Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Partnership - Current Affairs Questions and Answers

ANSWER: Neural machine translation technology

Explanation:
Google unveiled a new set of products and features for Indian languages to better serve the needs of Indians who were coming online rapidly.

Google Translate will use a new ‘neural machine translation technology’ to translate between English and nine widely-used Indian languages. These include Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. Other languages are Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati.

The firm indicated neural translation offered a huge improvement over the old phrase-based system, translating full sentences at a time instead of pieces of a sentence.

This change improves the quality of translation in a single jump than seen in the last ten years combined.

Sharing insights from the joint report “Indian Languages - Defining India’s Internet” - by Google and consulting firm KPMG India, the company stated the country had 234 million Indian language users who were online compared with 175 million English web users.

Google aims for another 300 million Indian language users to come online in the next four years.

The extension of neural machine translation to Chrome browser’s built-in auto-translate functionality to web content would make full-page translations more accurate and easier to read.

The content ranges from song lyrics to cricket discussions.

The new translation capability will also be available to users on Google search and Maps to aid discovery of new places such as cafes and hotels with translations of local reviews on Google Maps, both on mobile and desktop.

Extending support to cover all 22 scheduled Indian languages, Google also rolled out new Gboard, a keyboard for Android unveiled in launched in December 2016.

It has transliteration support for languages.such as Urdu, Tamil, Hindi and Bengali.

With Google Search built right into the keyboard, Gboard will allow users to ‘search’ and use Google Translate right on their keyboard.

For users who often switch back and forth between Hindi and English, they will also be able to use ‘Hinglish’ language option with new text editing tool.

ANSWER: Facebook

Explanation:
Social media site Facebook is collaborating with the Election Commission of India in 5 states going to polls next year to run a voter registration drive to encourage youth to participate in the democratic process.

• FB is partnering ECI and office of Chief Electoral Officers in UP, Goa, Punjab, Manipur and Uttarakhand
• Close to 155 million Indians are on FB
• The register to vote button is designed to encourage citizens to exercise their votes in the coming elections
• From Oct 6 to 9, FB users in Goa, Punjab, UP, Manipur and Uttarakhand who are 18 or above will receive a News Feed reminder to register for the vote
• Clicking on the register now button will direct people to the National Voters’ Services Portal which in turn will guide them towards the registration process
• Feature will be available at the following dates:
• Oct 6: Punjab
• Oct 7: Manipur
• Oct 8: UP and Uttarakhand
• Oct 9: Goa
• The page will disseminate election related information and develop a live interaction platform in the near future

ANSWER: Amazon India

Explanation:
To promote digital literacy among tribal entrepreneurs in Gujarat, Amazon India on 11th Jan 2017 signed an MoU with Gujarat Tribal Development Department.

The MoU was signed during the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit 2017.

As part of the MoU, Amazon India will educate, train and enable tribal entrepreneurs to sell products to Amazon customers in India and across the world.

Initiative will help tribals to grade and standardise their products, available to the Amazon customer base across the globe.

Amazon India will also train women entrepreneurs on making products attractive and appealing.

Product portfolio will include tribal products like paintings (Warli/Pithora/ Bhada), bamboo crafts, clay craft, minor forest produce, herbal medicines, embroidery items and tribal food items.

The agreement will benefit the local ecosystem and catalyse economic development among tribal communities.

Leading Retailer Amazon: Know More

• Founded: July 5, 1994 (as Cadabra)
• Location and HQ: Seattle, Washington, US
• Area served : Worldwide
• Owner/Founder/Chairman and CEO: Jeff Bezos
• Key Executives: Werner Vogels (CTO), Andrew Jassy (CEO, AWS), Jeff Wilke (CEO, Consumer)
• Industry: Internet

ANSWER: Disaster Response Summit

Explanation:
Facebook Inc. rolled out Disaster Maps for India to help communities across the country recover and rebuild from natural disasters faster by sharing critical pieces of data sets with humanitarian agencies in a timely manner.

The new product was launched at the company's first Disaster Response Summit in India along with the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to improve disaster response and disaster management in India.

According to United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) data, India is the third-worst affected country by natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, landslides, cyclones and drought.

Moreover, the response time during and after these crises is often slow and it takes significant time and resources to understand where help is needed most.

Disaster Maps, powered by Facebook's technology and intensive research, will address this critical gap in data that government organizations face when responding to a crisis.

Disaster Maps, which was introduced globally in June, uses aggregated, de-identified Facebook data to help organizations address the critical gap in information they often face when responding to natural disasters.

Facebook provides multiple types of maps during disaster response efforts, which include aggregated location information people have chosen to share with Facebook.

This helps NGOs and relief agencies get a clearer picture of where affected people are located so they can determine where resources-like food, water and medical supplies-are needed.

