Over the past few years, as the education sector was going through transformative change, EdTech startups rose to meet the demand of learners and help address some of the biggest challenges in education. At Google Cloud, we’re inspired by how EdTech startups continue to solve challenges with agility, innovative technology, and determination. We’re proud to help EdTechs make learning more personal, safe, and accessible, and we’re working to connect EdTech startups with the right people, products, and best practices that will help them grow

Announcing a new partnership with StartEd

Google Cloud is excited to announce a partnership to offer mentor-based programming for EdTechs with StartEd — an organization that accelerates education innovators addressing Early Childhood, K-12, HigherEd, Workforce, and Adult Learning. 

Founded by entrepreneurs nearly ten years ago, StartEd is on a mission to attract and develop a network of innovators working to ensure equitable, quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. The company trains and connects thousands of diverse entrepreneurs, educators, and investors at for-profit and not-for-profit organizations each year, working alongside corporations, foundations, and higher education institutions across the United States. 

StartEd has helped grow more than 2,500 companies and built a mentor network of over 800 senior leaders with deep expertise in early-stage EdTech companies. The StartEd community now numbers more than 25,000 members. 

“I am thrilled to embark on this transformative partnership with Google Cloud,” said Ash Kaluarachchi, StartEd CEO and managing director. “This alliance not only amplifies our mission to empower and nurture the world’s education innovators at every point in their journey, but it also unlocks unprecedented potential for the entire EdTech ecosystem. Together, we’re poised to redefine the future of education and work and to create lasting, positive impact for generations to come.”

Mentoring and networking opportunities for EdTech startups

Through this partnership, U.S.-based EdTech startups can apply to a new program, StartEd sponsored by Google Cloud. The program offers startups access to personal coaching, hands-on training, business support, and a large network of industry experts to help them accelerate their growth and transform education. Beyond the benefits from StartEd, startups will gain access to cloud credits, technical support from Google Cloud, and coaching from Google’s education leadership.

Apply to StartEd, sponsored by Google Cloud, today.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought dramatic changes to the financial services industry. Already under pressure from nimble young fintechs to modernize, established banks and insurers were undergoing incremental digital transformation. But in 2020, they hit the gas pedal. Branches closed and remote work became the norm. Almost overnight, employees needed secure remote access to corporate systems, and customers expected to be able to complete even complex transactions whenever they wanted, on whatever device. Even as things return to normal, many of these shifts are likely to be permanent. According to Forrester Research, nearly 90% of global financial services CIOs and SVPs believe that improving their application portfolio is key to improving customer experience and driving revenue.¹ The problem? Replacing legacy systems with cloud-based SaaS enterprise software is a massive, time- and resource-intensive process. 

IDG’s recently completed white paper, Financial Services Spotlight: Elevating agility and security in the cloud, highlights an alternative to the all-or-nothing approach to replatforming: “lifting and shifting” on-premises applications and workloads to the cloud without rewriting them. In this way, you keep your organization’s familiar architecture, but give it the scalability and cutting-edge technology of a modern cloud environment. That’s the promise of Google Cloud VMware Engine brings to the financial services industry.

Here’s a quick overview of the insights that the IDG study uncovers. Download the complete white paper.

Simpler migration, rich rewards

Google Cloud VMware Engine helps financial services companies seamlessly migrate and run 

VMware workloads natively on Google Cloud. Once in the cloud, firms can take advantage of Google Cloud services, access a robust third-party cloud ecosystem, and use the same VMware tools, processes, and policies their teams already know. The IDG study found that migrating to Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine offers multiple benefits:

1. Create new customer experiences. Migrating to Google Cloud puts modern, cloud-native architectures and technologies — such as containers and microservices — easily within reach. These make it possible for financial institutions to quickly and securely launch new applications and update them on a continuous basis using DevOps pipelines. They also allow firms to craft more personalized customer experiences across channels using Google Cloud’s native AI and data analytics.
2. Deliver new services. After migrating, financial services organizations can connect to multiple third-party service providers via cloud-based APIs to bring new, diverse services to their customers — without having to build from scratch. 
3. Make the best use of IT resources. When your data and applications reside in Google Cloud, you’re no longer constrained by the physical storage and compute limits of on-premises infrastructure. This means your company can match capacity to demand — even during unexpected peaks. You also gain more visibility into your hybrid cloud environment with Google Cloud’s operations suite, which offers intelligent analysis and easier troubleshooting for your platform and applications.
4. Gain fresh insights. The key to understanding what customers need and when they need it resides within your data, and data analytics in the cloud help you uncover those insights. Your company can connect to Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse, BigQuery, which leverages data to deliver valuable insights for personalized customer experiences, rich compliance reporting, new product development, intelligent fraud detection, and more. 
5. Choose what to move. Data governance regulations and requirements specific to the financial services industry mean that some data must remain on premises. Google Cloud VMware Engine lets you easily manage a hybrid cloud/on-premises environment to keep sensitive data fully under your control.
6. Become more resilient. Google Cloud VMware Engine gives financial services firms a distributed architecture and centralized control for their applications to support vital business continuity functions, such as backup and disaster recovery. This is on top of the performance and availability of Google Cloud’s global infrastructure.
7. Improve security. Using cloud-native application frameworks, administrators can issue patches and software updates centrally and automatically across their organizations. This reduces the risk of errors and security vulnerabilities. Firms also tap into the security features and capabilities of Google Cloud, including always-on encryption and AI-powered threat detection.
8. Redirect IT resources. Migrating virtualized workloads to the cloud can free up talent and budget to develop new products and services — time that was previously spent on maintaining complex on-premises infrastructure. That means less effort spent keeping the lights on, and more resources directed toward creating innovative and differentiating customer experiences.

