Jio News, Stories and Latest Updates https://analyticsindiamag.com/news/jio/ Artificial Intelligence news, conferences, courses & apps in India Tue, 13 Aug 2024 05:19:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://analyticsindiamag.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/cropped-aim-new-logo-1-22-3-32x32.jpg Jio News, Stories and Latest Updates https://analyticsindiamag.com/news/jio/ 32 32 India is Likely to Develop its Foundational Model This Year https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-insights-analysis/india-is-likely-to-develop-its-foundational-model-this-year/ Tue, 28 May 2024 12:06:40 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10121875 Why Isn’t There an Alibaba of AI in India Yet

A 'Jio Moment' in AI’ has been long overdue.

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Why Isn’t There an Alibaba of AI in India Yet

The US currently boasts major tech companies such as Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, and Google, along with startups like OpenAI, spearheading AI advancements. Similarly, China is close behind, just a year away in the AI race, with giants like Alibaba and Tencent, as well as emerging players such as 01.AI, leading the charge. And India?

“We need someone to engage as a frontline player in this space actively. Someone who has the resources to start from scratch; not relying on existing solutions but creating foundational models,” Stition.ai founder and Devika creator Mufeed VH told AIM in the latest episode of Tech Talks.

Further, he said that Indian companies can either sponsor or utilise their resources for these initiatives, yet no one has taken the initiative to start. “However, I am optimistic that India will develop a foundational model within this year,” he said.

Is India’s ‘Jio Moment in AI’ Coming Soon?

Recently, Reliance Jio collaborated with NVIDIA for the use of GH200 GPUs to build AI models in India. During his visit to India last year, NVIDIA head Jensen Huang was optimistic about Reliance building its own LLMs that power generative AI applications made in India. 

For now, Reliance Jio is keeping its AI developments under wraps, with no public disclosures to date. “Reliance wants to revolutionise the enterprise space with the use of AI… There is a centre of excellence with 100 experts working on AI solutions. Mukesh believes it is going to be transformative,” said Reliance New Energy Council chairman R A Mashelkar, in a recent interaction with Fortune India.

Meanwhile, Jio recently launched Jio Brain, positioned as the industry’s first 5G-integrated ML platform. It aims to empower telecom networks, enterprise networks, and industry-specific IT environments to incorporate ML tools into their day-to-day operations seamlessly.

TWO, a startup backed by Reliance Jio, also recently launched a family of models called SUTRA. These cost-efficient, multilingual GenAI models excel in 50+ languages, offering speech, search, and visual processing capabilities. 

Renowned startup accelerator JioGenNext introduced its latest cohort, MAP’ 24, consisting of ten dynamic, generative AI startups spanning diverse sectors such as healthcare, banking, legal services, entertainment, and agriculture.

Earlier this year, Jio also partnered with IIT Bombay to bring about initiatives like BharatGPT, which focuses on developing AI solutions for several sectors, including the telecom and retail sectors. However, there have not been any significant revelations yet. 

Adani AI Labs, an initiative by the Adani Group aimed at leveraging AI to tackle large-scale industrial problems, is also working on exciting AI projects and bringing them to the masses. One such notable work led us to ‘Train PNR Prediction,’ which predicts the confirmation probability of waitlisted train tickets, which will be useful for end users.

“We have achieved 95% accuracy in predicting it,” said Adani Digital Labs senior manager Gaurav Jain to AIM. 

India is not left behind. Other giants like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, and LTIMindtree seem focused on enterprise solutions, upskilling and reskilling, alongside experimenting with real use cases. 

Last year, Tech Mahindra became the first IT giant to launch something like a Generative AI Studio. ​​The IT solution provider introduced Tech Mahindra amplifAI0->∞, a comprehensive suite of AI offerings and solutions aimed at democratising and responsibly scaling AI deployment.

It is also working on an indigenous LLM in 40 different Indic languages, most notably Hindi. Called Project Indus, the model will be able to speak in many Indic languages.

One prominent initiative taking flight in India is AI4Bharat, which started as a collaboration between IIT Madras and Nandan Nilekani’s EkStep Foundation. It is sponsored by Bhashini, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA, with its contribution to the Indic open-source AI community tremendous. But the problem is, it is the only prominent one in the country so far.  That’s why India needs more ‘AI4Bharats’.

The time is ripe, and Indian conglomerates and IT giants can do a lot more. Recent earnings from big tech companies show growth driven by advancements in generative AI, and it’s unlike anything seen before.

China Is a Year Away From the US. And India? 

“People in China cannot access ChatGPT, OpenAI blocked China from accessing it,” revealed 01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee, saying that his country shouldn’t be left out of this revolution.

“I strongly believe that the US will lead in breakthrough innovations, but China is better at execution,” said Lee.

01.AI is a Chinese AI startup that only emerged about a year ago and is already at a billion-dollar valuation. It takes pride in calling itself open source, giving away its AI models to cultivate a loyal developer community that can contribute to the creation of groundbreaking AI applications. The startup also raised $200 million in investment from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. 

Lee believes that Chinese companies have closed the AI gap between the US and China greatly by executing better. 

“Taking my company as an example, we were eight years behind a year ago. Now we’re probably less than one year behind the top American company,” he said. 

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says otherwise. He had earlier said that China is focused on dominating several industries, but as of now, the US still maintains a significant lead in AI.

“In the case of AI, we are well ahead two or three years, probably, of China, which in my world is an eternity,” he added.

The rapid AI advancements coming from China question this claim. Brands such as Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei have become household names in China, and these are the very companies investing heavily in generative AI and releasing AI models like there is no tomorrow. 

Last year, Alibaba developed Qwen-72B, Tencent released ‘Hunyuan’, and Lee’s AI startup, 01.AI, also open-sourced its foundational LLM called Yi-34B.

China has also released a SORA rival, named ‘Vidu’, and recently, French luxury group LVMH also extended its partnership with the Alibaba Group to integrate Alibaba Cloud’s generative AI capabilities, including Qwen and Model Studio (Bailian), to enhance customer experience in China.

Lately, the internet has been abuzz with new AI developments coming from China daily—from posts about teachers in China using AI to grade exams to Chinese developing military robot dogs.

Chinese scientists also developed the world’s first AI child entity called Tong Tong.

It’s high time Indian conglomerates and IT giants took the lead in disrupting the AI space.

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BharatGPT Aims to Become Meta of Indic LLMs https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/bharatgpt-aims-to-become-meta-of-indic-llms/ Tue, 23 Jan 2024 09:30:00 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10111329 DST Announces New Hub with BharatGPT for Building LLMs in Indian Languages

BharatGPT believes in the power of open source as India is one of the largest contributors.

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DST Announces New Hub with BharatGPT for Building LLMs in Indian Languages

When it comes to India and generative AI, all of the recent Indic language models have been built on top of models built by Meta or Mistral. The Indian research community, though is rising up in the realm, wants to build models from scratch, and that is where BharatGPT is finding its moat. 

Speaking to AIM, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, professor at IIT Bombay who is leading the BharatGPT initiative said that there is definitely a need for a foundational model for Indic languages. “We are building foundational models from scratch and that is what is keeping us busy,” said Ramakrishnan about how BharatGPT will mark India on the global AI map.

Every company and every country is racing towards being the best at generative AI, more specifically LLMs. In the beginning it was the US companies such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI building the best AI models, now it’s Meta with Llama 2 and Mistral from France with its open source models that can be touted as leading the way. Same goes for China with Baidu and Alibaba leading research. It is only time that India makes its mark. 

Open source is the winner

The Indian academic institutions know the power of open source, especially when it comes to specialised models that are focused on healthcare or any other specific field. For example, researchers from IIT Patna recently unveiled a massive multilingual dataset for healthcare called MedSumm

“The hope is that once we put something out, the bandwagon then begins. Folks put more stuff out and like I said, the dataset piece is very important because once you make that available, people start to utilise it in various different ways,” Aman Chadha, the researcher of the paper, told AIM.

BharatGPT is also building on with a similar philosophy. Even though BharatGPT is currently focused on building foundational models for India, the initiative has also been open-sourcing a lot of its work on Decile (similar to GitHub and Hugging Face), along with licence-permitting commercial usage, and aims to continue doing it.

Ramakrishnan also emphasised that the solutions need to be developed across different verticals as well such as banking, healthcare, farming, etc.Mistral got France on the AI map. We want India to get on the AI map with BharatGPT.” 

He said that while we can keep writing research papers and creating graduates, it is important that all these help bolster the Indian ecosystem. “I think it’s time to not just create some AI solution for India, but a working full stack,” Ramakrishnan added. 

“We want everyone to use generative AI,” Vishnu Vardhan, the founder of Vizzhy, who is also the GPU buddy of BharatGPT told AIM, that the initiative would not just be about releasing weights, but making it available to everyone. He highlighted that the first model would be open source and wants developers to help them make it better. “The more people use it, the better it will become,” and eventually, they would release more versions of the model.

Vardhan emphasised that English models such as Llama and Mistral are good, but cannot address the complexity of Indian languages. He said that building Indic LLMs with a million tokens on top of English foundational models, which have trillions of token, won’t be enough to make them on par with GPT-4 for other languages such as Kannada or Tamil or Hindi.

He highlighted that Indic languages are very well connected with each other with their grammatical structure, which is very different from English. “That is why we decided that it would be easier to build models if they are originally in any Indic languages such as Hindi,” he explained, as it would be easier to mould them into other languages later. 

The BharatGPT team is also working on video and speech models which would be released soon after the launch of the initial text-based foundational model. 

The need for open source Indic models

Indian developers are one of the biggest contributors to open source. According to GitHub, with 13.2 million developers now on GitHub in India, the nation has firmly secured its position as the second-largest contributor to AI projects worldwide, just behind the United States. Of the total number 3.5M new developers joined GitHub in 2023.

All of this is while Meta, the open source giant is aiming for AGI goals with its upcoming Llama 3 model, and has a total of 350k H100 GPUs. BharatGPT team is also looking to acquire a lot more GPUs to continue training its models and also create an AI lab at IIT Bombay, where developers can train their own models. 

“Nobody else will build these Indic language models, and it’s definitely needed at the moment,” Amit Sheth, professor at Arizona State University who recently met Prime Minister Narendra Modi for discussions on AI policy, told AIM expressing enthusiasm about the rise of Indic LLMs such as Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu models based on Meta’s Llama 2 model. But he also highlighted that India needs to build models from scratch. 

Sheth also acknowledged that it is a very expensive and compute heavy task. He believes that we are not ready yet to train a model to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 as it would take millions of dollars and compute, which is hard to acquire at the moment. Plus, he also says that we also need to make sure about gathering data ethically.

He believes that this can be achieved with academic and private partnerships, which BharatGPT, Ola’s Krutrim, Sarvam AI, and Tech Mahindra’s Project Indus are also on the path. “A lot more research needs to be done, and I think high-quality original research is growing,” he added.

It only makes sense that BharatGPT becomes the open source foundational model for Indic language models, and as the researchers say, it is clearly headed that way.