Types of Facebook Maps

Facebook researchers have built three kinds of maps:

• Location density maps: These show where people are located before, during and after a disaster. We can compare this information to historical records, like population estimates based on satellite images.
  Comparing these data sets can help response organizations understand areas impacted by a natural disaster.
• Movement maps: These illustrate patterns of movement between different neighbourhoods or cities over a period of several hours.
  By understanding these patterns, response organizations can better predict where resources will be needed, gain insight into patterns of evacuation, or predict where traffic will be most congested.
• Safety Check: These maps are based on locations where our community uses Safety Check to notify their friends and family that they are safe during a disaster.
  We are using this de-identified data in aggregate to show where more or fewer people check in safe, which may help organizations understand where people are most vulnerable and where help is needed.

• While globally Facebook has partnered with organizations like the Red Cross, in India, initially it will join hands with two organizations: the NDMA and SEEDS (Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society).
• Facebook has 2 billion-plus users globally and according to a media report, its users in India have crossed the 240 million mark, making it the largest audience country for the social media company.
• Facebook has developed a number of crisis response tools.
• It activated the Safety Check feature in 2014 and launched Community Help in 2015, which allows the Facebook community to find and give help such as food, shelter and transportation.

ANSWER: Amazon

Explanation:
To popularise the ‘Tribes India’ brand in national and international markets, Trifed has signed a memorandum of understanding with Amazon Seller Services Pvt Ltd for sale of tribal products through e-commerce giant www.amazon.in.

As a part of the MoU, authentic tribal art and craft items crafted and sculpted by tribal artisans from all over the country will be showcased on the online portal for sale, an official release said.

From a single store in Delhi in 1999, the Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India Ltd (Trifed) has established a chain of 42 retail outlets and tie-ups with 13 State-level emporiums.

The nationwide expansion of the scheme to provide minimum support price for 24 minor forest produce (MFPs), such as karanj seed, mahua seed, tamarind, wild honey etc was announced.

The scheme is already being implemented in nine States.

For higher value addition of MFPs, big corporates shall be involved under PPP model.

The public-private partnership (PPP) model will be based on utilising private entrepreneur skills in undertaking processing as well as marketing of the produce, creating infrastructure and providing enabling environment for undertaking value addition of systematic scientific lines.

These will be sophisticated large value addition hubs managed by private entrepreneurs.

ANSWER: Tez

Explanation:
On 18th Sept 2017, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley launched Google’s payment app - ‘Tez’.

Tez by Google is perhaps the simplest form of monetary transactions.

Tez by Google and other ecosystems will make a major change in the digital payments landscape in India.

The tech giant claimed that Tez will enable money transfer directly from the bank accounts of customers, without them having to share their ‘personal information’.

The app will function on both Android and iOS platforms.

Google also said that the app will ‘understand’ eight Indian languages and will work with 55 banks

Tez (which means “Fast” in Hindi is Google’s play to replace cash transactions and become a more central part of how people pay for things, using their mobile to do so.

But it’s also a chance for the company to push out some new technologies - like audio QR (AQR), which lets users transfer money by letting their phones speak to each other with sounds - to see how it can make that process more frictionless, and therefore more attractive to use than cash itself.

Tez will see Google linking up with several major banks in the country by way of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) - a payment standard and system backed by the government in its push to bring more integrated banking services into a very fragmented market.

There will also be phones coming to the market from Lava, Micromax, Nokia and Panasonic with Tez preloaded, the company said.

Google has confirmed to me that payments made and taken using UPI are free for consumers and small merchants

To be clear, Tez is not a mobile “wallet” in the same way as PayTM offers a mobile wallet, where money is stored in the app and needs to be topped up to be used;

It’s more like Apple’s Wallet or other mobile wallets in the west: a place that links up your phone with your bank accounts to let you use your phone as a way to deduct payments from those accounts.

Supported banks include Axis, HDFC Bank, ICICI and State Bank of India and others that support UPI.

Online payment partners include large food chains like Dominos, transport services like RedBus, and Jet Airways

The app has support for English, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.

For money transfers, there is a limit of ₹1,00,000 in one day across all UPI apps, and 20 transfers in one day.

AQR and Tez: Know More

• Google says that AQR - the sound-based format for transferring money securely between devices - is its own proprietary technology.
• This appears to be the first time that Google has used it for payments, although it has used ultrasonic sound for transferring information between devices before
• For example, the tech has been used in Chromecast to connect devices since 2014. Other startups that have used audio-based “codes” to transfer payments and other data before include Lisnr, and Chirp.
• While AQR might seem like a neat technical twist, there are some practical reasons behind why Google might opt for this in Tez.
• For starters, it obviates the need for NFC in the device, and in the payment devices of merchants or whoever else a person is planning to transact with.
• The other thing is that it makes any kind of contactless transaction with the device fairly flexible and easy.
  
• Services like Airdrop on iPhones require Bluetooth and if you’ve used it before isn’t that seamless and foolproof to turn on (even though it works like a charm when it does). QR codes, meanwhile, require you to turn on the camera on your device and physically align it with a code on another screen, a potentially fiddly and difficult process.
• Using audio taps into some of the most basic features on even the most basic phones, a speaker and a microphone.
• Google has also trademarked the name in other Asian countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, so there seems to be a wider strategy to expand this to other regions.
• India, the second-most populated country in Asia after China, is a ripe market for mobile payment services, with a rapidly expanding middle class with more disposable income and a wider population that is very tech-focussed, with an estimated 300 million smartphones in use today.
• Digital payments are expected to reach a volume of $500 billion annually by 2020, according to a report from BCG and Google.

