Your Tech Story

artificial intelligence

OnePlus 10 Pro

OnePlus 10 Pro Now Available In India, Bullets Wireless Z2 Debut Alongside: Check Price, Specifications

On Thursday, the company released the OnePlus 10 Pro, its latest flagship phone. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC in the OnePlus phone is rated to deliver four times faster artificial intelligence (AI) processing and 25% more efficient graphics performance than the previous-generation Snapdragon chip. In addition, the smartphone has a faster charging time. The OnePlus 10 Pro will fight against the Samsung Galaxy S22 and the iPhone 13 based on its specifications and cost. The OnePlus Buds Pro Radiant Silver colour option was also launched by the business.

Specifications and Features

The back of the OnePlus 10 Pro is made of glass. Corning Gorilla Glass 5 is what it’s called. Volcanic black and Emerald Forest are the two colour options for the phone. The black variant is frosted and matte, while the green version is sparkling and anti-glare. According to OnePlus, both are fingerprint-resistant. Ceramic is used to cover the “large” camera module. Metal is used for the outside frame. The OnePlus 10 Pro is 8.5mm thick and weighs 201 grammes.

The face of the OnePlus 9 Pro is virtually unaltered. The OnePlus 10 Pro boasts a 6.7-inch 1440p AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, the same as its predecessor. According to OnePlus, the phone uses a second-generation LTPO panel, which should allow for faster switching — between 1Hz and 120Hz – depending on available content. The screen also has Corning Gorilla Glass Victus protection and dual colour calibration for ostensibly higher accuracy. An in-display fingerprint scanner handles biometrics.

OnePlus 10 Pro
Image source: beebom.com

The OnePlus 10 Pro is powered by Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor. This comes with up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB of UFS3.1 storage. This can’t be expanded. The OnePlus 10 Pro will be released globally with OxygenOS 12.1 based on Android 12. (in China uses ColorOS 12.1).
The OnePlus 10 Pro retains the primary (48MP, Sony IMX789) and tertiary (8MP telephoto) cameras from the OnePlus 9 Pro. A 50MP sensor lies behind a larger 150-degree field-of-view lens in the secondary ultrawide-angle camera, which is getting an upgrade. Users will be able to shoot at a maximum angle of 150 degrees (with Fisheye) or up to 110 degrees (without Fisheye) (with distortion correction).

OnePlus has maintained its previous cooperation with Hasselblad (now in its second generation). There are also some new camera features, such as the ability to shoot in 10bit colour throughout the triple camera system and up to 12bit colour in Hasselblad Pro Mode. Raw Plus is also supported on the OnePlus 10 Pro, which means you’ll be able to save in RAW and a processed JPEG at the same time.

The OnePlus 10 Pro includes a 32MP camera on the front. A 5,000mAh battery with 80W SuperVOOC wired and 50W AirVOOC wireless charging completes the set.
The OnePlus Bullets Wireless Z2 will be released initially in India. These neckband-style wireless headphones are a natural follow-up to the original OnePlus Bullets.

They have 12.4 mm drivers and are sweat and water-resistant to IP55. They’re rated to play music for up to 20 hours on a single charge, and they just take 10 minutes to charge.

Price and Availability

The base 8GB + 128GB storage option of the OnePlus 10Pro costs Rs. 66,999 in India. The phone is also available in a 12GB + 256GB storage option, which costs Rs. 71,999. Emerald Forest and Volcanic Black are the two colour options available.

The 8GB + 128GB storage option of the OnePlus 10 Pro costs EUR 899 (approximately Rs. 75,500) globally.

This year, OnePlus launched the OnePlus 9 Pro at a price of Rs. 64,999 for the 8GB + 128GB storage option. The 12GB + 256GB storage model went up to Rs. 69,999.
The 8GB + 128GB edition of the OnePlus 10 Pro was released in China in January for CNY 4,699 (approximately Rs. 56,100). It was also available in 8GB + 256GB for CNY 4,999 (approximately Rs. 59,700) and 12GB + 256GB for CNY 5,299 (about Rs. 59,700). (roughly Rs. 63,200).

The OnePlus Bullets Wireless Z2 costs Rs. 1,999 in India, the same as the original OnePlus Bullets Wireless Z, which was released in 2020. Beam Blue and Magico Black are the two colours offered for the earbuds.
Radiant Silver OnePlus Buds Pro is priced at Rs. 9,990, the same as the standard OnePlus Buds Pro.