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Reliance Jio Partners with IIT Bombay to Build ‘Bharat GPT’ https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/reliance-jio-partners-with-iit-bombay-to-build-bharat-gpt/ Thu, 28 Dec 2023 05:25:15 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10109587 Reliance Jio Partners with IIT Bombay to Build Bharat GPT

This comes after Reliance had announced its partnership with NVIDIA for using GPUs.

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Reliance Jio Partners with IIT Bombay to Build Bharat GPT

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm has forged an alliance with IIT Bombay for the ‘Bharat GPT’ initiative, according to revelations made by the company’s chairman, Akash Ambani. This collaboration, rooted in a partnership established in 2014, underscores a concerted effort to propel technological advancements.

At IIT Bombay’s annual Techfest, Ambani unveiled the company’s visionary roadmap, painting a picture of a far-reaching “ecosystem of development” and signalling the imminent advent of “Jio 2.0.” by leveraging large language models and generative AI, as indicated by Ambani.

This comes after Reliance had announced its partnership with NVIDIA in September for advancing AI india. This was for developing LLMs and nurturing India’s generative AI applications. Further, NVIDIA said that it will provide access to Reliance with GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and NVIDIA DGX Cloud for exceptional performance. 

Foreseeing a paradigm shift catalysed by AI across diverse industries, Ambani outlined plans to integrate AI both vertically within the organisation and horizontally across multiple sectors. The announcement also hinted at the prospect of introducing an operating system tailored for televisions, providing a glimpse into the multifaceted nature of the forthcoming technological innovations.

The expansion blueprint for Reliance Jio encompasses the introduction of novel offerings in media, communication, commerce, and devices, reflecting a comprehensive strategy to diversify and enhance its portfolio. Ambani expressed unwavering confidence in the transformative potential of 5G private networks, envisaging a future where enterprises of all scales can harness the capabilities of a 5G stack.

In underlining India’s potential as a forthcoming “innovation centre,” Ambani projected a lofty ambition of achieving a $6 trillion economy status by the close of the decade. He reiterated the ubiquitous role of AI in shaping society and industries, emphasising Jio’s commitment to national development, with monetary gains deemed a “byproduct” rather than the primary objective.

In a compelling call to action, Ambani urged young entrepreneurs to embrace risk-taking and actively contribute to societal well-being, underscoring the company’s ethos of aligning its pursuits with the broader national interest. 

Interestingly, there is another BharatGPT created by CoRover already in the market which is also doing exactly the same thing, and is also planning to launch chatbot soon in partnership with Google Cloud.

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FIFA Debacle: Jio can Learn how to Score a Mean Goal from Hotstar and SonyLiv https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/jio-needs-to-learn-a-thing-or-two-from-hotstar-sonyliv/ Tue, 22 Nov 2022 09:32:52 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10080366

Did Jio jump the gun in its bid to cover the FIFA World Cup?

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In September 2021, the Jio-Viacom bid (approx ₹450 crore) for the streaming rights of the FIFA World Cup in India got them a seat at the helm. This, in addition to acquiring the IPL 2023 digital rights for a staggering amount of ₹23,758 crore for 2023-2027, led many to believe that the telecommunications company is now set to steer sports viewership, and get a sizeable advantage in the OTT market in India. 

Subsequently, JioCinema, the application on which the content will be streamed, also topped the rankings in free mobile app downloads on Google Play, according to data from 42matters. Between September and October, there was a 46.6% increase in traffic on desktop and mobile. And, with the FIFA World Cup taking place this month, it was further expected to grow exponentially. 

However, during the first match of this prestigious event, the platform experienced several glitches, with viewers coming down heavily on Jio for the poor streaming experience it offered. The viewers reported long and repeated buffering, unexpected errors, lags in stream—in short, the servers were just unable to handle the load.  

JioCinema was quick to address the issue, apologising for the inconvenience caused, and asked users to update the app to enjoy a seamless viewing experience. But, this was to no avail since many reported that the problem persists despite installing the updates in the application.  

Following the abysmal show by Jio, many viewers were quick to commend Hotstar for having the technical expertise to pull off a concurrent watching of over 1.5 crore people during the Indian Premier League, and most recently, at the ICC T20 World Cup, while also insisting, albeit humorously, that Hotstar should snag the streaming rights from Jio.

One of the experts that AIM spoke to, cited various physical and virtual limitations to JioCinema’s poor stint in hosting the live stream of the FIFA World Cup. He said that maybe the servers were not sufficient to take the load, or the mechanism of scaling in the cloud may have crashed, or alternatively, the internet bandwidth may have been an issue. Only Reliance will be able to provide exact information on what went wrong. 

Hotstar vs SonyLiv vs JioCinemas

However, Hotstar is not the only streaming service in the area of sports content streaming. Another player that needs to be given due recognition is SonyLiv. SonyLiv was not only able to manage the broadcast of the previous edition of the FIFA World Cup, but also the Euros 2020, which reportedly surpassed the viewership of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, recording a total of 14 million hours of streaming.   

Like Hotstar and SonyLiv, JioCinemas also utilises the cloud service offered by AWS, and content delivery network provided by Akamai Technologies—both forming the two important aspects of its infrastructure. According to Stackshare, JioCinema uses core technologies such as Javascript, Node.JS, Kafka and others, alongside cloud infrastructure tools like Kubernetes, Jenkins, Kibana and others. 

However, there is a crucial difference separating the operations of JioCinemas from Hotstar.  

Samriddha Choudhuri, AWS DevSecOps associate manager at Accenture, writes a few pointers on how Jio’s poor performance is an indication to what streaming service platforms need to be able to manage large loads during high profile sporting events. He begins by saying that companies need to spend enough time and budget to deliver an effective system design. Having a cloud provider is not enough—the real skill lies in how the services offered by cloud are effectively integrated into the business outcomes of the platform. 

Further, Choudhuri lists some important details that streaming companies need to follow for effective system designs of modern applications:

  1. Organisations need to build faster streaming pipelines for consumption analytics, else it will directly affect the quality of the broadcast.
  2. They also need to ensure that all bad data is discarded—that is, if there are too many bad events, it will impact the analytics, which can further lead to hampering key data-driven business decisions.
  3. Next, there has to be proper metrics used for autoscaling. In the event that this is not the case, the application will fail to respond to sudden load. 
  4. Organisations also need to use microservices and event-driven architectures with message brokers like Kafka. 
  5. They should decouple applications so there is minimum impact of one system to another. 
  6. There needs to be proper observability in place. 

The above information shows the importance of system and technical engineers that bring the supported architecture to life. 

What’s Next?

Viacom18 was looking at a projected ₹300 crore in ad revenue from the ongoing FIFA World Cup live coverage. However, with the recent debacle, there is no clarity over what the future will look like for JioCinemas, especially with the IPL just around the corner. If the problem persists, the brands that were wishing to catch the eyes of the billion sports fanatics in the country might pull out, which will in turn adversely affect the revenues of Jio. 

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Now Reliance wants to conquer the AI space https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/now-reliance-wants-to-conquer-the-ai-space/ Tue, 28 Jun 2022 08:30:00 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10069835

Many believe that Reliance is aggressively scouting for AI and NLP companies in the digital space in a bid to create an Indian equivalent of FAANG – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.

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During the RAISE 2020, Reliance Group head honcho Mukesh Ambani said, “AI and other associated technologies of the fourth Industrial Revolution will vastly expand our capacity to solve the most complex and pressing problems before India and the world.” He also added that AI will help India in moving faster toward transforming India into a high-growth economy on its way to USD 5 trillion.

Ambani’s optimism in the technology is well supported by Reliance Group’s investment strategy in the field of artificial intelligence. Reliance’s digital clout is growing in the country, so much so that it has raised fears of a monopoly. Many believe that Reliance is aggressively scouting for AI and NLP companies in the digital space in a bid to create an Indian equivalent of FAANG – Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.

Investments and acquisitions

A 2018 media report said that Reliance Industries and its auxiliaries had set aside USD 2 billion for its multi-design strategy approach to transforming into a Technology and Innovation powerhouse. This strategy involves spending USD 1.6 billion on purchasing stakes in technology-driven companies situated in different countries, including the USA, the UK, and India. The remaining amount would be directed towards creating in-house tech in artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, augmented reality, Internet of Things, robotics, and Big Data analytics, among other emerging technologies.

Earlier this year, Reliance Industries invested USD 15 million in Silicon Valley-based Two Platforms to take over a 25 per cent stake in the company. A deep-tech company founded by Pranav Mistry in 2021, Two Platforms is building interactive and immersive AI experiences. This AI platform enables real-time AI voice and video calls, digital humans, and lifelike gaming. In a statement, the Director of Jio, Akash Ambani, had then said that this investment would help in expediting the development of new products in the areas of interactive AI, immersive gaming, and the metaverse.

In the same month, Reliance Jio Platforms, the tech arm of Reliance, invested USD 200 million in InMobi’s mobile content startup Glance. This company uses algorithms to deliver personalised news, entertainment content and live videos, making them available right on the smartphone lock screens. Glance is also backed by Google and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Silicon Valley-based venture fund Mithril Capital.

In January, Reliance made an investment of a whopping USD 132 million with a majority stake in robotics company Addverb Technologies. The Noida-based startup is one of the few companies in the world that work on every aspect of robotics. Post the investment, the total valuation of the company stood at USD 270 million. Even before the investment, Addverb’s creations were adopted across Reliance’s different businesses, including JioMart, Ajio, and Netmeds.

Last year, Reliance invested USD 8 million in California-headquarter NetraDyna, an AI startup which focuses on commercial fleet safety. Founded by former Qualcomm India & South Asia president Avneesh Agrawal and his Qualcomm colleague David Julian, NetraDyne has developed Driveri, vision-based driver retention and safety platform for commercial vehicles. In 2016 too, Reliance had invested USD 16 million in the company. With the combined value of the two investments, Reliance now owns a 37.4 per cent stake in the startup.

Another major investment made by Reliance was in 2019 when Reliance Jio Digital Services entered into a strategic transaction with the conversation AI platform Haptik. In a statement, the company said that the transaction size was estimated to be Rs 700 crore, with Rs 230 crore considered for the initial business transfer. At that time, Akash Ambani had said that this investment would boost the digital ecosystem and offer users conversational AI-enabled devices with multi-lingual capabilities. With Haptik on board, Reliance’s focus has been on the enhancement and expansion of Jio, with a market opportunity of 1 billion users.

Interestingly, Reliance began realising the potential of AI and machine learning much before the sudden traction that these fields are now receiving. In 2014, Reliance made an investment of USD 100,000 in Detect Technologies Pvt Ltd, which makes real-time pipeline monitoring systems to track leaks and corrosions using AI and other sensors.

Other notable investments/acquisitions made by Reliance include deep tech startup Tesseract; Pharma-based enterprise platform C-Square; AI-based edtech platform Embibe, among others.​​

AI talent

In 2018, Reliance announced the launch of JioInteract. It was touted by its parent company as the world’s first artificial intelligence-based brand engagement video platform. Under the leadership of Akash Ambani, the company soon started hiring professionals to build its emerging technology firm. Spearheaded by Akash Ambani, the JioCoin project was responsible for building a team of young professionals.

