Artificial Intelligence – Dutch Uncles

BigBasket’s Deep Tech Acquisition for Powering its Offline Retail

Shalmoli Sarkar — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 12:45:03 +0000

The inclusion of advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning in offline retail ensures seamless operations and minimises operational costs in offline retail. To redefine offline retail in a new avatar, BigBasket recently has acquired the enterprise business unit of Kerala-based deep tech startup Agrima Infotech to power BigBasket’s self-checkout offline store Fresho with its computer vision technology platform – Psyight.

Agrima Infotech’s Psyight is the world’s first food-focused recognition and Information Orchestration Platform that will aid BigBasket to identify all Indian fruits and vegetables uniquely from an image without using barcodes. Detecting raw food items like fruits and vegetables uniquely from an image is a complex machine vision problem since the appearance of those items changes drastically according to the location of its origin and seasons. Psyight’s AI recognition feature is versatile and can be integrated into any food system having a camera. Through this, AI recognition platform thousands of SKUs across seasons and various locations can be scanned to achieve 100 percent accuracy.

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A CIPHET study finds that the post-harvest waste and loss in the fruits and vegetable segment in India stands at 40,811 crores.

How AI recognition will work magic for offline retail?

Reduce inventory losses and wastage: Fresh fruits and vegetables in transit from the farmer’s place to the retail store undergo deterioration in quality such as green leafy vegetables losing water or apples shrinking in size, gradually moving closer to the expiry date. The change in the size of fruits and vegetables goes unnoticed by the naked eye. This prevents the retail owners from selling first the inventory nearing the expiry date. AI recognition will analyse the shape of fruits and vegetables that will help retailers or grocers to sell stocks of near expiry first and keep them for little time, thus preventing losses and wastage. It also helps supermarkets to plan inventory with the help of an algorithm that analyses previous demands and sale trends.

Increase profits and sales through an optimised planogram: The AI product recognition can identify which items are missing from the shelf to remind the store staff to restock products immediately thus following planogram compliance of products on the shelf. According to a study by National Association for Retail Merchandising Services (NARMS) when an optimized planogram is 100% matched, sales will be increased by 7.8% and profit by 8.1.

Increases efficiency at the checkout: Long billing queues are a disappointment for a majority of retail shoppers in India. Automatic product recognition ensures an efficient checkout process. Until now cashiers have had to type in the barcode for all fruits and vegetables for billing but with automatic product recognition, this will no longer be necessary.

Accurate stocks: Had there been barcodes, there exists a probability that an organically grown potato is accidentally scanned as a normal one impacting the accuracy of the actual count of organic potatoes. But, AI recognition on scanning reflects this in the store data. This also solves store-level ordering conventionally done using pen and paper, which is considered to be the biggest pain point in the world of fresh food.

Can grocery stores in India adopt AI recognition?

A CIPHET study finds that the post-harvest waste and loss in the fruits and vegetable segment in India stands at 40,811 crores. 5 to 16 percent of perishables like fruits and vegetables are ruined in transit or on farms therefore the appetite to adopt AI recognition systems or platforms in grocery retail exists. But lack of internal expertise and fear of complexity hinders them to adopt the same. For AI to be used in grocery retail, somebody has to train an AI model that knows what and how to do what the customer wants. The AI models require to be retrained constantly once integrated with the store. Retraining is necessary since AI models tend to lose accuracy and performance over time.

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Entropik Tech: Helping Businesses with Consumer Insights Through its Emotion AI Tech

Shalmoli Sarkar — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 13:59:15 +0000

Artificial intelligence can decode an individual’s eye dilation to determine intense emotions of elation, ecstatic, surprise, or anger while looking at a commercial or using a particular app or website. Gone are those days when brands used to gauge their marketing impact using conventional surveys. With digitisation making inroads into every business sphere, businesses are keeping their customers’ emotions at the centre to leverage the power of artificial intelligence. To induce immense engagement amongst its customers, brands are striving to build sustainable communities for the brands to forge bonds.Gauging human emotions using artificial intelligence sounds a bit far-stretched?

But, Bangalore-based Entropik Tech is leveraging the power of artificial intelligence to help brands understand customer experience through the lens of their emotional behaviour.

The inception of Entropik Tech

Founded in 2016, Entropik Tech is the brainchild of Ranjan Kumar which is a platform that helps businesses with relevant emotion-based insights to make their mundane marketing campaigns gather attention with the target audience and turn them into high ROI churners. India is a populous country with varied demographics and interests that entices brands to build products sufficing their needs, therefore to help marketing campaigns to strike a chord with the audience, it provides an AI-driven platform backed by AI algorithms to predict consumer emotion metrics.

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Entropik Tech helps businesses with relevant emotion-based insights to make their mundane marketing campaigns gather attention with the target audience and turn them into high ROI churners.

How does the platform decode human emotions?

Entropik Tech with its cutting-edge camera technology tracks and captures facial expressions to associate them with emotions and track eye-gaze movements in real-time. Human beings have 2 lakh expressions, the reactions recorded by the platform are analysed with its deep learning technology that deciphers the meaning of a certain expression.

It also does brainwave mapping where an EEG ( ElectroEncephaloGraphy )headset is used to track the neuro pulse of a user to measure sensory stimulus from the electrical activity taking place in the brain against touch, smell, and taste. The brainwave mapping also gives businesses an overview of looking at behavioural data. Through its facial coding feature it teaches machines to recognise a facial expression to associate with emotion and build a repository of ground truth data of these recorded emotions based on the defined models in behavioural psychology.

