Intel Solutions Marketplace for Partners enhances speed growth, innovation through global collaboration

Intel launched Intel Solutions Marketplace platform to help partners deploy solutions in an increasingly complex, data-centric economy. On the new platform, and all from personal dashboards, Intel partners can grow their businesses through new partner connections and matchmaking, receive and manage leads, monitor business performance, and market solutions to end customers. 

The Intel Solutions Marketplace is an online platform that drives collaboration in a new data-centric landscape, where users can explore offerings and network with Intel partners. For partners who have posting access, the Intel Solutions Marketplace enables network and co-create with industry providers, differentiate offerings and showcase them to enterprise end customers. 

The platform joins Intel Partner University as a key offering of Intel Partner Alliance, the company’s announced channel partner program transformation designed to help partners connect, innovate and grow in a data-centric world.

The Solutions Marketplace facilitates better collaboration between partners, helping them focus on desired outcomes and delivering customization. The platform is equipped with new capabilities that enable partners to connect and collaborate with a global network of other peer partners to jointly deliver innovative data-centric solutions to business end customers. 

Today, solutions typically include hardware, software and services in varying combinations and are increasingly being designed to solve specific business challenges. 

For example, a solution to help a municipality reduce energy consumption using smart devices could be entirely led by the services side of the business, while an artificial intelligence solution to drive predictive maintenance for reduced downtime might be led by a software or hardware vendor. The Solutions Marketplace makes this kind of collaboration easier and more efficient.

Intel Solutions Marketplace encourages partners to collaborate within an expanded ecosystem, allowing Intel partners and business end customers to research and pursue thousands of partner solutions, including Intel IOT Market Ready Solutions, artificial intelligence, autonomous technology, data center and cloud, 5G, and next-generation computing. It enables a new way for partners to innovate, go to market and grow their businesses.

The Intel Solutions Marketplace is designed to drive collaboration across the ecosystem, making it easy for partners to connect with each other, all within the trusted Intel ecosystem. Intel will roll out enhancements throughout 2020 to help partners manage leads, monitor performance from personal dashboards and continue to grow their businesses.

Mobileye is currently mapping 28,000 miles of Barcelona’s roads to improve safety of streets

Spain’s road safety authority, the Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT), and the City of Barcelona with Mobileye presented data from the first two months of the Autonomous Ready initiative, a program intended to enhance the safety of streets, while analyzing status of infrastructure to continue improving roads for the future.

Through the Autonomous Ready project, the City of Barcelona and DGT are using Mobileye’s driver assistance technology to make the city safer, both immediately and in the long term. Equipping fleet vehicles that travel roads at a high frequency serves a dual purpose: Fleets gain a significant safety boost, while the city gains valuable insights into accident-prone points in the city where infrastructure can be improved.

The Autonomous Ready initiative is possible following the commitment to safe and sustainable mobility of the various partners whose fleets have joined the project, including Alphabet, Aquaservice, Calidad Pascual, Correos, Endesa, Gestores 1880 SAU (GESCO), Ferrovial, Obremo, Fraikin, Logista (Nacex Integra2), Línea Directa and Seur, among others.

Barcelona’s public-private collaboration incentivizes city fleets to join the project by providing preferred status to these “safe fleets” in areas such as parking, access, and loading and unloading privileges. Additionally, these fleets are preparing themselves for expected EU regulations mandating the use of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) technology beginning in 2022.

400 vehicles from 12 local fleets have been equipped with Mobileye 8 Connect, Mobileye’s advanced retrofit ADAS system powered by the EyeQ4. Mobileye-equipped vehicles collectively travel 28,000 miles – or 45,000 kilometers – daily, sending data to the cloud about what the on-board camera “sees.”

In the first two months of the project, 240,000 pedestrians and 37,000 cyclists were detected. The equipped vehicles have experienced 668 near-miss collisions that were potentially prevented by safety alerts issued to the driver. The number of Mobileye-equipped vehicles is expected to grow to 1,000 in 2020, and to 5,000 within three years.