Further, Reliance is also investing in AI education. Reliance-owned Jio University also offers a post-graduate programme in AI and data science. As per the website, the programme aims to “instil theoretical capabilities and provide the know-how to create practical solutions for enterprise and society.”

What next

The investments and acquisitions in the recent past indicate Reliance’s conscious efforts to pivot from its image of just a petrochemical giant to a digital enterprise with ventures like Jio and JioMart. As noted above, Reliance has acquired or invested in a dozen tech startups across domains like health tech, SaaS, robotics, edtech, etc. It aims to become a ‘tech tornado’ for the next-generation technology world. 

At the RAISE 2020 event, Mukesh Ambani said, “In the past, nations have competed on physical capital, financial capital, human capital and intellectual capital. But, in the coming decades… nations will increasingly compete on Digital Capital,” Ambani said. He added that 1.3 billion Indians are digitally empowered to create faster economic growth, prosperity, employment opportunities, and better standards of living.

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Top tech mergers and acquisitions in India (so far) https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/top-tech-mergers-and-acquisitions-in-india-in-2022-so-far/ Sun, 03 Apr 2022 04:30:00 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10064035

Infosys has signed a definitive agreement to acquire oddity, a German digital marketing, experience, and commerce agency.

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In 2021, the economic optimism and availability of large capital stimulated domestic mergers and acquisitions (M&A) led by companies that liquidated non-core assets to streamline corporate structure and use cash to purchase assets, a PWC report showed. The major deals in the IT sector last year included Wipro’s Capco acquisition for USD 1.5 billion and Byju’s Great Learning (USD 600 million) and Epic (USD 500 million) purchases. The trend is likely to continue in 2022.

Reliance’s stake in Addverb

Reliance Industries Limited spent USD 132 million to pick up a 54% stake in Addverb Technologies, an Indian robotics startup. The Noida-based startup focuses on building automation and robotics solutions for warehouses and factories. Reliance has been already using Addverb’s robotic conveyors, pick-by-voice software, and semi-automated systems in its warehouses. Addverb churns out around 10,000 robots in a calendar year, including mobile robots, sorting robots, pallets shuttle and carton shuttle. And 80% of the startup’s revenue comes from the domestic market.

The robotics startup plans to use Reliance’s resources to achieve its goal of becoming a billion-dollar company in the next five years by targeting the global market.

HCL’s majority stake in GBS & Starschema acquisition 

HCL Technologies has acquired a majority stake (51%) in German IT consulting firm Gesellschaft fr Banksysteme GmbH (GBS). The remaining stake (49%) is with the largest German cooperative primary bank Deutsche Apotheker- und rztebank eG (apoBank).

Additionally, HCL has agreed to buy the Budapest-based company Starschema in a deal worth USD 42.5 million to strengthen its data engineering services and build a stronghold in Central and Eastern Europe. The deal is subject to regulatory clearance from the Hungarian Ministry of Innovation and Technology and is expected to be completed by March 2022. Starschema, founded in 2006, offers consulting, technology, and managed services in data engineering.

The deal will enable HCL to provide data engineering consulting and near-shore access to digital engineering services to a bigger pool of clients. The main idea behind the acquisition is to utilise Starschema’s data-focused expertise with HCL’s industry presence for a data-driven transformation.

Infosys buys Oddity

Infosys has signed a definitive agreement to acquire oddity, a German digital marketing, experience, and commerce agency. The move will reinforce Infosys’ creative, branding and experience design capabilities and demonstrates its continued commitment to co-create with clients and help them navigate their digital transformation journey.

“Using oddity’s digital commerce, marketing knowledge, and metaverse-ready set-up, it easily complements Infosys’ prowess in technological transformation,” said Ravi Kumar S, Infosys President, in a statement. 

oddity has a comprehensive service portfolio comprising digital-first brand management and communication, in-house production, including virtual and augmented reality, experience design and e-commerce services across Europe and China. The acquisition will power Infosys’ metaverse play. 

Tech Mahindra buys Thirdware, picks stake in Geomatic.AI

Tech Mahindra has acquired Mumbai-based enterprise applications startup Thirdware in an all-cash deal worth USD 42 million.

Thirdware, founded in 1995 by Bhavesh Shah, offers solutions and services in the consulting, design, development, implementation and support of packaged solutions and covers areas like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Thirdware delivers cutting edge business solutions and services to over 300 customers across the globe which includes Ford Motor Company, Pfizer, United Nations Organizations, Visteon, etc.

Thirdware’s capability to provide end-to-end implementations and global rollouts of ERP solutions will give Tech Mahindra an edge in the manufacturing space.

Tech Mahindra has bought 80 percent stake in Geomatic.AI through its Singapore-based subsidiary. “As part of this deal, Tech Mahindra will have 80 percent shareholding in Geomatic.AI for consideration of Australian dollar 6 million. Ausnet will have 20 percent shareholding and transfer digital workforce, intellectual property, assets and client contracts to the newly formed entity,” the company said in a regulatory filing.

Geomatic.AI will continue its focus on digital platforms-led non-linear growth in partnership with AusNet Services, an Australian energy and utility distributor. The company’s highly differentiated IP will allow Tech Mahindra to offer Drone Technologies, Digital Twins, AI-led services to linear asset-intensive industries such as energy and utilities, transportation, oil and gas etc.

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Can we and should we have fully open APIs? https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/can-we-and-should-we-have-fully-open-apis/ Fri, 04 Mar 2022 06:30:00 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10062091

With fully open APIs, too, developers get the same level of control and freedom in the cloud.

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Open APIs are quick access for many solutions but also bring up a lot of vulnerabilities. According to Neosec, almost half of the 300 senior decision-makers that they surveyed rated their API strategies were under development, and only 31% said that their API programs were fully executed across the entire organisation.

The survey that was conducted in November 2021 from decision-makers in the US, Germany, France and the UK resulted that 53% of companies use third-party APIs to develop products and services, and 46% create APIs as products by external developers.

Open APIs – solution for many

From government organisations to large companies, all are looking into integrating open-source APIs, not just because they are convenient and interoperable but also because they believe that fully open APIs are the future.

Last month, the National Health Authority (NHA) of India, under its scheme of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), announced the completion of 27 integrations with organisations offering Health Management Information Systems (HMIS), health locker services, Laboratory Management Information Systems (LMIS), health tech services and other digital services to develop an integrated, interoperable and user-inclusive digital healthcare ecosystem for the country.

Dr R S Sharma, CEO, NHA, believes that the objective of ABDM is to deliver health services in an affordable manner. For the same, they are building an interoperable, open system based on open source with open APIs and open standards. “So that basically enables every public player, whosoever wants to integrate with the system to integrate with ABDM,” said Sharma. Out of 27 integrators, 17 are private sector integrators that provide solutions compatible with the overall architecture of ABDM.

According to McKinsey, as the functionality evolves, APIs will deliver more advanced services. It has become a matter of pride for companies to be a part of Open API initiatives. Recently, Reliance Jio achieved the Open API Platinum conformance certification from TM Forum, requiring the telecom giant to successfully implement over 20 Open APIs. According to Nik Willetts, CEO, TM Forum, Jio is actually future-proofing their cloud-native tech stack by building their IT infrastructure using TM Forum’s Open APIs. Additionally, the company is using Open Digital Architecture (ODA) as the blueprint for its enterprise architecture.

There are also initiatives been taken to promote Open APIs. Last week, The Linux Foundation and the GSMA announced a new, open-source project called “CAMARA – The Telco Global API Alliance”. The partnership is to address the challenges in porting and reproducing API services across cloud architectures and heterogeneous operators. The project is expected to support customer and developer ecosystems by developing global, open, and accessible API solutions.  CAMARA also offers opportunities for collaboration between network and cloud companies like telcos, device manufacturers, ISVs, etc., to look into the challenges of porting and reproducing API services. 

Legally speaking – Open APIs are great

Fully open APIs have open source software that has open-source operation procedures. This allows for the technology to be reproduced and even audited in any region. Additionally, it resolves a lot of geopolitical conflicts. For example, users of Azure, AWS, or even the Google Cloud Platform might not be able to expand in Russia or an EU country as they require data to be locally stored. Additionally, in the EU, using any US-based clouds violates their GDPR. It totally makes sense to use fully open APIs that are based on open-source software as they are the technology of the future.

With fully open APIs, too, developers get the same level of control and freedom in the cloud.

Wrapping up

To consider the limitations of open APIs, it is essential to also take into account the issues with API itself. According to Salt Edge’s survey of over 2,000 API initiations with banks from 31 European countries, 38% of bank APIs don’t meet EU or UK regulatory standards. It was also revealed that 43% of banks did not support automated registrations to access the relevant APIs, 22% had faulty documentation, and 28% had downtimes during the integration.

A closed API is not accessible openly and typically resides in highly secure settings. But with Open APIs, a recent report from Transparency Market Research showed that, in terms of security, uncertainty and vulnerability of the third-party apps is one of the major restraining factors that affect the market.

According to experts, a good open API requires basic considerations like the choice of selecting data format (JSON, XML, Text, VML, etc.), the protocol (HTTP, HTTPS), and the version of API. It is also important to consider security, be it API authentication or HTTPS. Considerations of performance, availability, error, and defects for better service and availability of documentation in PHP, Python, Java, etc., become quite essential. Developers also can look into advanced options like streaming, catching, etc. and even limiting the callouts per day to handle traffic on the open API. 

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Reliance enters satellite internet market with new venture called Jio Space Technology https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/reliance-enters-satellite-internet-market-with-new-venture-called-jio-space-technology/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/reliance-enters-satellite-internet-market-with-new-venture-called-jio-space-technology/#respond Mon, 14 Feb 2022 10:32:37 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10060578 mukesh ambani reliance industries

Jio will be able to connect the remotest towns and villages, enterprises, government establishments, and consumers to the new Digital India.

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mukesh ambani reliance industries

Jio Platforms Ltd and SES, a leading global satellite-based content connectivity solutions provider, have announced a joint venture – Jio Space Technology Limited. The joint venture will deliver next-generation scalable and affordable broadband services in India using satellite technology.

While we continue to expand our fibre-based connectivity and FTTH business and invest in 5G, this new joint venture with SES will further accelerate the growth of multigigabit broadband. With additional coverage and capacity offered by satellite communications services, Jio will be able to connect the remotest towns and villages, enterprises, government establishments, and consumers to the new Digital India. We are excited about this new journey combining our massive reach and customer base with SES’s innovative leadership and expertise in the satellite industry, said Akash Ambani, Director of Jio.

SES will provide up to 100 Gbps capacity and will utilise Jio’s market reach to expand its business footprint in India. The joint venture will also develop extensive gateway infrastructure in India to provide services within the country.

The venture will leverage SES-12, SES’s high-throughput GEO satellite serving India, and O3b mPOWER, SES’s next-generation MEO constellation, to extend and complement Jio’s terrestrial network, increasing access to digital services and applications. Additionally, Jio will offer managed services and gateway infrastructure operations services to the joint venture.
The joint venture aligns with the Prime Minister’s ‘Gati Shakti: National Master Plan for Multi-modal Connectivity initiative to provide integrated and seamless connectivity by implementing diverse infrastructure.

