Today it was made public that Google has acquired Halli Labs, a very young (its first public appearance was on May 22 of this year) startup based out of Bengaluru, India, that was focused on building deep learning and machine learning systems to address what it describes as "old problems." The company says it will be joining Google's Next Billion Users team "to help get more technology and information into more people's hands around the world." Halli announced the news itself earlier today in a short post on Medium, and Caesar Sengupta, a product management VP at Google, also confirmed the acquisition with a Tweet. Welcome @Pankaj and the team at @halli_labs to Google. Google has now also confirmed the acquisition with a short statement it provided to TechCrunch.

Machine learning is perhaps the hottest buzzword in cybersecurity today. The artificial intelligence technology is deployed by cybersecurity firms in an effort to keep pace with the evolution of cyberattacks, as machine learning algorithms are able to improve predictability the more it is used. But according to Guy Caspi, CEO of cybersecurity company Deep Instinct, machine learning is no longer enough in an age of unprecedented evolution and volume of cybercrime. G DATA researchers recently found that last year a new malware specimen surfaced every 4.6 seconds. In the first quarter of 2017, it reduced to every 4.2 seconds, meaning millions and millions of new malware surfaced every year.

After raising $55 million last year to build its business beyond its existing help desk services, today Freshworks (the parent company of Freshdesk) has made an acquisition to help it fill out that strategy. The company has acquired Joe Hukum, a startup out of India that offers a platform for businesses to build their own chatbots. I've asked, but the companies are not revealing any terms of the deal. Joe Hukum, formerly known as Speedy, was originally focused more on building its own personal assistant / concierge app to help people order goods and services before pivoting to present the service as a platform for building bots for other businesses. "Joe Hukum" is a reference to its pre-pivot incarnation: it is a phonetic transliteration of a Hindi phrase that translates as "as you wish."

Automation, digital platforms, and other innovations are changing the fundamental nature of work. Understanding these shifts can help policy makers, business leaders, and workers move forward. The world of work is in a state of flux, which is causing considerable anxiety--and with good reason. There is growing polarization of labor-market opportunities between high- and low-skill jobs, unemployment and underemployment especially among young people, stagnating incomes for a large proportion of households, and income inequality. Migration and its effects on jobs has become a sensitive political issue in many advanced economies. And from Mumbai to Manchester, public debate rages about the future of work and whether there will be enough jobs to gainfully employ everyone.

American technology giant Google has acquired Bangalore-based artificial intelligence (AI) firm Halli Labs for an undisclosed sum. The firm which was co-founded by former chief technology officer of now defunct Stayzilla, Pankaj Gupta, announced the acquisition in a blogpost on Tuesday. The firm becomes the latest AI start up to be snapped by a technology giant after a spate of similar acquisitions by firms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple among others. "Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI and ML (Machine Learning) techniques to old problems and domains?--?in order to help technology enable people to do whatever it is that they want to do, easier and better. Well, what better place than Google to help us achieve this goal," the company said in a blog.

New Delhi: Google Inc. has acquired Halli Labs, a four-month old start-up out of Bengaluru that is developing artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. Halli Labs announced the acquisition late Wednesday. "We will be joining Google's Next Billion Users team to help get more technology and information into more people's hands around the world," the company said in blog post on Medium.com. According to a bio-note, also on Medium, Halli Labs is engaged in developing solutions to traditional problems using AI, MI, deep learning and natural language processing technologies. "Halli Labs is applying modern ML techniques to old problems and domains to help technology march on in its timeless purpose-- that of giving superhuman powers to all of us humans in letting us do whatever we want to do, better," the post read.

NEW DELHI: American technology giant Google has acquired Bangalore-based artificial intelligence (AI) firm Halli Labs for an undisclosed sum. The firm which was co-founded by former chief technology officer of now defunct Stayzilla, Pankaj Gupta, announced the acquisition in a blogpost on Tuesday. The firm becomes the latest AI start up to be snapped by a technology giant after a spate of similar acquisitions by firms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple among others. "Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI and ML (Machine Learning) techniques to old problems and domains?--?in order to help technology enable people to do whatever it is that they want to do, easier and better. Well, what better place than Google to help us achieve this goal," the company said in a blog.

To ride the rising wave of AI, financial services companies will have to navigate evolving standards, regulations and risk dynamics--particularly regarding data rights, algorithmic accountability and cybersecurity. The success of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms hinges on the ability to gain easy access to the right kind of data in sufficient volume. Put more simply, AI depends on good data. Even Google--which is famous for the pioneering work in AI that underpins its standard-setting search-based advertising business--makes no bones about the critical role of data in AI. Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, has said: "We don't have better algorithms, we just have more data." Companies increasingly realize that data is critical to their success--and they are paying striking sums to acquire it. Microsoft's US$26 billion purchase of the enterprise social network LinkedIn is a prime example. But other technology companies are also seeking to acquire data-related assets, typically to acquire more than just identity-linked information from social media sources by focusing instead on vast troves of anonymized consumer data. Think, for example, of Oracle pursuing an M&A-led strategy for its Oracle Data Cloud data aggregation service, or IBM buying, within the past two years, both The Weather Company and Truven Health Analytics.

One of the hottest areas for VC investment at the moment is AI/machine learning -- that includes artificial intelligence algorithms, related machine learning systems, neural networks, and back-end processing to produce insightful and self-learning applications. As Nvidia's CEO recently said: VC investment in AI has risen from $3.2 billion in 2014 to $9.5 billion for the first five months of 2017 annualized, with the number of funding rounds nearly doubling since 2015 to over 1,200 on an annualized basis so far this year. Investors piling into a space aim for multiple exits worth hundreds of millions of dollars. However, the pattern of AI exits is the opposite. Most successfully-exited AI companies sell for below $50 million after raising only a small amount of money.

Google once had a reputation for bankrolling moonshots. It spent billions creating a self-driving car, started Google Fiber to bring ultra-high-speed internet to the masses, and acquired the Darpa-backed robotics company Boston Dynamics. But since restructuring itself as a holding company called Alphabet in 2015 and moving many of its bigger ideas outside the core Google business structure, Mountain View's ambitions have become a little more sober and its investment strategy more restrained. As Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat put it during an earnings call last year: "We continue to rationalize our portfolio of products to ensure we efficiently and effectively focus our resources behind our biggest bets across Alphabet." In practical terms, that's meant scaling back Google Fiber and selling off some of its wilder projects, and it's also opened the door for another company–the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank–to take the lead on some of today's most audacious bets in global tech.