by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Commodity Market, Investing, Large Enterprise, Marketing Basics, Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
Rivian Automotive
San Francisco : US online retail giant Amazon is leading a $700-million funding round for electric truck startup Rivian Automotive, Rivian has said.
The latest funds will help produce its first all-electric vehicles — the R1T pickup truck and the seven-seat R1S SUV, which were revealed in the November Los Angeles Auto Show, Xinhua news agency reported.
“This investment is an important shift to sustainable mobility,” said RJ Scaringe, Rivian founder and CEO on Friday.
Scaringe said it was expected to deliver its R1T and R1S SUV to customers by late 2020. “We’re inspired by Rivian’s vision for the future of electric transportation,” said Jeff Wilke, Amazon CEO Worldwide Consumer.
The two vehicles will have up to more than 400 miles (about 644 km) of range with extraordinary performance, off-road capability and utility, said the auto company.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Emerging Businesses, Finding Customers, Markets, Online Marketing, Sales, SMEs, Social Media, Technology
By Gokul Bhagabati,
Bengaluru : With a wide range of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools at its disposal, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of online retail giant Amazon, is busy helping its customers in India, bringing to their doorsteps innovative solutions that address the challenges they face.
Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), the Indian subsidiary of the Amazon Group that undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India, brought to the country earlier this year a digital innovation programme headed by Madhusudan Shekar.
“In a heterogeneous country like India, the scope of innovation is tremendous,” Shekar, Head of Digital Innovation at AISPL, told IANS here, pointing out the diversity of needs in a country of over 1.2 billion people.
According to him, while start-ups are by nature quite innovative in their approach, the risk of inertia to innovation seeping in is higher in large enterprises.
“But large enterprises are always looking for innovations in areas such as optimising operational costs. We can help them find innovation solutions in these areas too,” Shekar noted in an interview on the sidelines of the Amazon AI Conclave held here last week.
“With the availability of a wide range of AI, ML, analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) tools and pre-trained models with AWS, the cost and time required for innovation come down drastically,” he explained, adding that businesses just need to fine-tune these models according to their needs, thereby saving time spent on building them from scratch.
Among the start-ups that showcased their innovative solutions at the event was ChironX, a Gurugram-based company which is using AI and Deep Learning for medical diagnostics.
The AI model that the company has built analyses retinal fundus images in seconds to detect several diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, hypertensive retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema.
“Our solution is now used by several hospitals in India,” said Rito Maitra, Vice President for Product at ChironX, adding that its data infrastructure needs are supported by AWS.
AWS, which is betting big on AI and ML for its growth, has over hundreds and thousands of active customers in the country.
“Every customer conversation that we have today has an element of AI and ML in it — whether they are enterprises, start-ups or other organisations,” Navdeep Manaktala, Head of Business Development, AISPL, told IANS, adding that over 85 per cent of what AWS does is driven by customer needs.
AWS has a broad portfolio of AI and ML services in areas such as text-to speech conversion, image analysis and document analysis, among others.
Shaadi.com, one of the world’s largest online matrimonial services, and Woo, a dating app, are among the company’s two biggest customers from India that use Amazon “Rekognition” — a Deep Learning-based image-analysis service.
The matrimonial website believes that with the use of “Rekognition”, it could reduce the time it takes for a picture to appear on a user’s profile by 95 per cent as a lot of time spent on manual moderation of the picture to see whether it matches the description in the profile can be cut.
“Amazon Rekognition APIs (application programming interface), particularly ‘DetectFaces’, provide rich image metadata that we can use to apply our business-specific quality guidelines to. Utilising information such as number of faces, size of faces, and estimated age range, we were able to remove photo-level manual curation work entirely,” said Sumesh Menon, Co-Founder of Woo.
Manaktala said that ML is also helping AWS better understand the customer needs, helping them secure their data. “The pace of innovation, in spite of our size, is tremendous,” Manaktala added.
With services such as Amazon “SageMaker”, the company also allows developers and data scientists to build, train and deploy Machine Learning models.
It also has what is known as AWS Partner Network (APN), a global programme focused on helping APN Partners build successful businesses or solutions by providing business, technical, marketing and go-to-market support.
Overall, the company offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, ML and AI, IoT, mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management.
(Gokul Bhagabati can be contacted at gokul.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology, World
San Francisco : With efforts to reform a European Union tax law not bringing the desired results, France is going to introduce from January 1, 2019 a digital tax on technology giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, the media reported.
The French government’s “GAFA” tax” is being introduced to combat attempts by the firms to avoid paying what is considered a “fair share” of taxes in the country, by taking advantage of European tax laws, Appleinsider reported on Monday.
The new tax regime is expected to bring in an estimated 500 million euro ($570 million) to the country’s cofferes for 2019, according to French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, The Local Fr said in a report.
Major technology companies have come under the scrutiny of lawmakers in countries like France and Britain for allegedly routing profits through operations in countries with extremely low tax rates or other arrangements.