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Jio forays into metaverse; picks up 25% stake in artificial reality firm Two Platforms https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/jio-forays-into-metaverse-picks-up-25-stake-in-artificial-reality-firm-two-platforms/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/jio-forays-into-metaverse-picks-up-25-stake-in-artificial-reality-firm-two-platforms/#respond Mon, 07 Feb 2022 05:29:54 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10059978 reliance jio

The company’s artificial reality platform enables real-time AI voice and video calls, digital humans, immersive spaces and lifelike gaming.

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reliance jio

Jio Platforms has picked up a 25%  stake in Two Platforms Inc for USD 15 million on a fully diluted basis. Two Platforms is a Silicon Valley-based Artificial Reality Company focused on building interactive and immersive AI experiences. 

After text and voice, the company believes the next chapter of AI is visual and interactive. The company’s artificial reality platform enables real-time AI voice and video calls, digital humans, immersive spaces and lifelike gaming. 

Two Platforms plans to bring its interactive AI technologies first to consumer applications followed by entertainment and gaming, as well as enterprise solutions including retail, services, education, health and wellness.

“We are impressed with the strong experience and capabilities of the founding team at TWO in the areas of AI/ ML, AR, metaverse and Web 3.0. We look forward to working together with TWO to help expedite the development of new products in the areas of interactive AI, immersive gaming and metaverse,” Akash Ambani, Director of Jio, said.

Two will work with Jio to fast-track the adoption of new technologies and build disruptive technologies such as AI, metaverse, and mixed realities.

Jio Platforms has also entered into partnerships with tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Meta who are actively building hardware and software services for metaverse.

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RIL’s New Announcements, UK Ditches Huawei And More In This Week’s Top AI News https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/reliance-jio-agm-huawei-5g-ban/ Sat, 18 Jul 2020 12:30:45 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=10002765

Reliance India Limited is one of the very few companies in the world that has been riding high amidst the pandemic. Be it the topping Warren Buffet or for attracting major investments, RIL’s chairman Mukesh Ambani has been in the news for all the right reasons. Apart from a couple of major announcements from Jio, […]

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Reliance India Limited is one of the very few companies in the world that has been riding high amidst the pandemic. Be it the topping Warren Buffet or for attracting major investments, RIL’s chairman Mukesh Ambani has been in the news for all the right reasons. Apart from a couple of major announcements from Jio, there has been a lot going on in the 5G space. Here is all the top news from this week.

Nokia’s New 5G Solution

On Tuesday, Nokia announced an upgrade that will enable its 4G/LTE radios to be migrated seamlessly to 5G/NR. These features are expected to provide immediate support for approximately one million radios, reaching 3.1 million by the end of the year and over 5 million in 2021. By upgrading existing radio elements via software, Nokia offers a novel solution for hassle free migration to 5G. This news comes at a crucial juncture as the world is poised to embrace 5G. 

The Finnish company estimates that their solution will save the telecommunications industry potentially tens of billions of euros in site engineering and re-visit costs as communication service providers are able to upgrade their networks to 5G.

Top Europe Court Bans US-EU Data Sharing 

On Thursday, Europe’s top court declared that he Decision on the adequacy of the protection provided by the EU-US Data Protection Shield is invalidated.

“The limitations on the protection of personal data arising from the domestic law of the United States on the access and use by US public authorities are not circumscribed in a way that satisfies requirements that are essentially equivalent to those required under EU law,” the court said in a statement.

The EU-U.S Privacy Shield Frameworks were designed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the European Commission to provide companies on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism to comply with data protection requirements. The court has also stated that the EU commission’s decision on standard contractual clauses for the transfer of personal data to processors established in third countries is still valid.

Ambani Puts India On Global 5G Map

The 43rd RIL AGM was streamed live for a digital audience who were introduced to brand new tech updates. The two-hour long event was widely covered by both regional and national news media. 

“The Jio-Google partnership can make India 2G-mukt.”

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, RIL

RIL announced that the tech giant will be investing Rs 33,737 crore – or take a 7.7% stake – in Jio Platforms. According to the terms of the partnership, RIL and Google will be developing an Android-based operating system that could power these entry-level phones.

RIL’s Chairman, Mukesh Ambani has even hinted that a homegrown ‘world-class 5G service’ can be ready for field deployment as soon as next year.

In a big boost to India’s AR/VR industry, RIL presented Jio Glass, a new augmented reality solution. Calling it a ‘meaningful immersive experience’, RIL President Kiran Thomas said that it is ideated to enable smoother virtual classes where both teachers and students can meet in 3D virtual rooms and conduct holographic lessons.

While little is known about its specifications, it is slated to weigh about 75 grams and will come with built-in apps to allow AR meetings to happen in real-time.

These announcements come amidst the news of major investments from Intel, Qualcomm and previously Facebook. And, in this year’s annual meeting, RIL had made their 5G ambitions official. With AI, AR/VR innovations in the loop along with collaborations with major players, Jio’s roadmap of the future looks quite exciting.

Huawei Hits Wall In The UK

On Wednesday, following new advice produced by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on the impact of US sanctions against the telecommunications vendor, the UK government  announced that Huawei will be completely removed from their 5G networks by the end of 2027. Starting this December, there will be a total ban on the purchase of any new 5G kit.

The decision was taken in a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) chaired by the Prime Minister, in response to new US sanctions, that were imposed on Huawei in May.

According to the official press release, there will be a ban on the purchase of new Huawei kit for 5G from next year and it will be completely removed from 5G networks by the end of 2027.

Google’s New Confidential VMs

Google Cloud announced their new product, Confidential VMs, now in beta, is the first product in Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio. Confidential VMs offer  memory encryption to further isolate workloads in the cloud. Confidential Computing builds on the protections Shielded VMs offer against rootkit and bootkits, helping to ensure the integrity of the operating system. Using the AMD SEV feature, Confidential VMs offer high performance for the most demanding computational tasks, while keeping VM memory encrypted. Google Cloud stated that Confidential Computing can help organisations transform the way they process data in the cloud while preserving confidentiality and privacy. 

Hackers Time Out On Twitter

In one of the biggest security breaches ever on Twitter, numerous high-profile accounts including those of Barack Obama and Elon Musk were taken over by hackers to promote a bitcoin scam, which earned them nearly $120,000. In a series of tweets Twitter said that its internal systems were compromised by the hackers, confirming theories that the attack could not have been conducted without access to the company’s own tools. According to Motherboard, Twitter’s internal company admin tool was allegedly used to conduct the account takeovers, potentially by resetting account email accounts and then recovering passwords. 

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IIT Madras’ New Data Science Degree, America’s AI Task Force, And More In This Week’s Top AI News https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/top-ai-news-of-the-week/ Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:30:20 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=68982

Unlike previous weeks, this time, there are a couple of mega announcements from India as well. There was also a landmark bill by the US that will change the future of AI. Know more about top happenings from this week. Intel To Pump A Massive $250 M Into Jio Reliance Industries Limited and Jio Platforms […]

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Unlike previous weeks, this time, there are a couple of mega announcements from India as well. There was also a landmark bill by the US that will change the future of AI. Know more about top happenings from this week.

Intel To Pump A Massive $250 M Into Jio

Reliance Industries Limited and Jio Platforms announced that Intel Capital will invest ₹ 1,894.50 crores ($250 million) in Jio Platforms at an equity value of ₹ 4.91 lakh crore and an enterprise value of ₹ 5.16 lakh crore. Intel Capital joins the list of marquee firms that have recently invested in Jio Platforms, taking the total investment amount to ₹ 117,588.45 crores. Facebook earlier announced its plans to invest in Jio, and now with Intel, Jio has bagged another major US collaboration.

Jio Platforms have been investing across its digital ecosystem, which powered by leading technologies spanning across broadband connectivity, smart devices, cloud and edge computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, augmented and mixed reality, and blockchain.

“We are excited to work together with Intel to advance India’s capabilities in cutting-edge technologies that will empower all sectors of our economy and improve the quality of life of 1.3 billion Indians.”

Mukesh Ambani, Reliance Industries

Intel Capital is known for its investments in disruptive technology areas like cloud computing, artificial intelligence and 5G, and this investment clearly tells that they consider Jio to be a disruptive force of the future. Read the press release here.

World’s First-Ever Online B.Sc. Degree In Data Science

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) announced the launch of India’s first online B.Sc. degree in Programming and Data Science. The programme is open to anyone who has passed Class XII, with English and Maths at the Class X level and enrolled in any on-campus UG course.

The students can access 4 weeks of the course content that consists of Mathematics, English, Statistics and Computational Thinking. The students will have to leverage the course lectures online to submit online assignments. This will be followed by an in-person qualifier exam at the end of 4 weeks. The interested candidates will have to pay a nominal fee of Rs. 3,000 for the qualifier exam. Read more here.

Researchers Rejoice: AI Task Force Act Is Here

The policymakers of the US have introduced a new bill that will ensure deep learning is affordable for all. 

The National AI Research Resource Task Force Act was introduced in the House by Representatives Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) and her colleagues. This bill was met with unanimous support from the top universities and companies, which are engaged in artificial intelligence (AI) research. Some of the well-known supporters include Stanford University, Princeton University, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, OpenAI, Mozilla, Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and NVIDIA amongst others. Read more here.

Popular Image Dataset Is No More

“It has been taken offline, and it will not be put back online. We ask the community to refrain from using it in future.”

MIT

MIT has withdrawn the 80 million images large dataset — Tiny Images for containing some derogatory terms as categories and offensive images. Created in 2006, the dataset contains 53,464 different nouns, which are directly copied from Wordnet. Those terms were then used to automatically download images of the corresponding noun from Internet search engines (using the available filters) to collect the 80 million images (at tiny 32×32 resolution, excluding the original high-res versions).

In a statement released by MIT, it said the dataset is too large (80 million images), and the images are so small (32 x 32 pixels) that it can be difficult for people to visually recognize its content. Therefore, manual inspection, even if feasible, will not guarantee that offensive images can be completely removed. Therefore, they have decided to formally withdraw the dataset. 

This decision comes amidst the ongoing debate about the role of bias in the ML community ever since the release of the depixelating image model. Read more here.

Write The Right Code With Amazon’s CodeGuru

Amazon recently announced the general availability of a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality known as CodeGuru.

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying applications’ most expensive lines of code. Integrate Amazon CodeGuru into your existing software development workflow for experiencing built-in code reviews to detect and optimize the expensive lines of code to reduce costs.

ACM Urges The US To Stop Using Facial Recognition Tech

According to a technology news portal, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) tech policy group has asked lawmakers to immediately suspend use of facial recognition, citing documented ethnic, racial, and gender bias. According to the letter released by ACM, it stated that the U.S. Technology Policy Committee (USPTC) had assessed the present state of facial recognition (FR) technology as applied by the government and the private sector. 

“FR technology is not sufficiently mature and reliable to be safely and fairly utilized.” 

The letter urged for an immediate suspension of the current and future private and governmental use of FR technologies in all circumstances known or reasonably foreseeable to be prejudicial to established human and legal rights. Read more here.

