5 startups to watch in India

Ola

On-demand cab service Ola has received US$500 million in a series F funding round, it announced today. Investors include Didi Kuaidi, Baillie Gifford, Tiger Capital, SoftBank Group, FalconEdge Capital, and DST Global.

Ola, Uber’s rival in India, claims that it gets a million booking requests a day and has over 350,000 vehicles using its service.

Hipship

Logistics startup Hipship got an undisclosed amount in funding from Inara Capital and a consortium led by Scootsy founder Rishi Khiani, it said today.

The startup aims to empower customers and SMEs by picking up and delivering their packages and documents. It aims to strengthen its technology backbone and expand across the country with the new funds.

Hostmaker

Hospitality management service Hostmaker today closed a US$2 million seed funding round led by DN Capital that also saw participation from Asia-focused DSG Consumer Partner and other venture funds, entrepreneurs, and travel industry professionals.

Hostmaker was founded a year ago by Nakul Sharma, a hospitality professional. It offers its Airbnb management services in London, Barcelona, and Rome, serving about 5,000 guests every month. The funding will be used for product enhancements and phase two of its expansion to other European capitals.

ScoopWhoop Media

News startup ScoopWhoop Media has raised US$4 million in fresh funds from venture capital firm Kalaari Capital.

The two-year-old startup plans to expand its video production unit, ScoopWhoop Talkies, with the fresh funds.

Goodbox

Tsepak Technologies’ instant messaging app Goodbox, which connects users with merchants, attracted US$2.5 million in a series A round. The investment came from Nexus Venture Partners.

Goodbox will use the money to expand operations, Bangalore-based Tsepak said in a press statement. The app allows businesses to create a real world-like storefront

Source : techinasia.com

Facing Cyber Blackmail? Don't Pay A King's Ransom

When your business is under fire and a ransom is on the table, it's tempting to pay and make the criminals go away. But how do you know they'll fulfill their part of the bargain? Even if they do, you've made yourself complicit in a growing criminal enterprise.

Demands to pay up or endure the consequences come in many varieties. It may be a promise not to out the victim for using a questionable service, or not to dump data files stolen from corporate servers. More often, though, the threat is delivered via ransomware, a type of malware that encrypts user files and makes the encrypted data useless until ransom is paid -- in amounts generally ranging from $200 to $10,000.

Some experts argue that paying ransom makes the situation worse because it rewards criminal behavior. The groups behind ransomware know victims will pay, which has resulted in more ransomware variants and new attack vectors. It's basic game theory: One victim pays the ransom, so the game will be repeated for the next victim, who will look at what the first victim did.

"Paying the ransom simply encourages the attackers to continue following the same playbook," said Andrew Hay, senior research manager at OpenDNS, which was acquired by Cisco earlier this year

Source : infoworld.com

How Robots Can Quickly Teach Each Other to Grasp New Objects

Grabbing a pen or pair of sunglasses might be effortless for you or me, but it’s fiendishly difficult for a robot, especially if the object in question is unfamiliar or positioned awkwardly.

Practice makes perfect, though, as one robot is proving. It is teaching itself to grasp all sorts of objects through hours of repetition. The robot uses different cameras and infrared sensors to look at an unfamiliar object from various angles before attempting to pick it up. Then it does so using several different grasps, shaking the object to make sure it is held securely. It may take dozens of tries for the robot to find the right grasp, and dozens more for it to make sure an object won’t slip.

That might seem like a tedious process, but once the robot has learned how to pick something up, it can share that knowledge with other robots that have the same sensors and grippers. The researchers behind the effort eventually hope to have hundreds of robots learn collectively how to grasp a million different things.

The work was done by Stefanie Tellex, an assistant professor at Brown University, together with one of her graduate students, John Oberlin. They used a two-armed industrial robot called Baxter, made by the Boston-based company Rethink Robotics.

At the Northeast Robotics Colloquium, an event held at Worcester Polytechnic Institute this month, Oberlin demonstrated the robot’s gripping abilities to members of the public.

Enabling robots to manipulate objects more easily is one of the big challenges in robotics today, and it could have major industrial significance (see “Shelf-Picking Robots Will Vie for Amazon Prize”).

Tellex says robotics researchers are increasingly looking for more efficient ways of training robots to perform tasks such as manipulation. “We have powerful algorithms now—such as deep learning—that can learn from large data sets, but these algorithms require data,” she says. “Robot practice is a way to acquire the data that a robot needs for learning to robustly manipulate objects.”

Tellex also notes that there are around 300 Baxter robots in various research labs around the world today. If each of those robots were to use both arms to examine new objects, she says, it would be possible for them to learn to grasp a million objects in 11 days. “By having robots share what they’ve learned, it’s possible to increase the speed of data collection by orders of magnitude,” she says.

To grasp each object, the Brown researchers’ robot scans it from various angles using one of the cameras in its arms and the infrared sensors on its body. This allows it to identify possible locations at which to grasp. The researchers used a mathematical technique to optimize the process of practicing different grips. With this technique, the team’s Baxter robot picked up objects as much as 75 percent more reliably than it did using its regular software. The information acquired for each object—the images, the 3-D scans, and the correct grip—is encoded in a format that allows it to be shared online.

Other groups are developing methods to allow robots to learn to perform various tasks, including grasping. One of the most promising ways to achieve this is deep learning using so-called neural networks, which are simulations loosely modeled on the way nerves in the brain process information and learn (see “Robot Toddler Learns to Stand by ‘Imagining’ How to Do It”).

Although humans acquire an ability to grasp through learning, a child doesn’t need to spend so much time handling different objects, and he or she can use previous experience to figure out very quickly how to pick up a new object. Tellex says the ultimate goal of her project is to give robots similar abilities. “Our long-term aim is to use this data to generalize to novel objects,” she says.

