Business Briefs: UA Little Rock Researchers Win Best Paper Award

Social media researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock have been recognized with the best paper award at an international conference for their research on the behavioral analysis of digital societies formed on the video-sharing platform YouTube. Indian American Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Science and director of the Collaboratorium of Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies, presented the paper that was co-authored by Muhammad Nihal Hussain, a doctoral student in information science; Kiran Kumar Bandell, a doctoral student in information science; Dr. Serpil Tokdemir, a postdoctoral researcher at COSMOS; and Dr. Samer Al-khateeb, UA Little Rock alumnus and assistant professor of computer science and informatics at Creighton University. The paper, “Understanding Digital Ethnography: Socio-computational Analysis of Trending YouTube Videos,” received the award at the eighth annual Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics, held in Nice, France. This is the fourth year in a row COSMOS researchers have won the best paper award at the SOTICS conference.

TiE SoCal Holds Trends in Cloud, Cyber Security Event

The TiE-SoCal chapter monthly event was on the topic of “Trends in Cloud and Cyber Security at the ROC in Irvine. TiE SoCal Chapter monthly events are held on the fourth Wednesday of each month and are available on socal.tie.org. The event was divided into two sessions. The first session included a short talk on Art of Making Connections and 25 minutes of managed networking amongst attendees. Second session included a short address from the Mayor of Irvine and speeches and Q&A on Cloud and Cyber Security. Among the speakers at the event included TiE SoCal executive director Anshuman Sinha, president Smita Bagla and marketing director Brian Frankel. Additionally, Dr. Charly Brown and Bala Ramaiah conducted speeches.

Mahindra Charts Possible Paths onto U.S. Roads

Mahindra Automotive North America’s first U.S.-built Roxor rolled off the line here about a year ago, and already top officials at one of southeast Michigan’s newest manufacturers say they’ll soon need more capacity, the Detroit News reported. The off-road vehicles they build here aren’t street-legal. But they’re selling much faster than the Mumbai-based company expected, a testament to Roxor’s rugged Jeep-like demeanor and the company’s ability to offer the units in a wide array of colors, the report said. The Indian automaker is also considering entering the U.S. market with a small minivan one day, said Pawan Goenka, managing director of parent Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd., in an interview with The Detroit News. One thing is certain, he added: Mahindra is striking a chord in the United States with its small footprint, making it more likely the lucrative market is sure to attract a larger presence from India’s largest producer of SUVs in the future. But there’s still more work to be done. This also isn’t the first time Mahindra officials have said they want to sell vehicles here, only to abandon its plans. The automaker currently builds roughly 30 Roxor off-road utility vehicles a day at the 150,000-square-foot factory in Auburn Hills. They’re made for recreation, hauling over rough terrain, grounds-keeping, and beach patrols, traversing everything from sand to forest floors, the report noted.

Istio Projects Launch Tetrate with $12.5M in Funding

Tetrate, an enterprise service mesh company, has launched with $12.5M in funding, led by Dell Technologies Capital. In addition to building an enterprise-grade service mesh platform, Tetrate plans to use the new funding to expand its open-source leadership and deepen its contributions to the open-source community. Tetrate aims to disrupt the multi-billion dollar networking market by leveraging Envoy and Istio, the industry-standard open source “service mesh” networking projects for the microservices world. Founded by the pioneers of gRPC and Istio from Google, Tetrate’s team comprises core maintainers of Envoy, key engineers of Istio, and other leading open source experts. “Fortune 500 enterprises need a microservices-friendly networking layer to power their digital transformation, including application modernization and public/hybrid cloud adoption,” said Varun Talwar, CEO of Tetrate and formerly co-creator of Istio at Google. “Tetrate’s mission is to create a secure and flexible application networking layer to help enterprises transition from their decades-old rigid networking stack. Our tools and technologies will help customers with the availability and manageability of their applications as they undergo this transformation.”

Madrona Venture Leads Ovation.io Series A Funding

Ovation.io, a next-generation clinical informatics company, announced Series A funding of $5 million led by Madrona Venture Group. Ovation will use the funding to accelerate lab deployment and expand features to enable independent labs to grow their business efficiently and maximize business value from their data. “Genomics and molecular testing labs have complex workflows that require new functionality that can only come from a modern SaaS and cloud-based solution,” said S. Somasegar, managing director, Madrona Venture Group. “At the same time, these labs have clinical and genomic data that is being under-utilized to provide improved patient outcomes. Barry (Wark) and the team have built an easy to use and rapidly deployable system for one of the most vibrant areas of precision medicine diagnostics and we are excited to help them grow their team and presence in the market.”

Mindtree Inaugurates Silicon Valley Reimagination Center

Mindtree has inaugurated its new Silicon Valley Reimagination Center with the objective of collaborating with the best of the valley ecosystem – including its thriving startups, world-leading academic institutions and innovation centers of large technology partners – for the benefit of its global clients. The center is designed to help Mindtree’s clients look beyond the current generation of digital technologies to fundamentally reimagine their business models, processes, offerings and experiences with a focus on modern artificial intelligence technologies. It will host a board of directors, CxOs, and operational teams to drive highly impactful business reimagination initiatives. The center will also be the hub for Mindtree’s high-tech and media business that serves some of the pioneering companies driving the adoption of beyond digital technologies.

“Our global clients in many industries are wondering, ‘What would a Silicon Valley startup company do if they were entering our industry today,'” said Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, executive VP for Mindtree’s Enterprise Reimagination business. “Our new Silicon Valley Reimagination Center has created an exciting space for our global clients to work closely with the best of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, help them connect the dots, and achieve that vision.”

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