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Reliance Jio To Finally Launch A Scalable Connected Car Solution Which It Has Promised For Years https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/reliance-jio-to-finally-launch-a-scalable-connected-car-solution-which-it-has-promised-for-years/ Thu, 06 Feb 2020 10:33:00 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=56136 Jio Connected Car Auto Expo

Reliance Jio Infocomm is finally rolling out its connected car technology at the 15th edition of Auto Expo that begins at India Expo Mart in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh. The telecom giant is aiming to become India’s first major telecom company to expand its market to connected cars, a highly competitive yet nascent market across […]

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Jio Connected Car Auto Expo

Reliance Jio Infocomm is finally rolling out its connected car technology at the 15th edition of Auto Expo that begins at India Expo Mart in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh. The telecom giant is aiming to become India’s first major telecom company to expand its market to connected cars, a highly competitive yet nascent market across the globe. 

Jio has been discussing the importance of connected vehicles, particularly in the context of IoT solutions for the last three years. According to reports, Jio has been developing its connected car technologies for more than a year at its campus in Navi Mumbai. 

Jio’s fast growth in 4G services and soon to be launched 5G will corroborate with its connected vehicle solutions. Experts have vowed that 5G, combined with more powerful computer chips, will bring in the perfect time for IoT and edge computing in the near future. For telecom players, the connected devices market seems like a natural extension. Mukesh Ambani also called IoT a key growth engine for the company. On the other hand, the slowing car sales in India could be a cause for concern for the connected car solutions market targeted at end consumers. 

IoT technology has been one of the tech areas most telecom companies have been trying to capture since it has applications in transportation, manufacturing, home automation, etc. According to reports, Jio will showcase a vehicle tracking system for transport service and logistics players, and will showcase the role it will play for connectivity, network and technology for connected cars. Also, the company has been working on its enterprise solutions, cloud network, and hardware solutions, all of which will help in creating a powerful connected vehicle solution needed for the scale in India. 

Will This Could Be An Extension Of Jio Car Connect?

According to Jio, Car Connect is a combination of a hardware device and a mobile app aimed to connect 90% of the cars on the Indian roads by the year 2020. The solution was powered by OBD (Onboard Diagnostic Device) with a Jio SIM inside, which will be connected to the ODB port of the car. The OBD would be giving users access to the entire ecosystem of Jio Apps – Jio Music and Jio Cinema .etc. Apart from ODB devices, Jio at the Auto Expo showcased hardware solutions based on AIS 140 standard and include door and fuel sensors and a panic button for drivers and passenger safety.

The Jio Car Connect mobile app could also display users’ vital car information like oil stats, water levels, fuel info, battery status .etc. The OBD device, paired with a Jio SIM card, will also give you the exact location of the car, which can be a useful feature in case of a theft or an accident with geo-fencing. Reliance Jio Infocomm had also signed a contract with US-based AirWire Technologies (AirWire) to manufacture the Jio Car Connect device to customers for narrow-band IoT network.

Could Connected Car Services Be The Next Big Thing For Telecom?

Connected cars with embedded eSIM technologies making the cars function like smartphones, and therefore it requires operating systems, apps, infotainment, and cybersecurity. In addition to sensors and LIDAR technologies, car systems can also perform real-time analytics and telematics for predictive maintenance, route planning, road safety and much more. All of this would need not just fast internet speed but also on-the-go computing at the edge services. The largest players in this segment are automated car manufacturers like Tesla, traditional car manufacturers who are rising to the occasion like Ford, big tech companies like Google and Amazon, and telecom companies like AT&T and Jio.

Other Industry Players Working Towards Connected Device Solutions

Other telecom companies in India such as Vodafone, Idea, and Bharti Airtel have also been active in connected car technologies given they have witnessed drastically reduced revenue from core telecom services like voice and data consumption. As part of its connected market strategy, Airtel had announced that the auto sector is a key focus area for which the company is building platforms through partnerships for connected cars. Airtel also owns a separate, independent IoT vertical which has partnered MG Motors for its Hector car wherein it introduced an IoT solution with features like vehicle telematics, navigation, and infotainment services, along with an embedded IoT SIM.

Also Read: WILL OPEN SOURCE PLATFORMS BRIDGE THE INNOVATION GAP ACROSS SMART CAR SOLUTIONS?

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Reliance Jio, Airtel and Huawei Battle It Out With Next-Gen AI Solutions At India Mobile Congress https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/india-mobile-congress-5g-jio-airtel-huawei/ Fri, 18 Oct 2019 09:30:24 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=48229 india mobile congress

Reliance Jio, Airtel and Huawei Battle It Out With Next-Gen AI Solutions At India Mobile Congress  The telecom sector’s AI prowess was on full display at the recently concluded India Mobile Congress organised by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Cellular Operator Association of India (COAI) between October 14 and 16 at Aerocity, Delhi. The […]

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india mobile congress

Reliance Jio, Airtel and Huawei Battle It Out With Next-Gen AI Solutions At India Mobile Congress 

The telecom sector’s AI prowess was on full display at the recently concluded India Mobile Congress organised by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Cellular Operator Association of India (COAI) between October 14 and 16 at Aerocity, Delhi. The event attracted various leading vendors in the telecom, networking, and other technology sectors who unveiled various products in IoT, 5G and AI.

Here are the key takeaways from this year:

jio

Jio

India’s biggest telecom company that ousted Bharti Airtel to lead the Indian market unveiled its patent-filed artificial intelligence-powered Video Call Assistant at India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2019. This all-new AI bot would allow businesses to take their customer service to the next level by allowing them to automate their communications. 

The company also launched Jio smart security with AI-centric security and surveillance, involving smart cameras and automatic car entry; managed society Wi-Fi and communication; Smart Building solutions using IoT. Using Jio’s narrowband IoT showcased at IMC, you can monitor real-time outdoor lighting, waste management, guard efficiency, water consumption, diesel generators and fire safety. Jio also unveiled SG-LAN, an intelligent solution for converged access with Radisys. 

airtel

Airtel

Bharti Airtel too unveiled industrial solutions for smart factories and other innovations like next-generation data centre that have the potential of driving deep analytics for great customer experience. Other solutions included adaptive traffic control system, city-wide surveillance, traffic enforcement system. 

Airtel’s AI-powered video analytics security and surveillance program integrates advanced features like facial recognition and object detection. Airtel showcased the next level of remote communication in healthcare, allowing doctors to manoeuvre a robot arm in real-time.

huawei

Huawei

The company showcased the country’s first smart massive MIMO optimisation based on AI technology for Vodafone Idea network. The MIMO optimisation helps create a pre-5G network for the participating networks which will be made to full-fledged 5G network in coming time. The technology adds automation capabilities to its network, improving optimisation efficiency, boosting cell capacity and enhancing end-user experience of the network. Industrial-level innovation that targets customer experience is at the heart of Huawei’s future vision in India. The telecom giant also rolled out Intelligent Operation Center (IOC)- a solution specifically designed for India’s smart cities of the future. 

Qualcomm

Qualcomm

Amercian semiconductor giant Qualcomm showcased its WiFi 6 products which have higher throughput in congested environments and provides low latency. Other product offerings from Qualcomm included a smart indoor camera which provides live remote monitoring with a 2-way talk using AI-powered person/face detection, 5G connected ambulances and a smart glove that performs ultrasounds.

Qualcomm collaborated with Ericsson to demo India’s first 5G video con millimetre-wave (mmWave) spectrum. Apart from that, Qualcomm also demonstrated a digital walkie talkie has a voice-over LTE allowing users to make video calls, VoIP, share texts and multimedia to users using the technology. 

startup india

Startup India

Startup India presented smart network connectivity solutions ranging from next-generation WiFi, WiFi for 5G, and India’s first automated cloud platform. Startup India introduced Sensorise which is an M2M service provider with the practice of supplying end to end solution in life cycle management of remote asset e-sim and IoT devices.

Overview

At a time when the country’s telecom sector is going through a time and riddled with various financial challenges, India Mobile Congress gave a ray of hope for the industry. Leveraging the power of 5G, AI and IoT, hundreds of demos proved India’s telecom will eventually recover strongly as the country’s move towards the $ 5 trillion GDP target. Next to watch is 5G spectrum allocation which will take place in the current fiscal. It is expected that the telecom players will likely bid aggressively to cement their showcased innovations. 

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Reliance Jio Makes A Bold Move With New AI-Powered Video Call Assistant https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/reliance-jio-makes-a-bold-move-with-new-ai-powered-video-call-assistant/ Tue, 15 Oct 2019 09:59:34 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=47966

Indian telecommunications giant Jio has unveiled its patent-filed artificial intelligence-powered Video Call Assistant at India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2019. This all-new AI bot would allow businesses to take their customer service to the next level by allowing them to automate their communications. Furthermore, the best thing about this bot is that it is not just […]

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Indian telecommunications giant Jio has unveiled its patent-filed artificial intelligence-powered Video Call Assistant at India Mobile Congress (IMC) 2019. This all-new AI bot would allow businesses to take their customer service to the next level by allowing them to automate their communications. Furthermore, the best thing about this bot is that it is not just powered by AI but when it comes to accessing it, it can be done via a 4G phone call, without even using/installing any other application.

This entire project has been done in collaboration with one of the subsidiaries of Reliance Industries in the US called Radisys.

The bot is built in such a way that it is capable of listening and understanding a customer’s queries. And Jio has even demonstrated the system at IMC 2019. When a number was dialled a video chat option also popped. And upon tapping on that option, a human-looking bot appeared on the screen. To show the bot’s capability, they even asked a question which it managed to answer.

The Bot Maker

The AI bot is not the only thing that the telecommunication giant has introduced, Jio has launched the Bot Maker which is also a part of the AI Video Call Assistant. The bot maker is essentially a toolkit for the developers. The main reason behind this launch is that Jio wants to help small businesses to come up with their own AI-based bots as this toolkit can help them build and deploy the AI assistant in a small fraction of time.

That is not all, one of the features that seem to be great is that the AI Assistant can be customised according to the brands need even if it’s an avatar. And all this is possible with the bot maker.

Bots That Made History

When it comes to phone bot, Google is already in the game. If you remember, last year, the company has launched the feature where the AI assistant could mimic a human voice. Powered by Google Duplex (a service that uses AI to call restaurants and speak on our behalf to book a table), the AI bot uses a very natural speech pattern which includes fillers like ‘er’ and ‘mmm’, ‘hmm’ so that it sounds more human.

Despite its capability of mimicking human voice, the AI bot came under the controversy in May this year. It has been revealed that a quarter of Google Duplex calls are actually placed by humans. And Google responded to the entire event by saying that it helps in obtaining data to train its AI. And eventually, it would also decrease the need for human involvement.

Outlook

In the past couple of days, Reliance Jio has made several headlines. It recently announced that it is going to charge 6 paise per minute for voice calls made to subscribers of other telcos to account for the termination charges it pays its rivals. The company has been under criticism since the very moment it has made this announcement. But now with this latest launch, the company seems to be gaining that rapport back.

