The art of growing a startup business lies in “finding a path” that’s timely, practical and scalable. Many sensor startups bet their future on automotive. Prophesee, based in Paris, was one such early gambler.
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Why You Might Want to Buy a Refurbished Phone
Experts say buying refurbished devices instead of more expensive, newer phones can save you money, as well as help cut down on the amount of waste being made by the smartphone industry.
"Price and value are arguably the most influential factors in the rise of refurbished," Lauren Benton, the general manager at Back Market, a refurbished electronics dealer, told Lifewire in an email.
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Intrinsic ID Unveils NIST-Certified Zign RNG for IoT Devices
Intrinsic ID, a leading provider of Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) security IP for embedded systems, has announced the Zign RNG for IoT devices.
This new offering will enable IoT chip providers and device makers to establish a high-security random number generator in software enabling it to be deployed on devices even after silicon fabrication to ensure a true source of randomness for IoT devices.
Random number generators (RNGs) are essential for cryptographic applications and form the foundation of security systems. For IoT devices, an RNG is generally implemented by incorporating hardware peripheral controllers, which are proving to be imperfect as a source for real randomness because they start with a deterministic input.
A report from Bishop Fox has shown that critical vulnerabilities have been disclosed in hardware random number generators used in billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices whereby it fails to properly generate random numbers, undermining their security and putting them at risk of attacks.
Intrinsic ID's Zign RNG extracts a true random seed harvested from noise in the SRAM PUF enabling IoT device makers to ensure confidentiality, authentication, and communication integrity. This makes Zign RNG the first embedded software implementation with a hardware entropy source option that does not have to be loaded at silicon fabrication.
Zign RNG can be installed later in the supply chain, and even retrofitted on already-deployed devices providing, what the company describes as, a “brownfield” deployment of a cryptographically secure NIST-certified RNG.
“RNGs extract randomness from hardware sources but some sources are better than others. With Zign RNG, randomness is extracted from a very strong source – the random patterns that appear in SRAM as a chip starts up. As a result, Zign RNG provides the benefits of a hardware entropy source without the need to make any hardware modifications and requires only minimal computing resources and memory which are limited on IoT devices,” said Pim Tuyls, CEO of Intrinsic ID.
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Security IP developer Intrinsic ID has launched a software random number generator to boost security in devices in the Internet of Things (IoT)
Zign RNG enables IoT chip providers and device makers to establish a high-security random number generator in software enabling it to be deployed on devices even after silicon fabrication to ensure a true source of randomness for IoT devices.
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MarTech Interview with Adrien Menard, Co-founder & CEO Botify
Adrien Menard, Co-founder & CEO Botify shares a few thoughts on the future of search marketing and what B2B marketers need to keep in mind to drive better search marketing ROI:
Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Adrien. We’d love to hear more about your journey through the years and what inspired Botify?
Botify was founded in France in 2012 by myself and Thomas Grange and Stan Chauvin. The three of us worked together at a digital marketing agency when we discovered a major flaw in how companies were conducting SEO; they were focusing too much on content and keywords, without knowing if Google and other search engines were even crawling those webpages. In fact, almost half of the pages of large, enterprise websites are not crawled by Google. When a page is not crawled or seen by Google, it will never rank in search engines, and therefore cannot drive traffic or revenue. This is how Botify was born – we recognized a huge opportunity to make more of large enterprise sites be discoverable by Google. Some of Botify’s first customers included EBay, BlaBlaCar, and Expedia. We entered the U.S. market in 2016 and now the U.S. now accounts for more than 60% of Botify’s revenue.
We’d love to hear more about the evolution of the Botify solution over the years since its launch? Congratulations on your recent funding as well, a few thoughts on this new round and how it will impact immediate near-term goals and growth?
Botify’s longest standing and most mature product suite is Botify Analytics, which is powered by our unified data model. Botify’s data model integrates all of the necessary data sources to get the most complete picture of a website’s technical health and organic search performance. In fact, Botify Analytics provides more than 1,100 metrics for any individual URL, and also allows customers to segment and filter the data any way imaginable.
It’s a super powerful application, however, in order to make that data easily actionable, we built Botify Intelligence. Botify Intelligence includes prescriptive insights and prioritized recommendations, helping brands define their action plan quickly. It also includes a monitoring and alerting solution to make brands aware of any problems or anomalies on the website before they turn into potential disasters.
Our newest suite, Botify Activation, is premised on actually implementing those actions, streamlining manual SEO tasks and maximizing SEOs’ and developers’ productivity, time, and resources.
Our goal is to enable customers to maximize revenue and performance from organic search, and do so efficiently and quickly. With our recent funding, we will continue to invest in product innovation, doubling-down on machine learning to speed the development of action plans.
The funding will also enable us to expand globally especially in Asia Pacific (the largest regional market for SEO) by growing operations there and expanding our collaboration with key brands and partners in the region. We are actively hiring in Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo across all departments.