ANSWER: All of the above

Explanation:
Google on Sept 12, 2017 unveiled several updates to its Translate App in an effort to bring down language barriers.

It said users in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati and Marathi can experience offline translations and instant visual translation in their preferred language.

The biggest application is that they are breaking language barriers.

Google Translate has also added support for conversation mode in regional languages including Tamil and Bengali.

This feature lets users have a bilingual conversation with someone, simply by talking to the Google Translate app.

Google Translate: Know More

• India is among the top four countries globally using Google Translate which translates over 140 billion words every day.
• More than 400 million people in India used the Internet.
• But the vast majority of India’s online content is in English, which only 20% of the country’s population speaks.
• The Translate app already lets the user use camera mode to snap a photo of English text and get a translation for it in these languages.
• Now, with Word Lens feature, Google has taken it to the next level, letting users instantly translate text using their camera.
• The company said now it was way easier for speakers of local Indian languages to understand English street signs in the city or decide what to order from a restaurant menu.
• Word Lens is powered by machine learning, using computer vision to distinguish between letters on an image.
• With the company's Google Translate, users can easily turn their phone into a powerful translation tool, whether for studies, business, travel or work.
• Offline support enables Indian language users to translate a word or sentence even when they are not connected to the Internet.

ANSWER: Drive File Stream

Explanation:
Google let fly an announcement that PC and Mac desktop app for Google Drive is going the way of the Dodo bird.

As the new alternative, customers will have two options.

For those using the G Suite service, the solution is called Drive File Stream, an app that will allow for quicker, more streamlined access to their files and also the ability to choose which ones are made available offline.

For non-G Suite users, another app called Backup and Sync will be the way to go.

It will have all the same features as the Google Drive desktop app that most users currently access on a regular basis, but with an added photo capability as well.

This seems to be a move towards making Google more of a one-stop shop for your online cloud storage.

The Backup and Sync app will allow users to store a large amount of photos, provided they're cool with the slight compression that will happen during the upload process.

If not, they'll have to pay extra for more storage.

After the debacle that was Google+, the company is hoping that, with this change, more customers will be housing all of their data in their infrastructure instead of with other providers.

ANSWER: Project Brainwave

Explanation:
In a bid to make artificial intelligence more accessible all-round, Microsoft has kicked off a new project which delivers real-time AI via the cloud.

It is utilizing some nifty technology from Intel.

Project Brainwave is described by Microsoft as a deep learning acceleration platform which employs Intel’s Stratix 10 FPGA (field programmable gate array) hardware accelerator to run AI.

This is through the cloud and still deliver near-instant results.

The system is capable of processing and transmitting data with ‘ultra-low latency’, delivering results as fast as that data comes in, and so effectively operating in real-time.

And that’s a clear boon for the sort of applications that need this, from digital assistants through to the likes of autonomous driving.

The system has already shown that Intel’s Stratix 10 tech can exceed 39 Teraflops in terms of performance on a single request.

Microsoft engineer Doug Burger notes that at that level of performance, the Brainwave architecture sustains execution of over 130,000 compute operations per cycle.

It is driven by one macro-instruction being issued each 10 cycles.

Running on Stratix 10, Project Brainwave thus achieves unprecedented levels of demonstrated real-time AI performance on extremely challenging models.

And further gains are expected as Microsoft hones the system over the next year or so.

Project Brainwave supports deep learning frameworks including Microsoft’s own Cognitive Toolkit and Google’s Tensorflow, and the firm is planning to bring it to Azure customers as well.

Powerful real-time AI processing capabilities on tap will be another major string to Azure’s bow.

ANSWER: Facebook

Explanation:
Social media giant Facebook will monitor the growth of the MSMEs in Odisha after imparting training to them in next one year.

The social networking giant has partnered the Odisha’s MSME department and Project Mission Shakti to train 25,000 entrepreneurs by the end of 2018.

The state government has plans to organise hands-on workshops for MSME entrepreneurs and women SHGs on 'Digital Marketing Skills'.
Facebook will prepare a data base through registrations in which they will take the email ids and mobile numbers of entrepreneurs in all the workshops.

After sometime either through personal conversations or through email, they can find out what is the difference Facebook has made in the business turnover or profits.

Facebook launched its SheMeansBusiness programme in Bhubaneswar, which was attended by about 1,100 women entrepreneurs of the state. The programme of Facebook is launched in 16 countries around the world including India.

It is designed to reach out to aspiring and established women entrepreneurs to help them build and grow their business online.
As per Facebook, it is the largest congregation globally under SheMeansBusiness programme.

More than 150 entrepreneurs today created their pages and uploaded their products on their profile.

CM Naveen Patnaik stressed on the use of the three Ts - technology, teamwork and transparency - to bring about transformation in the lives of people.

This is amply demonstrated today in the partnership of the government with Facebook - a partnership aimed to reduce the digital divide and empower nearly 25,000 entrepreneurs and SHGs over the next one year.