Barcelona’s leaders hope the city can serve as an example for other cities across Spain and the world.

The initiative is intended to make Barcelona safer in two main ways. First, by equipping hundreds – and, eventually, thousands – of fleet vehicles with Mobileye retrofit collision avoidance and mapping technology, those vehicles will be involved in fewer accidents. Secondly, by passively surveying the roads of Barcelona and sending that data to the cloud for analysis, the city can improve its infrastructure and make city streets safer for all.

As equipped fleets travel the streets of Barcelona on their usual routes, on-board cameras collect anonymous information about roadside infrastructure that is then aggregated with external data, such as accident history or weather information. 

The aggregated data becomes the basis for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the detection of potential dangers and the identification of hidden problems that generate mobility risks. Over time, as these sensors gather more information, city leaders can gain an in-depth understanding of the city’s risk profile by identifying patterns of behavior in the daily traffic in which vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians co-exist. 

As a result, city streets are safer, while evidence-based infrastructure improvements make for safer and more efficient mobility tomorrow.

Nokia Bell Labs prize awarded to new processor technology, pioneered by student and professor team from University of California at Berkeley

Nokia announced this year’s Nokia Bell Labs Prize, the global competition to recognize game-changing innovations that attracted more than 250 applications from 31 countries around the world. The 2019 prize has been awarded to a student and Professor team from the University of California at Berkeley. 

PhD student Tianshi Wang and Prof. Jaijeet Roychowdhury received US$100,000 for winning the competition, and the opportunity to pursue an expanded collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs. 

The pair won the prize for their work on “A Classic Spin on Quantum Computing." Their innovation is in a new type of processor element that will be significantly more efficient in computing the answers to discrete optimization problems. Their innovation will complement conventional digital processors (CPUs and GPUs) by tackling a variety of computationally hard problems of importance in many diverse areas, including 5G communication systems; complex tasks in planning, scheduling and control; and even the discovery of new drugs.

“The Bell Labs Prize is a unique opportunity for innovators around the world to collaborate with Bell Labs researchers to expand the potential of their innovations,” said Marcus Weldon, Nokia Corporate CTO and president of Nokia Bell Labs. “The competition is highly competitive, reducing more than 250 applicants to 5 finalists, who must convince their Bell Labs mentors and the judging panel that their innovation has the potential to change the world. This year’s winners have certainly met that criteria, by pioneering a new processor technology that will allow a large set of complex optimization problems to be solved with unprecedented efficiency and at low cost. It is truly impressive work and we will be closely collaborating with the team to help them realize this potential.”

The 2019 Nokia Bell Labs Prize competition was launched in April. Proposals were reviewed by Nokia Bell Labs researchers and evaluated based on three criteria, including whether the idea has a "10X innovation potential" to change the world; the proposal's technical merit; and the overall feasibility of the proposed idea.

The proposals were narrowed down to a select group of outstanding candidates who were given the opportunity to partner with Nokia Bell Labs experts to help expand the impact of their proposals. Five finalists were invited to the final judging event held this week at Nokia Bell Labs headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey. 

The judging panel was comprised of Weldon, Nobel Laureate Robert Wilson, world-renowned computer scientist and Bell Labs alum Al Aho, as well as previous Nokia Bell Labs Prize winners Samory Kpotufe (2018) and Kaushik Sengupta (2017).

Second place and $50,000 went to Dr. Sheng Xu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Nanoengineering at University of California at San Diego for his submission, “There is plenty of room under the skin: A wearable’s perspective.” His team have developed an easy-to-use ultrasonic patch that can provide noninvasive, continuous and unobtrusive monitoring of deep tissues. This innovation will not only impact consumers, who will have access to data on their hearts, lungs, livers, and GI tracts, but also healthcare systems allowing non-invasive continuous patient monitoring and ultrasonic imaging.

Third place and $25,000 were presented to Maximilian Arnold, Sebastian Cammerer, Sebastian Dörner, Stephan ten Brink of Stuttgart University in Germany for their innovative work on “Leveraging 5G Infrastructure for a Robust Positioning System.” Their indoor positioning system uses existing wireless communications networks to determine location which will allow ubiquitous, low cost tracking of all things, with simpler calibration than existing systems, and therefore has the potential to become a foundational part of the next industrial revolution.

