Startups and venture capital are pouring into what might seem an unlikely place: India's vast, outdated agriculture industry. Seizing on controversial new deregulation, entrepreneurs are selling farmers apps to connect them to big buyers nationwide and using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the rickety supply chains that lose one-fourth of India's produce to wastage. Enormous amounts of India's grain, fruit and vegetables rot between farm and table because of manual handling, repeated loading and unloading, poor inventory management, lack of adequate storage and slow movement of goods. This rate of wastage from faulty supply chains is four to five times that of most large economies, experts say. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government introduced changes it calls a watershed that will "remove middlemen and let farmers sell their produce directly to buyers," improving their prospects, especially in far flung areas.

Concerned that President-elect Trump's tweets could knock down the share price of your favorite stock? If you are an investor in (or an executive or employee at) a publicly traded company, then there is a new app to help you navigate the potentially choppy social media waters. It's called Trigger Finance, and it is the brainchild of three Cornell computer science engineers who want to level the playing field between institutional and do-it-yourself investors. Founded in 2015, Trigger is a financial technology mobile platform that provides free real-time data to help retail investors invest more rationally through an event-driven, rules-based approach. "Our mission is to build the next generation mobile investing platform that uses natural language, a wealth of data and artificial intelligence to help investors invest more rationally through rules and discipline," said Rachel Mayer, Trigger's co-founder and chief executive officer.