Hi Friends,

Even as I launch this today ( my 80th Birthday ), I realize that there is yet so much to say and do. There is just no time to look back, no time to wonder,"Will anyone read these pages?"

With regards,
Hemen Parekh
27 June 2013

Now as I approach my 90th birthday ( 27 June 2023 ) , I invite you to visit my Digital Avatar ( www.hemenparekh.ai ) – and continue chatting with me , even when I am no more here physically

Tuesday 27 September 2016

THE OTHER SIDE



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Friends,

We have all , known AMN as a very competent L&T-ite

The link above , tells us the story of the COMPASSIONATE person behind that tough facade !

You will enjoy watching this video

hcp
---------------------------------------------------------------------
cc:  Jairam,

Thanks for sharing this link

May be of Interest


Dear Jairam,

You may want to look up the following , L&T related blogs / articles / reports etc on my personal web site :



*    Quo Vadis ?

*    L&T : FIVE DECADES OFORGANISATIONAL WATERSHEDS AND BEYOND

 

       EVER-EXPANDING HORIZONS

*     The  Solution


hcp 
( M ) +91 - 98,67,55,08,08
--------------------------------------------------------------
PS :
Have you been able to release order on NOTIONAL PRESS , re 800 copies of " L&T Story " , for distribution among the present and the past , Senior Employees of L&T , as suggested by AMN during my visit ?
When do you think , the distribution will happen ?


Worth checking out




----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

These may interest you

hcp

Monday 26 September 2016

MIGHT INTEREST YOU



The word on the streets of India’s start-up world is that any mention of artificial intelligence (AI) makes venture capitalists drool. From Sequoia India to Tata Sons Ltd’s chairman emeritus Ratan Tata, reputed investors are adding companies working on AI to their portfolio. This is only to be expected, given that the entire tech world can’t stop talking about how AI, machine learning and neural networks will completely change the world over the next few decades. But it’s also a daunting task for Indian companies, given that all the big global players are pouring massive resources into the space. There are several Indian companies that have taken AI out of the lab and found real-world applications for it.
The screen you can talk to
If you walk into the Nepean Sea Road branch of RBL Bank Ltd (formerly Ratnakar Bank Ltd) in Mumbai next week and swipe your card, you will see yourself on a large screen that will enable various banking tasks, such as opening a new account or applying for a loan. You can interact with the screen using gestures, swiping your hands right and left to click on buttons and see further options, and you can also talk to the screen.
As you view the options, the screen will study your face, trying to gauge whether you’re engaged, interested or bored. If it believes you’re interested in car loan options, it will suggest schemes on these.
All this is powered by Fluid AI, a Mumbai-based start-up founded three years ago by brothers Abhinav and Raghav Aggarwal. Their gesture and speech recognition solution not only lets companies provide customers with novel and intuitive experiences, it also provides the enterprises with better data analytics.
As you interact with Fluid AI’s solution on the screen, it studies you and your preferences. It then crunches all this data and presents the enterprise with the analysis.
Apart from RBL Bank, Fluid AI has also built a solution for Axis Bank, which it will launch sometime next month. Auto companies such as Rolls-Royce, Hero and Toyota, as well as mobile service provider Vodafone, are among its customers.
Fluid AI is also helping enterprises use AI to make real-time decisions based on data. Their AI can trade in the stock market, says Raghav. It learns when to buy and sell a stock based on past data and can then make the actual decisions without human intervention. Similarly, if a mobile phone company wants to know when its customers are thinking of changing their service provider, Fluid AI can learn customer behaviour by analysing data—dropped calls, complaints, poor network areas etc.—and reach a decision on making a particular customer an offer or escalating his complaint at the crucial moment.
Raghav (left) and Abhinav Aggarwal of Fluid AI. photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
The Chatbots
If you search for Niki Bot on the Facebook Messenger app, you’ll be introduced to a virtual assistant that can help you pay your electricity, phone or cable bills or book you a cab. Type in “pay my phone bill” and it will ask for your number, service provider and bill amount. Then, if you have a Paytm account, you can pay your bill right there on Messenger, without being redirected to another app or site.
Niki Bot is the creation of Niki.ai, an year-old Bengaluru-based start-up that has raised funding from, among others, Ratan Tata and UTV group founder Ronnie Screwvala. Their aim is to allow you to conduct various transactions online—paying bills, booking transport, ordering food, getting chores done—on one platform, while talking to a digital assistant.
Apart from their Facebook bot, they also have their own app, Niki. On this, you can do everything you can on the Facebook bot, plus book a bus, order a burger from Burger King and get your laundry done. What makes the app “intelligent” is that it will attempt to have a conversation with you, while an app like Zomato would make you go through menus and select things yourself. If you want to order a burger on Niki, for example, you can say “I like chicken”, and it will tell you it has a grill chicken burger combo meal available. When it asks you when you want your laundry picked up, you can say “First thing in the morning”, and it will understand what you mean.
MagicX, a Bengaluru-based start-up that raised funding this year from investors such as Kris Gopalakrishnan, a co-founder and former chief executive officer of Infosys, does almost exactly what Niki does. Its app and Facebook bot are both called MagicX, and the app can communicate in English, Hindi and Kannada—eight more languages are expected to be added soon. The company has the advantage of having previously operated a chat application called Magic Tiger, which had people answering requests over messaging, so it has gained some insight into what customers want from a digital assistant.
Neither Niki.ai nor MagicX are doing anything revolutionary. There are plenty of digital assistants powered by AI being developed around the world, not the least Facebook’s own M, which lets people in the US perform all sorts of tasks, from buying someone a birthday gift to making dinner reservations. However, they can stay ahead of the competition by quickly tying up with as many service providers as possible. So if a company such as Facebook does want a digital assistant that could perform tasks for people in India too, it would be easier for it to simply acquire or ally with Niki or MagicX rather than approach every restaurant, airline and mobile service provider for tie-ups.