Starting April 5, the OnePlus 10 Pro will be available for buy in India. A silver version of the OnePlus Bullets Wireless Z2 and Buds Pro Radiant will be available on April 5.

LivePerson

When nobody answers Rob LoCascio’s question leads to the foundation of an international conglomerate.

LivePerson is a company established in the internet and computer software sector in 1995. Robert LoCascio (famous as Rob LoCascio) founded the company to redefine conversation among people with the help of AI (Artificial Intelligence). The company’s headquarters are based in New York City and it is currently working in a remote mode so there are no other offices worldwide. LivePerson is a publicly-traded company and it has customers all across the world. LivePerson has two main products, namely, The Conversational Cloud and LP Insights.

About The Company

The main goal of LivePerson is to make the life of normal people and various brands much easier with the help of conservational AI. More than 20 years after the company’s establishment, LivePerson started offering its AI-based product. The main idea behind this conversational AI was to offer customers the technology to create AI-powered chatbots. This would help the brand answer various questions of the consumers thus taking pressure off the human service staff.

LivePerson has more than 18,000 active clients spread across the world and some of them include HSBC, Orange, and GM Financial. In 2020, LivePerson made it into the Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies list. It was Robert LoCascio who successfully invented the live chat technology for websites back in 1995.

Idea Behind LivePerson

The idea to build LivePerson and provide people with conversational AI struck Rob’s mind when he first started using the internet. Well, he had a query about a product and he dropped a question on its website. He noticed that nobody answered his question so he had to go the conventional way of dialing the number and waiting for the person on the other side to respond. After this experience, he thought that although the main idea behind the internet was to connect people in reality he had a sore experience. Rob proceeded with the idea and built an international conglomerate, LivePerson.

LivePerson
Image source: miro.medium.com

Acquisitions

LivePerson has a big list of acquisitions and started in 2000. LivePerson’s first acquisition was HumanClick, a company that offered real-time customer service applications. In July 2006 it acquired Proficient Systems followed by Kasamba Inc in 2007. It acquired a web analytics and optimization platform called NuConomy in 2010. After a couple of years, in 2012, LivePerson acquired three companies in the same year. They are Amadesa (a web marketing company), Look.io (mobile chat provider), and Engage Pty Ltd (cloud-based customer contact solutions). In 2014, LivePerson acquired NextGraph, Synchronite, and Contact At Once. LivePerson’s latest acquisitions are Tenfold, a customer experience integration platform, and VoiceBase, a voice analytics platform.

Success Of LivePerson

After establishing the company in 1995, Rob took the company public in 2000. It was one of the last companies that became public before the dot-com bubble burst. It took almost ten years for the company to rebound and they survived the most difficult times. In 2011, the company was named Fortune’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies and Forbes 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies. Currently, the company is focusing to scale its voice AI innovation and that is why it acquired Tenfold and VoiceBase. In November 2021, the company was named to Inc’s first annual Best-led companies list.

About Rob LoCascio – Founder and CEO

Rob LoCascio, both founder and current CEO of LivePerson is one of the longest-standing founding CEOs in the tech industry. It was Rob who more than two decades ago made this innovative invention that helps initiate an authentic conversation between a company and its customers. He opened the door of massive opportunities for brands so that they can provide quality customer support. Apart from being a famous entrepreneur, Rob is also a philanthropist.

Rob completed his education at Loyola University Maryland and started working for Elders IXL. But, the company laid off employees after six months and Rob lost his job. After losing that job he was determined to open his business and never work for someone else. In 1991, Rob founded Sybarite Media Inc but it was shut down in 1995, the very year he founded LivePerson.

SenseTime

SenseTime – A Chinese AI Unicorn That Came Up With Some Of The World’s Most Advanced Technologies.

Based in Hong Kong, SenseTime is known as the world’s most valuable AI (artificial intelligence) company. It was founded in 2014 and within 7 years it has gained unicorn status and developed some of the advanced AI algorithms. A computer science professor, Tang Xiao’ou, and a computer scientist, Xu Li co-founded the company with others. It started as an academic project and by 2019 its valuation became $4.5 billion. It has landed some of the biggest conglomerates as its clients including Alibaba, Honda, Qualcomm, and Weibo.

About The SenseTime

It is almost hard to believe that a young seven-year-old company develops such advanced Ai-based technologies that it is one of the finest in the world. The company develops AI technology including image and facial recognition, object detection, medical image analysis, video analysis, remote sensing, etc. Its products are used in several different industries from entertainment to healthcare.

