AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Olea Edge Analytics, an intelligent edge computing platform for the water utility industry, today announced the closing of $35 million in Series C funding led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate hiring across all departments and further develop their AI and edge computing-based solutions to help utilities manage water. A full suite of sensors combined with advanced analytics monitor and manage each component throughout the network, giving utility departments previously unavailable insights and recommendations on how to return their resources to optimal performance. Olea Edge Analytics has now raised a total of $50.6 million to help cities monitor and manage critical water assets, including large commercial and industrial meters, uncovering millions of dollars in recoverable revenue. "Cities and water utilities are facing tremendous challenges from all sides: financial, operational, hiring and more," Olea Edge Analytics CEO Dave Mackie said.

LoopMe, an outcomes-based platform, has launched a measurement solution, PurchaseLoop Measurement, which provides real-time consumer brand lift measurement and analytics for OOH advertising, according to a company press release. Designed for agencies, brands and publishers to measure media effectiveness throughout their campaigns, PurchaseLoop Measurement also provides analytics across media channels, including digital, CTV, digital audio. "Consumer behavior has changed rapidly over the past 18 months, creating new challenges as brands try to measure whether their advertising is moving the needle," Chris Swarbrick, managing partner - ad technology strategy and coordination at OMG UK, said in the release. "LoopMe provides a unique offering that leverages real-time machine learning and artificial intelligence to find consumers where they spend the most time -- on their mobile devices -- and measures advertising effectiveness across brand metrics in a quick and scalable way, even as the market becomes more fragmented. LoopMe is paving the way for the next wave of brand measurement solutions that secure a true 1-1 connection between brands and consumers."

Tech giant Google is going to try and make some of its software more environment friendly. In a slew of updates announced today, the company said software like Maps and Search will start showing results that are meant to steer people towards environment friendly options. For instance, users in the US will not only see the fastest route to a destination on Google Maps, but the app will also show the most fuel-efficient route. The company said it is using artificial intelligence (AI) and insights from the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to provide eco-friendly routes on Android and iOS versions of Maps. The feature is available only in the US right now and will come to Europe next year.

OpenBench, Inc., an emerging leader in AI-enabled small molecule discovery, entered into an agreement with HemoShear Therapeutics, Inc., a privately held clinical stage biotechnology company, to use the OpenBench virtual screening platform to identify novel, potent inhibitors of an undisclosed rare disease target. Under the terms of the agreement, OpenBench will receive payment for successful identification and experimental confirmation of novel chemotypes that meet HemoShear's potency and developability criteria. Financial terms were not disclosed. "We are excited to support HemoShear's efforts to identify clinically relevant therapeutic candidates for a rare disease with significant unmet patient need," said OpenBench CTO James Yoder. "We feel confident that the OpenBench technology will pair nicely with the HemoShear REVEAL-Tx platform to help identify potent, developable hits and optimize the likelihood of success for this HemoShear discovery program."

LEWES, Del., Oct. 05, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- John Snow Labs, the Healthcare AI and NLP company and developer of the Spark NLP library, today announced that it will enable free access to its enterprise-grade Annotation Lab and NLP Server software for all users. This announcement comes on the first day of the company's annual NLP Summit, a free online event that brings together the AI community to discuss the most important trends, use cases, and solutions advancing natural language processing (NLP). The Annotation Lab, a robust data labeling and AI/ML solution for teams, enables users to annotate documents, images, and videos. The software automatically trains models using active learning and transfer learning. The simple and efficient project-based workflow helps users leverage real-time analytics on productivity, dataset bias, inter-annotator agreement, and more.

The company announced today that it's making the Echo Show 10 devices in the US compatible with the popular video calling software. Users who have their calendars linked up to the Alexa will have their meetings started automatically while people who haven't done that can say, "Alexa, join my meeting" or "Alexa, join my Zoom meeting" to join one. This is the second Echo Show to gain Zoom access; the Echo Show 8 started supporting the videoconferencing platform in the US in December. The Echo Show 10's camera tracks users as they move throughout a room, meaning callers can see the screen no matter where they sit or stand. Presumably, this functionality will work with Zoom, putting it on par with other competitor devices like the Facebook Portal and Google Nest.