IDG research concluded that migrating business applications to Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine can help financial services companies stay ahead of change without incurring further technical debt from their legacy IT systems. Working with cloud-based systems can give your financial services company much of the scale, speed, and agility of a startup while still enjoying the benefits of being an established organization.

Read the complete white paper to learn more about the ways in which Google and VMware work together to accelerate digital transformation for financial services firms.

^{1. Vmware-forrester-financial-services-modern-app-report.pdf, A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of VMware, 2020}

For a look ahead at the trends that will animate the retail industry this year, let’s take a look back at the 2022 National Retail Federation (NRF) “Big Show” in NYC.

Attendees at January’s event were treated to tangible examples of how retail challenges are being solved today, including new solutions to help them parse customer expectations and buying patterns, adapt stores into omni-channel experience hubs, and improve data visibility and actionability.

NRF 2022 also took the “omni-channel everything” theme of last year’s show to the logical next level: Enabling the best hybrid experiences. The message came through loud and clear of the importance of integration and interoperability in this new hybrid world – making everything work well together.

The need for modern digital infrastructure to enable this blending of physical and digital retail smoothly is paramount. To that end, technology vendors demonstrated how digital transformation initiatives, such as contactless and real time IoT and mobile applications, need to be built on cloud, edge, and secure connectivity to allow retailers to achieve the modern seamless hybrid retail that today’s consumer wants.

Other prominent themes and technologies highlighted at NRF included: extending engagement in the metaverse, sustainability, physical and digital security, and the agility and adaptability imperative.

The Metaverse and Hybrid (Omni-channel) Experiences

Today, the metaverse is an extension of our lives, enhanced by technology, which exists as a series of virtual worlds. In the future, the metaverse will be an interconnected, endless world where digital and physical lives fully converge. Imagine waiting for an appointment at a real booth on the NRF show floor while your avatar roams a fully fleshed-out digital NRF, meeting other virtual attendees, stopping for coffee at the digital Starbucks, and paying for a coffee that an in-the-flesh Starbucks employee brings to them. Digital and physical selves merge seamlessly in the metaverse, as the worlds draw closer together.

In the metaverse, brands have a digital presence, too. Nike filed seven trademarks late last year, including those for “Nike,” “Just Do It,” and its swoosh logo, and posted openings for virtual designer roles, indicating its intent to make and sell virtual branded sneakers and apparel. It subsequently purchased RTFKT Studios, a company that already makes and sells NFTs and digital sneakers. (In one collaboration with teenage artist FEWOCiOUS, the company sold 600 pair/NFTs of sneakers in just six minutes to the tune of more than $3.1 million.)

The metaverse also opens possibilities for gathering data about consumers and product demand. Imagine a sneaker drop in the virtual world. Certain styles of new kicks sell like gangbusters, giving the brand insight into what might sell IRL, intelligence that leads to trend-right production and less inventory headed for markdown or landfills. The metaverse can be a vehicle for more sustainable operations.

The metaverse further bridges the narrowing gap between digital worlds and physical worlds. Most consumers aren’t outfitting an avatar, but they are moving between online and offline and expect retailers to accommodate those hybrid omni-channel journeys seamlessly. Those demands have accelerated around last-mile delivery and experiences such as buying online and picking up in store (BOPIS) or at curbside, shopping in store and returning merchandise online, adding items to a BOPIS purchase when at the store, or communicating a substitution to the third-party grocery delivery service

Hybrid experiences open opportunities to please the consumer in new ways, but they also add expense and complexity. The need to meet this demand while enabling profitability was a major theme behind many of the technologies discussed at NRF. These included artificial intelligence (AI) for recommending the right product, return logistics software for defining and guiding product-specific reverse logistics workflows, order orchestration and fulfillment applications for omni-channel shopping, and last-mile delivery visibility for optimizing customer experience, to name a few. Also on display were task management applications help to improve and optimize in-store employee engagement, as well as touch-free applications to allow for faster payments and customer self-service checkout. RFID continues to improve inventory accuracy and inventory locating on the shelf, throughout the store, and the supply chain.