When the company was founded in 2014, it developed DeepID, a facial recognition algorithm that was the first of its kind to detect accuracy better than human eyes. SenseTime is working with the Chinese government on a project to make the country economically autonomous by 2025. Currently, SenseTime is a privately-held company.

SenseTime
Image source: wire19.com

Early History

In October 2014, Tang Xiao’ou and Xu Li co-founded SenseTime and in the founded year it unveiled the best algorithm for better detection accuracy than human eyes. This algorithm is called DeepID and it is even ahead of Facebook. The company also presented and published several papers on computer vision and they were accepted into the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Within one year of its establishment, a total of 9 papers were accepted. In 2016, the company enrolled itself in the ImagineNet competition and it bagged the first price in several fields including object detection, video object detection, and scene analysis. The number of papers accepted in the CVPR Conference also rose to 16 by the end of the year.

Success Of SenseTime

In 2017, SenseTime broke all of the records of past company’s in the AI industry in terms of the highest rounds of financing. The number of publications kept on increasing and by the year-end, it surpassed both Google and Facebook with 43 publications. It was in the same year that SenseTime raised $410 million in the Series B funding. SenseTime started collaborating with several companies and government bodies of China. For example, in October 2017 it started a joint venture with Qualcomm followed by collaborating with Shanghai Municipal Government, and Honda by the end of the year.

In 2018, the company declared a collaboration with MIT for advanced research in the field of AI but after a couple of years, the program was canceled by MIT. In April 2018, a non-profit AI lab called HKAI Lab was founded to make Hong Kong a global AI hub. SenseTime founded this lab jointly with Alibaba and the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. SenseTime was also named as China’s National Open Innovation Platform for Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence on Intelligent Vision in September 2018.

Recent Days

Since 2014, SenseTime has tried to develop more advanced AI technologies that are equally focused on the research and development side of the company apart from the business part. In 2019, it became the first company in the world to join MIT’s Quest for Intelligence Campaign. The company is planning to go public as it filed IPO this year on the Hong Kong exchange. Though the company has given the world’s largest computer vision model, the profit curve is not very impressive. SenseTime heavily invests in R&D (60% of funding) and plans to expand to more and more industries both in domestic and overseas countries.

About The Founders

Tang Xiao’ou, apart from being the co-founder of SenseTime is also an information engineering professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is an alumnus of MIT and worked at Microsoft Research Area for four years. In 2009, he received the best paper award at CVPR Conference.

Xu Li is the co-founder and current CEO of SenseTime. He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong followed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has published more than 50 academic works in the field of computer vision and won many awards.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace – The Software Intelligence Company Assuring Error-free Execution of Business Applications.

It won’t be inappropriate if we call the current era the era of Information Technology. There is no business that is not using the very technology to accomplish their daily work. Though there have been discovered various software to ease out the tasks for companies, still to deal with some conflicts in that software we require some application monitoring software too. This software ensures the seamless working of the software without having to face any errors or other conflicts. Dynatrace is one of the companies which is responsible for building such software and helping companies work without any difficulty. Dynatrace is a U.S.A.-based software intelligence company that offers monitoring and optimization services to ensure a better user experience for its clients.

About The Company

Dynatrace is a sixteen years old company founded in 2005 in Linz, Austria. The company has its headquarters based in Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S., but it offers services to its customers globally. Dynatrace is best known for its Software Intelligence Platform, which uses AI to provide monitoring and application optimizing services to its customers. Other services by the company include Application Security, Cloud Automation, Digital Business Analytics, Infrastructure Monitoring, and IT Operations Analytics, etc.
It is a publicly-traded company, as it trades on the New York Stock Exchange as DT. As of the year 2021, about 3000 people are working at Dynatrace, and for the fiscal year 2021, it made revenues worth US$703.509 Million. Apart from its headquarters in the U.S., the company has opened about 50 offices in countries like Canada, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, Italy, Poland, Ireland, the U.K., Estonia, Finland, France, and Greece, etc. From Mastercard and Bank of America to At&T and Vodafone, almost every big-name company is using services by Dynatrace.

