DiGiSPICE: Industry Monitoring 23 January 2019
- Priyanka Kanodia
- Jan 24, 2019
- 13 min read
DiGiSPICE
Industry News
Bharti Airtel starts rollout of 4G on 900 MHz
Publication- The Economic Times
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Bharti Airtel NSE 0.05 % customers may soon be able to experience better 4G data speeds even indoors as the telco begins the rollout of the technology using spectrum in the highly efficient 900 MHz band across 10 circles, including Delhi and Mumbai. Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer at Bharti Airtel, said introduction of LTE 900 technology is primarily aimed at boosting our indoor network coverage, and 4G availability will also contribute to an increase in traffic on voice over LTE (VoLTE).
The Sunil Mittal-led telco is working with Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei and ZTE to execute deployment across Mumbai, Delhi, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kolkata, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, North East, Assam and Rajasthan. “We see healthy growth in VoLTE traffic volume as more customers upgrade to 4G smartphones.
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Paytm crosses 100 million travel ticket bookings milestone within 3 years
Publication- Business Standard
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Digital payments company Paytm Tuesday said it has crossed a milestone of selling over 100 million flight, train and bus tickets within three years. The company said it has acquired a customer base of nearly 13 million as of January 2019. It further said it is aiming for a two-fold growth in travel ticketing volume in 2019-20. Paytm, the brand owned by One97 Communications, had set up its travel business in Bengaluru in 2016 with the launch of flight and train bookings through its app and website. A large chunk of the travel ticket bookings on Paytm is driven through its mobile app.
Paytm said it has witnessed three times growth in its 'travel business' with more than 38 million tickets sold in 2017-18. "The company has been able to effectively address the needs of mobile-only travellers by introducing a host of new features to simplify ticketing for first-time users across tier-II and III cities. The company also witnessed that tier-II and III have contributed to over 65 per cent of its growth," Paytm said.
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Hungama Music starts original audio programming in Tamil ‘Endrendrum Punnagai’
Publication- Indian Television
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Hungama Music has announced its foray into original audio programming from 22 January. Starting with Endrendrum Punnagai, a Tamil audio original, Hungama Music will soon launch additional shows in other key Indian languages including Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi, among others. Endrendrum Punnagai is hosted by RJ Sindhu and is now available to stream on Hungama Music. Speaking about the foray into audio originals, Hungama Digital Media COO Siddhartha Roy said, “Like video content, there is an increasing demand for differentiated and local content on music streaming platforms. Over 48 per cent of our audience consumes content in languages besides Hindi.
Our audio originals will help us enhance the user experience by offering an enriching catalogue of exclusive content, besides a multi-lingual and multi-genre library of songs and music videos. We plan to launch ve to six audio originals in the next 12 months and aim to increase our regional user base by almost 30 per cent.” Hosted by RJ Sindhu, a known name on radio in Chennai – often called the morning energy shot for her listeners, Endrendrum Punnagai will focus on musicians from Tamil Nadu and their contribution to the world of music. The initial episodes of the show will be dedicated to the internationally-acclaimed musical maestro, AR Rahman, with subsequent episodes being dedicated to other wellknown musicians from Tamil Nadu.
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Singtel, Ericsson and Singapore Polytechnic Open 5G Garage, Singapore's 1st Live 5G Facility
Publication- IT News Online
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Singtel, Ericsson and Singapore Polytechnic (SP) have opened Singapore's first live 5G facility at SP's Dover Road campus. The facility, named 5G Garage, is connected to Singtel's latest pilot 5G network located at Ayer Rajah and runs on 3.5 GHz trial spectrum granted by the Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA). Conceptualized by Singtel and Ericsson, 5G Garage will serve as a training center, test bed and ideation lab to develop Singapore's 5G ecosystem and drive the adoption of 5G by enterprises in their digital transformations.
According to the latest Ericsson Mobility Report, 5G is slated to be the fastest generation of cellular technology to be rolled out on a global scale. With ultra-fast connectivity speeds and low latency rates, 5G is set to transform industries such as transportation, logistics, healthcare and manufacturing, and enable a future of smart cities, autonomous vehicles and Artificial Intelligence. The first-of-its-kind 5G collaboration between enterprise, industry and an institute of higher learning in Singapore, 5G Garage was officially launched at SP's Engineering Show 2019.