The word on the streets of India’s start-up world is that any mention of artificial intelligence (AI) makes venture capitalists drool. From Sequoia India to Tata Sons Ltd’s chairman emeritus Ratan Tata, reputed investors are adding companies working on AI to their portfolio. This is only to be expected, given that the entire tech world can’t stop talking about how AI, machine learning and neural networks will completely change the world over the next few decades. But it’s also a daunting task for Indian companies, given that all the big global players are pouring massive resources into the space. There are several Indian companies that have taken AI out of the lab and found real-world applications for it.
The screen you can talk to
If you walk into the Nepean Sea Road branch of RBL Bank Ltd (formerly Ratnakar Bank Ltd) in Mumbai next week and swipe your card, you will see yourself on a large screen that will enable various banking tasks, such as opening a new account or applying for a loan. You can interact with the screen using gestures, swiping your hands right and left to click on buttons and see further options, and you can also talk to the screen.
As you view the options, the screen will study your face, trying to gauge whether you’re engaged, interested or bored. If it believes you’re interested in car loan options, it will suggest schemes on these.
All this is powered by Fluid AI, a Mumbai-based start-up founded three years ago by brothers Abhinav and Raghav Aggarwal. Their gesture and speech recognition solution not only lets companies provide customers with novel and intuitive experiences, it also provides the enterprises with better data analytics.
As you interact with Fluid AI’s solution on the screen, it studies you and your preferences. It then crunches all this data and presents the enterprise with the analysis.
Apart from RBL Bank, Fluid AI has also built a solution for Axis Bank, which it will launch sometime next month. Auto companies such as Rolls-Royce, Hero and Toyota, as well as mobile service provider Vodafone, are among its customers.
Fluid AI is also helping enterprises use AI to make real-time decisions based on data. Their AI can trade in the stock market, says Raghav. It learns when to buy and sell a stock based on past data and can then make the actual decisions without human intervention. Similarly, if a mobile phone company wants to know when its customers are thinking of changing their service provider, Fluid AI can learn customer behaviour by analysing data—dropped calls, complaints, poor network areas etc.—and reach a decision on making a particular customer an offer or escalating his complaint at the crucial moment.
Raghav (left) and Abhinav Aggarwal of Fluid AI. photo: Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
The Chatbots
If you search for Niki Bot on the Facebook Messenger app, you’ll be introduced to a virtual assistant that can help you pay your electricity, phone or cable bills or book you a cab. Type in “pay my phone bill” and it will ask for your number, service provider and bill amount. Then, if you have a Paytm account, you can pay your bill right there on Messenger, without being redirected to another app or site.
Niki Bot is the creation of Niki.ai, an year-old Bengaluru-based start-up that has raised funding from, among others, Ratan Tata and UTV group founder Ronnie Screwvala. Their aim is to allow you to conduct various transactions online—paying bills, booking transport, ordering food, getting chores done—on one platform, while talking to a digital assistant.
Apart from their Facebook bot, they also have their own app, Niki. On this, you can do everything you can on the Facebook bot, plus book a bus, order a burger from Burger King and get your laundry done. What makes the app “intelligent” is that it will attempt to have a conversation with you, while an app like Zomato would make you go through menus and select things yourself. If you want to order a burger on Niki, for example, you can say “I like chicken”, and it will tell you it has a grill chicken burger combo meal available. When it asks you when you want your laundry picked up, you can say “First thing in the morning”, and it will understand what you mean.
MagicX, a Bengaluru-based start-up that raised funding this year from investors such as Kris Gopalakrishnan, a co-founder and former chief executive officer of Infosys, does almost exactly what Niki does. Its app and Facebook bot are both called MagicX, and the app can communicate in English, Hindi and Kannada—eight more languages are expected to be added soon. The company has the advantage of having previously operated a chat application called Magic Tiger, which had people answering requests over messaging, so it has gained some insight into what customers want from a digital assistant.
Neither Niki.ai nor MagicX are doing anything revolutionary. There are plenty of digital assistants powered by AI being developed around the world, not the least Facebook’s own M, which lets people in the US perform all sorts of tasks, from buying someone a birthday gift to making dinner reservations. However, they can stay ahead of the competition by quickly tying up with as many service providers as possible. So if a company such as Facebook does want a digital assistant that could perform tasks for people in India too, it would be easier for it to simply acquire or ally with Niki or MagicX rather than approach every restaurant, airline and mobile service provider for tie-ups.
The Niki.ai app in action.
The E-commerce enablers