Dynatrace
Image source: wikimedia.org

Founding Dynatrace

Bernd Greifeneder is the founder of Dynatrace. He founded the company Dynatrace Software GmbH on 2 February 2005 in Linz, Austria. During the dot-com boom, Greifeneder was studying Computer Science at the JKU Linz. Despite the popularity of the internet around, he always felt confused about online shopping stores getting crashed due to more than ten users using the website. This problem led to a solution by Greifeneder, as he invented software for websites to handle rush with ease and without getting them collapsed. This led to the birth of Dynamic Tracing with the help of AI and then to the founding of Dynatrace in 2005. In the beginning, the company used a few servers for the business, but later with the growth, it started using thousands of servers for its work.
Within one year of founding Dynatrace, the founder of the company was able to bag investments from the leading venture capitalist Bain Capital Ventures. In the next three years, the company received 13 million US dollars from Bay Partners of California.
In 2011, Compuware acquired Dynatrace for a sum 256 of million US dollars, and with the acquisition, Compuware (previously a public company) became private. After the acquisition, Greifeneder held the position of CTO at the company, and the company growth skyrocketed like never before. The two companies were different in their field of work, and Dynatrace remained a separate division of Compuware handled by Greifeneder. Later in 2014, the Compuware APM group was renamed Dynatrace. In the same year, the company also established the Digital Performance Management category. Dynatrace had its first IPO in 2019 and started to trade on NYSE. For the past many years, Dynatrace has won several awards of excellence, including Best Large Company to Work For by Built In Boston.

The Founder

Bernd Greifeneder is the founder and the current CTO at Dynatrace. He is a software engineer with a graduate and postgraduate degree in computer science from Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. He has held many prominent positions in various companies. Greifeneder has spent more than seven years at Segue Software Inc., where he started as the Project lead and was promoted to be the CTO of Globel Technologies and Chief software architect. Greifeneder also served Ruxit as the Senior Vice President and CTO of the company. He founded Dynatrace in 2005, and since then, he has served the company as the CEO, CTO, Vice President Engineering, etc. Currently, he is leading the company as the Senior Vice President and CTO.

Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications – A Leading American Company Developing Speech Recognition Software.

Nuance is an American-based multinational software company that is well-known for speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. The company’s headquarters is based in Burlington, Massachusetts. Nuance Communications was originally founded in 1992 which was then incorporated as Visioneer. After a few years, Visioneer merged with ScanSoft, one of its prime market competitors which were followed by a couple of more mergers resulting in the establishment of Nuance. Currently, Nuance Communications has more than 6,500 employees developing quality solutions for its clients. The solutions provided by Nuance are incorporated across many industries including healthcare, financial services, telecom, retail, government, and many more.

History of Nuance Communications

The company, Nuance Communications has its roots back in 1992 when Visioneer was founded by Pierre-Alain-Cotte. When the company was founded it was a privately owned company that developed a sheetfed scanner called PaperMax. Visioneer started selling its different business divisions to other companies which included hardware business to Primax Electronics and spinning off PaperPort, Visioneer’s proprietary software. In 1999, Visioneer decided to acquire ScanSoft from Xerox and the newly formed company was known by the brand name ScanSoft.

The history of ScanSoft dates back to 1974 when Raymond Kurzweil founded a company to develop the first omni-font optical character recognition system. This company and the technology were sold to Xerox in 1980 which later became famous as ScanSoft. After the acquisition of ScanSoft by Visioneer, the newly formed public company focussed on looking beyond just designing desktop imaging software. So, in 2001, the company entered the speech recognition market after acquiring Lernout & Hauspie. After entering into this new sector, the biggest competitor of ScanSoft was Nuance Communications. In 2005, ScanSoft decided to merge with its competitor and thus acquired Nuance for $221 million. The merged company was named Nuance Communications.

Nuance Communications
Image source: forbes.com

Technologies of Nuance Communications

Nuance uses cutting-edge technologies to provide advanced solutions across a wide range of industries. In 1996, the company launched a product called PowerGrid which was the first clinical speech-to-text automation product for the healthcare industry. This product helped in cutting the transcription cost by 87 percent. On the other hand, Dragon Systems which was a part of ScanSoft (since it acquired Lernout & Hauspie) made some major breakthroughs. In 1997, Dragon NaturallySpeaking was rolled out and it became the first speech detection system in the world for commercial use. In 2012, Nuance became the first company to enable mobile EHRs with speech recognition systems which helped the doctors to document medical records on the go. The two companies Nuance and ScanSoft (Dragon Systems) gave each other very strong competition, so the merger of the two companies created an even more powerful conglomerate in the speech recognition business.

After the merger till recent date, Nuance Technologies has rolled out many impressive products with ensured quality and protection. In 2015, the automatic speech recognition technology of Nuance was combined with a major television network provider for delivering a remote-controlled voice interface to the customers. In 2017, Dragon TV bagged the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for “Contextual Voice Navigation for Discovering and Interacting with TV Content.” The customers of Nuance have been recipients of many prestigious awards for the enhanced quality of work they produced by using Nuance solutions which helped the company win the Technology Partner of the Year award.