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Within six months of launch, Paytm Money now claims to have more than 1M users
Publication- Inventiva
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
A new offering from Paytm Money will not only allow users to view all their investments in one place but also track their daily portfolio performance irrespective of their channel or mode of investment. Indian payments conglomerate, Paytm’s wealth management platform, Paytm Money on Tuesday said that it has more than 1 million users on their platform. In a statement, the company also announced that it’s introducing a new feature, which will allow users to track the performance of all their mutual fund investments on the Paytm Money app for free.
Investors simply need to upload their Consolidated Account Statement (CAS) generated via Karvy Fintech on Paytm Money and within minutes they can start tracking all investments in their portfolio right on the Paytm Money app.
During its launch, Paytm Money had received an investment commitment of $10 million for setting up its operations from its parent One97 Communications Limited. Before the launch, the platform already had more than 850,000 users registering for early access, according to the company.
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Big Data, machine learning, data science to drive top job opportunities: Report
Publication- The Economic Times
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Big Data, machine learning and data science will drive top job opportunities this year, says the Salary Benchmark 2019 report by professional recruitment consultancy Michael Page India. Strong hiring activity is expected to continue as roles broaden to senior hires, given an increased demand for senior Indian executives equipped with business and stakeholder management experience. “Movement among senior-level professionals can be attributed to the growth of India’s industries and the availability of talent. This explains the key employment activity within the mid and large manufacturing organisations specialising in chemicals, building materials as well as domestic consumer companies,” said Nicolas Dumoulin, Managing Director at Michael Page India in a statement.
“The entrance of new funds within the private equity sector has also led to senior level hiring. Furthermore the rise of India’s Ecommerce and fintech NSE 0.00 % businesses have increased opportunities for senior talent to move in from established industries such as the FMCG and banking spaces,” added Dumoulin.
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AI, blockchain and cloud will be game changers for the financial services sector
Publication- ET CIO
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
AI is enabling enterprises to unleash the trapped value in their core businesses. With AI/machine learning, we can now achieve bigger goals and deliver greater value to customers. This advanced technology can handle much of the labor-intensive work that experienced, well-trained underwriters and processors have been responsible for in the past. For instance, by leveraging more data and analysing customer default probability, the credit scoring systems can predict behavior, thereby helping lenders come to a more conclusive decision based on data.
On the AI front, we have partnered with a small company and have rolled out some solutions in a small but effective manner. The results have been good and we are looking to scale it up.Today, the utilisation of robotics and automation – along with decisioning logic – has helped to advance enterprise business processes from the sluggish, error-prone efforts few years back to a far more productive environment with a focus on data integrity and customer experience.
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Unpacking blockchain and the potential of open, trustless finance
Publication- ET CIO
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Blockchain has been cast as a “holy grail” technology for all kinds of industry verticals, from consortium banking settlement to supply chain, asset provenance, and more. However, increasingly more businesses are realizing that private blockchains are essentially modified distributed databases - marginal technological innovations that add extra efficiency and transparency to existing IT processes.
Public blockchains, on the other hand, are transformational technologies - innovations that redefine value creation and distribution altogether. By combining cryptography, distributed databases and economic incentives, public blockchains are a complete reworking of the way we think about organizing relationships between users, service providers and networks.
The aim of this article is simple. In order to move blockchain from idealization to implementation, we must understand the real end use-cases of public blockchains, starting with understanding the overarching vision of the technology. To that end, we will highlight one key narrative: open and decentralized finance - what it means, whom it can impact, and how it can change the world.
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Banking tech institute proposes blueprint for blockchain platform in India
Publication- Business Standard
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has come out with a blueprint of Blockchain Platform for the banking sector. The blueprint has suggested broad roadmap on adoption of the new technology in various business and organisational functions along with common protocols to ensure interoperability among different entities as there were no regulatory guidelines in place for adoption of Blockchain technology by banks and financial institutions in India as yet.
The institute has proposed a collaborative approach among all the stakeholders in a network while stressing on the need to evolve a codified set of rules for smooth operations and collaboration. The institute suggested a governance structure besides the layers of applications and services, headed by a steering committee to oversee the implementation of a platform based on Blockchain technology.
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IDRBT proposes road map for blockchain technology
Publication- The Financial Express
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) has come out with a blueprint of blockchain technology for the banking sector. The institute has been working with government, banks and industry for building a blockchain that can serve as a common platform to launch varied applications.