Right now, e-commerce offers convenience and lower prices than physical stores. But the next step is to completely revolutionize shopping by providing truly personalized experiences. What online shopping sites and apps mainly rely on now are tags keyed in by people. If you search for a sari that an app has tagged as Banarasi, you will see ads for Banarasi saris the next time you open it. But the app is not truly learning your taste in clothes.

This is where Mad Street Den comes in. A two-year-old Chennai-based company, Mad Street Den is specifically targeting online fashion retailers and, through its tool Vue.ai, helps them learn more about their customers and make the experience of shopping more intuitive. Using Mad Street Den’s services, retailers can also allow people to search for garments through images rather than text.

So, rather than typing in “green sari with sequins suitable for casual and formal functions”, you can just take a photo of a sari that fits that description, and the online shopping app, using Mad Street Den’s AI, will show you similar saris. All the while, the app is learning about your specific tastes and will suggest products based on its assessment.

Mad Street Den counts online fashion retailers Craftsvilla and Voonik among its clients. Slightly worryingly for the company, though, Flipkart recently discontinued its image search feature, which was powered by Singapore-based ViSenze, citing minimal usage.

Mumbai-based Arya.ai is also hoping to enable companies to use AI, but rather than building tools for them, it has built a programming tool called Braid, released earlier this month, that other companies can use to build neural networks. Companies can then use those neural networks to do everything from automatizing their processes to learning how to recognize photographs.

