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Month: November 2018

Asia Inc. 500 & IBC

Asia Inc. 500 has always been at the forefront of recognizing and rewarding individuals and organizations for their valuable contributions made towards the economy and global society at large. Walking an extra-mile, Asia Inc.500 also made its debut in the international publications by launching magazines that spread awareness of the successful startups and entrepreneurs in areas of AI, Blockchain and other upcoming technologies and frameworks.

With a mission of informing, inspiring and equipping people with a solid understanding of the various fields in the digitally transforming world, the magazine launch has been processed. The special editions of the magazine unfold the innovative vision and the broader implications of the new emerging trends like artificial intelligence/machine learning and other modern technologies.

There are many magazine publishers that dabble in this business though, but Asia Inc. 500 with more contemporary editorial-style publication with richer photography dazzles the audiences across Asia. It has been a fabulous year for Asia Inc. 500 so far with back-to-back magazine launches. All the 4 launches till date received a massive response from the global audience becoming an icon in promoting the applications of emerging technologies.

The inaugural session of Asia Inc. 500 first magazine was held during International Blockchain Congress (IBC) in India. Asia Inc. 500 and Nucleus Vision, in collaboration with the governments of Telangana and Goa, and NITI Aayog have launched the first edition of the International Blockchain Congress which was held from August 3-5, 2018. This is India’s first ever International Blockchain Congress which is also the world’s largest industry-government Blockchain conference that was attended by hundreds of government officials, global Blockchain leaders, innovators, enterprises, and technologists.

The conference was attended by distinguished guests such as Mr. Tim V Draper, Founder of DFJ Ventures, Mr. Amitabh Kant, CEO Niti Aayog, Mr. KT Rama Rao, IT Minister, State of Telangana, Mr. Rohan Khaunte, IT Minister, Goa, Mr. CP Gurnani, CEO Tech Mahindra, Mr. Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Assoc., Mr. Min Kim, CEO of ICON Foundation, Mr. Ian Balina, Global Community Influencer, and many others.

On the first day of the IBC, Asia Inc. 500 unveiled its first ever magazine on Blockchain “INDIA ARRIVES IN BLOCKCHAIN”. The special edition of the magazine which unleashes the arrival of Blockchain in India was launched by Sri K T Rama Rao, Hon’ble Minister for IT, Govt. of Telangana. Others who were present during the launch were Jayesh Ranjan, IT Secretary, Govt. of Telangana, Ameya Abhyankar, IT Director, Govt. of Goa, CP Gurnani, CEO, Tech Mahindra, Abhishek Pitti, CEO & Founder, Nucleus.Vision, Katherine Hadda, Consul General, Hyderabad, Rama Iyer, CEO & Founder, ELEVEN01, Sri Rajendra Nimje, Director General, Centre for Good Governance, Raghavendra Hunasgi, Founder – Asia Inc. 500 & Blockchain Nation.

The first event of its kind in the country on the emerging technology, IBC, had witnessed over 3000 participants on a two-day conference in Hyderabad with keynotes, panel discussions, and deep dives across 20 sessions conducted by over 50 speakers. While the first two days of the IBC was organized at HICC in Hyderabad, the third day was hosted in Goa. Many joined to witness the revolution spurred by Asia Inc. 500 in taking the nation a step closer to the Blockchain realm.

Following the huge success of the first magazine, the second edition of the magazine was launched in September, but this time in Malaysia. Asia Inc. 500 was associated with Global Blockchain Summit 2018, Malaysia, that brought together blockchain gurus, technology players and influential audience of government. The second edition of the exclusive magazine “Empowering Global youth through Blockchain Technology” was released during this phenomenal event.

