DiGiSPICE: Industry Monitoring 31 January 2019
- Priyanka Kanodia
- Jan 31, 2019
- 7 min read
DiGiSPICE
Competitors
Paytm buys IAN-backed Nightstay to expand travel business
Publication- VCCircle
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Digital payments company Paytm has launched domestic hotel bookings on its platform and has acquired last-minute hotel bookings app Nightstay to expand its travel business. The company said in a statement that it will investing upwards of Rs 500 crore for scaling the hotel booking business and expanding its portfolio. Nightstay Travels Pvt. Ltd was founded in 2015 by former Info Edge (India) Ltd executive Nasr Khan. It procures unsold inventory from hotel owners at a discount and offers the rooms under three categories – boutique, business class and luxury class hotels.
It operates on dynamic pricing for partner hotels with inventory being made available for booking every morning. Users can book their stay for up to three days at one go and avail the last-minute deal. It works with hotels in 12 cities across the country. Paytm’s parent One97 Communications Ltd has been on a deal-making spree lately. It acquired the operator of fintech application Balance in August last year and bought Delhi-based mobile technology startup Cube26 Software Pvt. Ltd in June.
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Industry News
Accel backs Streamsource, its maiden blockchain investment in India
Publication- ET Tech
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Streamsource, a blockchain marketplace for unsecured personal loans, has raised $1 million in seed funding from Accel India, making it the early-stage venture investor’s first local investment in the blockchain sector.
Founded in May 2018, Streamsource allows lenders to buy and sell consumer leads in a secure and private way. A customer can evaluate a another consumer’s creditworthiness against a lender’s model, without divulging details of the consumer or getting access to the lender’s model.
“Both parties are completely private and do not share confidential information with each other. Both sides are protecting their data, while still transacting with each other,” said Mayank Tewari, co-founder of Streamsource.
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Wilfredo Sotolongo lays out Lenovo’s gameplan for the IoT market
Publication- ET CIO
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
The numbers are truly staggering. Research agency Gartner forecasts that there will be 20.4 billion IoT connected things in the world by 2020. Lenovo, the leading global PC and Smart Devices wants to have a piece of the action. The company is training its sights on the IoT market. In a feature interview with ETCIO.COM, Wilfredo Sotolongo, General Manager, Internet of Things (IoT) at Lenovo Data Center Group shares the company’s strategy to gain a foothold in the IoT market.
On Lenovo’s market strategy for digital technologies We attack different markets through our segments dedicated to major technology trends like cloud, mobility, AI, IoT and 5G. each of the technology segments has its own segment General Manager. As the GM for IoT segment I take care of the IoT solution set. We also have a GM for the AI piece who is also responsible for high performance computing.
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Accenture to sell software that eats up BPO jobs
Publication- Financial Chronicle
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Accenture Plc, the global consulting firm, will begin selling automation software that has already eliminated about 40,000 internal roles. The new platform, that’s been five years in development, suggests ways to streamline and automate processes in areas such as finance and accounting, marketing and procurement.
Debbie Polishook, the group chief executive officer of Accenture Operations, said that all its workers affected have been retrained by the company for other jobs. Over the time the company was developing SynOps its headcount kept growing. It currently employs 469,000 people, up from 425,000 in 2017.
Accenture Operations, the company’s outsourcing unit, once used human workers in mostly low-wage countries such as India, to handle routine data entry and customer service tasks for clients. Now that unit is hoping this new software will help clients’ achieve further savings by--at least in some cases -- eliminating the need for humans altogether.
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IoT Community announces SPTIoTCoE as Part of Domain Expertise Initiative
Publication- BW CIO World
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
The IoT Community (Internet of Things Community), the world’s largest community of corporate executives, IoT professionals and practitioners, announced the formation of its security, privacy and trust focused IoT Center of Excellence (SPTIoTCoE). It will be co-chaired by Nancy Shemwell, COO of the IoT Community and Dipto Chakravarty, CTO at Exostar. Ms. Shemwell previously served as the CEO at the cybersecurity firm, Vericlave, and currently serves as chair of their Board of Advisors. Serving as vice chair of the CoE is Jason Cook, MD at the Chertoff Group.
“I am honored to announce the formation of our SPTIoTCoE, and proud to work with industry experts Dipto and Jason,” said Ms. Shemwell. “Our charter is to provide meaningful, actionable IoT security input to established security frameworks and standards, provide industry master classes, use-cases, and best practice advice. This CoE will bring together a team of security icons whose knowledge in the Security, Privacy and Trust IoT domain will add a strong voice to the ever evolving effort to secure the IoT networks.”
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Blockchain, the new technology of trust
Publication- Telangana Today
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Whether it is for having a secured database of land records or to have leakage proof implementation of government schemes, one technology that can be used is blockchain. The technology can be leveraged by almost all the government departments to maintain transparency, security and privacy of data. Telangana, the youngest State, has been a pioneer in this regard as has set up a Blockchain District, signed partnerships to secure certificates issued by IIIT Basar and to track the credit history of self-help groups.