Recently, Entropik Tech through its emotion AI capabilities has decoded the emotions that have come across the viewers’ minds while watching the season-5 trailer of Netflix’s most popular web series – Money Heist. In its emotion report emotions of happiness, anger, sadness, and surprise were found to be dominant when Lisbon decided to command the heist for a full-blown attack against Colonel Tamayo’s men at the Bank of Spain. It attracted higher engagement and attention when the trailer showed the late character Berlin’s cameo.

People’s love for web series, realistic dramas and documentaries has increased competition amongst OTT content providers and has left them jostling for the viewers’ attention. Therefore, emotion-based AI technology will be essential for these streaming giants to understand their audience better and expand their viewer base.

The product portfolio of Entropik Tech

Entropik Tech’s product range consists of the following:

Affect Lab: It is a cloud-based consumer insight SaaS platform backed by emotion AI. It is suitable for businesses in retail, advertising, and media that need to gather accurate insights on consumer emotions, shopper experiences, and subconscious behaviour.
Affect UX: It is a cloud-based user testing SaaS platform fused with Emotion AI tech. This platform is beneficial for UX researchers and designers to test websites, apps, and prototypes. With high-precision Eye Tracking and Facial Coding, Affect UX gives you a peek into the minds of your users.
Affect API: It provides a comprehensive suite of APIs that enable the adoption of Emotion AI tech. It tracks facial coding, eye tracking, and speech recognition capabilities. This product will work wonders for the edtech platforms and online classrooms where tracking facial expressions and automatic speech recognition to transcribe a voice note will help detect an individual’s emotional state in virtual learning.

A conversational intelligence platform- Decode

The preventive measures of the pandemic have nudged corporates to quickly adapt to virtual working culture. In most of the virtually conducted meetings, more than 80 percent of the recordings remained unused. Therefore, Entropik Tech is planning to develop Decode -currently in beta phase, which will solve the problem of unused meeting recordings for organizations and turn them into useful insights that will help in increased productivity of the business.

In addition to this, the Decode platform fusing intelligence with conversations will transform into actionable insights increasing the productivity of sales and HR functions for closing on leads and candidates respectively.

In the coming times, brands will fiercely be fighting for the consumer’s eyeballs to create campaigns that will etch a memorable impression in the minds of people. Therefore, startups developing products to decode emotion using AI will have ample business opportunities.

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How The DataTeam is Helping Big Businesses to Make the Most from Data?

Shalmoli Sarkar — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 11:58:34 +0000

We sell a pair of socks by leveraging AI and data analytics for acquiring customers. Sounds weird? But, this is what Pritika Mehta, founder of SockSoho- a D2C startup selling socks mentioned in an interview when asked about her flourishing D2C socks business in India.

By analysing various data points SockSoho generates insights on customer behaviour and spending patterns that help refine marketing strategy and inventory planning and expand into multiple verticals.

The approach taken by SockSoho is probably the story of every startup’s success which is making the startup ecosystem so well-received in India over the recent decade. But, the biggies and conglomerates that have been ruling the consumer’s cart for ages have remained a laggard in the usage and generating insights from massive volumes of customer data they generate. However, the Chennai-based The Data Team is now looking to change this.

What is The Data Team?

Founded by Rangarajan Vasudevan, The Data team is an AI service company that offers solutions in business intelligence in sectors of telecommunications, retail, oil and gas, e-commerce, banking, media, insurance, fintech, and NBFC. Through its AI-driven solutions, it is enabling brands to have a frictionless customer experience and provide the personal touch, immediacy, and convenience that customers expect. The Data Team’s solutions can transform a usual CRM ( customer relation management) system into a self-updating, auto-correcting system that remains on top of its game eventually building customer loyalty and brand building.

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According to a report from Indian Grassland and Fodder Research Institute, the fodder deficit is upto 29 percent in the availability of feed including fodder.

Cadenz- Decoding customer’s behaviour

Cadenz – the flagship product of The Data Team is the market’s first Customer Intelligence Platform that provides enterprises live behaviour intelligence about its customers using its data automatically.

It helps enterprises to eliminate customer friction to boost revenue, improve loyalty and monetise effectively.

How does it work?

Cadenz gathers scattered customer data, consolidates records, and automatically infers the interests of customers using behavioural AI algorithms. It has below features to offer:

A single view of the customer

It can build a 360-degree view of all customers by integrating customer journeys across multiple touchpoints. Within the single view, Cadenz can say the following things about your customer-

1. Personalise product or service recommendation

2. Anticipate user behaviour for cross-channel marketing

3. Provide contextual customer service.

Real-time personalisation

Instantly hyper-personalises customer at every interaction at points such as location, POS, call centre, transaction, location, purchase history, and personal preferences, etc. It benefits the business by-

1. Increasing the wallet share

2. Better customer satisfaction

3. Boost conversion

Automated behaviour segmentation

With Cadenz businesses can discover customer profiles or customer groups using natural language-based concepts. Its ability to identify micro-segments reduces the period from the conception of a new idea until it is released to the marketplace.

The Data Team’s distinguished clientele consists of HDFC Bank, Singtel, Indian Oil, Central Group, Credit Mantri, SEBI, and ICICI Lombard.

What lies ahead for such AI solution service providers?

In today’s tech-savvy world, customer intelligence is a must-needed asset required for the continuity of business. Its importance is felt highly in the BFSI sector since banks need to respond faster and make the customer feel special and give assurance that their money is safe with them. AI solutions extract relevant customer information and provide hyper-personalized products and services that can truly help financial institutions improve revenue per customer and connect with customers like never before.

Similarly, for a telecom company’s continuity in the long run offerings such as high data speeds and free voice calls is passe’. The telecom company must understand every subscriber’s preference and build a customer profile that will aid them to deliver delightful customer experiences resulting in more stickiness and usage.

Therefore, such startups will have good business opportunities ahead since the legacy brands will require this valuable data to accelerate their business and transform into a digitally native business.

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Stellapps Technologies- Digitising the Dairy Supply Chain

Shalmoli Sarkar — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 14:40:23 +0000

Amul’s famous jingle of the 90s era featuring Smita Patil’s cameo at the end of the commercial is reminiscent of an epic white revolution that made India a world leader in milk production from a milk deficient nation after independence. The commercial at the end, expresses gratitude to Amul’s cooperative milk movement that made the village women economically independent. Since the revolution, India’s dairy farming took great strides that emerged to be a self-sustaining industry and largest employment provider after Britishers left our economy in shambles.

With all the praises for India’s white revolution, India’s dairy industry is yet mired in the hands of unorganised players. Approximately, 60 percent of surplus milk is handled by the unorganised sector (milkmen), while the remaining 40 percent is procured by the organised sector comprising of dairy co-operatives and private companies. Moreover, the industry is highly plagued by inconsistent quality and quantity of milk, incapable of managing a bigger herd, and wastage of milk. According to Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) and MRSS estimates, about 3 percent of the milk produced gets wasted annually.

The bright rays of advanced technology do not seem to have reached the dairy industry due to its domination by unorganised players all these years until, in 2011, five techie friends from Wipro witnessed the prevailing roadblocks in the production process in dairy farming decided to intervene technologically by establishing Stellapps Technologies.

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According to Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) and MRSS estimates, about 3 percent of the milk produced gets wasted annually.

Stellapps Technologies– A brainchild of Wipro techies

Bored of their mundane jobs, five Wipro techies Ranjith Mukundan, Ravishankar G, Shiroor Praveen Nale, Ramakrishna Adukuri, and Venkatesh Seshasayee in their late 30s and early 40s thought of starting their venture that will improve the quality of life. After much discussion, the techies narrowed down to set up their venture in agriculture and health that birthed the idea of digitising the dairy supply chain thereby establishing Stellapps Technologies Pvt.Ltd in 2011. The startup based out of Bangalore nurtured and incubated at IIT Madras focuses on digitising the dairy supply chain using IoT, machine learning, and data acquisition. Milk is the largest consumable beverage in India but the yield per animal is low, due to a lack of preventive healthcare, proper nutrition, veterinary assistance, and reproductive management for cattle. Stellapps solutions target the small and medium farmers who own small herds of cows and operate without any technical intervention. Its multiple automation and knowledge-based solutions aid the farmers in optimising the milk production process and monitoring the health of the cattle. A tech intervention in the dairy supply chain will drastically improve the operations of the entire chain.

The road to entrepreneurship was not smooth

Like most ventures, roadblocks to success was no stranger to Stellapps Technologies. One thing which played in their favour was the unfamiliarity of the founders regarding the functioning of the dairy industry. Since none of them belonged from an agro/dairy background they invested a significant amount of time in understanding the vertical and begin everything from fundamentals to be able to implement their IoT stack to it. Their lack of experience helped them to look at things from a fresh perspective.

Access proved to be a major challenge for the founders since their customers or target audience lived in the outskirts of the cities that made deployment, support, and maintenance cumbersome as lots of time were spent travelling to those places.

Moreover, Stellapps realised that to educate the farmers about the importance of adhering to quality control, traceability, supply chain, and cold chain optimisation protocols, they had to find an alternate way to work with milk federations and unions, since approaching the dairy markets under government control directly would mean battling red tapism.

Smart Milking and cattle monitoring

The milking process and cattle monitoring is the first step in dairy farming that is a daunting task for the farmers due to the long intercalving period, low awareness in nutrition management, less access to quality veterinary services, and skewed ratio of cattle population and veterinary institutions. Here, Stellapps mooON device is an AI-enabled animal wearable that has two components: mooON device and app. MooOn device is a pedometer for cattle that detects heat based on their activities and resting behaviour. The app is a herd management application that gives real-time alerts on animal activities, recommends personalised nutrition plans for every breed, and provides cattle historic data management. This wearable has enhanced milk quality and yield by 20 percent, reduced the intercalving period by one month as AI helps to detect the heat for artificial insemination, and has led to a 50 percent and 10 percent reduction in cattle health and farm admin expenses respectively.

Creating transparency in the dairy business

After completion, of the milking process, the next step is to send the collected milk to various collection centres. The collection of milk in the collection centres takes place manually and is riddled with challenges such as data manipulation due to manual capturing, milk adulteration, lack of analytics for making an informed decision in dairy management, troublesome reconciliation for paying farmers, and lack of transparency. Smart AMCU from Stellapps is an automatic milk collection unit enabled by the android IoT device smartCC.

The cloud-based chilling management solution smartCC collects data automatically that consists of total solid loss in milk and checks the quality degradation of the milk due to delay in chilling after procuring from farmers. The data collected is made available to the dairy processors and is made visible to other farmers in the collection centre on a real-time basis, thereby creating transparency while incentivising.

The dairy companies now have to pay a higher price for better quality milk and therefore cannot pay a price that is compromising to the farmers. It also upgrades the milk quality and reduces adulteration as the data now will act as the litmus paper for determining the milk quality depending on which farmers will be incentivised. Thus, this will mutually benefit both the farmers and dairy processors as the deal will be of the right price for the right quality.

ConTrak, which is another IoT-enabled device that does real-time management of the cold chain storage with its advanced reporting and monitoring mechanism accessible through web and mobile portals, while MooFlow ERP helps in simplifying dairy operations.

MooPay- digital financial inclusion of farmers

When it comes to loans and seeking financial help, the banks and financial institutions in India turn a deaf ear to the farmers whether agriculture or dairy, thereby, forcing them to borrow money from friends and unorganised lending institutions at enormously high-interest rates. MooPay makes financial services from banks accessible to the farmers by bringing attractive financial products such as loans, and insurance at attractive interest rates to be able to carry on their daily operations. To the dairy processors, it saves from the hassle of cash handling by offering an automated and direct farmer payment and quicker payment reconciliation eventually increasing farmer’s loyalty.

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Stellapps multiple automation and knowledge-based solutions aid the farmers in optimising the milk production process and monitoring the health of the cattle.

The Pricing, profits, and business model

Stellapps follows a competitive pricing model as compared to its counterparts overseas. The price of its solutions includes the entire budget starting from the infrastructure development to the milking process and cold storage. They realize their revenues from a fixed share per litre of milk production from a profit-making farmer and earn profits when a farmer makes profits. They also supply their dairy solutions in a zero-capex model business i.e. rental payment models where they charge customers for subscriptions and cloud services. Its clientele consists of dairy processors and milk cooperatives such as Nandini, Amul, Heritage, Nova, Milk Mantra, Osam, Thirumala, Milk Lane, Hatsun, and Britannia.

Stellapps -money matters and funding

Recently, in October 2021, Stellapps has raised $18 million as a part of its first funding for its pre-series C round from global animal nutrition and aquaculture company, Nutreco. Its other existing investors include Qualcomm Ventures, Celesta Capital, and ABB Technology Ventures. With funds raised Stellapps plans to utilise the funds to scale its traceability network and digital footprint across India.

A round of applause and the road ahead

Stellapps is India’s first dairy technology solutions company, building automation tools powered with cloud, mobility, and data analytics for dairy farms, cooperatives, and private dairies. Its statistics consist of transforming the lives of 1.3 million dairy farmers, working with 4,50,000 cattle, processing 2 billion litres of milk through its solutions annually, and has enabled farmer payment worth $750 million annually.

After the lockdown disrupted the dairy operations in 2020-2021, the organised dairy sector is set for a rebound and is estimated to grow by 5-6 percent, to cross Rs 1.5 trillion in sectoral revenue for the first time, according to Crisil. This growth projection of organised dairy means ample business opportunities for Stellapps.

Stellapps also has ambitious plans to step into foreign geographies like – Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, other SAARC nations), and in developed markets in Europe and the US through partnerships with large original equipment manufacturers.

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AI in Home Healthcare Startups Simplifying Diagnosis

Shalmoli Sarkar — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 03:35:11 +0000

India’s health infrastructure began crumbling under the daily increasing cases of coronavirus. However, the daily increasing cases against a recovery rate of 97.52 percent, which is the highest in the world highlights a different picture. The problem is not the virus contraction, but the inadequate healthcare infrastructure such as beds, oxygen, ventilator, the poor ratio of doctors and nurses per patient.

Most towns and cities are burdened and under-resourced to do swab tests for a daily surge in cases, resulting in long waiting queues for sample collection and test results. This eventually delayed the covid treatment until it reached the peak of infection, and meanwhile, their infection might have spread to others if asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic.

In many cases, the patient with mild symptoms of the virus panicked and admitted themselves to hospitals that could have been conveniently cured at home itself with proper medication. The third wave of the pandemic created absolute chaos where the person in the critical state could not avail a bed in the hospital.

Remote healthcare in India, which remained nascent, soon gained ground in the pandemic, as doctors and patients found it convenient to keep clinic visits to a minimum. Technologies such as AI were infused in home healthtech startups that improved the speed and accuracy of diagnostics. Imaging technologies have reduced the time of diagnosis from days to seconds as cutting-edge technologies interpret, imagine, and produce instant results.

According to a joint report from EY-IPA, India’s domestic telemedicine market is estimated to reach $5.5 billion in 2020-2025 and will be growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31 percent.

How AI in home healthtech startups is speeding up diagnosis?

Home healthtech startups provide cost-effective medical assistance at home that comprises services such as at-home nursing, health screening, monitoring, telemedicine, and telehealth.

Home healthtech startups effectively leverage AI for detecting symptoms. The AI checker uses natural language processing (NLP) that analyses a patient’s free-text symptom description. After gathering information on a patient’s illness history, the machine learning algorithms assess the symptom inputs to produce care recommendations concerning the severity of a disease. For instance, an AI symptom checker can recommend self-care for mild symptoms of a disease and will advise emergency care if history shows recently being attacked with strokes, increase in high blood pressure, or heart attack.

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As per a McKinsey report, Indians can save around $10 million by 2025 by using telemedicine instead of visiting doctors physically.

The reception of AI-based symptom checkers in home healthcare startups

In 2020, several Indians turned to online platforms to consult with doctors and get diagnostic tests done. The reception of home healthtech looks promising as according to a recent health tech report by IAMAI-Praxis, there was a 300 percent increase in teleconsultations.

Moreover, another evidence of embracing healthtech solutions widely can be understood from Eka Care raising seed funding of $4.5 million by the angel and early-stage investors. The app offers AI-based symptom-checkers to enable patients to document symptoms and understand medical conditions. Symptom checkers help in the early detection of diseases, eliminates the need for unnecessary repeat tests, and saves treatment costs for patients.

Similarly, Healthtech startup Mfine uses an AI-based self-check feature for specific diseases, that helps an individual to make more informed decisions. The same platform also prepares a consolidated summary of investigation details, pointers on the diagnosis, and possible treatment suggestions to the doctors.

What lies ahead for the home healthcare startups in India?

As per a McKinsey report, Indians can save around $10 million by 2025 by using telemedicine instead of visiting doctors physically. Using AI, these healthcare platforms can analyse patient data in real-time to improve the precision of treatment. Another business opportunity lies in sharing symptoms data with various pharma and drug companies. The vast data collected by home healthtech startups can prove to be an asset for them, since they require such information to build progression models for the discovery of drugs and vaccines, at the same time both parties should ensure privacy and cybersecurity of data.

The potential also lies in rural healthcare, which is devoid of basic healthcare facilities. In the future, home healthcare startups, in collaboration with the government, can provide health care services in remote and inaccessible areas through telemedicine.

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Here’s Why Extracurricular Learning Is The Fastest Growing Edtech Segment

Aakash Sharma — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 03:35:08 +0000

With the advent of edtech and the rapid digitisation of education in recent years, every element of education and training has changed through technology. Classes have shifted online, doubt clearing sessions are scheduled on student portals, exam registrations are done on websites, and so on.

Among the changes, one that is emerging as the fastest and most enticing for students is the digitisation of extracurricular learning and activities.

What is ‘Extracurricular Learning’ in edtech?

Due to the growing importance of holistic development, extracurricular learning is becoming one of the fastest-growing areas of educational technology (edtech). Extracurricular learning mainly includes activities such as yoga, general culture, arts, crafts, dance, and reasoning.

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Given the vibrant and profitable potential in the field of extracurricular learning, many start-ups have emerged with innovative ways to seize the new opportunities.

Yellow Class – a key extracurricular learning player

Yellow Class, the ‘Online Free Hobby Classes for Kids’ platform, is an edtech company that focuses on extracurricular activities as teaching pedagogy. The edtech start-up offers children a wide range of extracurricular learning activities through its live instruction platform using artificial intelligence to ease up interaction and participation.

Yellow Class was founded in June 2020 by Anshul Gupta and Arpit Mittal to provide free extracurricular and leisure activities for children under the age of 12. More than 1 million children have participated in over 150 million minutes of activities on the platform. The start-up also plans to add new categories such as musical instruments and sports under its ambit of extracurricular learning.

Yellow Class has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Elevation Capital. It will use the funds to improve products, develop richer content and increase recruitment and expansion to more than 500 cities in India and other regions.

Market insights

The extracurricular learning sector in India has witnessed steady growth in recent years. The segment is expected to reach $5.8 billion in valuation by 2021. In its current form, which is a fragmented market dominated by local and small businesses, the market has a lot of potential for companies to become industry leaders.

Since most school programmes and education infrastructure are purely academic in nature and usually do not focus on the holistic development of children, extracurricular options of learning available easily online are coming to the mainstream. Today’s parents highly favour alternative ways to promote children’s hobbies and other activities.

How can new edtechs enter this segment?

As mentioned above, the extracurricular learning market is witnessing an upward trend due to the transforming face of education and increasing competitiveness. Students and parents alike want to engage in multiple productive activities that can form their base for holistic development.

Start-ups and emerging businesses must heed these tectonic changes and start building solutions to fill the gap between traditional education and edtech. Just like Yellow Class has jumped in this industry, gaining a much-needed beginners’ advantage, other businesses can also follow suit and develop unique one-stop-shop learning solutions.

Businesses and entrepreneurs operating in the edtech space can adopt digital extracurricular learning solutions and training modules. They can focus on a wide range of topics and mentors like influencers and professionals who can enlighten the young minds about alternative careers and productive extracurricular activities.

While using children-friendly edtech solutions, entrepreneurs can also use e-gaming, AI gamification tools and features like interactive chatbots to keep students engaged. Edtechs can also deploy digital activities such as polls and quizzes in the user interface for more engagement.

Essentially, by creating a new category in the ed-tech space and giving kids easy access, fun, and interactive classes, edtech businesses can grow their ventures in the edtech boom while helping students learn actively and passionately.

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The Indian Online Gifting Industry, The Tailwinds To Its Growth

Shalmoli Sarkar — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 10:30:10 +0000

While reminiscing the good old days of the birthday celebrations of his college days, the friend sitting abroad surprises him with his favourite cake at midnight. The distant friend that day thanked the existence of online gifting, for which he could send across the cake to his friend that too at midnight.

Online gifting has been on a growth trajectory in India after people enjoyed the convenience of gifting from a distant location to choose from multiple customisable gifting options for numerous occasions or sometimes it cannot be any occasion. After all, who needs an occasion to showcase love and affection.

According to a report from TechSci Research, the online gifting industry in India is projected to grow from $119 million in 2019 to $159 million by 2025. Over the years, the occurrence of gifting occasions has increased due to the rising influence of a western culture that has birthed new occasions such as sibling’s day, grandparent’s day, pet day, etc, which otherwise was limited to birthdays and marriage anniversaries.

The online gifting industry is divided into three gifting segments namely: festive, corporate, and personal. According to Technopak, the total size of the Indian corporate and personal gifting market combined is Rs 250,000 crore. Of this, the corporate gifting owns Rs 12000 crore and is estimated to grow over 200 percent per annum.

New trends in the Online Gifting industry

Corporate gifting into wellness and WFH products

Owing to the health crisis caused by Covid-19, the corporates are not just limiting themselves to appreciation letters and flexible working schedules for their employees. Companies are offering more wellness and work-from-home products ensuring the well-being and safety of employees. Wellness products like immunity-boosting teas, ayurvedic products, Vitamin C supplements, customised masks, hand sanitizers are some of the top gifting choices for corporates in gifting. This also bolsters corporate branding.

Green gifting

Most individuals are choosing to give meaningful gifts such as indoor plants over disposable gifts. The majority of the gift plants include bamboo, succulents, money plant, medicinal plants, and bonsai. These plants are associated with luck and promote healthy surroundings.

The pandemic effects

The preventive measures of the pandemic have taken away the shine from our celebrations since only a limited number of people can come over. People who are staying distant are showcasing their affection for friends and relatives by sending personalised gifts via online booking.

e-Gift cards

Gift givers sometimes offer e-gift cards to their loved ones. An e-gift card consists of a digital code that is emailed to the recipients. It is the most convenient gifting option for a wedding occasion or house warming ceremonies as several times the gifts are repeated. An e-gift card gives recipients the freedom to make purchases from retail, restaurants, furniture stores, etc. With a validity of over a year or 6 months, they can use it at their convenience.

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According to a report from TechSci Research, the online gifting industry in India is projected to grow from $119 million in 2019 to $159 million by 2025.

Tailwinds for the online gifting industry

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Analytics

Leveraging AI, online gifting platforms are offering customers a seamless experience of gift selection, by asking users to fill in the information regarding gift recipient, occasion, the relationship between the recipient and gift-giver, and budget, The platform using a machine learning algorithm narrows the product options and zeroes down on the best gifting options. It also benefits the company to gain insights about the current gifting preferences and stock more such products.

The last-minute surprises

The ability to deliver delicious cakes, bouquets, chocolate boxes, and customised gifts late at night or midnight is a major factor for its growth. Anyone can now customise the date and time concerning the occasion. Some online gifting platforms have introduced same-day delivery.

Personalisation

The ability to personalise gifts within the click of a button is luring users to opt for online gifting. Products like – T-shirts, coffee mugs, photo frames, choice of flowers for a bouquet can be curated based on personal choices and needs. This makes the industry more consumer-centric.

The tech-savvy individuals

Millennials between the ages of 25-35 are tech-savvy and are caught in a hectic schedule. Instead of brainstorming about what gift to give, the individuals find it convenient to download an app, fill in the relevant details, select a gift among the recommendations and deliver the gift. They prefer the instant one-stop-shop and mobile concept of the online gifting segment for its efficiency.

How are online gifting platforms responding to the pandemic?

Despite facing disruptions in delivery, the online flower and gifting retailer Ferns N Petals, has registered a sales increase of 18 percent in the pandemic. With the world now boxed in a virtual culture, it has introduced a host of innovative virtual gifts that includes musician on video call (musical services of guitarist, violinist, flute player, etc), celebrity video messages, digital caricatures, dance class on call, E-greeting cards, etc.

To help corporates choose the best gifting options in the pandemic without visiting a store, Offineeds.com- a corporate gifting company has begun ‘The corporate gift show’. The video show format resembling Telebrands and Naaptol is an effective presentation of corporate gifting products explaining its features.

What lies ahead for the online gifting industry in India?

In the corporate gifting space, companies are realising the power of employee engagement and brand building, and now with a remote workforce, the surge in demand for corporate gifting will increase.

The local handicraft players can get a boost from the online gifting industry. Online gifting start-ups for more unique gifting options, can add terracotta products, mirror work crafts, wobbly head dolls and Channapatna toys.

Offering digital services of live musicians singing or playing an instrument of the recipient’s favourite song, or live dancers performing will give them an earning opportunity that has largely been hampered in the pandemic.

The post The Indian Online Gifting Industry, The Tailwinds To Its Growth appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

Weryz, An Enabler Fulfilling Personal And Professional Lives

DU Desk — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 03:35:08 +0000

In a fiercely competitive business environment, new startups are jostling to own the maximum share in reach and profit pie. We live in a digitally induced lifestyle, surrounded by abundant information and ideas that can be overwhelming at times. It is a risk for the startups and businesses to get lost in the clutter and might even get erased from people’s recall. The distinctiveness is lost in the process, which is why the personal branding of entrepreneurs is imperative.

The road to entrepreneurship is a bumpy one. When an entrepreneur comes out of its cocoon to do something disruptive they undergo several barriers and hardships. These hardships further shape the entrepreneur’s personality and journey to add distinctiveness to it. Many Indian entrepreneurs perceive personal branding to be an advertisement for themselves that might not give the business limelight whereas, effective personal branding can drive tractions to business and generate leads.

Personal branding helps an individual communicate their unique story and draws attention to what matters. It strengthens the trust between business, colleagues, and clients alike while boosting the reputation of the business founder and fostering successful relationships- both personally and professionally.

The art of personal branding is well showcased by Shailja Dutt, founder of Weryz, a personal branding solutions app, helping individuals to deep dive into the brand ‘You’.