Acquisitions and Mergers

After ScanSoft merged with Nuance, the merged company acquired many companies from 2006 till date. The first acquisition was for $357 million in 2006 when it bought Dictaphone Corporation. Nuance acquired companies from a variety of sectors which helped it expand to biometric solutions, healthcare documentation, etc. In 2011, Nuance acquired Noterize, a company that developed software for Apple iPad. This year, Microsoft has offered to buy Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion but the deal is still pending.

Mark Benjamin – CEO of Nuance Communications

Mark Benjamin is the CEO and President of Nuance Communications since 2018. Even after the deal is successfully closed with Microsoft, Mark will stay as the CEO of the company. Before Mark joined Nuance, he served as the President and COO of NCR Corporation. Mark completed his graduation from the University of Miami and has a rich working experience of more than 20 years across 100 countries.

BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI: Bringing Innovation in the Field of Bioscience

Artificial Intelligence is a wonder that people would have laughed about two decades ago, but today, this technology is attracting almost every other type of field. In the past, futuristic sci-fi movies did give us a glimpse of AI in the form of flying cars and automated homes, etc. But we did not know that this technology will be here so soon, making a mark in every category in the world. After bringing a revolution in the field of technology, automobile, and more, medicine and pharmaceutical companies are also up for investing in AI and machine learning to make their research and drug discovery even better and faster. One such drug discovery startup is BenevolentAI.

BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI is a London-based drug discovery startup, that has adopted Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to speed up medicinal research and reduce the overall cost to half. The company was founded by Ken Mulvany on 13 November 2013, in London with co-founders Michael Brennan and Ivan Griffin. It uses AI technology such as pattern recognition to find a match for existing genetic, metabolic, and clinical information in order to develop new drugs. According to the founder, the drug discovery industry has a vast amount of information, that is impossible to handle by humans alone, so using AI, this information can not only stored but also be used to target different diseases.

Most of the clinical trials are focused on hypotheses for a particular disease, but with the AI technology at BenevolentAI, the existing research is used for finding a new disease to target and for which the existing hypothesis fits the best. This way there is no waste of time in discovering a new compound from scratch, but the drugmakers can jump straight to the clinical trials to find new drug candidates from existing information. The company uses AI combined with the expertise of qualified scientists to make sure that the end result is effective.

Ken Mulvany founded the company with a target to find a cure for ALS and Alzheimer’s using AI, and in 2021, the company will also be starting clinical trials for excessive daytime sleepiness in Parkinson’s disease in the US. The company currently has got 90 people working for it in the UK and US. In September 2016, only after four years of its founding, it raised $1.4 billion, becoming a unicorn. In 2018, the company raised another $115 million and valued at $2 billion. Benevolent AI has also acquired the UK operations of Proximagen for an undisclosed sum.

Idea Behind BenevolentAI

BenevolentAI is a machine intelligence company with an aim to develop drugs for every existing disease in the world with the help of artificial intelligence. The company is focusing on using AI to mine and analyze the already existing biochemical information to develop new drugs for the diseases. According to Jackie Hunter, the Board director at BenevolentAI, every 30 seconds a research paper is published, and 95% of them fail. There is vast information about discovery and research for drugs that are going in vain. It takes about ten years and over $2.5 billion to develop, test, and get ‘the drug’ for a particular disease, but with AI and machine learning the time and the cost of producing a drug can be reduced by 30% to 50%.

BenevolentAI collects the already existing drug research data that was for a particular condition but could not yield the desired results. Though the research might have failed for a certain disease, BenevolentAI uses the same research and clinical trials data to test for other diseases, such that the deep research will not go waste, and the existing information is used to find new drug candidate for other diseases.

The Founder

Ken Mulvany has got more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and investor. Currently, he sits as the Chairman of BenevolentAI. Before Benevolent AI, Mulvany also founded another biotech company named Proximagen and served as the CEO of the company. Proximagen was into developing the drugs for central nervous system disorders.  Mulvany sold Proximagen in 2012 to Upsher-Smith Laboratories for $553million.

BenevolentAI Founder
Image Source: miro.medium.com

Today, Mulvany is a member of various advisory boards of different organizations, including the UK Government on Artificial Intelligence and the Oxford Sciences Innovations advisory boards. Apart from that, he chaired the Trustees of the Cure Parkinson’s Trust and is also a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence.