devices, empowering businesses with a comprehensive suite of managed services that support system and device management, video and data delivery, and meet high demand for cybersecurity.
With a focus on adding security, flexibility and scalability to its offerings, Axis has also built the next generation of its video management system (VMS)—AXIS Camera Station—on Axis Cloud Connect. Accordingly, Axis is extending its VMS into a broader offering that includes AXIS Camera Station Pro, Edge and Center. The AXIS Camera Station offering is engineered to more precisely match the needs of users based upon flexible options for video surveillance and device management, architecture and storage, analytics and data management, and cloud-based services.
According to Johan Paulsson, CTO at Axis Communications, “Axis Cloud Connect is a continuation of our commitment to deliver secure-by-design solutions that meet changing customer needs. This offering combines the benefits of cloud technology and hybrid architectures with our deep knowledge of analytics, image usability, cybersecurity and long-term experience with cloud-based solutions—all managed by our team of experts to reduce friction for our customers.”
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S8UL tied up with KRAFTON, the creators of the popular battle royale game – Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI), for the official launch of their latest game, Bullet Echo India.
Bullet Echo India is a multiplayer PvP tactical top-down shooter game, that invites players to form teams, devise strategies, and engage in adrenaline-fueled battles to emerge as the last team standing, similar to a battle royale.
Lokesh Jain aka 8Bit Goldy, Co-Founder of S8UL, expressed his enthusiasm by stating, “We are delighted to partner with KRAFTON for the launch of Bullet Echo India, as this gives us another chance to bring new & enriching gaming experience to the community. With KRAFTON’s expertise and our deep understanding of the Indian gaming community, we are confident that Bullet Echo India will excite players across the country. I also look forward to it opening new avenues for esports athletes trying to make a mark in the competitive landscape”.
The Why
According to the FICCI-EY report titled ‘#Reinvent: India’s media & entertainment sector is innovating for the future,’ shooting games hold a prominent position in India, generating substantial in-app purchase revenues. Also, the rising popularity of gaming influencers has contributed to the expansion of the gaming ecosystem, attracting new cohorts of players.
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S8UL’s lineup of renowned creators, including Mortal, Scout, Regaltos, Snax, JokerKiHaveli, PayalGaming, KaashPlays, and others, will create engaging content for their YouTube audiences during the official launch of Bullet Echo India.
Infratech startup Mytek Innovations Pvt Ltd launched a digital platform that uses open artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help contractors deliver infrastructure projects on time. By leveraging AI tools, Mytek’s platform offers better features than traditional project planning tools that can take up to seven days to build a project plan from scratch. Mytek’s platform helps contractors create a customized project plan instantly and allows for editing the plan as and when needed.
“Today, delays and budget overruns are commonplace in infrastructure projects. Mytek’s platform will be a powerful tool for contractors and subcontractors all around the country that helps contractors save costs and deliver projects on time. We are using the latest technologies to not only revolutionize project planning but also democratize it,” said Shivkumar Borade, founder and chief managing director of Mytek Innovations.
Borade added, “We envision a future where advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence, drives efficiency, sustainability, and innovation in every aspect of the industry. By providing cutting-edge solutions tailored to the needs of contractors, architects, and the infrastructure sector, we aim to empower professionals to overcome challenges, maximize productivity, and achieve unparalleled success. Our vision is to be at the forefront of this transformation, leading the way to a brighter, more efficient future for the construction industry.”
The Why
India has one of the largest construction industries in the world, with an estimated size of over USD 700 billion. And yet, the industry operates in a fragmented fashion, leading to delays, cost overrun, compliance-related delays, and substandard quality of work. Mytek’s platform aims to bridge the gaps in the industry by helping contractors organize all aspects of a project, such as workforce, machinery, tools, materials, and technology.
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Agora, Inc. (NASDAQ: API), a platform for real-time engagement APIs, unveiled its latest innovation, Adaptive Video OptimizationTM (AVO) along with support for the AV1 video codec. This advanced technology harnesses the power of machine learning to dynamically adjust parameters at every step from capture to playback to deliver an enhanced live video streaming experience.
“Reliable and high-quality live streaming is essential in today’s video-dominated media landscape,” stated Tony Zhao, CEO and Co-Founder of Agora. “Our Adaptive Video Optimization technology enables smooth delivery of every video call and livestream—despite network variability, user’s location or device type. These improvements empower Agora’s customers to provide the highest-quality live video user experience.”
“Agora’s Adaptive Video OptimizationTM (AVO) drastically improved the real-time video experience in our app,” said Ellard Capiral, VP of Engineering at social live streaming app KUMU. “Users get smooth, high-quality video without freezes—even on slow connections and older devices. Since implementing AVO, we’ve seen a 30% increase in session length and engagement.”
The Why
In today’s fast-paced digital world, live video calling and streaming often encounters hurdles such as unstable network conditions, packet loss, and limited bandwidth. These challenges can result in freezing, stuttering, grainy video, and dropped connections, diminishing the real-time video experience and negatively impacting user engagement. Adaptive Video OptimizationTM uses a series of advanced machine learning algorithms to address these common issues. By optimizing video quality in real time based on network conditions, device capabilities, and available bandwidth, AVO ensures the highest possible video quality and optimal performance even under varying network scenarios.
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