Sustainability

NRF 2022 saw a strong focus on sustainability. An NRF/IBV study released at the show highlighted the significant embrace of sustainable shopping by consumers. According to the survey, 62% of shoppers are “willing to change their purchasing habits to reduce environmental impacts.” About half indicated a willingness to pay a premium – on average a 70% premium – for sustainable products and brands.

Retailers are working to improve sustainability and reduce carbon footprint across operations by using sustainable sourcing through the supply chain, the store, and even returns. Tech vendors unveiled a variety of solutions enabled by cloud/edge, AI, computer vision, and IoT/RFID to allow retailers to effectively measure and record their environmental efforts, with the goal of reducing their impact.

Several cloud and digital infrastructure providers showcased sustainability clouds and other technology aimed at asset management with the goal of reducing energy consumption, water usage, waste. Examples included using IoT sensors to reduce water usage, optimizing re-use of store assets, and dashboards that allow retailers to accurately monitor and measure carbon output. However, such sustainability solutions can be most successful when running on the next-generation digital infrastructure that helps retailers better compete and differentiate in today’s omni-channel world.

Physical and Digital Security

According to a 2021 NRF survey, 57% of U.S. retailers reported the pandemic led to an increase in organized retail crime, while 50% reported an increase in shoplifting. When IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey, Wave 10 (November 2021) asked retailers which digital infrastructure investments would provide the greatest strategic advantage in 2022, their #1 response was “cybersecurity and recovery investments.”

A wide range of technology vendors acknowledged retailer concerns with regards to security, fraud, and loss prevention:

• Networking, connectivity, and edge vendors highlighted multilayer security solutions that promise to protect data from a range of IoT applications that utilize customer and associate data. Many offer security consulting services to address varied threats including ransomware, retail crime, and loss prevention.
• Security and e-commerce security vendors showcased solutions to prevent fraud and abuse in e-commerce applications as well as omni-channel applications such as BOPIS and curbside pickup, using AI-based analysis for identifying “bad”/risky customers and mitigating risk.
• Cloud vendors highlighted how retail clouds provide consistent, reliable identity management and data security.
• POS/payments/store technology vendors emphasized their ability to handle payments securely from any platform with multifactor tokenization, improved identity techniques such as biometrics and voice authentication, as well as AI-enabled and computer vision solutions for loss prevention at checkout and at the door.

The Agility and Adaptability Imperative

On display at the show were multiple flavors of the digital infrastructure technology that retailers need to achieve agile, personalized, data-driven, integrated seamless operations across the many channels of today’s retail landscape. The emphasis was apt. More than half of retailers plan to boost investment in business agility and operational agility over the next 12 months, according to IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey, Wave 10 (November 2021).

Technology vendors highlighted their connectivity investments to enable business and operational agility and their technology investments for better ease of integration, scalability, and the ability to more easily swap out or mix and match applications with integrated platforms, open systems, hybrid cloud, and retail industry clouds.

Vendors also showed off infrastructure to better harness data while enabling its visibility, maximizing its value, and providing the data-driven personalization essential for competitive advantage and differentiation. Highlights included fast, secure connectivity, 5G and Wifi-6, and edge- and cloud-enabled data and AI platforms to generate real-time insights – all designed to enable today’s omni-channel retail.

Advice for the technology buyer

Retailers should consider these key themes from NRF 2022 when making technology investment decisions for 2022 and beyond. To avoid lagging behind those retailers already moving toward thriving into the future, take action to:

• Enable the seamless, contactless omni-channel approach that today’s consumers want and expect.
• Replace legacy infrastructure that was not built to handle the modern retail environment that requires the agility and adaptability to seamlessly connect rapidly increasing volumes of data securely and more quickly than ever.

Whether sustainability, adaptability, the metaverse, or security are top concerns, addressing business needs holistically and strategically should be job #1.

Continue the conversation by downloading our Transforming retail and CPG markets whitepaper today.

In 2013, long before the world was discussing clean energy and sustainable practices, two IIT Madras graduates — Swapnil Jain and Tarun Mehta — had an idea to develop India’s first-ever electrical scooter.

This was at a time when auto manufacturers were still focusing on fossil-fuel-driven vehicles and ‘eco-friendly’ mobility solutions were more a trendy alternative catering to a niche market.

The duo founded Ather Energy in 2013 and launched their first fully-electric scooter, the Ather S340, in Bengaluru in 2016. Since then, the company has released several new models into the market and is planning to expand to eight more cities by the end of the year.

To support the smooth running of their vehicles, lower costs, improve time to market, and create great customer experience, Ather turned to Google Cloud.

Read the Full Story on YourStory