Though mostly used in bitcoin dealings, the blockchain technology can be used in any and every field where data is involved. Many private financial technology companies are embracing the technology and experts point out that the time is right for governments to adopt this technology in a big way. By using blockchain, government schemes can be made leakage-proof and transparent.
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Japanese IT Giant Fujitsu Develops Blockchain-Based Electricity Sharing Project
Publication- Krypto Money
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Fujitsu, the Japanese IT firm successfully tested a blockchain-based solution for the inefficiencies in electricity surplus management. A local power distribution company ENERES partnered Fujitsu on the project.
According to the press release published by the company on Jan. 29, blockchain has been employed to increase the success rates of power sharing, that was administered through a process known as Demand Response (DR).
DR is basically an agreement between utility companies and consumers that is aimed to anticipate periods of peak demand by ensuring surplus power is available to those who need it. According to Fujitsu, the current technology uses makes DR an inefficient mechanism and blockchain has demonstarted improvement in the system.
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Ugandan Coffee Maker Uses Blockchain To Track Their Coffee Products
Publication- Krypto Money
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
A Ugandan coffee company, Carico Cafe Connoisseur adopts blockchain technology in order to certify its coffee shipments, assuring consumers that all of their products are from the right source. According to a Business Daily report on January 25, 2019, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) will be used to track coffee’s raw materials as it moves along the supply chain before reaching the stores. Founded in 2016, the coffee company now tracks delivery data of beans by farmers to collection centers, warehouses, inspection centers, and its final exportation through a blockchain solution.
As blockchain technology is gaining traction, more and more companies across the globe are willing to adopt the technology to track their products. The product range being tracked ranged from luxury goods to farming to the general supply chain. The blockchain tracking technology ensures that the consumers know the exact source of the product they are using, bringing full transparency into the trade.
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SWIFT Collaborates with Blockchain Consortium R3 To Launch A PoC Gateway
Publication- Krypto Money
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Gottfried Leibbrandt, the CEO of major global banking payments network SWIFT has announced there plans to launch a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) gateway to enable blockchain software firm R3 to link to GPI (Global Payments Innovation) payments from their platform.
Leibbrandt revealed the plans in a panel with Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple at the Paris Fintech Forum on Jan. 30. SWIFT currently has around 10,000 banks in its network. While the firm has taken part in several blockchain pilots last year, nothing substantial pertaining to its legacy wire transfer architecture was introduced.
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Blockchain Technology Makes Huge Progress Due To Their Real Business Value
Publication- Owlt Market
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Blockchain technology has made rapid advancements in the recent time that has definitely raised its credibility in the international market. Despite the fact that it originated as an operating platform of cryptocurrency it has carved its way to other domains successfully. Even when there is a significant drop in the values of digital currency it did not make any impact on blockchain related products and services.
The industry experts support the fact that it might take another couple of years for its impact to be felt but it remains indifferent from cryptocurrencies falter. Blockchain, therefore, remain viable and popular because of its eminent characteristics and business values applications.
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Opinion: Are There Really Less Women at Blockchain Conferences?
Publication- Crypto News
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Recently, a study conducted by event software platform Bizzabo, said that three quarters of crypto events attendees are men. According to news portal Bitcoin.com, the research covered nearly 100 conferences across 15 countries. These are all events visited by professionals from the crypto industry and related sectors who want to stay informed about the latest developments in the crypto space.
The study showed that more than three quarters (79%) of attendees were male, while only one quarter (21%) were female. In November, we released the Gender Diversity & Inclusion in Events Report and found that 70 percent of all event speakers are also male.
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10 Best IoT Platforms in 2019
Publication- CIOL
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
Internet of Things (IoT) is among the fastest growing industries nowadays. We can see connected device in our homes and offices, even now Indian car manufacturers are using IoT to connect our cars to offer smarter and effective commute.
The objective of connecting devices using IoT is to communicate information. This implementation involved in building IoT platform and there are some giants and top IoT players that we talked previously 5 best IoT platforms, now we are looking ahead for some more players in the industry with some unique features.
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Banks to launch blockchain-based funding for SMEs
Publication- Horizons Cottages
Edition- Online
Date- 31 January, 2019
ICICI, Axis, HDFC along with 8 other banks are all set to launch the country’s first block-chain linked funding for small as well as medium enterprises (SMEs). The step is expected to bring about a major difference to the lending practices.
The list of banks includes ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Yes Bank, HDFC Bank, RBL Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, and South Indian Bank. Apart from these, the State Bank of India, IndusInd Bank and Bank of Baroda will also be involved in this initiative as outside members, as per the report by The Economic Times.
As per the sources, all the discussions between the participating banks is being mediated by a consortium called the Blockchain Infrastructure Company (BIC). The bank representatives have had a few meetings for establishing a live network to ensure transparency and security in the supply-chain finance.
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