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Why Indian SMEs Are Important For Big Tech Companies  https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/india-sme-big-tech-companies/ Thu, 05 Sep 2019 12:00:57 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=45557 SME India Technology

The small and medium businesses (SMEs) in India include 63.4 million units and accounts for nearly 30% of India’s GDP, employing about 460 million people. The sector also makes up for 33.4% of the India’s output in manufacturing, giving employment to around 120 million Indians, according to CII.  When it comes to exports, the SMEs […]

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SME India Technology

The small and medium businesses (SMEs) in India include 63.4 million units and accounts for nearly 30% of India’s GDP, employing about 460 million people. The sector also makes up for 33.4% of the India’s output in manufacturing, giving employment to around 120 million Indians, according to CII.  When it comes to exports, the SMEs contribution is estimated at about 45% of the total exports. 

Even though the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) sector contributes to a large chunk of India’s GDP, traditional inefficient methods of operating business and the low rate of technology adoption has hindered smaller business to achieve their potential. Google’s research in collaboration with consultancy firm KPMG revealed that 68% of the 51 million SMEs are not connected to the internet. The study also found that digitization of SMEs could expand their contribution to India’s GDP by 10 percentage points, pushing it up to 46-48% by 2020. 

Clearly, SMEs in India are yet to attain their full potential and get to the next level of business growth. The finance ministry recently set a target of making Indian a 5 trillion dollar economy and SMEs play an important role in achieving the target. The only hurdle is technology adoption, and this is where tech companies are coming to the front, making technologies available for SMEs to thrive. 

What Tech Companies Are Doing To Foster Technology Adoption In SME Sector

Elaborating how different companies are focusing on the SME sector, we see many examples. One of the most prominent is telecom giant Reliance Jio announced that it wanted to expand the digital benefits and make them more inclusive for small and medium sized businesses. The company said SMEs will be given cheap digital services, from compute to storage, to connectivity. Jio’s partnership with tech giant Microsoft will help provide the cloud services Jio would need to scale the infrastructure to millions of SMEs across India. 

Reliance is not the only one working to bring digitisation to Indian SMEs. Recently, large tech companies like Dell, HP, Intel, Vodafone Idea and WhatsApp came together under the guidance of industry body Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) for project called Tech-Saksham. The project plans to reach out to over 10,000 MSMEs. The tech companies will work with SMEs overcome challenges in adopting technology, proving resources and expertise to make sure India’s large SME base gets the digital assistance it needs badly. Shreekant Somany, Chairman, CII National MSME Council stated the direct benefit of the project involving the technology players will be made available through training programmes and workshops on the latest technological solutions such as cloud computing, and market access for trade and exports.

Yet another example is Cisco, one of the world’s largest players in cloud networking, which recently set the target of having interactions with 25 SMEs everyday in an initiative to help them go digital. About 30% of Cisco’s business in India comes from SMEs, and therefore the company has made SMEs a big priority. The company has reported that the SMEs want simple solutions and therefore cloud-based offering from the company has been extremely successful among SMEs, adding 5,000 new customers this year in India. “We are seeing significant traction in our SME business, thanks to ‘Start’ portfolio. Since the launch of Cisco Start portfolio in FY17, we have on-boarded 5,000 new customers in a year,” Cisco India and SAARC Managing Director. 

Apart from that, Google has also been working to capture this booming market with its enterprise offerings such as Google for Work, Google Cloud and others. The company’s CEO has also stated that Google will provide digital training to “thousands of small businesses so they can adopt technologies. Digital Unlocked is one such program run by Google in partnership with industry body FICCI, to provide Indian SMEs key digital skills to help them to get online and connect to customers in different parts of the country. 

Even Facebook announced an initiative under which it is collaborating with Venture Capital (VC) funds to accelerate the growth of the small and medium businesses (SMEs). Facebook’s VC Brand Incubator Program will be the first in a series of programs by Facebook that will be focused on helping SMEs achieve growth in India by providing them with technology skilling and support. 

The Opportunity

According to Google-KMPG study cited above, digitally-empowered SMEs have about twice the revenue growth projections in comparison to offline SMEs. This is an area of large opportunity for tech companies, where they can profit tremendously by helping SMEs grow through technology innovation. In an effort to fill the widening gap between large and small businesses, tech companies are fast competing to provide digital infrastructure support to SMEs. This includes a wide array of support, from digital payments to cloud to AI-led innovation. 

IDC predicts SME spending on IT hardware, software, and services, including business services, is expected to reach $684 Bn in 2021 . India will be one of the fastest growing markets for IT spending in SMEs, growing at 7% CAGR from 2016-2021. The digitisation wave which started with digital payments extended to GST software and GST bundled devices being made available to SMEs. All of the transactional has enhanced the use of cloud based technologies. But, compute and storage requirements are only going to increase with time and if India wants to include SMEs, it must have a robust digital infrastructure with world class cloud and connectivity services. 

Overview

The need of the hour is for industry stakeholders, government policy makers and enterprises to work together to enable the digital empowerment of SMEs, which have been left behind. Big tech companies have realised the opportunity as they are actively helping Indian SMEs adopt newer technologies like cloud, AI, process automation, IoT and data analytics to make enterprise process like accounting, inventory management, sales, marketing, HR, customer service, etc more efficient and at par with their large global counterparts. 

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Breaking Down Reliance Jio’s Entry Into The World Of Blockchain, IoT & Edge Computing https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/reliance-jio-ambani-blockchain-iot-edge-computing/ Wed, 14 Aug 2019 05:19:41 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=44460 Reliance Jio Partners with IIT Bombay to Build Bharat GPT

Reliance Jio recently announced a host of digital services, including the country’s largest blockchain network, an IoT platform, and a CDN and edge computing platform. With the announcements, Jio has indicated that it is going to herald a new era of communication and digitalisation, which is not just restricted to telecom, but encompasses everything which […]

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Reliance Jio Partners with IIT Bombay to Build Bharat GPT

Reliance Jio recently announced a host of digital services, including the country’s largest blockchain network, an IoT platform, and a CDN and edge computing platform. With the announcements, Jio has indicated that it is going to herald a new era of communication and digitalisation, which is not just restricted to telecom, but encompasses everything which touches digital, both for end consumers as well as businesses. 

Jio has already played a prominent role in boosting the country’s digital initiative by providing 340 million Indian subscribers cheap and fast internet services, which is an important utility for any fast-developing economy. In the past, Jio mobile services gave a huge push to services in the retail and finance space, and so players like Paytm, Flipkart and thousands of others directly benefited. Had it not been for Jio, many of the digital businesses might not worked as well as they have in the last few years, as the company gave a platform for those businesses to directly connect with customers, derive valuable insights and create new business models. 

Now with the recent announcements, one thing has become very clear— Reliance Jio plans to focus on its business of creating digital solutions. The company said has about 6000 software engineers, and is targeting to hire many more to accomplish its digital initiatives. In this direction, it has also invested in 14 startups to help drive different parts of the newly announced digital infrastructure. “Digital Platforms will be Jio’s contribution to transform India into an AI-first economy,” said Mukesh Ambani during his speech at the company’s 42nd annual general meeting.

Enterprise-Grade Solutions For A Fraction Of The Cost

The fast-rising payment and e-commerce space depends directly on the shoulders of telecom players such as Jio to help them with connectivity. Now, Jio wants to expand the digital benefits and make them more inclusive for micro, small and medium sized businesses as well. The company wants to help millions of organisations by connecting them with Jio’s digital infrastructure. The company said SMEs will be given cheap digital services, from compute to storage, to connectivity. The integration of all industries with the Jio platform, as outlined in Mukesh Ambani’s vision, will ease the inefficient processes across them. 

While businesses today pay out ₹15,000 ₹20,000 for a bundle of connectivity, productivity and automation tolls, Reliance said it will provide all of that for just 1/10th of a cost, around ₹1,500. The announcement could potentially be a boon for micro enterprises struggling to make it in the digital era. The level of value it can add to the economy will be unprecedented, believe many. Businesses will have access to unlimited enterprise-grade voice and data services, video conferencing, security solutions, marketing and sales solutions which are at par with larger enterprises. “Medium and large enterprises spend ₹3-5 lakh annually for solutions, for which we have custom-designed plans,” Ambani said.

Why Does Reliance Want A Blockchain Network?

Jio announced it is also creating the country’s largest blockchain network, comprising of thousands of nodes spread across. But, why does the company want with distributed ledger technology? To protect the data and privacy, Ambani said. According to Ambani, the blockchain network will serve to give data provenance as well protect it from tampering, duplication, and illegal use of corporate or private data. Of course, experts have said in the past that if Aadhaar data had been managed using a blockchain, we wouldn’t have seen breaches. The blockchain network likewise will make processes efficient as data could be instantly matched between the given parties, without much hassle. The blockchain according to Jio will touch all parts of their infrastructure, where transactions are involved. “We want a brand new model for data privacy so Indian data is owned and controlled by Indian people and not by corporates, especially global corporations. The blockchain network will be vital for India, in modernising supply chains and agriculture,” Ambani added. 

IoT: A ₹20,000 Crore Opportunity For Reliance Jio

Reliance Jio sees a ₹20,000 crore opportunity in the narrowband IoT market and wants to create a pan-India network for connected devices. According to the company, 2 billion IoT devices will be installed in India in the next 2 years and Jio wants to have half the share in those installations. It is to be noted that other telecom players like Airtel are also keenly looking at IoT services. Airtel recently announced it was talking with car manufacturers to create connected vehicle solutions based on IoT. The smart connected devices based on IoT will generate create massive amounts of data through sensors, which can be analysed for making smart decisions. Insights from that data will certainly help Jio in its future direction in capturing the connectivity and digital solutions market further. “Unique custom insights can be leveraged to grow this into a much bigger business in the next 5 years,” Ambani stated. 

JioFiber: An Important Piece Of The Puzzle 

How can all this be achieved with just mobile services? India still needs ubiquitous WiFi, across homes and businesses so the dream of Digital India can be achieved. Jio understands that well. Its Fiber-to-home (FTH) service is soon going to provide affordable yet ultra-fast WiFi to the citizens. With speeds between 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, it will make it even easier for a large part of the population to connect to the digital infrastructure, thereby enhancing India’s broadband penetration, which stands today at 10 percent compared to China, where it is 70%. Reliance says it will provide Reliance Fibre services to home users at 1/10th the global rates with subscription starting at 700 Rs ($10) per month. Similar to Jio’s mobile services, it is predicted that cheaper rates for high-speed broadband will ensure Reliance Jio gets to amass hundreds of millions of users. Nation-wide broadband is an important part of the strategy as without the connectivity, how will connected devices market flourish? 

Jio Also Bets On Edge Computing For Seamless Connectivity 

To provide seamless connectivity in digital services such as streaming content, Jio will create its edge computing and content distribution network with over 1000 nodes present across the nation. Edge computing is another crucial technology that a lot of services rely upon, particularly those that consume lots of data. According to research, more than 30% of organisations’ cloud deployments in India alone will include edge computing to solve bandwidth issues as well as reduce latency to process data in real-time. Be it streaming services, smart assistants, AR/VR or data emanating from billions of IoT devices, edge will make it easy for Jio to process all the data interactions instantly. “With the help of edge computing and CDN with tens of thousands of nodes, favourite content and apps will be nearer to you, so you can enjoy them, download them in real-time,” said Ambani. Jio also said it will create applications using natural language processing and speech recognition for Indian languages, served at the edge. Edge computing will serve well with Jio’s launch of 5G, which the company stated will be ready soon. 