SAN FRANCISCO & NEW YORK & TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gap Inc. (NYSE: GPS) has acquired the New York and Tel Aviv based start-up Context-Based 4 Casting Ltd. (CB4) that uses cutting-edge AI and machine learning tools to transform retail operations, increase sales and improve the customer experience through predictive analytics and demand sensing. "We believe artificial intelligence and machine learning will shape the future of our industry. Gap Inc. has experience working with CB4's world-class data scientists, so we understand the impact and the wide applications their science can have across sales, inventory and consumer insights, as well as its potential to unlock value and enhance the customer experience," said Sally Gilligan, Chief Growth Transformation Officer, and head of the Strategic Growth Office at Gap Inc. The deal was brokered by Gap Inc.'s Strategic Growth Office, a unit of the company that seeks out opportunities to fuel growth and accelerate new capabilities across its portfolio of brands. CB4's award-winning technology makes recommendations that support new sales and more satisfied customers.

Munich and Tel Aviv, September 30, 2021 – MicroSys Electronics announced today its partnership with artificial intelligence chipmaker Hailo to launch its miriac AIP-LX2160A embedded platform, hosting up to 5 integrated Hailo-8 AI accelerator modules. The new edge server-grade AI solution enables high-performance and scalable AI inference capabilities at the edge. The new, application-ready AI platform offers industries a high bandwidth and power-efficient solution at the edge for a range of applications in Industry 4.0, such as automotive and heavy machinery. Powered by the NXP QorIQ Layerscape LX2160A high-throughput processor technology, the miriac AIP-LX2160A can integrate multiple advanced Hailo-8 AI accelerators and offers best-in-class processing performance and deep learning capabilities of up to 130 tera-operations per second (TOPS). The combined solution delivers exceptional AI computing performance across multiple standard NN benchmarks, including over 6000 Frames Per Second (FPS) on Resnet-50, over 5000 FPS on Mobilenet-V1 SSD and close to 1000 FPS on YOLOv5m.

Apple has been slowly but surely creating a name for itself in the low-code/no-code movement. This July, the Cupertino-based company announced the launch of Trinity AI, a no-code platform for complex spatial datasets. Trinity enables machine learning researchers and non-AI devs to tailor complex spatiotemporal datasets to fit deep learning models. Back in 2019, Apple revealed SwiftUI, a programming language that required much less coding than the Swift language. With the release of Trinity, Apple doubles down on its effort to significantly lower the threshold for non-devs and non-ML devs.

McapMediaWire -- Majic Wheels, Corp. (OTC Pink: MJWL) ("Majic" or the "Company"), a Delaware corporation, that is positioning itself as a player in the disruptive industries of fintech and software development by means of acquisitions, announces it has signed a letter of Intent ("LOI") with Bamboo Wellness Holdings Limited. Bamboo Blockchain and Analytics Competency Center aims to create a holistic healthcare ecosystem that will drive a data-driven decision-making model. Supported by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the Bamboo ecosystem aims to drastically bridge the health protection gap and bring insurance to everyone. According to a market size, share & trends analysis report by Grand View Research: "The global insurtech market size was valued at USD 2.72 billion in 2020. It is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48.8% from 2021 to 2028. The increasing need for digitization of insurance services is expected to propel the market growth. The health segment led the market and accounted for more than 24.0% The increasing demand for digital platforms, which connect exchanges, brokers, providers, and carriers in health insurance, is anticipated to fuel the demand for the health segment. Life and health insurers are focusing on using advanced analytics to better serve and understand their customers. Numerous health insurance companies are adopting insurtech solutions to streamline claims processing procedures."