Continuing the same momentum, the third edition was launched in the month of October during Vizag Fintech Festival 2018 in Vizag, India. The Vizag Fintech Festival 2018 is the largest financial technology festival in India where Asia Inc. 500 has collaborated with the government of Andhra Pradesh to organize the festival. The week-long event which took place from October 22-26, 2018, was inaugurated by the Hon’ble Chief Minister, N. Chandra Babu Naidu and the Hon’ble IT Minister, Nara Lokesh. The event also witnessed the presence of key dignitaries like Sri. Ganta Srinivasa Rao, Hon’ble Minister for Education, Sri. JA Chaudhary, IT Advisor to Govt. of AP, Sri. K. Vijayanand, IAS, Principal Secretary ITE&C Dept., and Sri. Anoop Singh, IFS, Special Secretary ITE&C Dept.

Fintech Valley as a platform, brought pioneers and enablers of innovation to host an exclusive group of leading corporates, startups, academia and regulators from around the globe. The event also had the world’s first humanoid citizen robot, Sophia, as the star attraction of the Vizag Fintech Festival where Sophia was engaged in an intriguing interaction with the State IT Minister N Lokesh and other delegates.

Asia Inc. 500 launched the Third and exclusive edition of its magazine – “VIZAG – Asia’s own Fintech Valley” at the Vizag Fintech Festival. Sri Nara Lokesh, Hon’ble Minister for IT, Govt. of Andhra Pradesh unveiled the third edition along with Sri J A Chowdary, Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Government of Andhra Pradesh.

Continuing the trend of success, Asia Inc. 500 unveiled the Special (fourth) Edition in November at the 3rd SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards 2018, Malaysia. Asia Inc. 500 was conferred with the privilege of an international publication and an exclusive partner of Yayasan Usahawan Malaysia at the event. Hereafter, Asia Inc.500 will be used as a platform to promote the success stories of Malaysian entrepreneurs globally.

With a handful of successful launches so far, Asia Inc. 500 looks forward to launching many special editions. It will also be hosting many such events to harness a proactive interaction between government regulators, industry leaders, and startup innovators.

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The SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards (SEBA) 2018

This is the digital age that we live in and the way business is conducted today is very progressive. There are always fresh ideas and new innovations that keep sprouting up to accustom to the radical change. With many innovations now emerging, businesses continuously adopting new tools and technologies, and entrepreneurs investing their time and resources in growing their business further contributing to the economy of the nation, such efforts need to be recognized and awarded.

The SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards (SEBA) is one such platform that recognizes the achievements and contributions of business visionaries. The SEBA 2018 ceremony, which was held at on 14 November 2018 at the Grand Ballroom, Palace of the Golden Horses, Malaysia, recognized and acknowledged the achievements of the country’s leading business visionaries across all sectors of industry and their contributions to economic development. The award ceremony was held for the third consecutive year this year.

The SEBA 2018 has showcased exemplary individuals, thought leaders, successful entrepreneurs and companies who are game-changers in various disciplines. Among the recipients of the most prestigious SEBA awards were leaders who have successfully transformed their organizations and created inspiring legacies to be emulated by others. The awards also honored those eminent entrepreneurs from Malaysia who have shown strong business and thought leadership, those who leveraged on technology innovation for the greater good and expanded their business successfully across the region.

During the event, the SEBA Business Club made its inaugural launch. It is mainly aimed at supporting Malaysia’s SME business landscape by harnessing the experience and expertise of both past and current award recipients. This exclusive business club brings together the crème de la crème of the country’s top SMEs and entrepreneurs to empower the exclusive grouping of the elite and like-minded business community. The synergistic platform connects and allows for greater collaboration amongst its members and promotes not just business-only activities but also links to various NGOs and CSR programs to ignite alliances and successful business propositions.

The SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards (SEBA) was set up as an initiative to not only recognize Malaysia’s outstanding entrepreneurs and enterprises but to also uncover growing talents and upcoming companies that are transforming the face of industries they operate in. SEBA, which is held annually under the auspices of MyPreneurship, was also designed and catered with entrepreneurs in mind, bridging industry player and stakeholders, while providing a platform to connect, communicate and collaborate.

The SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards is a company or individual's partner for its growth, opportunities, and sustenance. Award categories are based on best merit, depending on accomplishments and track records. These are selected by the Jury upon a complete audit and review process, involving both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks. The awards are usually for Entrepreneurs and Startups, for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and for National Icons and Conglomerates, including MNCs.

