New tech on the block: FinTech, AI, cybersecurity, metaverse, crypto, cloud & SaaS

The Tech Panda takes a look at recent tech launches.

FinTech: AI-driven financial Mentors Vasu and Vidya

Research & Ranking, the equity investment advisory brand and a part of Equentis Wealth Advisory Services Private Limited, launched India’s AI-driven financial Mentors Vasu and Vidya. Designed to empower individuals with comprehensive financial insights through engaging and visually appealing snackable content. Vasu and Vidya are among the early AI Financial Mentors in the BFSI industry in India.

Alok Arya, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), of Research & Ranking shares, “Our mission at Research & Ranking is to educate and empower individuals to create wealth by establishing trusted relationships with clarity, consistency, and compounding. We firmly believe that the right investment advice can help investors achieve their financial goals, and demystifying investments is the first step towards this aim. To this end, we are reiterating and enhancing the delivery of information by leveraging the capabilities of AI.”

He further adds, “The introduction of Vasu and Vidya marks our giant leap toward promoting financial education by presenting financial information as engaging and relatable. We envisage a future where individuals from all walks of life can confidently navigate the intricate landscape of finance, securing their financial well-being.”

Features

Through short videos, they will dive into personal finance, investing, budgeting, saving, and more complexities. The user-friendly format aims to make even the most intricate financial concepts accessible to a broader audience, enhancing finance understanding nationwide.

The AI-Driven Financial Mentors will cover diverse topics, catering to novice learners and those looking to expand their financial knowledge. Whether it’s understanding the basics of stock market investing, or exploring strategies to grow wealth, these AI mentors will deliver expert guidance concisely and interactively.

AI: An influencer marketing platform that guarantees brand partnerships to content creators

Kofluence, an AI-led influence platform, launched its latest product Kofinity which offers guaranteed brand partnerships to every content creator, and an opportunity to monetise their social influence. Having successfully delivered over 1600+ campaigns across 30 diverse sectors with over 550K contributors on board and a collective reach of 6Bn+, Kofluence is at the forefront of influencer marketing solutions.

Ritesh Ujjwal, CEO and Co-Founder, Kofluence said, “We’re thrilled to introduce Kofinity! With this launch, we’re confident that Kofluence is well-positioned to lead the charge in this rapidly evolving industry. We aim to foster India’s thriving creators economy by monetizing 100k influencers in the next 12 months, enabling creators on their journey to becoming creator-preneurs.”

The Why

Typically access to premium offers often come with eligibility criteria or cost considerations, but Kofinity allows content creators to share these offers with their audience so they can avail them easily and freely without having to meet any such criteria.

Features

• Creators can acquire a free unique URL through ‘kofluence.com/in’, which will serve as a hub for their curated brand deals.

• With ‘always-on’ campaigns, creators can partner with brands they love, in a hassle-free manner.

• Each transaction made through their personalized link directly translates to payouts.

• Top performers can earn more than 25,000/- per week along with guaranteed shortlisting for collaborations that require minimal content creation and no prior content approval.

Cybersecurity: A solution for marketers to identify & mitigate invalid traffic

TrafficGuard, a digital ad verification and fraud prevention platform launched its Performance Max (PMax) Channel Solution to provide robust safeguards for businesses that rely on Google’s Performance Max in their digital marketing strategies. TrafficGuard PMax solution gives marketers tools for identifying and mitigating invalid traffic (IVT) within Performance Max campaigns.

Mathew Ratty, CEO of TrafficGuard said: “We launched our Pmax Channel solution to give marketers greater visibility and control over their Performance Max campaigns. It provides in-depth reporting analysis, audience targeting solutions, and invalid traffic filters that enable marketers to maximize ROI, safeguard their campaigns, and make informed decisions. At the same time, they can influence the PMax algorithm to ensure the data it optimizes towards is as close to your target audience as possible. This enables businesses to prevent the negative effects of the black box algorithm, as they can influence it to their advantage.”

Elie Shuggi, Chief Product Officer at TrafficGuard, said: “This solution addresses a crucial need within our marketing community. Trusting black box algorithms has become increasingly challenging, and we believe TrafficGuard’s PMax solution offers the protection they seek. Our initial trials have been promising, filtering out bot traffic amongst other invalid traffic, and enabling Google’s Performance Max AI to seek genuine users across Google advertising channels.”

Features

• It detects and categorizes invalid traffic, generated by Google’s AI wrongly recognizing the ‘positive’ signals from illegitimate traffic, and optimizing towards these “users”.