Earlier this year, the European Commission published proposals for a three per cent tax on the revenues of major tech companies with global revenues above 750 million euro a year and taxable EU revenue above 50 million euro, the BBC reported.
But to become law, EU tax reforms need the support of all member states. And some countries, including Ireland, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Finland are yet to come on board to bring the reforms.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Interviews, Large Enterprise, Markets, Online Marketing, SMEs, Technology
Werner Vogels
By Nishant Arora,
Las Vegas : For the first time since launching its Mumbai region services two years back, retail giant Amazon’s Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) has seen a 70 per cent increase in the accounts of Indian companies, says Amazon Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Werner Vogels.
In an interview with IANS, Vogels said AWS has been a preferred choice for both big and small businesses in the country which are currently undergoing digital transformation.
“Most importantly, we have seen a significant growth in India. For the first time since launching the Mumbai region, we have seen 70 per cent increase in the accounts of Indian companies,” said a beaming Vogels after delivering a marathon keynote address at the company’s annual “ReInvent” conference here.
The company launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region with two availability zones in 2016 and has seen stupendous growth in adding new customers in the region.
AWS currently has 19 AWS Global Infrastructure Regions and five more are coming soon.
“We were fortunate that even before the opening of Mumbai region, AWS had seen a significant growth in India,” added Vogels.
One of the interesting things in India and other similar countries, said Vogels, is that young entrepreneurs are looking to build long-term businesses.
“Digital entrepreneurs in India are looking to build really long-term sustainable businesses and are taking a different path. They want to have tight control over expenditure and how they are actually growing. AWS is an ideal choice for them,” the Amazon CTO told IANS.
“If you do not take massive investments and want to build and grow on a slower pattern, AWS is here for you,” he added.
On the other hand, AWS is also powering several big businesses in India.
redBus, the world’s largest online bus ticketing platform, runs on AWS and has created hassle-free travel experience for people in India who uses low-cost phones.
“redBus put so much engineering into making their Web pages lightweight so these could open very fast on any type of device. This has created a difference in the lives of so many people in India with low-end phones,” said Vogels.
Tata Motors is another big customer for AWS.
“They have put sensors for preventive maintenance on their trucks and all that runs on AWS. Several media companies in India run on AWS. Online travel company MakeMyTrip runs on AWS. There are many such successful examples,” Vogels told IANS.
According to him, Amazon learns from all their customers and looks for unique patterns as every company is different and does development differently.
“We are an ideal choice for both big and small businesses in India,” he added.
Vogels echoed AWS CEO Andy Jassy who earlier said that the Asia-Pacific region has huge potential to write the next growth story for AWS, with India playing a key role in Cloud adoption among both enterprises and the governments.
“The business in the Asia-Pacific region is very broad and is growing very quickly. The business is growing rapidly in China, India, Singapore, Australia and South-East Asian countries,” Jassy noted.
AWS which registered $27 billion in revenue and 46 per cent growth (year-on-year) globally is an undisputed Public Cloud leader with 51.8 per cent share in Cloud infrastructure market globally, followed by Microsoft at 13.3 per cent and Alibaba at a distant 4.6 per cent.
In India, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL) is a subsidiary of the Amazon Group which undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in the country.
(Nishant Arora was in Las Vegas at an invitation from AWS. He can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Commodities, Commodities News, Commodity Market, Finding Customers, Investing, Large Enterprise, Marketing Basics, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Technology
San Francisco : Amazon on Tuesday announced a new investment of $10 million in Closed Loop Fund (CLF) to support recycling infrastructure in the US aimed at cutting the amount of waste treated at landfills.
Amazon said its investment will increase the availability of curbside recycling for three million homes in communities across the country, making it easier for customers to recycle and further develop end markets for recycled commodities, Xinhua reported.
The funds will help “divert one million tons of recyclable material from landfill into the recycling stream and eliminate the equivalent of 2 million metric tons of CO2 by 2028 — equivalent to shutting down a coal-fired power plant for six months,” the company said.
The CLF was founded in 2014 to invest in companies and organisations working on services, infrastructure or technology that aimed to provide more accessible recycling service to American communities, when about half of Americans today lack access to convenient, sufficient curbside recycling at their homes.
“This investment will help build the local capabilities needed to make it easier for our customers and their communities to recycle and to increase the amount of material recycled across the country,” said Dave Clark, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations.
The CLF hopes that over the next 10 years, it could help eliminate more than 16 million tons of greenhouse gas, divert more than 8 million cumulative tons of waste from landfills, improve recycling for more than 18 million households, and save nearly 60 million dollars for American cities.
“Amazon’s investment in Closed Loop Fund is another example of how recycling is good business in America… we hope their leadership drives other brands and retailers to follow suit,” said CEO of Closed Loop Fund Ron Gonen.
As one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, Amazon packages produce a massive amount of cardboard and packaging waste every year, and the company shipped more than 5 billion items for its members of the Amazon Prime service in 2017.
Amazon has been enforcing the Frustration-Free Packaging program since 2008, which has eliminated over 500 million boxes and more than 244,000 tons of packaging materials over the past 10 years.
—IANS