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Business Awards – Vanity or Sanity?

With the variety of awards out in the market today, deciding which ones to enter could be
challenging! Could it be more of a hassle than a potential business gain? Here are five reasons why nominating for the much anticipated annual SME & Entrepreneurship Business Awards (SEBA) will benefit your business.

1. Improve Employee Motivation

Awards are a fantastic way to recognize the hard work and achievements of your employees. It
provides a way to focus on the success of the company and a feel-good factor coupled with a sense of pride. Besides celebrating the victory of winning the awards, employees can also be treated to a glitzy awards dinner which can yield networking opportunities.

2. An opportunity to attract new business

We’ll let that quote speak for itself. A prestigious business award win can not only help give your
business that seal of quality but also act as a good third-party endorsement for your brand. It also gives a stamp of authority and credibility within your industry peers and makes for a great talent enticement. Pitch yourself as the best and attract only the best talents to push your business forward.

3. Free marketing

Improve your brand awareness and promote your business to new and potential customers by
maximizing a business award win. Include the prestigious award logo as part of all your marketing collateral and celebrate employee’s hard work and success by identifying PR opportunities. It’s fantastic to be recognized so it’s important to make sure that people know what your business has achieved. Winning a business award can also open doors to getting contracts, finding new supply channels and breaking into new markets.

4. Networking and reputation reinforcement

For SME’s, awards are undoubtedly the best way to not only showcase the caliber of the work that is being done but to also rub shoulders with the very best of the business community. Being shortlisted(or winning) will improve client retention, and assuredly send your clients home chatting to their friends about how great you are. And, as we all know, word of mouth and personal recommendation is still the most influential factor in the business world today.

5. Benchmark against your peers

Prestigious business awards are the perfect platform to come out of your corporate shell, show off that perfectly executed marketing campaign or business strategy and set yourself high among industry peers. The process of applying for the award itself could help you think about ways you could be doing things better and with that, be able to identify areas for improvement within your business. A winning application would force you and your team to think of ways to stand out from the competition whether it’s through innovation, diversity, growth or even people development. More often than not, that benefit to your business itself would outweigh the award prize itself.

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What happens when education and technology converge

Technology is now everywhere which can be seen penetrating through our very own lives. Over the past decades, technology has made a significant development in all sectors by spreading its roots vast in the diverse fields of banking, medical sector, retailing and others. Consider the old days wherein one had to stand in long queues at the banks to do the financial transactions, there was no proper diagnosis of the disease and no proper infrastructure to perform a surgery, one had to turn to the malls or stores to buy the grocery or clothes or any other essential goods.
But now, it is entirely a new scenario; banking transactions can be done from our smartphones with many conveniences, major surgeries can be performed with the collaboration of famous surgeons across the world using video conference and one can shop and buy for his favorite things or clothes from his home. The advent of this technology has impacted the educational sector as well, yielding to an evolutionary approach.

Technology in Education has undoubtedly, undeniably, and irresistibly been transforming the educational realm. For instance, let us go back to the vault. A decade or a two ago, a typical classroom in schools was once characterized by long hours of lectures given by the teacher and students sitting through those long monologues. Today, the penetration of technology in education has changed everything upside down and it’s no longer the same phenomenon. With the emerging technologies making their own path in the field of education, schools and colleges are adopting digital solutions to enhance the learning experience and teaching skills in students and teachers.

There has been an introduction of digitization in classrooms which has transformed the environment of the class by making it more interactive, collaborative and participative. Technological developments like smart boards, classrooms PC, projectors, power point presentation, and television are few types of technology used in education. With gadgets replacing textbooks and information from databases evolving into paperless formats, the introduction of various digital educational tools has created drastic changes in the quality of education. To everyone’s surprise, school mobile apps are the current trend.

Technology has few important facets that took education to a new level. The introduction of new gadgets coming into the market every day has made learning just a click away. TV, the Internet, and mobiles are some examples of technologies we can’t ignore using them in our daily life. Online education eliminates time and space constraints as education can be acquired from any corner of the world. With many educational institutions providing online educational programs, it can be seen that there is no geographical distance and time difference. With computer-assisted learning being used widely in many schools, colleges, and Universities, it is no exaggeration that using technology in education has become a fact of our lives.