• It customizes exclusion lists tailored to each customer’s needs and subsequently guides Google’s Performance Max-AI to avoid engaging with these undesirable elements, including low-value clickers and bad actors. This strategic approach not only safeguards businesses from illegitimate traffic but also influences PMax’s AI to focus on elevating the presence of higher-value, authentic users. The result is a greater return on investment on ad spend for businesses using PMax.

• The result of using the solution is increased return on ad spend as the budget is optimized to target more genuine people, valuable insights so users can spot trends and optimize digital media channels accordingly, and time and resources saved with automated invalid traffic and fraud protections.

• It also provides a Data Collection Filter, which enables businesses to mitigate their exposure to unwanted data collection. This is critical in the prevention of the inadvertent collection of children’s data by businesses utilizing PMax and ensures businesses comply with local data privacy and child protection legislation.

Metaverse: A gamified adventure for how the metaverse can be leveraged as a force for good

DBS unveiled its metaverse concept for DBS BetterWorld, a gamified adventure to demonstrate how the metaverse can be leveraged as a force for good. The virtual experience highlights the global food waste challenge and what Businesses for Impact, supported by the DBS Foundation, are doing to address the issue.

Shoma Narayanan, Managing Director and Head of Group Strategic Marketing and Communications at DBS Bank India, said, ” DBS is dedicated to creating a larger impact beyond banking to build resilient and food-secure communities while contributing to environmental sustainability. We continue to harness the power of technology and innovation, tapping into the potential of the metaverse. Through DBS BetterWorld, we aim to drive awareness about pressing issues like food waste and create unique engagement opportunities. This closely aligns with DBS Foundation’s focus on championing social enterprises that bridge gaps within food and agricultural value chains. We are excited to see how this initiative scales and paves the way for a more sustainable future.”

The Why

According to the United Nations, one-third of all food produced in the world – or an estimated 1.3 billion tonnes – is wasted each year. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that ~40% of the food produced in India is wasted every year due to a fragmented and ineffective supply chain. This not only decreases nutritional security but also results in income losses for farmers.

To help address this issue, DBS launched its Towards Zero Food Waste initiative in 2020 to rally its employees, customers, communities, and the public to collectively create a more food-resilient future. As at the end of 2022, the initiative has generated over 2,000 tonnes of total food impact, which includes food waste reduced, food recycled, and food redistributed.

Features

As part of the virtual experience offered by DBS BetterWorld, players must complete a series of activities inspired by five Businesses for Impact supported by the DBS Foundation and their unique approach to mitigating food waste:

• Brewerkz – a craft beer maker based in Singapore, Brewerkz is focused on upcycling brewers’ spent grains, a by-product of beer-making that is often discarded in the industry today, into food products.

• Breer – a food upcycling startup based in Hong Kong, Breer collects surplus bread from bakeries and restaurants and uses it to brew craft beer.

• GreenPrice – based in Hong Kong, GreenPrice specialises in selling food that is close to or just past their “best before” date, helping eliminate food waste while making food more accessible to low-income households.

• Edible Garden City – operating out of Singapore, Edible Garden City champions the grow-our-own-food movement by making soil-based urban farming and edible gardening more accessible to city dwellers.

• Rooftop Republic – based in Hong Kong, Rooftop Republic transforms underutilised and unconventional spaces in the territory, such as disused helipads, into urban farms.

• DBS BetterWorld will be accessible to the public once The Sandbox’s Alpha Season 4 is launched.

AgTech: Agri Next initiative to bridge the technological gap within the agricultural ecosystem

Ninjacart, Indian agri-startup that leverages technology and data to organize the agriculture ecosystem, launched a future-forward ‘Agri Next’ initiative driven by a mission to bridge the technological gap within the agricultural ecosystem.

Kartheeswaran K K, CEO & Co-Founder of Ninjacart, expressed, “The ‘Agri Next’ initiative serves as a testament to our enduring commitment to crafting an interconnected and empowered agricultural ecosystem. Through this initiative, we aim to transcend the boundaries of traditional agriculture and embrace a future where technology and innovation drive growth, efficiency, and prosperity for all agri stakeholders.”

The Why

By addressing challenges like poor network access, overcrowding, and limited infrastructure, this strategic endeavor will enhance connectivity, ensuring uninterrupted internet access for all agricultural stakeholders. This access will enable them to use Ninjacart’s Ninja app, facilitating the discovery of verified traders, providing access to credit, payment guarantee solutions and enhancing their overall trade activities, ultimately improving their daily business operations.

Features

This strategy includes advancements in enabling commerce, the adoption of cutting-edge logistics and fulfillment solutions, and the provision of accessible capital options, all aimed at empowering agri citizens across the value chain- from farmers to traders and retailers. This empowerment will enable them to make informed decisions, enhance efficiency, and increase savings, marking a significant step towards a more technologically advanced agricultural sector.