For companies such as Mad Street Den and Arya.ai, the competition will be stiff, as some of the biggest tech companies in the world are researching image recognition and analytics. A recent Evans Data Corp. report says that about 60% of software developers in India have been experimenting with AI and machine learning. So we can expect plenty of competition in the space in the next few years.

Jason Fernandes, founder of tech start-up SmartKlock, contributed to this story.


hemen  parekh


Marol , Mumbai , India


( M ) +91 - 98,67,55,08,08


Friday 23 September 2016

Name of the Game : Co-operation


There was a time when a Company had to compete with other companies within its own Industry

Entry-barriers across industries were very high

No more !

In the Internet Age , a Company never knows from where a competitor will spring up and completely re-write the " Rules of the Competition Game " !

It seems , the rules of this new Competition Game is , " CO-OPERATION "
Something like : " If you cannot lick them , then join them "

FOR  EXAMPLE :

The existing Car Manufacturers are being threatened by the " Non - Car Manufacturers " such as Amazon / Google / Apple / Alibaba / Baidu etc , who are rushing headlong into manufacture of Autonomous ( Driverless ) Cars


So these Car Manufacturers have realized the threat looming on the not-so-distant horizon and started tying-up with " Ride Share " companies

Eg:

*    General Motors with Lyft

*    Toyato  with Uber

*    Volkswagen with Gett

*    BMW with Scoop

*    Ford ( India ) with Zoomcar

*    Mahindra & Mahindra with Ola


WHY  ?

Because they have realized that the  TECTONIC  SHIFT  shaking up the Car Industry is :

If you can have " Transport as a Service " delivered WHERE you wants , WHEN you wants , WITHIN  5 minutes and CHEAP , then why OWN  a car ? - and worry about repairs / parking / driver / taxes  ?


Ride sharing services are re-writing the rules of " Asset Ownership Vs Asset Service "


Remember , some 30 years , in many parts of India , homes and shops , used to " OWN " a small privately owned diesel-operated GenSet , since there were long hours of power BLACK-OUTS  ?  One could not depend upon State owned power supply companies . You had to fend for yourself !


But when power from Public Utility Companies became abundant / cheap and reliable , private  Gensets disappeared  !


That is about to happen in case of privately owned cars of which India produced some 2.8 million in 2015-16


HOW  ?

A privately owned car ( may be ) operates for just 2.4 hours ( out of 24 hours ) per day . That is 10 % utilization


Rest of the time , it is parked


But suppose , it was available for plying on the roads , for 50 % of the time ( 12 hours per day ) ?


That is 5 times as much ! And available to ANYONE at a moment's notice ( thru Mobile App )


Then , it is theoretically possible that the number of NEW cars Indian private owners buy , may go down to 0.5 million per year ( as against 2.8 million ) , since few people would want to " Buy / Own " a car !


That is a huge threat to existing car manufacturers ! Imagine being made obsolete by Ride-Sharing Companies !

  
WHAT   NEXT  ?

Next tectonic shift is :

DRIVER-LESS  CARS  =  LESS-CAR  ROADS


Why do you think , car-companies like Tesla / General Motors / VW  and non-car companies like Google / Uber etc are frantically working to launch " AUTONOMOUS ( DRIVER-LESS ) " cars ?


They have no love lost for the drivers ! ( May be , a little bit ! )


In a traffic jam , taking a taxi from Andheri to Churchgate , will take you 90 minutes , even if it is a Uber or Ola


So , a Ride Sharing company may save you those other hassles ( repairs / parking / taxes / driver etc ) , but it does not save you any travel-time , to go from A to B


That ( no reduction in travel time ) holds good , even for DRIVER-LESS , ride-sharing taxies !


Diver or no driver , travel time remains the same


Except for another " PARADIGM  SHIFT " in case of DRIVER-LESS cars , viz:


Its utilization can easily go up to 90 % of 24 hours !