What happens when technology and education converge? The result is unprecedented and unparalleled. This new technology in education is revolutionizing education by making learning more collaborative and knowledge sharing easy. Wrapping up, it can be said that technology still and will remain a vital component of society and education as well and who can tell what it will usher in, in the new age? Let’s wait and watch!

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Google Cloud AutoML: AI now accessible to all Businesses

The tech giant Google which previously launched the new research initiative in 2017, to tackle the bias in AI and make the technology accessible to everyone, now has it all. In a significant development from the leading tech company, Google on Wednesday, 17 Jan 2018, unveiled “Cloud AutoML Vision” to democratize the benefits of the latest in machine learning research. The new platform is a suite of easy-to-use tools that make AI accessible to all businesses with Cloud AutoML that requires no in-depth training.

It is a world-known fact that Artificial intelligence has been emerging as an increasingly important area for Google over the last few years and Google was investing heavily in AI, particularly in machine learning. The newly launched Cloud AutoML is aimed at helping businesses with limitations of machine-learning expertise, to go beyond and build their own high-quality custom models using advanced techniques like learning2learn and transfer learning provided by the company.

“The Cloud AutoML Vision is a service that makes it faster and easier to create custom ML models for image recognition. Its drag-and-drop interface lets you easily upload images, train and manage models, and then deploy those trained models directly on Google Cloud,” wrote Jia Li, head of R&D, Cloud AI, and Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist, Cloud AI, in a blog post announcing the launch.

In 2017, the Internet giant introduced Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, to help developers with machine learning expertise easily build ML models that work on any type of data, of any size. And today, Google claims, more than 10,000 businesses are using Google Cloud AI services, including companies like Box, Rolls Royce Marine, Kewpie, and Ocado. While Google has offered pre-trained machine learning models via APIs that perform specific tasks, there was still a vacuum that needed to be filled in order to bring AI to everyone. To close this gap, and to make AI accessible to every business, Google introduced the Cloud AutoML.

Here are the remarkable features that the tool has to offer

Increased Accuracy: Cloud AutoML Vision is built on Google’s leading image recognition approaches, including transfer learning and neural architecture search technologies. This means you’ll get a more accurate model even if your business has limited machine learning expertise.

Faster turnaround time to production-ready models: With Cloud AutoML, you can create a simple model in minutes to pilot your AI-enabled application, or build out a full, production-ready model in as little as a day.

Easy-to-use: AutoML Vision provides a simple graphical user interface that lets you specify data, then turns that data into a high-quality model customized for your specific needs.

Undoubtedly, Google is leading the race to dominate Artificial Intelligence and with the launch of Cloud AutoML Vision, it proved AI is for everyone, simultaneously making sure no one is left behind.

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Union Budget 2018: Focus to Uplift the condition of Women

Couple of days after the “Pink Economic Survey 2018” was submitted by the Chief Economic Advisor, Arvind Subramanian, that emphasised on women empowerment and gender equality, the Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, gave reasons for women to cheer in the Union Budget for the financial year 2018-19 tabled on Thursday, February 1, 2018. The Budget has beneficial measures for women across the nation including rural, urban, poor, salaried, and non-salaried.

Empowering women in the country and promoting the idea of gender equality as one of the prime focus, finance minister presented this year’s Budget. Earlier, at various stages, the government has clearly indicated its interest in eliminating gender gaps that have been a hindrance to the social and economic integrity of the country. Through this Budget, it looks like the NDA government has made the right move to boost women.

In a bid to encourage and motivate women towards employment, and influence them to join the workforce, the finance minister has proposed take-home pay for the new women employees to go up in the formal sector. The women joining the workforce for the first time will have to contribute only 8 percent (instead of 12 or 10) of the Employee’s Provident Fund (EPF) for the first three years. However, the employer’s contribution to the EPF would remain 12% in all sectors of the government. The EPF contribution reduction for women will enable higher take-home wages and reduce the burden on employers to hire more women.