Finally, we are expanding our partner ecosystem across technology, marketing, and solution partners. We plan to build upon the strong partnerships we’ve already forged; and continue to create alignment, interoperability, and collaboration opportunities with the partners that are essential to our customers’ strategies and success.
What are some of the top concerns still surrounding marketers when it comes to their overall search marketing objectives and strategies, can you talk about a few best practices that you feel marketers need to follow more on?
Marketers are embracing search as a way to generate profitable, efficient, and sustainable traffic, yet are still struggling with measuring its ROI. Historically SEO has been harder to measure than other channels and has been underutilized. Botify is working to quantify the impact of organic search by linking SEO to performance and ROI. We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a study on enterprise organizations prioritizing SEO and its effects on their long-term revenue. The results showed that SEO can generate a 584% ROI in less than 3 months for companies using Botify.
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10 Things You Didn’t Know about Adrien Menard
What do you know about Adrien Menard, the CEO of Botify? Botify is one of those unique companies that helps other companies create an online presence, one that truly helps them get the most out of their efforts to sell goods to customers. Learning how to have an effective online presence can be difficult, something that Botify has set out to help businesses manage more successfully. It’s all the brainchild of Adrien Menard. He is not only the CEO, but also the co-founder of the company. Like most entrepreneurs who get involved with these types of projects, he has a rather interesting story behind it all. In fact, here are 10 things about him that you might find interesting as well.
1. His efforts with Botify were born out of personal experience
Before he founded Botify, he was working on an entirely different startup, this time in Paris. He discovered that despite his efforts to market that particular startup in the most effective manner possible, roughly 50% of the people that looked for similar businesses on major search engines such as Google completely ignored the fact that his company existed at all. That is precisely when he realized that there had to be a better way to do business. Based on his own experiences, he set out to help other businesses market themselves successfully on social media and via the Internet. The goal was to make these businesses have an online presence that simply cannot be ignored, one that would instead stand out among everything else in their particular area of expertise.
2. He knows a thing or two about software development
Botify is a company that works with software in order to help businesses get ahead in the digital world. When everything is stripped down, the majority of it comes down to using business analytics in order to figure out what businesses need to be doing in order to increase their online presence. If he didn’t have an extensive understanding of software, he never would have been able to create these algorithms in the first place. As such, it would be virtually impossible to be successful with a company like Botify.
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Synaptics is to acquire the DSP Group in a deal worth $538m to boost its AI and IoT technology
The DSP Group has wireless chips for multiple markets in the Internet of Audio Things (IoAT) with DECT/CAT-iq, ULE, Wi-Fi, PSTN, HDClear, video and VoIP technologies. The company had a turnover of $35.8m in the last quarter, with a turnover of $114.5m in 2020. The deal at $22.00 per share values the company at $528m
Synaptics recently announced its Low Power Edge AI initiative and the addition of DSP Group's SmartVoice products to Synaptics' Katana smart vision platform creates a complete portfolio that can both serve existing customer needs and address the significant future market. In addition, the combination further strengthens the Synaptics wireless connectivity portfolio by adding DECT Ultra Low Energy (ULE) for intelligent home security systems.
The DSP Group, founded in 1987, initially started out licensing DSP cores such as Pine, Oak and Teak. In 2002 the group combined its IP licensing business with Parthus Technologies to create Ceva and focussed instead on audio digital signal processors and more recently on AI cores. In 2020 it acquired noise cancellation specialist SoundChip in Switzerland, and as well as the headquarters in San Jose, California, has offices in Nuremberg, Germany, Edinburgh and Daresbury in the UK.
"We continue to invest in technologies that tilt our product mix toward IoT applications," said Michael Hurlston, President and CEO of Synaptics. "DSP Group's expertise in SmartVoice and ULE wireless solutions, coupled with Synaptics' leadership position in far-field speech recognition and IoT directed Wi-Fi/BT combos enables us to deliver increasingly differentiated solutions to our combined customer base, while positioning us to lead the transition to AI enabled devices at the edge of the network."
"We are excited to join forces with Synaptics, a recognized leader in products for IoT. This combination provides a great result for our shareholders who have supported us through this journey, delivering meaningful and certain value," said Ofer Elyakim, CEO of DSP Group. "Our complementary portfolios together with the combination of our world-class engineering teams creates an exciting opportunity for DSP Group's core technology to extend further into our existing customers' product portfolio."
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Botify helps brands bridge the gap between their website and search engines to get the most out of their online presence.
When it comes to running a successful company nowadays, it’s hard to overstate the importance of search engine optimization, or SEO — the process that draws traffic to your website when people Google something. In fact, last year, businesses spent about $47 billion on SEO-related services, and the market is expected to be worth more than $103 billion by 2025.
Botify, a software startup helping businesses turn organic online searches into increased revenue, is in a position to take a big bite out of this burgeoning industry thanks to a fresh $55 million funding round. The Series C was led by InfraVia Growth, with participation from Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Eurazeo and Ventech, and will be used to scale the company’s operations amid increasing market demand.