It will provide complimentary public WiFi at the APMC Staples Mandi located in Gultekdi, Pune

Spanning an expansive 0.36 square kilometers, the project deploys 24 routers strategically positioned across 23 key locations within the Mandi in Pune. Thorough testing ensures that the WiFi network covers the entire market area, offering seamless internet connectivity to all Mandi visitors.

Crypto: Wealth management solution ‘EARN’ for users across the globe

Global crypto exchange, Coinstore, launched its wealth management solution ‘EARN’ for users across the globe.

Jennifer Lu, Co-Founder at Coinstore, said “Coinstore’s brand revamp is aimed at becoming a one stop solution for crypto enthusiasts by providing range of digital asset services under one roof. We are thrilled to introduce our EARN feature at Token2049 where global crypto community will get exclusive access to our latest product. Coinstore plans to launch spot trading, futures trading and derivatives pledge soon to provide a enhanced user experience”.

The Why

Coinstore EARN provides a lucrative opportunity to users and institutions to earn passive income from their digital assets by providing high annual percentage yields. EARN is developed by Coinstore’s expert quant team and is seamlessly integrated into the Coinstore ecosystem, providing a wider range of token application scenarios.

Features

• The EARN feature empowers users to make the most of their digital assets investing them for a fixed tenure to earn guaranteed returns.

• The users can lock-in their digital asset for a tenure of their choice and redeem the invested amount along with interest at the end of the tenure.

• It offers a variety of Web3 functions such as powerful NFT wallets, smooth management of assets on-chain and impeccable security to provide a holistic web3 experience to users.

AI: A holistic set of solutions to help customers embrace the power of AI

Qlik announced Qlik Staige, a holistic set of solutions to help customers confidently embrace the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deliver tangible value. With Qlik Staige, customers can innovate and move faster by making secure, governed AI and automation part of everything they can do with Qlik – from experimenting with and implementing generative AI models, to developing AI-powered predictions.

“Qlik understands that organizations are looking for pragmatic ways to leverage AI to make better, faster decisions, right now,” said Mike Capone, CEO of Qlik. “Our competitors have made many announcements that promise future products or vision. Our difference is that Qlik customers are using AI in real ways, including leveraging a proven and trusted LLM and a full range of AI-enhanced analytics. Additionally, with Qlik Staige, our customers are transforming their organizations – as evidenced by over half a million AI models built using Qlik AutoML.”

The Why

Every organization is looking to AI for competitive advantage, but adoption is difficult. Leaders are cautious about going too fast due to risk, governance, and trust concerns. Qlik Staige helps organizations build a trusted data foundation for AI, leverage modern AI-enhanced analytics, and deploy AI for advanced use cases.

Features

Build a trusted data foundation for AI – Qlik helps deliver AI-ready data to organizations like Airbus and J.B. Hunt. Qlik’s data integration and quality solutions leverage AI to automate data delivery and transformation, reducing complexity, mitigating risk, and enabling data fabrics. Innovations include:

• AI-enhanced data quality offering diagnostics and remediation on incomplete, corrupt / unreliable data.

• Connectors to key AI infrastructure including ChatGPT, Hugging Face, expert.ai, and Amazon SageMaker with upcoming support for Microsoft Fabric and vector databases.

• Reduced manual coding with prompt-based generation of custom SQL transformation logic.

Find and act on insights with AI-enhanced analytics – Qlik delivers AI-enhanced and predictive analytics capabilities for leaders like CaixaBank and Intuit. Insight Advisor, Qlik’s analytics AI assistant, answers questions with relevant text and visualizations in ten languages. Qlik’s OpenAI connectors extend the power of generative AI to Qlik analytics, bringing even more powerful chat capabilities to a rich user experience. Qlik is introducing a range of new native AI capabilities, including:

• New analysis types to auto-generate the best visualizations, natural language insights, and even entire dashboards in a few clicks.

• Key driver analysis to gain a deeper understanding of what is happening and why through built-in predictive analytics that identifies what is creating the biggest impact on an outcome.

• AI-assisted script generation to easily create Qlik expressions through natural language.

• AI-generated insights to intepret and summarize findings directly within the dashboard.

• Generative AI Support Chatbot, built with Ada, to quickly answer questions and streamline resolutions on more complex issues.

Build and deploy AI for advanced use cases – The Ohio State University and Appalachian Regional Healthcare System are among the many customers using Qlik AutoML™ to extend AI’s impact. With Qlik AutoML, organizations scale data science investments to more users while enabling technically inclined staff to customize AI solutions for new use cases. Qlik AutoML now has feature engineering to speed data transformation and improve model accuracy.