Digital Platforms Will Boost Reliance’s Strong Retail Presence

One of the key focus areas for Reliance is retail. This is one area besides telecom where Reliance has a large presence, and so modernising its retail part and leveraging its digital platform can create tremendous value. Here, instead of creating value for other large e-commerce businesses like Amazon and Flipkart, Reliance signalled that it is keen to make his retail business flourish in the country via his digital initiatives. Reliance wants to do this in multiple ways. Ambani said he wants to make the company’s distribution chains more efficient as well as integrate small and medium-sized Indian merchants on the digital platform. This will be done using connected Point of Sale devices, which the merchants will be able to use for inventory management, customer relationship management, banking and finance, etc. “We want to modernise and integrate the smallest Tirana shops to help them become transformative. We want to create an end-trend digital distribution stack in the retail sector. For this, we are deploying blockchain, IoT, AI across India and removing inefficiencies and the value destructions,” announced Ambani. 

Where Does Microsoft Fit In?

With so much connectivity to be created, Reliance Jio needs to set up its cloud network comprising of multiple data centres across the nation. For the company’s cloud network, it will leverage Microsoft for its expertise. Using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Cognitive Services, Jio plans to create seamless computing, storage as well as create AI models using the massive amounts of data its platforms will create. Jio said it will set up data centres itself and Microsoft will bring in Azure Cloud for a bunch of technology solutions relating to AI, machine learning, data analytics, blockchain, IoT and edge. The partnership will create well-integrated solutions, spanning connectivity, data storage and real-time computing, deployed at the edge of the network. “Microsoft will bring Azure cognitive services to more devices, creating new breakthroughs in intelligent experience with the support of major India languages,” Satya Nadella said. 

Overview

With a slew of announcements, Reliance Jio has given itself even more headway when it comes to competing with other telecom players like Airtel and Vodafone, which are already under the water. Mukesh Ambani has also demonstrated that Jio is and will remain a core part of India’s digital infrastructure. With a refreshed business model focused on digital services, broadband and connected devices, the company has a long way to go. It also seems with a strategic focus on software and connected business solutions, Jio will strengthen Reliance’s businesses in other sectors, including finance, agriculture, healthcare, retail and entertainment. It will be interesting to see how Jio brings about the solutions it has promised using Microsoft’s and its own capabilities.

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Indian Telcos Are Adopting Blockchain To Filter Out Spam: Here’s How It Works https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/indian-telcos-are-adopting-blockchain-to-filter-out-spam-heres-how-it-works/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/indian-telcos-are-adopting-blockchain-to-filter-out-spam-heres-how-it-works/#respond Tue, 28 May 2019 10:23:16 +0000 https://curiousdose.com/?p=10002141 Blockchain technology has now begun trickling down to the consumer and is set to offer a benefit that is sorely needed by many. Prominent Indian telcos Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have begun rolling out blockchain solutions to curb spam calls. This is keeping in mind the modern regulatory standpoint by the Telecom […]

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Blockchain technology has now begun trickling down to the consumer and is set to offer a benefit that is sorely needed by many. Prominent Indian telcos Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have begun rolling out blockchain solutions to curb spam calls.

This is keeping in mind the modern regulatory standpoint by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Keeping in mind consumer interests, TRAI set a framework for access providers to do something about the problem of unsolicited commercial communication.

Regulation And Compliance

The TRAI published an amendment to the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation on 19th July 2018 which will be enforced from the end of this month onwards.

The regulation was to curb the rise of unsolicited commercial communication to protect customers from spam calls. However, those making the calls still found ways to get into loopholes that the access providers left in their system.

Since all telecom service providers in India fall under the purview of TRAI, they are required to adhere to the new norms mentioned by the regulator. The party wanted to make sure that only those registered in the databases can make the calls to prevent fraud. Apart from this, they also wished to record user consent for telemarketers for consumer protection.

How Does It Work?

The blockchain, at its base, is a database. What makes it different is its ability to not only hold a single version of the truth but also synchronize with multiple parties who might not be ready to work together or agree on the data. This architecture is a perfect fit for an environment such as the telecom market.

At its core, the blockchain solution will be a shared ledger of UCC numbers distributed across a telco’s databases. It is also a very transparent system, and will enable a clearer outlook on parties that are looking to exploit loopholes left by the telcos.

Tech Mahindra, one of the blockchain service providers in the picture, developed a blockchain solution late last year after the regulations were made public. It was revealed that this was built on Microsoft’s Azure platform, and functions at the “intersection of cloud and blockchain”, according to the National Technology Office of Microsoft India, Prashant Shukla.

The system will “ensure a new way of monitoring and enforcing compliance throughout the ecosystem,” he stated.

Apart from this, IBM, another of the service providers, is offering solutions for mobile number portability and do not call registry. The VP of IBM Research, Sriram Raghavan, stated that the company had completed the proofs-of-concept and pilots with “major telecom providers” in the country.

The solution will be a private distributed ledger that can be accessed by telcos. The ledger will contain the registry of consumers that have forbidden consent to any calls by telemarketers and will be shared across all operators. Apart from this, the company is also offering a solution for better mobile number portability; a solution which works across multiple telcos.

At the time, Raghavan stated,

“We anticipate that going into the New Year, we’ll start to see blockchain solutions getting rolled out. We have completed proof of concepts and pilots.”

More recently, Tanla Solutions, one of the service providers, also confirmed that the projects are being rolled out currently. A spokesperson said,

“Deployment is underway and will help in arresting spam and fraud-related commercial communications”

Blockchain Adoption Rising

The three companies have chosen to partner with different parties to ensure the seamless rollout and maintenance of their respective blockchains. Vodafone Idea has partnered with a Hyderabad-based company known as Tanla Solutions for their deployment across 395 million users.

Airtel, with its 325 million users, tied up with blockchain industry leader IBM for their solution. The company has shown previous experience in handling blockchain solutions, and has R&D capabilities to explore optimizations.

Jio tied up with Tech Mahindra, who developed the blockchain solution in conjunction with Microsoft. With over 307 million users on the platform, the telco is looking to utilize Microsoft’s Azure platform for its deployment.

Post the rollout of all of these networks, India will become the hotbed of one of the biggest blockchain implementations in the world. With over 1 billion customers reached due to this initiative, India will be home to one of the most burgeoning blockchain markets in the world.

The World Economic Forum even predicted that the blockchain would account for almost 10% of the global GDP by 2025.

With blockchain set to be a trillion-dollar industry, India looks to be cementing its role as a leader in the technology for years to come. The country has also shown its interest towards blockchain in other ways as well, with the National Payments Corporation of India looking to adopt such technologies for better digital payments flow.

The forward-thinking mentality of regulators and readiness of participants also shows an atmosphere conducive to growth. It is left to see how the market is going to develop in one of the world’s biggest countries.

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Jio To Tackle India’s Real-Time Problems With AI, Starting With Speech-To-Text Conversion https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/jio-to-tackle-indias-real-time-problems-with-ai-starting-with-speech-to-text-conversion/ Thu, 12 Jul 2018 07:36:05 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=26378 reliance jio

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the fourth-largest telecom player in India has started building a team of professionals to work on artificial intelligence and its multiple use cases. Speaking at a NASSCOM summit with the theme ‘Democratising AI’, Shailesh Kumar, chief data scientist at Jio told a newspaper that they now wanted to deploy AI to […]

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reliance jio

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Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the fourth-largest telecom player in India has started building a team of professionals to work on artificial intelligence and its multiple use cases. Speaking at a NASSCOM summit with the theme ‘Democratising AI’, Shailesh Kumar, chief data scientist at Jio told a newspaper that they now wanted to deploy AI to solve India’s real-time problems. He added that the mobile phone network and data could be provided at low costs by deploying scalable AI and lowering tariffs.

The first step, explained Kumar, was to find the sections of the society which do not have access to mobile and internet and then to deploy AI there. He added that Jio was set to start from ground zero to solve these India-specific cases. As a part of this initiative, Kumar said that Jio would use AI for converting speech to text, keeping in mind the variations in accents across all Indian languages.

“The diversity of the country makes this process even more complex unlike the Western world where they deal mostly with only one language,” said Kumar.

At the India Digital Open Summit held last year in Mumbai, Akash had said that AI, voice assistant, voice recognition and voice command were some of the new technologies that are growing on a daily basis in terms of usage. Now, Reliance Jio wants to hire professionals who have demonstrated experience in machine learning and even in blockchain.

Earlier this month, AIM had carried a report about Jio hiring senior persons to build a dedicated AI team. “The company wants to set up this team in either Bengaluru or Hyderabad. Akash Ambani is taking a keen interest in this and is expected to lead this initiative… They have already started the recruitment process in Bengaluru…apart from AI, they are looking for people who can work on machine learning and blockchain,” the source had told a newspaper regarding the same.

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Reliance Jio Starts Hiring New AI Team To Work Under Akash Ambani https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/jio-artificial-intelligence-hiring-akash-ambani/ Tue, 05 Jun 2018 12:29:31 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=25171

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the fourth-largest telecom player in India has started building a team of professionals to work on artificial intelligence and its multiple use cases. Reportedly, the team will be led by Akash Ambani and will work on AI use cases for the telecom firm. Sources told a newspaper, “Reliance Jio has hired […]

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Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the fourth-largest telecom player in India has started building a team of professionals to work on artificial intelligence and its multiple use cases. Reportedly, the team will be led by Akash Ambani and will work on AI use cases for the telecom firm.

Sources told a newspaper, “Reliance Jio has hired a few senior people who will build this team… The company wants to set up this team in either Bengaluru or Hyderabad. Akash Ambani is taking a keen interest in this and is expected to lead this initiative… They have already started the recruitment process in Bengaluru…apart from AI, they are looking for people who can work on machine learning and blockchain.”

At the India Digital Open Summit held last year in Mumbai, Akash had said that AI, voice assistant, voice recognition and voice command were some of the new technologies that are growing on a daily basis in terms of usage. Now, Reliance Jio wants to hire professionals who have demonstrated experience in machine learning and even blockchain.

The move comes close on the heels of Reliance Jio’s competitor Bharti Airtel’s decision to build a team to focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Airtel’s AI and ML team will be led by Santanu Bhattacharya who was appointed as the chief data scientist earlier in April. He is reportedly building data science and analytics capabilities to launch innovative products and service experience on the network.

Last month, Reliance had announced the launch of Jiointeract, in what the company called as the “world’s first artificial intelligence-based brand-engagement video platform.” They had added that as Jio’s base of over 186 million subscribers and another 150 million smartphone users were ready, JioInteract was to become the largest platform for movie-promotion and brand engagement.