The blueprint has suggested broad roadmap on adoption of the new technology in various business and organisational functions along with common protocols to ensure interoperability among different entities as there are no regulatory guidelines in place for adoption of blockchain in banks and financial institutions.
Currently, interoperability between different blockchain platforms is not well established. Common infrastructure and technology is a far superior approach to build a true ecosystem around blockchain technology, in the absence of which the stakeholders like corporates have to hook to different blockchain networks.
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Tenders for smart city project to be received in February
Publication- The Times of India
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
The tenders for smart city projects will be received next month. This was stated by MC commissioner, K K Yadav during Chandigarh Smart City advisory council meeting, which was held on Tuesday. During the meeting, Yadav said that the tenders for 24x7 water supply in Manimajra with smart meters, augmentation of five sewerage treatment plants and construction of one new plant of two MLD capacity at Kishangarh, public bike sharing and for construction of animal carcass incineration will be received by the second week of February. The third meeting of the advisory council, Chandigarh Smart City was held under the leadership of MP Kirron Kher at Sector 17.
The commissioner gave detailed status of various works under smart city as well as convergence projects being executed by engineering wing of Chandigarh administration and municipal corporation. Mayor Rajesh Kumar demanded that the works of legacy waste biomining should be taken on priority. Chief engineer, UT, explained that the works of public plaza and subway in Sector 17 will be completed by the end of February, 2019. He further said that the tender of construction of bus queue shelters have been floated and work will be allotted very soon. MP Kirron Kher suggested constructing a tourist reception centre in Sector 17 plaza also to cater the needs of tourists visiting the city beautiful.
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What does a Big Data Analyst do?
Publication- The Hans India
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
The advent of modern computer networks and the democratisation of information has exponentially multiplied the amount of digital data being generated. According to a Cisco estimate global IP Traffic will reach 2 zettabytes by 2019. (1 zettabyte = 1 billion terabytes). This unprecedented increase in data has come about not only due to employment of existing methods, but from new horizons that have seen massive growth in the number of connected devices.
Portable devices are at the center of data growth. Plus, additional volumes from M2M (Machine to Machine) data through AI and IoT technologies are responsible for constant data accumulation. The term Big Data has come into daily parlance owing to a shift in analysing structured relational databases toward working with massive quantities of unstructured databases generated through a variety of sources. There developed an urgent need to build tools that analyse and interpret such unstructured datasets.
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CBDT using data analytics to identify people not filing tax returns
Publication- ANI News
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
The Central Board of Direct Taxes is identifying people through a non-filers monitoring system by using data analytics and has asked them to assess their tax liability for the assessment year 2018-19, file income tax returns or submit an online response within 21 days. The non-filers monitoring system aims to identify and monitor persons who enter into high-value transactions and have potential tax liabilities but have still not filed their tax returns.
An analysis was carried out to identify non-filers about whom specific information was available in the database of the Income Tax Department The sources of information include statements of financial transactions, tax deduction at source, tax collection at source, information about foreign remittances, exports and imports data. A government statement said data analysis has identified several potential nonfilers who carried out high-value transactions in the financial year 2017-18 but have still not filed income tax returns for the assessment year 2018-19 (relating to the financial year 2017-18).
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Formation Of Revolutionary Economy Through Blockchain Technology
Publication- Owlt Market
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Blockchain technology has marked the beginning of a revolution the moment it came in existence. The industry experts believe that it can change the entire face of remittance and financial operations. Renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Silvio Micali supported this claim at a recent gathering and even stated that this technology is capable of creating the foundation for the borderless economy.
In an interview with Bloomberg’s Daybreak Asia, the professor chalked-out the most important and unique features of this technology which will help in forming the path of such seamless economy. The three most important properties of blockchain-enabled system are decentralization, security, and scalability. However, in the current scenario, it is only possible to achieve two properties simultaneously at any time as mentioned by Bloomberg.
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Latest Blockchain Survey Unveil Technology Statistics And Enterprise Business Investments
Publication- Owlt Market
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
One of the “Big Four” multinational organizations Deloitte has come up with an interesting blockchain survey which has revealed some intrinsic details of the market and the perception of this emerging ecosystem. The 2018 global blockchain survey report of Deloitte includes opinions and outlook of about 1,000 blockchain executives across the world. Amazingly, it covers many aspects surrounding this domain that brings out a completely new, fresh and positive image of blockchain happening within the enterprises.
