Businesses, especially startups, that are working in the Internet of Things and the wearable segments can look forward to bringing their products to market much faster, with the global player NXP Semiconductors launching two new platforms.
Typically in product manufacture, building the basic elements takes up six to nine months and costs a huge amount of money. These elements are common in most cases. “With our products, entrepreneurs need not keep reinventing the wheel and wasting time and money,” said Ashok Chandak, Senior Director, Global Sales and Marketing, NXP Semiconductors. “They can instead focus on their creative ideas and the go-to-market strategy, and start working right from day one, as our products have all the desired hardware blocks and electronic chips already interconnected, and the software blocks already ported.”
He said the NXP products, WaRP7 and Hexiwear Reference Platform, are one of its kind, though some other players are also looking at providing similar solutions, “But the extent to which we have gone is unique,” said Mr Chandak, adding that the solutions will be especially beneficial to entrepreneurs, product design labs and R&D organizations, besides startups.
He said the company has partnered with two e-commerce portals. “The customers will get a complete working unit, along with all the software files, the design files, the build-up material information etc. It is up to them to make use of all of that or some of it, and build their ideas on top of it,” he said.
Intel launches Xeon Phi
With volume of data mounting in geometric proportions and Artificial Intelligence going mainstream, the focus is shifting to processors that can cope with not only the load but also dive deep into data and come out with accurate insights without latency.
Intel last week launched its Xeon Phi processor that is faster, scalable and easily deployable. It also helps data scientists to run neural networks and training models much faster.
This is important because high-performance computing is coming out of scientific labs to more mainstream applications.
This is Intel’s first bootable host processor that is designed for highly parallel workloads. Free of dependence on GPU accelerators, it scales efficiently, and can handle a wider portfolio of workloads and configurations than accelerator products, said a company release. Intel is hoping to partner more closely with the automotive, manufacturing and aerospace industries.
DriveU partners with Zoomcar
DriveU, a fast-growing on-demand chauffeur aggregator for private car owners, is partnering with leading self-drive car rental firm Zoomcar. This means Zoomcar customers will get their vehicle delivered and picked up by DriveU’s trained and uniformed drivers. DriveU started the doorstep delivery service for Zoomcar in Bengaluru and has since expanded the service in Mumbai, Delhi NCR and Pune. In the next few months, the company plans to expand the service to other cities where Zoomcar is operational, said a DriveU release.
Internet grows
Around 79 lakh domain name registrations were added to the internet in the second quarter of this year. According to VeriSign, this brings the total number of domain name registrations to approximately 33.46 crore across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of June 30, 2016. It also marks a growth of 2.4 per cent over the first quarter of this year. Domain name registrations have grown by 3.82 crore or 12.9 per cent year over year. As of June 30, 2016, there were as many as 12.75 crore .com domain name registrations and 1.58 crore .net domain name registrations.
Track company budget in real time
Happay, a Bengaluru-based fin-tech company that offers expense management solution for companies, has launched pre-paid card designed to track, monitor and control marketing spends and conversions on daily, weekly and monthly basis. The Digital Marketing Expense Card, tailored to requirements of a marketing team, also monitors the marketing budget and expense on real-time basis.
New solution to cut power consumption
ROHM Semiconductor, the Bengaluru-headquartered Indian arm of Japanese ROHM Group, has come up a solution to bring down electricity consumption of home appliances and industrial equipment. The solution, specially tailored for the Brushless Direct Current motors India, has features that will reduce the design time and hence enable customers to take their products faster to market.
Considering the Indian conditions, the new solution, which can be applied to ceiling fans, ACs, air coolers, and air purifiers, has been designed to withstand the harshest of the voltage fluctuations, said a company release.
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