Shailja Dutt – her journey of entrepreneurship

Shailja Dutt, an economic honours graduate from Lady Shri Ram College, holds an MBA from International Management Institute. Weryz is not Shailja’s first entrepreneurial attempt. She first stepped into the entrepreneurial shoes two decades ago by establishing Stellar Search-a leadership advisory firm specializing in senior talent acquisition in emerging markets across the globe. It provides services in Leadership Assessment, Executive Coaching, Employer Brand Consulting with its presence in India, South East Asia, and Africa.

The founder feels that the important aspect of an individual choosing a career path or beginning a business should be finding the ‘Why’ and position themselves as thought leaders. The answer to Why is what most aspiring entrepreneurs do not have an answer to. To enable individuals to showcase their unique journeys and answer the ‘Why’ effectively led Shailja Dutt to set up personal branding firm Weryz in October 2020.

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Weryz helps an individual discover, define, enhance and promote themselves as a brand.

What does Shailja Dutt’s Weryz do?

Weryz helps an individual discover, define, enhance and promote themselves as a brand. Its state-of-the-art AI-powered assessment helps an individual to discover strengths, potential, and what gives them joy. The firm combines the art of effective communication with the science of personal branding.

Features of the personal branding solution – Weryz

Self Discovery: Weryz’s custom-made assessment tool derived from data analytics and backed by years of corporate experience, aims to discover and magnify an individual’s core values and unique strengths.
Build Online Reputation: It strategises communication to amplify an individual’s unique strengths and stories to the right target audience and also measures engagement across social media. The platform’s AI-powered assessment tool helps to uncover potential and help to define purpose.
Get expert assistance: Weryz’s dedicated communication specialists, a network of coaches, mentors, gurus, experts, and its team of content strategists offer guidance and tailor-made solutions at every stage.

How does Weryz work?

Weryz app is available in both the App Store and Google Play store. The person needs to download the app, fill in some basic information to complete an assessment. The assessment effectively helps a person to understand themselves better, increase awareness and provide insights into their unique qualities. The assessment is a free test, however, the next process of receiving a detailed report is chargeable at $ 19.99

After the assessment is completed, Weryz recognises strengths and offers guidance to help the individual amplify their story for professional and personal growth.

What lies ahead for women entrepreneurs in personal branding?

India already ranks low in female entrepreneurship and also investors are reluctant to invest in women-led startups and businesses. Having strong personal branding will help women entrepreneurs gain a profound presence on social media and establish themselves as thought leaders. People will start to know who you are, attracting the right target audience and opportunities needed to achieve goals.

The post Weryz, An Enabler Fulfilling Personal And Professional Lives appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

ARTPARK Innovation Program Explained

DU Desk — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 05:36:00 +0000

What is ARTPARK Innovation Program?

ARTPARK Innovation Program is launched by Bangalore-based non-profit organisation, AI & Robotics Technology Park (ARTPARK), offering technological solutions to social problems in India.

Top notch universities usually fail in converting their academic research into market-ready products and services. ARTPARK aims to bridge this transitional gap between innovations developed in top and renowned universities and deploy those technological innovations to tackle issues in India.

The programme also has a mission to support innovative ideas, help to productize innovation, get external benefactors for the organisations who expertise in product designing, selling and marketing. It will also provide the startups with investors for seed funding to get them started.

What Does it Plan to do?

The programme is planning to grow the AI & Robotics innovation ecosystem in India by creating or working with existing startups. The programme has aligned with the $100 million venture fund for supporting startups in the artificial intelligence and robotics sector.

It also plans to uplift the healthcare, education, mobility, infrastructure, agriculture, retail and cyber-security problems in India and globally. The programme will also facilitate students and professionals with a proper training in advancing their skills and knowledge regarding this sector. It will also develop products like:

DataSetu– Creating a data sharing ecosystem and marketplace that will boost the AI applications and solutions.
BhashaSetu– Enabling Indic language translation to expand the participation level in the economic growth of the country, regardless of languages.
Avtaar Robotics– Allowing emotive robotic nurses to transport healthcare professionals’ skills across the globe.
Akashmarg– Roads in the sky, like Drone Skyways, for autonomous drones.

Along with the technology-led economic growth and innovation in the startup ecosystem in India, the programme plans to aid the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat.

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Along with the technology-led economic growth and innovation in the startup ecosystem in India, the programme plans to aid the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat.

Why Was This Programme Started?

The ARTPARK Innovation Program was launched with the purpose of extending their support to the startups in the AI & Robotics sector. Preparing these startups for future unicorn businesses, ARTPARK aims to help the startups to take up more risks and challenges.

With the clear vision of uplifting Indian societal problems, the programme is also creating inclusive and sustainable development in the country. Through this programme, the top universities will be able to market their innovations in a proper way to the general public in India. The programme also makes AI & Robotics more accessible to a larger population.

Who Will It Benefit?

This programme is helping some interesting companies in this sector such as Vishwa Swarm, Astrome, Karmalife, Ten3t Healthcare and Playment. It already selected six startups incubated in universities for the first batch of AIPs. The programme will help such tech-savvy startups to emerge as future unicorn startups in India in the technology sector.

ARTPARK Innovation Program Categories

Under AIP, four major programmes are designed:

ARTPARK-Spark:

A starting-up programme for young minds, encouraging them to spark their entrepreneurship skills. It is for 6 months with an aim of training them to be part of early founding teams in ARTPARK or mission projects.

ARTPARK-Ignite:

An incubation programme for 6-18 months for AI & Robotics startups. Igniting their innovation by enabling them with data, domain, expertise and research along with providing capital for their startups.

ARTPARK-Turbo:

Encouraging and supporting young AI & Robotics startups by funding them to kick start their ideas.

ARTPARK-Boost:

Extending support to the existing companies to join ARTPARK mission projects without any equity investment.

How Will AIP Benefit Tech-Startups, Especially AI & Robotics Sector?

The AI Focused and Robotics startups will be used to solve societal problems. The programme enables the AI & Robotics tools and technologies that can bring growth to the developing world. With the help of this programme, AI & Robotics solutions built in India can become robust solutions at a global level.

The post ARTPARK Innovation Program Explained appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Transforming Academia to Industry

Abhilash Bapanasha — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 03:14:52 +0000

While even a decade ago, the scenario of robotics would sound like the figment of a sci-fi writer’s colourful imagination, but today, it is our reality. The advent of superlative technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics, has caused us to make significant strides in the robotics sector. We are now at the cusp of a revolution through which robots will give us complete freedom from laborious, mundane tasks and even they are doing the tasks beyond human capabilities. Building these technologies is our speaker for MentorED, Dr. Munish Jindal. MentorED is our weekly live 45-minute workshop where industry veterans share their knowledge and experience and discuss topics that are apt and relevant to the start-up and small business fraternity. Each workshop focuses on entrepreneurship development for ambitious entrepreneurs, small business enthusiasts, founders and small business owners.

Dr. Munish Jindal is the Founder and CEO of HoverRobotix and the Founding President of MENTORx Global. He is awarded and honoured with the highest civilian honour ‘Karmaveer Chakra’ by the United Nations. Born and raised in Ludhiana in an Entrepreneurial family, Dr. Jindal is a PhD in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence from the USA besides having an MBA from University of Technology, Sydney and a CPA – Chartered Accountant from Australia. He launched the concept of Hoverboards, Autoboots and Mobility Robots in India.

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At this very moment when we are talking, there are 52 million opportunities available just in the domain of artificial intelligence and who is developing these robots? It is on us humans so all we need to do is learn to learn, continuously learn and unlearn to learn. We just need to develop ourselves so that we can keep on innovating, creating, producing and forcing disruption so that we keep on moving to the next level.

Dr. Munish Jindal thrilled the audience at the initiation of what was a largely informative and illustrative presentation about how ordering a pizza over phone would sound like in the near future, thanks to the rapid strides in artificial intelligence. Although largely portrayed in Hollywood science fiction movies as the wow factor for the audience, it is a reality now as he rightly points out, “It is embedded in our lifestyle and that is how you are going to see that artificial intelligence is in every sphere of our life and how it is transforming our lives.” It needs to be mentioned here that his venture, HoverRobotix is the pioneer of e-mobility in India with hoverboards, autoboots, mobility robots and many more in the list.

“Imagine a camera in your room, the way we get up, the way we walk, the way we move or we exercise, it is taking note of everything and analysing it and letting us know what kind of areas in our body needs improvement. What kind of future events are we going to face so that we can even correct them before we face any kind of disease.” Dr. Jindal shared his encounter with IBM Watson in February 2020 and shared, “We can ask IBM Watson everything it can analyse our personality as well as it has answers to everything. So, this is how we are entering the brave new world of mind matter and computing whereby robots and humans are going to work hand in hand. So, it is not humans versus robots, it’s man with machine synergies. Once volumes of data are fed into these systems, they tend to learn from the environment and in no time produce the desired outcomes.”

Dr. Jindal from his own experience as a pioneer in the robotics space of the country feels that there is a need for a common platform to share awareness about AI in order to ethically, successfully and knowledgeably harness its benefits. He envisions that such a platform will bring the mentors, trainers and educators together and build a bridge with the industry leaders.

While there are speculations that continue to remain about robots posing as threats to human employment in jobs, Dr. Jindal negates such apprehensions,“At this very moment when we are talking, there are 52 million opportunities available just in the domain of artificial intelligence and who is developing these robots? It is on us humans so all we need to do is learn to learn, continuously learn and unlearn to learn. We just need to develop ourselves so that we can keep on innovating, creating, producing and forcing disruption so that we keep on moving to the next level.” Thereafter he shared the curriculum of AI giving examples of popular applications in our smartphones like Facebook, WhatsApp and their own set of data processing techniques. Whether it is just a mouse click or a photo upload, data is continuously being processed and retrieved in systems all within fragments of seconds.

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Whenever we face a problem our first reaction is why does not someone do something regarding this problem? Any problem you face is the next unicorn idea. Whenever you face a problem, if you want to solve it is going to be the next silicon idea in your hand.

Audience Asks

What are some basic requirements to bring AI into an already established business?

You need to understand what exactly you want to do, what processes you want to automate. Certain times it does not even require much. We people feel that okay to automate their processes they may require huge investments or they might need to bring the new systems. No, it’s not that you just have to check out what processes you want to automate. Accordingly, you can develop the software or required hardware and the processes can be streamlined into established business. The best part is artificial intelligence is becoming very affordable and it can be used in any sphere in every sphere of establishment business as well as upcoming start-ups as well.

“Whenever we face a problem, our first reaction is why does not someone do something regarding this problem? Any problem you face is the next unicorn idea. Whenever you face a problem, if you want to solve it is going to be the next silicon idea in your hand.” As the mentor rightly points out, it is that one idea that is essential to fill the void and make the difference. He urges everyone to embrace technology to decode the future of a beautiful world.

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