Cloud: New pre-configured activescale cold storage bundles to simplify on-prem cloud resources deployment

Quantum Corporation, a solution for unstructured data, introduced new pre-configured bundles to make it even easier to purchase and deploy Quantum ActiveScale™ Cold Storage, the industry’s only S3-enabled object storage solution architected for both active and cold data sets that reduces cold storage costs by up to 60 percent.

“We’re using Quantum ActiveScale to build Amidata Secure Cloud Storage, which delivers highly scalable, available, and affordable storage for organizations,” says Rocco Scaturchio, director of sales and marketing for Amidata, a leading managed service provider based in Australia. “The new offering enables organizations to tap into cloud storage benefits even if they lack internal cloud expertise.”

The Why

With the massive amount of data customers need to retain for business and compliance purposes, customers are using both public and private cloud resources to store and manage this data, driven by their budget, frequency with which they need to access the data, and their data protection requirements. With ActiveScale, customers can build their own cloud storage resource to control costs and ensure fast, easy access to their data for compliance, analysis, and to gather insights to drive business forward.

Features

As a leading Outperformer in the latest GigaOm Object Storage: Enterprise Radar Report, ActiveScale combines advanced object store software with hyperscale tape technology to provide massively scalable, highly durable, and extremely low-cost storage for archiving cold data, enabling organizations to maintain control of their most valuable data assets and unlock value in cold data over years and decades without unpredictable and expensive access fees. Whether customers are developing solutions for life and earth sciences, media production, government programs, web services, IoT infrastructure, or video surveillance, ActiveScale is ideal for unstructured data management, data analytics and AI workloads, active archiving, and long-term retention and protection of massive data sets.

To simplify purchasing, ActiveScale Cold Storage is now available in pre-configured bundles complete with all the components customers need to easily deploy the solution. The bundles are available in four standard capacity sizes—Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large—that range from 10 petabytes up to 100 petabytes.

AI: A new and rebuilt semantic search powered by an advanced GPT-driven language model

PatSeer, an Indian AI-driven B2B SaaS platform for Intellectual Property (IP) Research and Intelligence announces a new and rebuilt semantic search powered by an advanced GPT-driven language model. The new semantic search replaces its older Natural Language search capabilities in the product by custom-training the underlying LLM model to understand patent semantics.

“In the many conversations with patent professionals, I’ve been told that Boolean and AI-based patent systems will always be separate tools and I could never accept that,” remarked Manish Sinha, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at PatSeer. “I’m excited to debunk that notion today. PatSeer has become the first to offer a seamless fusion of transformative AI-driven search within a professional patent search database. The days of maintaining access to two separate solutions or paying by the query are over. At PatSeer our commitment to harnessing the power of Deep Learning AI to tackle greater challenges remains stronger than ever. Following the launch of our AI Classifier last year, the advent of our new Semantic Search marks another significant milestone in this journey. We are quite excited with the possibilities here and the road ahead.”

The Why

Intellectual Property encompasses various forms, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Among these, patents stand out as legal documents that grant their holders exclusive rights to an invention for a specified period, typically 20 years from the filing date. This exclusivity empowers inventors to prevent others from making, using, selling, or importing their inventions without permission.

Patent research involves delving into patent databases to extract useful information about emerging innovations and industry trends. This form of research helps businesses make informed choices regarding product development, market strategies, and intellectual property protection. Beyond its corporate applications, patent research also serves the interests of policymakers, investors and the general public, by providing them with essential data that can influence technological and social advancements.

As a platform that’s used by thousands of IP searchers daily, PatSeer’s complex Boolean search functionality will continue. However now, with the integration of the new semantic search, PatSeer is offering the best of both worlds, eliminating the need for two separate systems.

Features

• PatSeer’s new AI search feature brings a significant improvement in result accuracy on tests conducted across various research sectors, further solidifying their presence as a global company which caters to prominent blue chip firms in India and abroad.

• With this new development, patent professionals are no longer confined to the contextuality limitations of Boolean searches and can capitalise on PatSeer’s AI capabilities for comprehensive searches.

• With a true Boolean and AI integration, users get unique capabilities that neither can provide independently. For example, one can initiate a semantic search and narrow the results iteratively with Boolean searches and vice versa.

• It also allows for the semantic re-ranking of Boolean results using a paragraph or a relevant patent.

• The system also suggests related records to existing results based on the underlying language model’s contextual understanding.

• For transparency purposes, users can view the closest matching snippets from full text to understand why a record scored higher in their results.
• The new semantic search is also immediately available as an API for integration into internal systems.