Imagine 1 LAKH , DRIVER-LESS , Uber / Ola ride-sharing taxies roaming the streets of Mumbai , 24 hours a day !


That may eliminate from the roads of Mumbai , 10 LAKH private cars ,  making Mumbai , a


less CAR  /  less  TRAFFIC JAM  /  less  POLLUTED /  less NOISY /  less TRAVEL-TIME  / less ACCIDENT , city  !


I hope Shri Nitin Gadkariji , re-focuses on replacing Old Polluting Petrol / Diesel Vehicles ( V-VMP ) with Driver-less Ride Sharing Future of Urban Transport


I am sure , he is aware of the Guidelines released by the US Department of Transportation just 2 days back , which outlined safety expectations and encourage uniform rules for the DRIVER-LESS CAR technology  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

23  Sept  2016

www.hemenparekh.in / blogs



Thursday 22 September 2016

From OLD to NEW ? No , go NEWER !


Economic Times ( 19 Sept 2016 ) carries following news report :

GST comes in way of government’s plan to scrap old vehicles 


" The government's ambitious programme to get old, polluting vehicles off the road has hit an unexpected speed bump: Goods and Services Tax. 


The Voluntary Vehicle Fleet Modernisation Programme ( V-VMP ) is back on the drawing board as the government reviews its options to reward those who agree to junk their old vehicles to buy new, less polluting, ones. 


The earlier plan was to levy lower excise tax on new vehicles bought under V-VMP. 


But the new tax system that is expected take effect next fiscal year will amalgamate excise tax into the overarching indirect tax called GST. The finance ministry doesn't favour giving incentives under GST and has directed the roads transport ministry to examine other methods to encourage people to scrap old vehicles. 



The draft policy currently proposes slashing excise duty by half on the purchase of a new vehicle after scrapping an old one, fair value for the scrap and special discounts from automobile manufacturers.


The incentives are expected to reduce the cost of a new vehicle for the buyer by 8-12%.


Further, to encourage commuters to shift to new and high capacity buses, which will help decongest roads, the policy also recommends complete excise exemption for state transport buses. "

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Simply replacing OLD petrol / diesel vehicles with NEW petrol / diesel vehicles is a half-way house !


No one understands this better than our " Minister-in-a-Hurry " , Shri Gadkariji , who does not believe in the theory of " Evolving through Incremental Improvements "


That is the reason he mandated the vehicle manufacturers to jump straight from current BHARAT 4 emission norms to BHARAT 6 emission norms , ( bypassing BHARAT 5 norms ), by 2020  !


He knows how 800 million poor Indian Citizens who had never owned a landline telephone , simply bypassed it with a cheap mobile , to usher a Communication Revolution in India !


But even he cannot persuade the just constituted GST Council ( which will hold its very first meeting today ) , to reduce GST rate for new vehicles . That would open up a " Pandora's Box "


But surely he can convince his Cabinet Colleagues ,


*  The  FUTILITY  of just replacing OLD with the NEW ( petrol or diesel )

*  The  DESIRABILITY  to move straight from OLD ( petrol / diesel ) to NEWER ( electric vehicles )



Here is how this can happen ( - and without having to reduce GST on the new electric vehicles ! ) :


Abolish  CORPORATE  INCOME  TAX  for next 10 years for the following manufacturers / service providers ,


#  Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles and Manufacturers of " Special Purpose Components " thereof


#  Manufacturers of equipment needed for charging of electric vehicles


#  Companies  owning and operating Electric Charging Stations


#  Companies manufacturing Solar Power Generation Equipment


#  Electric Utility Companies owning / operating Solar Power Generation Stations
 

    ( Surely , we don't want to simply transfer the pollution from cars to fossil fuel power plants ! )


#  Any other manufacturer / service provider who helps to accelerate this revolution


Now , with this " INCENTIVE " , imagine the kind of " FIERCE COMPETITION " among the vehicle manufacturers to quickly switch-over from petrol / diesel to  ELECTRIC VEHICLES  , in order to survive !