As part of another flagship programme, Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (Ujjwala scheme), the Centre intended to provide free cooking gas connection to 8 crore women below the poverty line. The initial target which was to provide free LPG connections to around 5 crore poor women was now proposed to increase the target to 8 crores.

In a serious bid to encourage women towards self-employment and make them more self-reliant, Mr. Jaitley allocated Rs 3 lakh crore for Micro-Units Development and Refinance Agency Ltd (MUDRA) scheme in the Budget. The government’s MUDRA Yojana designed to provide first-time entrepreneurs with funds at a concessional rate of interest has a whopping 76% of women beneficiaries with more than 50 percent belonging to SCs, STs, and OBCs.

Under the MUDRA scheme, women can avail a loan of Rs 10 lakh and a maximum amount of Rs 50 lakh, encouraging them to start their own ventures and promote self-employment. The loans to women’s self-help groups would also be increased as much as by 37 percent, said the finance minister. The government will encourage the women’s self-help groups to take up organic farming to boost the organic farming sector.

The Budget 2018 will also provide and allocate four crore electricity connections to underprivileged women under Saubhagya Yojana scheme.

In a commendable note, the government has also increased the maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks simultaneously ensuring the provision of creches in organizations. The move will retain women to work even after childbirth.

Several top government officials including Jaitley have previously mentioned that this year’s financial focus will be to uplift the condition of women in the country. With the budget presented by the NDA government, there’s no exaggeration that this indeed is a budget for women and their empowerment.

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Women and their contributions in 2017

We are approaching the end of 2017, and in a very few days, we would be entering into the new year 2018. As we have come to an end, I just want to take all our dear readers through the year 2017 again with a snapshot of the all the significant contributions made by women in this year.

Nirmala Sitharaman

Nirmala Sitharaman became the first full-fledged woman defense minister of India in 2017. Prior to this, Indira Gandhi has held this portfolio before, in addition to her responsibilities as Prime Minister of India.

Mithali Raj

The captain of the Indian Women’s cricket team in Tests and ODI, Mithali Raj, is the highest run-scorer in women’s international cricket and the only female cricketer to surpass the 6,000 run mark in ODIs. She is the first player to score 7 consecutive 50s in ODIs. Mithali is also the first captain (men or women) to lead India to an ICC ODI World Cup final twice – 2005 and 2017.

Manushi Chhillar

The Indian medical student from Haryana was crowned Miss World 2017. Manushi Chhillar is the sixth Indian winner of the long-running contest.

PV Sindhu

Indian ace shuttler and 2017 Rio Olympic silver medallist PV Sindhu won the silver medal in 2017 World Badminton Championship held at Glasgow, Scotland. It was overall Sindhu’s third medal at the World Championships as she earlier had won bronze medals in 2013 and 2014 editions.

Kavita Devi

Kavita Devi made history by becoming the first Indian woman wrestler to sign with WWE. Devi is an accomplished powerlifter who won gold at the 2016 South Asian Games, representing India. She also has the distinction of being the first Indian woman to compete in a WWE ring, during her participation in the Mae Young Classic.

Captain Anny Divya

Captain Anny Divya is the world’s youngest woman pilot to captain the Boeing 777. She was recruited by Air India when she was just 19. She started to learn to fly a Boeing 737 and later found herself in the cockpit of Boeing 777, flying the largest twinjet in the world.

Apart from the aforementioned list, there a few other women who broke the glass ceiling in the technology sector and also bagging positions in the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women List for 2017.

ICICI Bank’s MD & CEO Chanda Kochhar (ranked 32); Roshni Nadar Malhotra, executive director and CEO of HCL Enterprise (57); Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (64), Chairman and MD of Biocon; Shobhana Bhartia (92), Chairperson and Editorial Director, HT Media Ltd and Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra at rank 97 made it to the Forbes World’s Most Powerful Women List.

