Yearly Archives: 2021

The top three start-ups at the fourth edition of the start-up contest hosted by the IIM Calcutta Alumni Association, Mumbai Chapter (IIMCAA-M), bagged prizes worth Rs 10 lakh and a chance to be mentored at some of the country’s top institutes.

Clarion Call 4.0 was managed, hosted and conducted by IIM Calcutta Innovation Park (IIMCIP).

IIM Calcutta Innovation Park has committed investments worth Rs 1.5 crore towards three identified start-ups from among the top 20. Additionally, this year, the top three start-ups won prizes worth Rs 10 lakh and a chance to be mentored at some of the top institutes of the country.

More than 1,000 start-ups applied to participate in Clarion Call 4.0 and about 550 met the eligibility criteria.

The top 20 start-ups also have access to the Clarion Call 4.0 accelerator/incubator partners – IIMCIP, IIT Bombay SINE, India Accelerator, Huddle, Sparklehood, Zone Startups of BSE, Airtel Startup Accelerator, HTIC IIT Madras.

“These partners would offer incubation support to the start-ups that include business mentoring, access to market and funding,” said Subhrangshu Sanyal, CEO, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park.

Clarion Call brought together the largest group start-ups, investors, incubators onto a single platform and unearthed many promising and deserving start-ups and connected them to investors and accelerators.

IIMCAA onboarded the largest group of investors (venture funds, angel networks) for single event. There are about half-a-dozen active investment conversations from this.

Eight of the top 20 start-ups competed in a grand virtual live event on May 1 and a special jury of five picked the top three start-ups. The winner was Homepecked eMarketplace Services (https://www.homepecked.in), followed by first runner-up StoryMirror Infotech (https://storymirror.com/) and second runner-up Solus AI (https://www.solus.ai). They won cash prizes of Rs 10 lakh.

To make the selection process best in town, IIMCAA tied up with PwC as a process and knowledge partner to evaluate and score the entries and bring them down to top 50 finalists.

The top 50 were evaluated via multiple rounds of pitching sessions by a 25-member jury that consisted of entrepreneurs, investors, industry leaders, and the top 20 finalists were identified.

ZipCast Solution uses Containerized Software on Red Hat OpenShift to enable forecasting for Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, Distribution and Manufacturing industries

Mumbai (IN) and Dallas (TX), March 9, 2021 –  Cartesian Consulting, a global analytics firm, today announced that the company is using IBM Cloud Paks on Red Hat OpenShift to power ZipCast, a solution that helps clients accelerate enterprise-scale demand forecasting for the Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, Distribution and Manufacturing industries. The solution is designed to automate the model building and forecasting process by surfacing pre-built models to help data scientists save time and focus on higher-value work.

Harnessing the flexibility, security and portability of IBM Cloud Paks to power solutions across hybrid cloud environments, ZipCast:

• Collects and analyzes data from multiple sources, including on-premises and multicloud and
• Extracts and transforms raw data into market-ready analysis using IBM Watson, IBM Data Refinery and IBM Cognos Analytics that ZipCast can use to predict daily inventory, forecast merchandise shortages and schedule stock replenishments.

“Working with IBM to build ZipCast has been absolutely brilliant. IBM Cloud Paks helped us build ZipCast in a manner that can significantly improve productivity and adoption among data scientists,” said Sandeep Mittal, Managing Director, Cartesian Consulting. “ZipCast is helpful for enterprises that are looking to improve their forecasting abilities.”

“Our work with Cartesian reinforces IBM’s commitment to create assets with our ecosystem partners that bring value to clients across industries.” said Gaurav Sharma, Vice President – Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM India. “IBM Cloud Pak for Data empowers organizations to unlock the value of their data, designed in a cost-efficient way. An industry accelerator for demand forecasting, Cartesian’s ZipCast solution leverages IBM Cloud Pak for Data to build and deploy forecasting models to respond to dynamic market requirements.”

Cartesian Consulting is part of IBM’s Cloud Pak ecosystem, an initiative to support partners of all types — whether they build on, service or resell IBM technologies and platforms — to help clients manage and modernize workloads from bare-metal to multicloud with Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.

About Cartesian Consulting:
Cartesian Consulting is a global analytics consulting firm. Set up in 2009, the firm specializes in analytics that helps businesses improve customer value, marketing spends, and business decisions. The consulting practice provides bespoke analytics solutions for Customer Analytics, Media and Attribution analytics, Promo Optimization, Demand Forecasting, Pricing and Promo Optimization, Store analytics, Retail analytics and the application of AI to business needs across industry verticals including Retail, eCommerce, QSR, Hospitality, BFSI and CPG. Cartesian’s analytics practice is widespread, with a strong focus on predictive modelling, reinforcement learning, the use of neural nets, NLP and computer vision, and the building of interpretable machine learning models. The firm also evangelizes the use of a wide array of technologies to build models and bring in domain expertise that comes from having hundreds of projects under their belt. For details on ZipCast read more.For further information: Cartesian Consulting: Deepa Ghosh, dghosh@cartesianconsulting.com | IBM India: Zarin Darashaw, zdarasha@in.ibm.com