Source : technologyreview.com

Amazon’s innovation marketplace launches in the UK

Shoppers can now get access to some of the startup scene’s latest hardware, food and wellbeing products as Amazon’s curated Launchpad portal is now live outside of the US.

Although many current listings are from US companies (and some, like Pebble, aren’t particularly new) UK makers littleBits and smartphone manufacturer Wileyfox are among the first to start selling on the site.

An Amazon spokesperson said this is an opportunity for people to get to know the stories behind the products they buy as the site offers space for information about the founders who came up with the ideas.

Amazon Launchpad is mainly designed to support startups that are already part of the shopping giant’s growing partner network of VCs, accelerators, incubators and crowdfunding platforms.

This now includes products funded on UK crowdfunding sites like Crowdcube and Crowdfunder.co.uk.

The programme clearly gives Amazon a direct line into innovators as products are launched, although the companies do not have to list exclusively on the Launchpad.

Budding makers and existing Amazon suppliers can apply now to be listed on the portal, even if they aren’t working with one of Amazon’s partners, but their products must be ready for shipping within 90 days.

Source : thenextweb.com

Paris attacks: Faced with cyberwar, ISIS issues 'how not to get hacked' messages

 ISIS-affiliated account on the messaging app Telegram has sent out a message about Anonymous' threat to launch its "biggest operation ever" against the terrorist group.

After the Paris terror attacks on Friday that left at least 129 people dead and hundreds more injured, the hacking collective Anonymous posted a video in which a person who claims to represent the group said, "Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down."

"We will launch the biggest operation ever against you," the masked person said. "Expect massive cyberattacks. War is declared. Get prepared."

 ISIS-affiliated account on the messaging app Telegram has sent out a message about Anonymous' threat to launch its "biggest operation ever" against the terrorist group.

After the Paris terror attacks on Friday that left at least 129 people dead and hundreds more injured, the hacking collective Anonymous posted a video in which a person who claims to represent the group said, "Anonymous from all over the world will hunt you down."

"We will launch the biggest operation ever against you," the masked person said. "Expect massive cyberattacks. War is declared. Get prepared."

The message goes on to provide "instructions" on how to avoid potential hacks: Don't open any links unless sure of the source. Change Internet Protocol addresses "constantly." And "do not talk to people [you] don't know on Telegram" or through Twitter direct messaging.

The message was then forwarded around to various other ISIS-affiliated Telegram channels.

Anonymous started targeting extremists in January after the terror attacks on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. The hackers worked to identify ISIS-linked social media accounts and take down extremist websites.

Source : The Times Of India - Tech

State Of Play: 3D Printing

Once a booming new industry seemingly set to take over the world with its revolutionary technology, today the 3D printing industry lies partially buried, with even the pioneering MakerBot Industries shutting stores and slashing staff numbers. The question is though, is this a fatal blow or merely a blip in 3D printing's inevitable rise?

It’s not been a good year

Even the most loyal advocate of 3D printing has to admit that 2015 is the year that saw the 3D printing bubble burst. After riding a five-year wave of innovation and hype, a period in which 3D printing was brought to the public through a series of crowdfunded projects, stores, events and products, as well as being heralded as the return of old-fashioned, localised manufacturing, things suddenly fell off a cliff.

MakerBot Industries, the poster child for the 3D printing field, shuttered its three high-street stores, let go 20 per cent of its staff and its parent company, Stratasys, saw its share price plummet from 104.16 on November 17, 2014, down to 22.59 as of November 16, 2015. At its height on January 3rd, 2014, Stratasys had once seen its shares worth 136.46 each but now they were worth a fraction of that.

Things weren’t localised to MakerBot and Stratasys too. 3D Systems, another prominent 3D printer manufacturer whose CTO Chuck Hall is credited with actually inventing the stereolithographic process used by many of the machines, also saw its share price nosedive, falling from 35.33 last year down to 8.65 over the same period. Organovo also saw its share price halved, Voxeljet AG too. It was a collapse that reminded people of the dot-com bust. Now, far from people zealously proclaiming that in the future ‘everything will be 3D printed’, investors were actively veering away from the tech, fearing that the industry was now in terminal decline.

Source : techgignews.com

Sandeep Girotra To Be New Nokia Head For India

NEW DELHI: Finnish telecom gear maker Nokia said Sandeep Girotra would become the head of India as part of the planned merger of the company and Alcatel-Lucent.Girotra is currently vice president and head of India, Nokia Networks.

The company said Girotra would oversee the combined company's customer operations across India, driving the execution of strategy and ensuring superior customer service, underpinned by a strong focus on innovation and quality.

Nokia in April had announced the acquisition of French firm Alcatel-Lucent in an all-stock deal valued at 15.6 billion euros ($16.6 billion).

"Sandeep Girotra would become the head of India as part of the planned combination of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent, after and subject to the successful closing of the public exchange offer for Alcatel-Lucent securities announced on April 15, 2015," the company said in a statement.

Girotra joined Nokia Networks in 1996 and has held a number of different roles in India, heading the region since 2011. In 2010 he served as head of sales for business solution networks having been customer team head at IDEA Cellular within Nokia Siemens Networks from 2007 to 2009.

Girotra would report to Ashish Chowdhary, chief customer operations officer.

"We are delighted to announce the appointment of Sandeep Girotra as designated head of India. He brings valuable regional experience and expertise, and would be a great asset to the management team," Chowdhary said.The proposed appointment is effective only after the successful closing of the public exchange offer and is subject to the completion of the relevant works council consultation procedures, it added

Source : techgignews.com