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Most Powerful Women in Technology

Gone are those days when women were asked to stay at home taking care of the family and children while men went out to earn the livelihood. Also, gone are those days when women were relented from pursuing a career of their choice. Breaking through the glass ceiling, women today, are no less than their male peers in careers, management, leadership and also technology. Leaving everyone to astound, women are now delivering the unexpected results standing alongside with men and challenging them in anything and everything.

Today, we bring you the most influential and powerful women in technology who not only entered the technology sector but also took up some big roles in those important companies.

1. Sheryl Sandberg COO, Facebook

Ranked 4th in the Forbes list of most powerful women and top in the technological field, is Sheryl Sandberg, the first chief operating officer of Facebook. Being the Facebook’s COO since 2008, Sandberg has helped dramatically boost revenues at the social network. In 2012 she became the eighth member and also the first woman of Facebook’s board of directors. She is an American technology executive, activist, author and also the founder of Leanin.org. She has previously worked as the chief of staff for the United States Secretary of the Treasury. Sandberg’s current net worth is $1.6 billion.

2. Susan Wojcicki CEO, YouTube

The Chief Executive Officer of Youtube since 2014, Susan Wojcicki, is the next to the join the list of most powerful women in technology. Wojcicki became Google’s first marketing manager in 1999 and then became senior vice president of Advertising and Commerce. She handled two of Google’s largest acquisitions- the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube and the $3.6 billion purchase of DoubleClick.

3. Meg Whitman CEO, HP

President and Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Meg Whitman, is the next to appear in the list. Whitman previously served as President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay, from 1998 to 2008. During her 10 years with the company, she oversaw its expansion from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. Whitman was a senior member of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 and ran for governor of California as a Republican but supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.

4. Ursula M. Burns Retired Chairman and CEO, Xerox Corporation

Ursula Burns was the Chairman of the Board of the Xerox Corporation from 2010 to 2017 and Chief Executive Officer from 2009 to 2016. During her tenure as a chief executive officer, she helped the company transform from a global leader in document technology to the world’s most diversified business services company serving enterprises and governments of all sizes. Shortly after being named CEO in 2009, she spearheaded the largest acquisition in Xerox history, the $6.4 billion purchase of Affiliated Computer Services.

Ursula, who regularly appears on Fortune’s and Forbes’s list of the world’s most powerful women, is a board director of American Express, Exxon Mobil, Nestlé, and Datto.

5. Roshni Nadar Malhotra CEO, HCL Enterprise

Roshni Nadar Malhotra is the executive director and CEO of HCL Enterprise, which she became in 2009 at the age of just 27. The company, which was founded by her father Shiv Nadar, was at the forefront of the personal-computing industry and boosted India’s rise as an IT hub. Roshni is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a unique and diverse community of the world’s most outstanding, next-generation leaders.

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Qualcomm 5G Pioneer Initiative: Signs $2 billion sales MOUs with leading Chinese vendors

We are about to witness a major evolution of mobile technology in the next couple of years with 5G going to become the most anticipated next-generation mobile network. The previous generations like 3G and 4G were a breakthrough in the communications. While 3G receives a signal from the nearest phone tower for phone calls, messaging and data, 4G also works the same, but with a faster internet connection, i.e., it allows people to access data about 10 times faster than 3G.

Their successor, the next generation telecommunications standards, 5G, will allow for faster transfer of data, quicker response time by reducing latency or the amount of time taken to transfer data from device to device and also allow more devices to connect to the internet with better functionalities. Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Ericsson, and BT have already begun forming 5G partnerships and investing to research into 5G and its application. In a notable advancement, Ericsson and Nokia have even developed 5G platforms earlier last year aiming to provide the first 5G radio system and end-to-end 5G support for mobile carriers respectively.

Earlier last week on Jan 25, 2018, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) has announced “5G Pioneer Initiative” at the 2018 Qualcomm Technology Day in Beijing, China. The 5G Pioneer Initiative aims to explore ways towards mobile technology innovations in the 5G era. At the event, Qualcomm announced partnerships with six leading Chinese manufacturers by signing memorandums of understanding for sales worth at least $2 billion over 3 years. The “5G Pioneer” initiative includes Lenovo, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Wingtech that have expressed their interest in working together to accelerate the availability of 5G devices in China and support China’s smartphone industry for the global opportunities.