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Meet JioInteract, Reliance’s New AI-Based Brand Engagement Platform https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/reliance-jiointeract-ai-platform-amitabh-bachchan/ Fri, 04 May 2018 12:35:43 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=24285

Reliance Industries Limited announced the launch of Jiointeract on Thursday, in what the company is calling as the “world’s first artificial intelligence-based brand-engagement video platform.” The official statement read, “The first of many services to be launched on this platform is the Live Video Call that features India’s favourite celebrities. To kick-start, Jio has on-boarded […]

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Reliance Industries Limited announced the launch of Jiointeract on Thursday, in what the company is calling as the “world’s first artificial intelligence-based brand-engagement video platform.”

The official statement read, “The first of many services to be launched on this platform is the Live Video Call that features India’s favourite celebrities. To kick-start, Jio has on-boarded none other than Bollywood’s biggest star, Amitabh Bachchan, who will promote his upcoming comedy-drama film 102 Not Out in the most innovative way.”

The company added that as Jio’s base of over 186 million subscribers and another 150 million smartphone users was ready, JioInteract was to become the largest platform for movie-promotion and brand engagement. “Over the next few weeks, Jio will introduce services such as video call centres, video catalogue, and virtual showrooms to the forefront redefining customer experience,” said the statement.

JioInteract’s first service Live Video Call will allow all Jio and other smartphone subscribers to make a video call to Bachchan anytime during the day, starting 4 May 2018. Users can even ask questions related to his upcoming film, 102 Not Out and book their movie tickets in real-time through JioInteract’s ticketing partner BookMyShow.

Such use of artificial intelligence is a first across the world and will reposition the way brands and customers think of engagement

“This unique and innovative service uses a powerful artificial intelligence based platform to listen to user questions and respond to them in the most appropriate way. In addition, the platform has a unique auto-learning feature that helps improve the answering accuracy,” RIL said in a statement.

Introducing VCBaaS or Video Call Bot as a Service

“Positioned as VCBaaS (video call bot as a service), JioInteract with its multimedia capabilities attempts to democratise AI and video call technologies in a simplified way for effective brand engagement. This technology has wide scale applications across B2C space. Using it, Jio is also tapping developer ecosystem to create innovative applications like virtual showrooms, product demonstrations, ordering cart for e-commerce, etc.”

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Are 5G and AI Linked? Can India Vault To Pole Position In AI Race With 5G Rollout? https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-origins-evolution/5g-ai-linked-can-india-vault-pole-position-ai-race-5g-rollout/ Thu, 01 Mar 2018 05:55:53 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=22181

With the launch of Jio, Mukesh Ambani has disrupted the telecom market like never before, by offering free voice calling, as well as dirt cheapest data plan. Jio now claims to handle 55,000,000 GB of data every day. Not only that, Jio has forced key telecom player like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, BSNL to slash […]

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With the launch of Jio, Mukesh Ambani has disrupted the telecom market like never before, by offering free voice calling, as well as dirt cheapest data plan. Jio now claims to handle 55,000,000 GB of data every day. Not only that, Jio has forced key telecom player like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, BSNL to slash data prices in the country.

After the 4G disruption, Indian government is now drawing a roadmap for the launch 5G services by 2022, a technology that will offer internet speed of up to 100 times faster than 4G and has the ability to bring more advanced technology like internet of things, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles.

“We have created a high-level 5G forum that will work on vision, mission and goals of 5G service in the country. When the world will roll out 5G in 2020, I believe India will be at par with them,” Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha said.

5G and AI

The growing trends of artificial intelligence and machine learning is actually paving the way for 5G network. It is speculated that 5G will carve out a way for the next generation robots or humanoids, which will be controlled wirelessly than wired communication links and also enable data storage resources of the cloud.

Initially, 5G will be an overlay to existing 4G and will start achieving meaningful scale and reach by early 2020s. Though it will be expensive to deploy 5G infrastructure and will require a fresh business models and regulation, claims a WEF report.

The fifth generation will also power the autonomous self-driving cars. According to Huawei Technologies estimates, on 5G, a autonomous car travelling at 100 kilometres per hour will have moved just 2.8 centimetres, or little more than inch, from the time it detects an obstacle to when it activates the brakes.

5G network will increase the number of connected devices around the world. It will also enable fast speed data transfer between devices on the computer and the cloud storage.

The 5G network and artificial intelligence are intertwined. On one hand, 5G will create a huge amount of data in the cloud storage. On the other hand, artificial intelligence will lead to more stable network connection for individuals and for businesses. Chances, users might have fewer call drops and service providers will have have an easier time with maintenance.

Is India 5G and AI ready?

The 4G network in India is still at the nascent stage and it works on raw bandwidth, which means there are high chances to lose internet connectivity when you are underground or to a higher ground. Despite that, the telecom industry and government are coming together and is committed to bring the 5G network in India by creating a roadmap for introducing the network in India in a year or two. Indian government has initiated measures to introduce the fifth generation network via National Telecom Policy.

The Telecom Authority of India have issued a discussion paper that would represent 5G and Internet of Things in India. Additionally, the Center has also earmarked Rs 500 crore for the research and development of 5G technologies. As a part of NTP, government is even planning to give a boost to telecom manufacturing. With a aim to cover 100 million people in the second phase of BharatNet project, government is providing a subsidy of Rs 3,600 crore to Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone to set up WiFi in rural areas.

Telecom companies have begun testing of 5G network in India. On September 2017, Airtel has reportedly deployed Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology to enable 5G network. MIMO will make the network future ready for meeting the data demand coming from digital revolution in India, claims a report.

Telecom companies have also started allocating huge funds to improve the network quality and customer services. Jio, Airtel, Vodafone have doubled their fibre deployment for 4G and 5G network.

Recently, Airtel and Chinese company Huawei group have also conducted 5G network trail in Manesar and Gurgaon. Chinese company Huawei Group is planning to be the first one to bring 5G phones and infrastructure in India.

Sunil Mittal’s company has recently tied up with South Korean company SK Telecom to work together in developing 5G technology, network functions virtualisation (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and internet of things.

After shaking up the telecom market with $25 million 4G wireless network, Reliance Jio is now working with Israel’s Airspan to bring 5G service in India. Jio is taking the process ahead by deploying around 5 million small cells made by Airspan. These small cells are reportedly capable of carrying over 350 terabytes of data along with 5 million VoLTE calls. Talking about the 5G technology Jio said that the switch from 4G to 5G will be offered overnight. A single software upgrade would make every single cell tower from 1 GBps to 20 GBps.

Even Swedish telecom gear maker Ericsson is in talks with some telcos in India to bring 5G technology in India. “Our radio system is already 5G ready. The so called processing unit, baseband unit- the brain of the system is 5G ready and prepared for software upgrade and prepared for IoT software upgrade as well as our latest radio equipment,” Christian Hedelin, head of strategy-business area networks at Ericsson told in a interview to a media company.

To match China, US and other countries in AI race, Modi government has formed a committee to roll out a nationwide AI programme that will include robotics and data analytics. In this year’s Budget, FM Arun Jaitley has entrusted Amitabh Kant-led NITI Aayog to spearhead a new national programme focused on research and development of artificial intelligence, where government will likely provide incentives to startups and venture funds that undertake application-oriented research on AI across key sectors including banking, insurance, education, health, retail and transportation.

Government would see that there is no spectrum shortage to ensure India does not lag behind the rest of the world in launching 5G services, Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha said. He also said that the new telecom policy would be suitably aligned to ensure India is 5G ready and in sync with the world telecom. “The government is betting big on 5G as its is expected to deliver new levels of performance and efficiency and offer  opportunities for myriad apps and business model that could potentially lead to better healthcare, smart cities, more efficient manufacturing and enhanced lifestyles, he added.

Commenting on the matter, Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said that the government has approved a 5G technologies test best that would be a key enabler for standards and devices that would be needed for 5G rollout and usage.

On a Concluding Note

Though India is readying itself to bring 5G network by 2020 to keep pace with the global technology adoption but it lacks 100 percent fiber coverage, investment in fiberisation and basic infrastructure. The last-mile fiber coverage in India is only about 25 to 30 percent and the investment in fiber infrastructure is only 10 percent of overall deployment cost.

The Indian telecom companies are also facing the Right of Way charges hurdle, as different states have different Right of Way policies and because of that telecom companies are losing out significant amount of infrastructure investments to municipal bodies across states. Though government tried to ease the current situation by introducing new Right of Way rules but it has not properly implemented on ground.

To leapfrog to fifth generation network there must a government-industry collaboration, fiberaisation, infrastructure development, the government also need to ease the Right of Way issue. And to win the AI race, both AI industries and research in India will need a big boost by initiating new measures to ensure that Indians are fully prepared to embrace the new era of AI.

The post Are 5G and AI Linked? Can India Vault To Pole Position In AI Race With 5G Rollout? appeared first on AIM.

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Reliance Jio To Enter Indian IoT Market https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news-updates/reliance-jio-iot-ayush-sharma/ Tue, 30 Jan 2018 09:23:49 +0000 https://analyticsindiamag.com/?p=21098 reliance jio

After its shock and awe campaign in the telecomm industry with its extremely low priced mobile and data services, and now the announcement of its foray into cryptocurrency,  Reliance Jio Infocomm is gearing up to conquer the Internet of Things (IoT) space. According to reports, the Reliance Industries subsidiary has brought onboard Ayush Sharma as the senior […]

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reliance jio

reliance jio

After its shock and awe campaign in the telecomm industry with its extremely low priced mobile and data services, and now the announcement of its foray into cryptocurrency,  Reliance Jio Infocomm is gearing up to conquer the Internet of Things (IoT) space.

According to reports, the Reliance Industries subsidiary has brought onboard Ayush Sharma as the senior vice president of engineering and technology to drive accomplishments in this space. Before joining Reliance Jio, Sharma operated his own venture, MotoJeannie in the US. He has also worked with companies such as Huawei, Ericsson and Cisco in the past.

With Sharma’s involvement, Jio aims to build business around IoT and disruptive technologies such as mobile edge computing, blockchain and artificial intelligence.

“Jio is looking at these technologies to enable world’s largest programmable network with alternate technologies available,” Sharma said. He has already started assembling a team of engineers to innovate and utilise these technologies.

The company aims to introduce IoT products and solutions for regular consumers as well as industries and enterprises. However, the immediate focus is on the latter.

“It will take at least a year to enable consumer IoT, but the large focus is on enterprise IoT. We are working on specific use cases,” said Sharma. He also added that Reliance Industries seeks to employ these technologies in its in-house verticals such as logistics and retail in order to develop their intelligence.

The bandwidth and latency required for enterprise and industrial use cases of IoT is expected to be the supplemented by the company’s 4G Network.

According to Sharma, Jio is building its private platform backed by big data. To create a comprehensive network for consumer IoT, Jio is said to be in the process of enrolling car manufacturers, consumer appliances and durables maker and so on, and is also collaborating with vendors of various technologies.

Just like its closest competitor, Bharti Airtel, Jio is foraying into home automation services as well. It is reportedly planning to introduce its own line of home surveillance systems. According a recent study, the home automation market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.5% between 2017 to 2022, and generate nearly $54 billion in revenues by 2022.

This report comes within a month after the announcement of the company’s plan to create is own cryptocurrency, JioCoin. Open Source is said to be playing a key role in both JioCoin as well as the IoT initiative.

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