According to Allianz research, coronavirus could prove fatal to as many as 9 percent of SMEs in Germany and 11 percent in the six largest economies in Europe this year. The researchers forecast a hit of as much as 1.34 trillion euros to the Eurozone economy from the pathogen. To protect hitherto healthy German companies, including SMEs, from ruin and prevent a domino effect on supply chains, Allianz’s trade credit insurer Euler Hermes has joined up with Germany’s federal government and the German Insurance Association. Under the initiative, the government will backstop losses of 30 billion euros for trade credit insurers this year to cover payment defaults by clients of German companies. Euler Hermes and the other participating insurers will transfer 65 percent of their premium income to the government, in addition to covering losses of up to 500 million euros and all default risks exceeding the 30 billion euros of the government guarantees. Euler Hermes also reached an agreement with the French government, leading the negotiations together with other insurers and insurance associations to develop economic support solutions. A similar scheme was announced in Belgium through collaboration with credit insurers, governments and trade associations. To soften the blow to SMEs, Allianz Spain has initiated several support measures, including delaying premium payments for up to 120 days, while Allianz France has pledged to contribute up to 28 million euros of the 400 million euros that the French Insurance Federation is donating to a French government fund aimed at helping small companies and independent workers.
Travel giant Tui has just set out a road map for restarting the industry as the coronavirus pandemic eases. The company plans to run holidays at scale from July. “Summer holidays are possible responsibly and with clear rules,” chief executive Fritz Joussen said. The Anglo-German holiday company says it is “ready for an early resumption of travel activities in Germany and Europe”. Tui is about to reopen two German hotels, in Sylt and Mecklenburg. It has also announced a range of safety measures designed to reduce the risk of infection. When package holidays begin again, passengers on Tui flights will fill in health questionnaires and screened before boarding with a temperature scan. They must wear face masks during the journey. Boarding of aircraft will be staggered, with more buses deployed where necessary. Seats on flights will be “assigned apart as much as possible on flights with lower occupancy” – but this will not happen on full planes. Between the airport and the resort, the company envisages an “increased offering of private transfers”. At the destination, Tui has promised “implementation of 1.5-2 metre safety distance” – reflecting the difference between the German and UK measures of social distancing. There will be fewer tables in restaurants, with extended opening hours to compensate, and a serviced buffet instead of the traditional self-service buffet with priority on open-air seating spaces.
Team sports will be replaced by other activities, with tennis instead of soccer. Saunas will be closed. Tui will try to arrange “Increased availability of outdoor activities,” and its excursions will involve smaller groups. On Tui’s cruises, buffets will be closed and only every third seat will be occupied in theatre. “Frequently touched surfaces” will be cleaned every 30 minutes, and there will be additional health staff onboard – with COVID-19 testing devices on board. The first cruises will be on the North Sea, departing from German ports. UK sales for the winter of 2020-21 are up 8 per cent, and the first bookings for summer 2021 have more than doubled – though many of these are from holidaymakers who have postponed their trips from this year. Mr Joussen rejected the suggestion that prices for 2021 had soared, saying: “Prices will be reasonably stable; 30 per cent price increases don’t fit into the picture.”
Alphabet (Google)-founded self-driving car Waymo has raised a further $750 million, pushing the total investment the company has announced in the past two months to $3 billion to bolster its financial war chest, at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has added a new momentum to developing self-driving vehicles. Autonomous vehicle (AV) companies are now demonstrating the potential for contact-free delivery, facilitating thousands of essential deliveries in small pockets across the US. The coronavirus crisis “spotlights a way that AVs can be a public good, in a way that nobody could have imagined even a few months ago,” said Eric Danko, the director of federal affairs for Cruise, GM‘s AV division. Rep. Greg Walden, the top Republican on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, agreed: “The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated real-world applications of AV technology. Whether it be to deliver meals and packages to seniors or to support our health care workers on the front lines, AVs are being put to work.” He said Congress “must create a federal framework for the safe development and deployment of AVs.” Cruise has facilitated more than 4,000 food and meal deliveries from two food banks in San Francisco since mid-April, with each vehicle staffed by two safety drivers, Danko said. “We’re focused on developing the technology and playing a small part in the current crisis in terms of trying to fill an immediate need,” he said. Rival AV firm Nuro is providing contactless delivery to health care facilities in Sacramento and San Mateo, after receiving a federal exemption to produce driverless vehicles. Matthew Lipka, federal lead for Nuro’s AV policy team, said his company will deploy and test vehicles with or without legislation, but added that it would be useful if the Department of Transportation received “congressional guidance.” Cruise recently predicted that the global autonomous vehicle industry is an $8 trillion market opportunity.
The Singapore government is helping stalls in wet markets go online, as people stay at home due to lockdown restrictions. Since the government instituted a partial lockdown, the F&B and retail industry has been among the most badly affected with some expecting as much as an 80% revenue loss. In a survey conducted by the #savefnbsg coalition with key industry players from F&B establishments, 88% of restaurants indicated that they would not have been able to survive April without assistance. This means the livelihoods of over 220,000 people and their families supported by over 18,000 local F&B establishments are under threat. To combat this, an influx of traditional F&B and retail merchants are flocking online. The initiative, created by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and creative agency BLKJ is currently being trialed by Tekka Market in Serangoon. Six stalls in the market will use Facebook Live to sell their products and interact with their customers. According to Rachel Chew and Christie Way, creative group heads at BLKJ, the initiative was started because a lot of wet market stalls have been around for decades and still rely on the same traditional means of selling using cash. “We hope that by helping them digitise, we can enable them to compete with newer, more modern businesses with online platforms, so they too can survive,” Chew explained. Way explains that many of the wet market sellers work very long hours – they said they barely have time for their own day-to-day operations and they have never considered going online. To them, selling is the easy part when it comes to going online. She says the real challenge they faced is coordinating logistics, such as packing and delivery. As smaller wet market stalls struggle with time, manpower and capacity for logistics, BLKJ and IMDA hopes they can continue to sustain their online presence even after the initiative is over. To do this, both parties are helping the stalls in the wet markets to garner a fan base and set up a system that they will be able to operate independently. “Another challenge we faced was ensuring freshness and quality. People go to the wet market because they want to make sure they get the best produce by personally touching and seeing it for themselves,” explains Way. “Buyers need to trust that what they buy online will be of the standard that they’d choose themselves. It’s why Max Kee, the veteran live stream seller who mentors our Tekka sellers, repeatedly emphasises to them that they must only give their buyers the freshest produce and not shortchange them.” Customers can order products from the stalls during the Facebook Live video, confirm their details through Facebook Messenger and make payment via PayNow, a local instant funds transfer service.
An Amsterdam restaurant has devised an innovative concept for distanced dining – a greenhouse dining concept. In China, plastic screens dividing diners have already been put in place in some major chains, but some more elegant inspiration comes from waterside vegan restaurant, Mediamatic Eten. Diners will be seated inside one of the ‘Serres Séparées’ – what they call the new glass concept houses – which can accommodate two people comfortably, or three at a push. Of course, solo diners are welcome too. Long wooden planks are used to serve diners, which is a simple but clever way of ensuring staff can maintain a six-foot distance.
Putting a twist on the restaurant home delivery trend, UK boutique burger chain Patty & Bun are selling a DIY four-burger kit in a box. Inside the box is everything needed to make four Patty & Bun burgers: four patties, a generous amount of streaky bacon, four buns, four slices of Red Leicester and a pot of Smokey P&B Mayo. Supplied by the burger group’s own butcher HG Walter and presented on the same paper that Patty & Bun uses to wrap its burgers, the ingredients are identical to those used in the restaurants. The only other things needed are lettuce and tomato, and Patty & Bun provide detailed instructions. Priced at £25 for four plus £6 for delivery, the burgers work out at about £7.50 each, roughly £2.50 less than in the restaurants, and have so far proven to be a popular affordable luxury, with Patty & Bun and HG Walter struggling to keep up with demand. “This is a period of adapting – you can either go on the defensive or the attack; we are trying to go on the attack in terms of being as creative as we possibly can,” says Patty & Bun founder Joe Grossman. “We had wanted to do a BBQ kit for the past couple of years but had been so busy we didn’t have the time. You are always making excuses when you’re on the growth plan but then we thought ‘we need to do this’.” The burger group is not alone in diversifying its offer by selling meal kits. London-based pizza group Pizza Pilgrims has brought back its Frying Pan Pizza Kit that contains the ingredients to make two pizzas at home. Plant-based burger group The Vurger Co has also created a meal kit that contains all the components needed to make its burgers and dessert specialist Chin Chin has released two ‘starter kits’ for its marshmallow hot chocolate and griddled cookie dough.
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Original Source: brandchannel.com
Kolkata boys Rajit Bhattacharya (23) and Ankit Das (22) met as toddlers at nursery school. The two friends grew up together, attending the city’s well-known South Point School. They also landed up at the same engineering college, Jadavpur University. There they met Aisik Paul (23), who was pursuing electronics and telecommunications engineering with Rajit, while Ankit studied chemical engineering.
The three friends often worked together for various college events and festivals. The trio was adamant about “starting something of their own” and not taking up jobs after graduating from engineering college. That’s why they chose not to appear for a single interview during college placements.
Data Sutram co-founders Ankit Das, Aisik Paul and Rajit Bhattacharya (L-R)
In 2018, their final year of college, the batch mates set up data startup Data Sutram, after having skipped placements and amid stiff resistance from their families.
“Jadavpur University, ranked among the top engineering colleges in India, is known for its placement record and job offers. Coming from service backgrounds, we had immense resistance from our families for not sitting for placements,” say Aisik and Ankit.
Both their fathers had government jobs. While Aisik’s father was a deputy chief engineer at the state-run Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC), Ankit’s father was a senior civil engineer working for the government of West Bengal.
The resistance from Rajit’s folks was relatively less as his parents had an entrepreneurial background. The senior Bhattacharya, an IIT-graduate, was an engineer in a US firm, before he set up a social enterprise two decades back with Rajit’s mother, also a Jadavpur University engineering graduate.
Besides the placements, there was also pressure from the families on the three young men to pursue MBA. The group jokes that till date Ankit's father sends him MBA preparation material.
“I think one of the fundamental reasons we didn't pursue MBA is summarised by simple data that suggests that the conversion of MBA graduates into entrepreneurs right after MBA is very low, not just in India but internationally.
“I feel what drew us to entrepreneurship was our technology's ability to make a difference to solve problems. I feel we had really good mentors who helped us bridge the business gap, to never really feel like we needed it, (an MBA)” Rajit says.
The startup was inspired by two major events that led the trio to discover “the power of unstructured data”.
The first was an internship project in their third year, where they developed a platform that used satellite data to predict crop yield and help the government plan fertiliser distribution and subsidies across the state to encourage farmers to grow and meet demand.
The second was when they developed a predictive analytics solution for a retail chain as part of a project that measured demographic and ethnic distributions around a store to estimate the potential sales of each grocery item.
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What does Data Sutram do?
The Kolkata startup helps businesses increase delivery efficiency and reduce marketing burn. “With our data and insight, companies have increased deliveries by over 35 percent, increased growth of push channel by up to 20 percent, and reduced marketing burn by 60 percent,” Rajit says.
With a global shift in focus from globalisation to localisation and the boom of ecommerce, the need of the hour is hyper-local data and actionable insights, he explains.
Data Sutram uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to uncover these raw data sources and compute socio-economic parameters like demography, ethnicity, affluence, and spending capacity to understand a location and help a business.
This is done by pinpointing new locations for business to expand, improving performance of existing assets (both physical and digital), and microtargeting the right audience for the product.
According to market research and consulting firm Mordor Intelligence, the data as a service (DaaS) market was valued at $26.23 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $46.50 billion by 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent over the forecast period of 2020-2025.
Data Sutaram expects to break even in three years and hit the Rs 1 crore revenue mark within a year.
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What’s under the hood?
The Data Sutram platform comprises two parts: a data engine and a visualisation platform. The first part is an AI engine that automatically processes raw data from multiple sources, cleans, geotags, structures, and marries it to create socio-economic demographic indexes about every location at various granularity levels.
“The data engines tap into over 178 data sources of both public and private, including satellites,” Rajit says.
The visualisation platform is a Geographic Information System (GIS) platform that integrates data visualisation and data analytics to help clients visualise the impact of their decisions on the locations and give them insight to help them leverage the power of location data.
“The unstructured data lying in the form of text and images within multiple sources is like raw cotton that needs to be processed, cleaned, geotagged and converted into textile that can be readily utilised by a business,” Rajit explains.
As far as competition in India is concerned, it includes the likes of Bengaluru-based location intelligence startups Locale.ai and GeoIq.
However, Data Sutram believes its “ability to make use of unstructured data (in the form of images, text in different languages not readily consumable for a business) through its AI engine” sets it apart.
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Investment pitches and funding
The startup was initially bootstrapped and surviving on revenue from consultancy projects, with six engineers on board. Three months after graduating from engineering college, the trio received a call from serial entrepreneur-turned-angel investor Sanjay Mehta to come pitch in Mumbai to be part of the first cohort of 100X.VC, a venture capital firm set up by him.
The team managed to raise its first cheque within two days of its maiden investment pitch.
“Two weeks of the 100X.VC programme gave exposure to a huge industry circuit and funding circle opened up a lot of opportunities for us fresh-out-of-college engineers and proved to be a life-changing event,” Rajit says.
Data Sutaram raised Rs 25 lakh from 100X.VC. It is currently in talks with angel networks to raise around Rs 2 crore within the next two-three months.
Currently the startup has a 11-member team, including the three co-founders.
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Coronavirus disruption and improvisation
Data Sutram’s focus sectors are retail, ecommerce, agri tech and BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance). Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the retail sector has taken a big hit and the startup’s clients have been unable to pay for the services.
“However, with a quick turnaround time, our focus has shifted towards essential services like groceries and pharmacies,” Rajit says.
Just as location intelligence methodologies such as geofencing and geo-targeting are being utilised by the government to tackle the spread of the coronavirus, the same can be done to solve the bottlenecks that have come up in supply-chain logistics, he adds.
“Our platform along with the population density, store coordinates, and other external data points can predict the demand of essential commodities for every locality. The platform can track the demand real time and prevent an area from having a shortage crisis by alerting distributors, pharma and grocery chains, and authorities about an impending crisis.”
Citizens can also alert and convey their need for essential goods that they are unable to find in their neighbourhood by directly accessing the platform and submitting their query.
“Our platform has helped one of the most reputed pharma brands of western India to deliver medicines to a larger number of housing societies in Mumbai, Pune and Thane, helping it utilise its resources more efficiently,” Rajit says.
(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)
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Original Source: yourstory.com