ABI Research recognises blockchain innovators kicking up a storm in decentralized cloud

ABI Research has identified the 15 hot tech innovators in the space that are already kicking up a storm in the cloud space: 0Chain, ælf, Ankr, DFINITY, Ethernity, Edge, Filecoin, iExec, Internxt, Golem, PPIO, Oasis Labs, Sia, Sonm, and Storj. Together, these startups have amassed over $600 million in funding in the last three years, through VCs and token sales (initial coin offerings).

Traditional centralized cloud computing has become a consolidated market with heavy-weight incumbents making penetration by new market entrants difficult. As a result, the offerings are high-priced and often locked into other cloud services from the same provider. Further, the complex nature of cloud configuration and the centralization aspect has made data security an emerging risk. 

Over the last few years, the decentralized cloud market has emerged with the goal to displace public cloud service providers with cheaper, more secure blockchain-based compute and storage alternatives. 

“The technology being built promises significant cost benefits over traditional offerings from existing cloud services, with containers, blockchain, and trusted computing being leveraged for security as well as simplicity. As the startups launch their mainnets and commercial offerings, the cloud market is likely to undergo significant upheaval,” says Michela Menting, Digital Security Research Director at ABI Research.

The technology leveraged is relatively new and untested, with founding developers looking to improve on existing blockchain technologies used in applications like Bitcoin. 

“The startups in the space are developing the infrastructure and the networks to be more power-efficient and scalable, as well as more resistant to common blockchain vulnerabilities such as 51 percent attacks, consensus delays, selfish mining, smart contract, and Denial of Service,” Menting added. “Critically, they are set to give traditional cloud providers a run for their money by offering significantly lower price points for cloud services. They are achieving this by leveraging a network of peers to offer spare computing power and storage capacity in exchange for token-based incentives.”

These findings are from ABI Research’s Hot Tech Innovators: Decentralized Cloud Computing and Storage report. This report is part of the company’s Blockchain & DLT research service, which includes research, data, and ABI Insights. 

Hot Tech Innovators reports focus on companies at the forefront of transformational innovation, particularly those that are younger and less well-known than the incumbents, at the technological forefront of their markets, developing new business models, destabilizing the current market and prime acquisition targets.

QliqSOFT post-acute visit management app offers business-enhancing delivery-data for hospice and home healthcare agencies

QliqSOFT has launched on Monday VisitPath, its home health nurse distress notification-enabled mobile care-delivery app designed to provide hospice and post-acute business administration with data that improves business and patient outcomes. Additionally, Visit Path puts safety in the hands of the home health nurse. 

The Visit Path web-based administrator’s dashboard integrates with GPS-enabled smart devices to ensure patient care delivery is optimized, on time and recorded. This, along with the ability to manage unscheduled and after-hours visits, improves patient and home health nurse satisfaction, patient outcomes, billing accuracy and a digital record that prevents ensures government reimbursements are never penalized.

As a real-time, GPS-enabled care management delivery solution, Visit Path verifies where and when a hospice or home health field nurse is on duty, begins service for a client, when they complete service and when they are off duty. This verification of service is the basis for accurate, compliant billing. The administrator's dashboard is a window into ROI.

With a focus on home health, hospice, and other post-acute verticals, QliqSOFT is excited to share the news of Visit Path to coincide with the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization’s (NHPCO) annual Interdisciplinary Conference.

“This app is a good solution for hospice and home healthcare agencies that want more insight into their care delivery data to reduce costs and improve their business outcomes," says QliqSOFT founder and CEO Krishna Kurapati. “Additionally, the distress notification provides safety and security for nurses while visiting homes and if they should run into trouble while in transit between visits.”

“We wanted to provide hospice and home healthcare agencies with a product that gives them real-time knowledge of completed patient visits activity to help them better manage their field staff,” Krishna added.