⏳ Two decades - Of pain, thanks to MS Excel

Dear Colleague, a pretty interesting question is trending on social media lately, so we thought, let's start the October issue by asking our 45,000+ monthly readers that very question;

Q. How many 'once in a 100-years' events have you lived through so far? 

Here's a list of such happenings we drew up at INT. 

Y2K, Covid, a few catastrophic economic crashes, natural calamities, the internet and smartphone revolution, IoT, and Artificial Intelligence. 

Also, here are two things we know.

1️⃣ We've got you thinking and you want to add to that list of events. Please hit reply to this email and we will take note. 

2️⃣ Most such events revolve around tech innovations and after 26 years in the business, we are finally sure we chose the right industry to serve. 

Now, about the month that went by...

STATS: Video Meeting Backgrounds Are Mission Critical

Accept it. We all have squinted our eyes and cringed at that colleague who always comes to video meetings with her video on, complete with a background of a bookshelf. 

Turns out, such colleagues are having the last laugh now. 

What Are You Saying?

No kidding. Per this report on credibility in video meeting, participants in a survey found faces appearing against backgrounds featuring houseplants or bookcases as more trustworthy and competent.

More Pre-Meeting Background Checks

✅ Statistical analysis showed that participants rated faces against the houseplant and bookcase backgrounds as being more trustworthy and competent than faces with other backgrounds. 

❎ Faces against a living space or novelty image were rated as the least competent or trustworthy. So no more live office backgrounds, please.

✅ Survey respondents tended to perceive happy faces as more trustworthy and competent than neutral faces. CXOs, please take note and lighten up. 

✅ The survey also found out that female faces are more trustworthy and competent overall. At INT., we know this for a fact and are blessed to have women leaders in every function, and, hold your breath...

✅ Among female faces, those with the living-space background were perceived as trustworthy as those with houseplants or a bookcase, suggesting that the lower trustworthiness associated with the living-space background was primarily driven by male faces. 

📢 Girls in the INT. marcom team, time for you to take over all video meetings from here on, till the boys fix their backgrounds. ✊

Healthcare: Turn The Paige For A Cancer-Free World

These days, Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, but AI in the healthcare sector is perhaps one of the most powerful applications of this tech. 

Agreed. But What's Breaking?

By combining a warehouse full of medical images with Microsoft’s massive computing power, AI can now possibly revolutionise detection and care for the millions of us battling cancer globally, every year. 

Can We Please Know More, Already?

Yo! Paige just announced its collaboration with Microsoft to build the world's largest image-based AI model for cancer detection.

📌 Here are 4 things we know:

1️⃣ The model is training on a ginormous volume of data, ingesting millions of images to identify both common and rare cancers.

2️⃣ Paige, originally a spin-off from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, currently owns an AI that assists pathologists in detecting breast, colon, and prostate cancers.

3️⃣ The initiative aims to boost speed and accuracy for overburdened medical staff, and

4️⃣ Paige emphasises that it is a tool for doctors, not a replacement. 

Something That Makes Me Sound Really Cool, Please? 

Paige is incorporating up to four million digitised microscopy slides across multiple types of cancer from its unmatched petabyte-scale archive of clinical data. 

It will then utilise Microsoft’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure to train the technology at scale and ultimately release it for use in hospitals and laboratories across the globe using Azure.

Insurtech: Shut Up And Take Our Money

Difficult times, rough roads, slippery slope, and funding winter are all trendy global terms that are being laughed at in the Indian insurtech circle. 

And Why Such Glee?

Umm, according to Inc. 42, through Q1 to Q3, 2023, Indian startups experienced a substantial drop in funding, with a total of only USD7 Bn raised. 

Comparatively, in the same period in 2022, startups raised USD22 Bn in funding and an even higher amount of USD27 Bn the year before. 

However - please hold that coffee - insurtech players Onsurity and InsuranceDekho have recently announced their series B fund raises, with the latter raising funds a second time in 2023. 

Spread The Joy Please

1️⃣ Per Mint, Insurtech startup Onsurity recently secured USD24 million in Series B funding led by the World Bank's International Finance Corporation. 

The three-year-old kid on the block caters to over 5,000 businesses in 26 Indian states and 3 UTs and over 80% of businesses purchasing healthcare memberships from Onsurity have ventured into employee healthcare for the first time, it seems.

The startup will use this funding to build a technology solution, powered by AI, aimed at eliminating prolonged waiting periods and uncertainties typically associated with claims and also increase spends to grow it's portfolio by 10X. 

2️⃣ Per Business-Standard, InsuranceDekho, one of India's leading insurtech players, has raised another USD60 million in its ongoing Series B funding round. 

With this latest capital infusion - a mix of equity and debt - the company has attracted new marquee investors like Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and the insurer BNP Paribas Cardif, in the latest round. 

😮 Also note, just in February 2023, InsuranceDekho had secured USD150 million in the largest Series A funding raised by an Insurtech in South Asia.

Stuff We Are Watching

📌 Ola and Porter Score Zeros: For 3 years in a row now, Ola scored 0 out of 10 points in Fairwork’s ranking of e-commerce platforms in terms of fairness to gig workers. BluSmart emerged as the top ride hailer with 5 points. Uber scored 1 point. BigBasket topped the fairness table with 6 points, Zomato, Swiggy, and Urban Company came in joint second with 5 points each. Zepto scored 4 points, Flipkart 3, Amazon 2, Dunzo 1, and Porter joined Ola at the bottom of the table with 0 points.

📌 We Can't Be Roadkill, Thanks: Google executive Prabhakar Raghavan testified at the ongoing antitrust trial in the suit brought by the US Justice Department and a coalition of state attorneys general, alleging Alphabet's Google unlawfully abused its dominance in the search-engine market to maintain monopoly power.

📌 Take Responsibility, Please: The updated Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)’s guidelines advise software manufacturers on how they can demonstrate security principles to their customers and the public, emphasizing that software makers must be able to compete on the basis of security. 

😅 Video above: What do bored engineers do? Original post here. . .

Time to address this email's subject line now. 

You see, the Excel team at Microsoft is finally fixing a feature that has been a pain point for scientists for almost 20 years now. 

😅 The feature, called Automatic Data Conversion, which in the past constantly converted certain human gene names into calendar dates in scientific research, can now be disabled.

To Explain, every one of the nearly 44,000 human genes has a shortened version of its name and a symbol. So when a scientist typed SEPT1 to represent the Septin-1 gene in an Excel sheet, the program would assume they meant September 1 and change it. 

Big Deal?

You decide. A study of 10,000 scientific papers on genes published from 2014–2020 found that more than 30% contained a gene name error that was Excel's fault. 

📴 How to disable it: You can now control Excel’s auto correcting functions under File>Options>Data. 

💡 Comments and feedback are always welcome on the last day of October. Simply hit reply to this email and get instantly connected to a team of 850+ technology experts to start any kind of conversation, or to solve burning revenue problems for your business within a realistic timeframe. 

Please don't take 20 years though. 

See you in November. Cheers! 

Team INT.