Prior to developing Botify, French entrepreneur Adrien Menard was heading a large marketing agency in Paris. While there, he says he realized that an average of 50 percent of its website was ignored by sites like Google and Bing, meaning the agency was losing big opportunities to drive traffic and revenue. So, he teamed up with co-founders Stan Chauvin and Thomas Grange to figure out a way to help big companies drive incremental traffic and revenue from these search engines.
Botify does this with three different products. The first is Botify Analytics, which collects and analyzes data from every phase of the search process. The second is Botify Intelligence, an AI-powered engine that uses the data from the analytics product to provide recommendations on ways to not only protect the traffic a company already has, but also grow it. Finally, there’s Botify Activation, which turns all this data and insight into actions automatically, allowing companies’ SEO teams to focus their efforts on other tasks. These tools, coupled with Botify’s strategic partnerships with platforms like Google Cloud, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Microsoft’s Bing, gives users what they need to get the most out of their online presence.
What Botify says sets the company apart from its competitors is its ability to help companies make their site organically searchable on sites like Google, without any of the tricks typically needed to maintain a high SEO ranking. At the end of the day, Menard says, organic traffic is more sustainable and generates more revenue, which is why Botify is so attractive.
“Organic search marketing represents, on average, about 70 percent of the online traffic and revenue that our customers are doing, so organic search is very important for them and they are going to evaluate Botify on our capacity to support their growth in the revenue coming from the search engines,” Menard told Built In. “[With Botify], they are going to equip their teams with the capabilities to analyze, decide and implement their organic search strategy much faster than if they don’t use Botify.”
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The Flow Machines Mobile leverages machine learning to help users create new music based on style palettes.
The computer science research arm of Sony has launched a cloud-based AI music production tool called Flow Machines Mobile (FM Mobile) to help musicians generate ideas for new melodies, chords, and basslines.
The Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) FM Mobile app, available on the Apple App store and compatible with a range of digital audio workstation (DAW), features a machine learning model that analyses musical data based on the style palette that users select to match the genre and chord progression of the song they want to create. Users can create their own original style palette in the app or choose from various preset palettes created by Sony CSL.
When users press the compose button, the AI will generate eight-bar melodies according to the selected chord progression, Sony CSL said.
"There are parameters such as note duration and melodic complexity, which allows users to have proposals from AI matching their intention," the company added.
Users can then save their creations and import it to their DAW using Flow Machines Professional (FM Pro), a plugin that Sony CSL developed in 2019 for use in a DAW, or into Apple's GarageBand.
FM Mobile has been launched in Japan and the United States. The app will also be released in Europe, Sony CSL said, but a date has not been set.
Meanwhile, the Japanese conglomerate's semiconductor business is set to release two types of stacked event-based vision sensors designed for industrial equipment.
The two sensors, Sony said, employ the company's copper-to-copper connection technology to provide electrical continuity between the pixel chip and the logic chip, and feature pixel size of 4.86 μm.
These features enable the sensors to detect changes in luminance, as well as sense slight changes in vibration, abnormalities for use in predictive maintenance of equipment, and changes in sparks produced during welding and metal cutting, Sony said.
Additionally, Sony boasted the two sensors are equipped with event filtering functions developed by Prophesee.
"Using these filters helps eliminate events that are unnecessary for the recognition task at hand, such as the LED flickering that can occur at certain frequencies (anti-flicker), as well as events that are highly unlikely to be the outline of a moving subject (event filter). The filters also make it possible to adjust the volume of data when necessary to ensure it falls below the event rate that can be processed in downstream systems (event rate control)," Sony said.
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Sony's IMX636 has an array of 1280 x 720 pixels while the IMX637 has 640 x 512 pixels and can detect up to 1 billion events per second based on technology from Prophesee.
Sony Semiconductor has launched two event-based image sensors intended to improve industrial equipment based on technology from Freench developer Prophesee.
Event-based vision sensors asynchronously detect luminance changes for each pixel and output the changed data only, combining it with information on pixel position (x,y coordinates) and time, thereby enabling high-speed, low latency data output. This is a type of image sensing pioneered by Prophesee.
The two companies rolled out a prototype sensor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February 2020.
The IMX636 has an array of 1280 pixels by 720 pixels while the IMX637 has 640 pixers by 512 pixels. Both sensors are black and white and support the detection of up to 1 billion events per second.
The two products Sony is launching are stacked and use a proprietary copper-to-copper connection technique to support a pixel size of 4.86 micron. Copper pads are used to when stacking the pixel section (top chip) and logic circuits (bottom chip). Compared with through-silicon via (TSV) wiring, where the connection is achieved by electrodes intruded around the circumference of the pixel area, this method gives more freedom in design, improves productivity, allows for a more compact size, and increases performance.
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