Expect a MAD RACE  to switch over - a race in which selling prices of electric vehicles gets 10 % lesser than equivalent petrol / diesel version  !


No need to " incentivize / reward " the buyers with a reduced GST , for scrapping their old polluting vehicles  !


Just harness the combined power of  Corporate  GREED with INSTINCT  FOR  SURVIVAL  !


Entire World would want to copy the  MIRACLE  that gets unleashed in India


I hope Shri Gadkariji will give my suggestion , a serious consideration

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

22  Sept  2016

www.hemenparekh.in / blogs




Monday 19 September 2016

On its Way : Refugee-Migrant Tsunami


Hindustan Times ( 20 Sept 2016 ) carries following news report :

: We can change this : World leaders at UN approve plan for refugee crisis :

" With more people forced to flee their homes than at any time since World War

 II, global leaders on Monday approved a declaration aimed at providing a more

 coordinated and humane response to the refugee crisis that has strained 

resources and stoked divisions from Africa to Europe.




The issue of what to do about the world’s 65.3 million displaced people took

 centre stage at the UN General Assembly with leaders from the 193 member

 states converging on New York for the first-ever summit on Addressing Large 

Movements of Refugees and Migrants.




The declaration carries no concrete commitments and is not legally binding but

 rather calls on countries to protect refugees’ human rights, boost humanitarian

 aid and increase resettlement of refugees.




A number of countries rejected an earlier draft of the agreement that called on

 nations to resettle 10 percent of the refugee population each year, something

 that has led several human rights groups to criticize the document as a missed

 opportunity.




According to the UN Refugee Agency, refugees are people forced to flee due to

armed conflict or persecution, while migrants choose to move in search of a

 better life. Around the world, there are currently about 21.3 million refugees,

 3.2 million asylum seekers, and 40.8 million migrants.




More concrete progress is expected at a follow-up summit on Tuesday called by

 President Barack Obama, where at least 45 countries are expected to make

 pledges that are in line with US goals of increasing humanitarian aid by $3

billion, doubling resettlement and increasing access to education for 1 million

 youngsters and access to employment for another million of the displaced.



Prior to the pledging summit with world leaders, Obama will host a meeting with

 top executives from 50 companies to discuss what the private sector can do to

 help address the problem, Power said. "



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Refugees  are fleeing wars / persecution by military dictators / oppression by


 radical and fanatic Terrorist Groups



Migrants  are fleeing unemployment in their own poor ( and corrupt ) countries, 

which causes poverty / starvation




Hence , the permanent / ultimate solutions are :


Stopping wars everywhere / eliminating dictatorships - military rules - 

terrorists



Eliminating corruption and creation of jobs in poor countries to reduce

 inequity within societies




Despite the laudable efforts by the UN , all of this is unlikely to happen any time

 soon . May take many years



Or , may never happen , given the collective human greed ( at the level of rich

 Societies / Nations ) !



Or , may happen very soon , if the World-wide population of Refugee / Migrant /

 Displaced Persons swells from 65 million to 650 million within next 10 years ! -

 a more likely / probable scenario !




Considering that ,


Economies are slowing down World-wide , causing unemployment on

 unprecedented scale



#  Countries unable to provide jobs to their own citizens are unwilling to accept 

more refugees / migrants



#  Rich EU countries / USA / Australia etc are facing problems of integration of


 refugees within their Societies ,




It is not too late for the World at large , - and especially , the Rich Nations - to

 consider my following suggestions :




(  http://myblogepage.blogspot.com/2015/06/world-migration-day.html  )



*  MUAMMARGADDAFI - A VISIONARY ?   


(  http://myblogepage.blogspot.in/2015/08/muammar-gaddafi-visionary.html   )   














   

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

20  Sept   2016


www.hemenparekh.in / blogs