Representatives from Lenovo Group Ltd., Guangdong OPPO Mobile Telecommunications Corp. Ltd, vivo Communication Technology Co. Ltd, Xiaomi Communications Co. Ltd, ZTE Corp., and Wingtech Technology Co. Ltd, joined Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon on stage to give support to working together on this initiative. Speaking on the occasion, Cristiano Amon said, “5G will bring massive new opportunities to the mobile industry, and we are excited to work with these manufacturers on this 5G Pioneer Initiative. The president of Qualcomm further added saying, “Qualcomm Technologies has close relationships within China’s mobile and semiconductor ecosystem, and we’ll continue to work with this ecosystem to drive innovation as we move from the 3G/4G era to the 5G era.”

In a recent 5G Consumer Survey conducted by Qualcomm Technologies, it showed that 60% of Chinese consumers are likely to purchase 5G smartphones when available. This clearly indicates that Chinese mobile users are showing an unprecedented interest in 5G. This further gives a scope for innovation and development in the Chinese mobile industry and opportunities for the global mobile landscape. Through the “5G Pioneer Initiative”, Qualcomm Technologies will extend support to the Chinese manufacturers to create brand new 5G mobile phone experiences for users around the world by providing comprehensive solutions such as the radiofrequency front-end.

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Story of twin brothers who made millions by selling their AI travel app startup to American Express

Let say you are a busy professional or a frequent traveler and have no time or want to save your time with the travel research or the booking process, and if you’re wondering how to do it, then here’s a good news for you. Mezi app does it all for you; it takes care of all your travel research and presents you with options to compare. It is a personal assistant for all things related to travel, flights, and hotels. Here’s the story of the twin brothers who developed this app and later made millions by selling it to American Express.

The Pune-born twins, Swapnil Shinde and Snehal Shinde, co-founders of travel assistant startup Mezi, developed the artificial intelligence-powered travel app in 2015. This app allows travelers to simply text their requests for flights, hotels, or restaurant reservations. Upon texting, Mezi then provides recommendations, best options and makes travel arrangements for the customers at their request who can then finalize the bookings. Mezi uses artificial intelligence (AI) and human expertise to personalize online travel discovery and booking experience. By learning travelers’ preferences and understanding the way customers make requests using natural language, Mezi gets smarter and more efficient over time.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the company has 45 of its 60 employees based in Pune and Mumbai. Swapnil and Snehal Shinde, have previously launched Dhingana, the Indian streaming music service that was later acquired by US Rdio in 2014. Using their expertise and the algorithm they built at Dhingana for throwing up the right recommendations to users, the Shinde siblings then created Mezi app. This app was initially created as a one-stop solution for shopping as a virtual shopping assistant. Later, Mezi has found success as a chatbot-led virtual travel assistant since its 2016 pivot. Since then, it says 100,000 users have downloaded the app to book flights and make hotel and restaurant reservations.

Nexus Ventures Partners is an early investor in Mezi which put $2.5 million in December 2015. The company also developed $9-million fund-raise in July 2016, which saw participation from Saama Capital and American Express Ventures, the strategic investment arm of American Express. The travel category turned out to be the most successful and in November 2016 Mezi pivoted to focus solely on flights, hotels and restaurant bookings. In addition to its iOS and Android app, Mezi also offered a white-label “travel-as-a-service” solution for travel agents.

The twin brothers have just sold Mezi, their second startup, to American Express in an all-cash deal estimated at $125-150 million. American Express on January 30, 2018, announced that it has acquired Mezi, a personal travel assistant app. After the deal closes, Mezi will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Express. “With messaging emerging as the channel of choice for many, and the demand for unique experiences increasing, we believe the combination of Mezi’s capabilities with our global network of expert travel counselors creates a differentiated, high-touch service experience for our card members,” said Phil Norman, Vice President of American Express Digital Labs in an announcement. However, the company’s co-founders will continue to lead Mezi and report to Norman.

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