As per the Deloitte’s survey, about 95 percent of blockchain executives that belong to different sectors are making the investment in this form of distributed ledger. In addition to this, about 26 percent of the companies are keen to put their funds somewhere between $1 million and $5 million in this future technology while other 23 percent can invest about $5 million to $10 million.
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Blockchain Accelerator Program Brings Digitizing Securities On Front-End Of Market
Publication- Owlt Market
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
IBM’s blockchain accelerator program has earned quite a popularity and space in the global market. It is known that IBM has been making huge developments in the blockchain industry and it is one of the pioneers leading with a wonderful team of blockchain researchers and developers. The latest update in the blockchain industry has caught the attention of everyone as Securitize, the digitizing securities compliance platform that runs on this technology is about to join this program.
Securitize is one of the leading names that will make a part of this group. Founded in 2017 this is a compliance platform and protocol which is very popular for managing and issuing securities, share buy-backs, dividends, and distributions on a blockchain-based platform.
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Here's why the Indian Army Chief's demand for use of AI and Big Data in Defence operations is the need of the hour
Publication- Digit
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
The first ever aerial bomb was dropped by the Austrians on Venice in 1849 using an unmanned hot air balloon, but most of us associate the advent of aerial bombing with the infamous Hiroshima incident from World War II which outright flattened the city and more than 80,000 of its population. With time, war tactics evolved to replace hot air balloons and hefty aircrafts with unmanned combat vehicles more popularly known as drones, which have been proving their lethal efficiency since the Gulf War.
The wars of the future, however, will not be fought with bombs and guns. The new over-the-air warfare will be lead by cyberwar and India as a nation is one of the most ill-prepared countries to handle the threat, especially from states like China. At the recently concluded National Conference on Self Reliance in Defence Manufacturing in Hyderabad, Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat impressed upon the need for the use of AI and Big Data in India’s defence operations. The apex officer said that our adversary on the northern border (China) is spending a lot of money on AI and cyber warfare and that India is not in a position to be left behind.
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Trend Micro’s IoT Telecom Security Solution Receives VMware Certification
Publication- Express Computer
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Trend Micro recently announced that its telecom IoT security solution, Virtual Network Function Suite (VNFS), has been certified as VMware Ready. This designation verifies the compatibility of the Trend Micro solution to secure modern networks that are built to support 5G and Internet of Things (IoT).
“We are pleased that Trend Micro qualifies for the VMware Ready logo, signifying to customers that it has met specific VMware interoperability standards and works effectively with VMware cloud infrastructure,” said Kristen Edwards, director, Technology Alliance Partner Program, VMware. “This signifies to customers that the Trend Micro solution can be deployed in production environments with confidence and can speed time to value within customer environments.”
Certification by VMware allows communications service providers who prefer or have already adopted VMware vCloud NFV to easily add network security services from Trend Micro. Those who are interested in the Trend Micro solution but haven’t virtualized their networks yet will find it much easier to set up an evaluation environment with VMware vCloud NFV.
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Citizens Reserve is building a supply chain platform on the blockchain
Publication- Inventiva
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
Citizens Reserve, a Bay Area startup, has a broad goal of digitizing the supply chain. Last fall, the company launched the Alpha version of Suku, a Supply Chain as a Service platform built on the blockchain. Today, it announced a partnership with Smartrac, an RFID tag manufacturer, based in Amsterdam, as a key identity piece for the platform.
Companies use RFID to track products from field or factory to market. Eric Piscini, CEO at Citizens says this partnership helps solve a crucial piece of digitizing the supply chain. It provides a way to trace products on their journey to market, and ensure their provenance, whether that is to be sure no labor was exploited in production, environmental standards were maintained or that the products were stored under the proper conditions to ensure freshness.
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Tech Mahindra is betting big on blockchain, AI and deep machine learning: CEO Gurnani
Publication- CNBC TV18
Edition- Online
Date- 23 January, 2019
CP Gurnani, MD & CEO of Tech Mahindra, spoke to CNBC-TV18 about the growth trends for 2019 and the company's business prospects. “Everything that we discuss here today with all the 3000 delegates at the World Economic Forum (WEF), ultimately the theme boils down to connected world and connected solutions and who better than Tech Mahindra for connected world, “ Gurnani said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
"The growth trends of 2018 will continue for the company," he said. “Technology will continue to have a good run mainly because the consumer needs are more suited to their own needs and I do believe that personalization will drive the business,” he said, adding that using data for personalisation and customization of services is key.
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