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Eye-Tracking: Control Your Computer with Your Gaze

Historically, exceptional situations always give innovations a nudge. When the pandemic hit, companies of all sizes and areas of business had to rethink the ways their workforce would work best in the ‘new normal.’

Many companies have always been investing heavily in how their workforce can work best, whether they are developers, sales and services employees, or in administration. Each has individual needs, but what they all have in common is that they need access to a computer in order to fulfill their tasks. They use a keyboard, a mouse, and touch as the de-facto, standard interaction with the machine. This technology hasn’t evolved much over recent years.

At offices, we are used to working according to ergonomic standards whereas in our home offices we may not have these standards available.

Next Generation of User Experience – From ‘Touch Less’ to ‘Touchless’

Did you know that, on average, 25% of a work day is spent using a mouse, accounting for thousands of clicks and scrolls? We switch between the keyboard and mouse up to 2,000 times per day. In an internal pilot at SAP with 35 users from different departments, almost 500 kilometers of mouse-movement distance was measured within six weeks.

This not only costs a lot of time but also causes stress-related diseases, such as repetitive strain injuries (RSI), also known as ‘mouse arm.’

With the eye-tracking solution NUIA from SAP partner 4tiitoo GmbH Munich, it is possible to provide an innovative tool to employees, working to address their ergonomic situation, reduce mouse movements and mouse-keyboard swaps, and improve efficiency and appearance during customer calls.

All SAP colleagues can order this solution to use in the office and even their home offices.

Following its pledge to flex, SAP’s future of work plans include monitors equipped with eye-trackers by default and the ability to download necessary software just by scanning a QR code.

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The Use Case Podcast: Storytelling about Censia with Joanna Riley

In the Use Case Podcast, episode 114, we have storytelling about Censia with Joanna Riley. During this episode, Joanna talks about how practitioners make the business case or the use case for purchasing Censia.

Joanna is an expert in all things teams and tech. Her passion for democratizing talent information in order to help organizations hire much better talent more efficiently and lucratively really comes through during the podcast.

Listen Here…

Chicago-Based Startup Anthill Raises $3 Million in Seed Funding

Chicago-based startup Anthill AI, Inc., the talent management platform designed for the deskless workforce, announced it has raised $3 million in seed funding. Founded in 2020 by co-founders CEO Muriel Clauson and CTO Young Jae Kim, Anthill makes it possible for companies to connect with, develop, and retain deskless employees in manufacturing, distribution, and retail at scale. The HR SaaS startup has created a comprehensive talent platform based upon skills data and people science for employers paired with a mobile experience for employees. The startup’s goal is to better understand and develop the deskless workforce (those who do not work at a desk or computer), who are 80 percent of the global workforce.

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The Business of Marketing Featuring Elias Guerra, CEO of Popwallet

Throughout season 2 of The Business of Marketing podcast, there will be a spotlight featuring a selection of startup companies working with SAP.iO to accelerate their business. This episode, you will hear from Elias Guerra, CEO of Popwallet and participant in SAP.io Foundries Program, and shares some of the biggest drivers that impacted the growth of his company and the ways that SAP.iO was supportive through this process for growth in the future.

 

Listen to podcast here…

Too Good To Go Partners With Waze to Fight Food Waste

Too Good To Go is an app that connects users to stores and restaurants with unsold surplus food and offers it at a discounted price. This week, the company announced that it has partnered with Waze, a GPS navigation software app, to fight food waste.

The partnership is called Waze for Good initiative, and it will last throughout the month of August. On the Waze app, the map will feature 100 Too Good To Go partner businesses in the metro areas of Washington D.C., Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, and Portland. Some of the featured stores will include Just Salad, Auntie Anne’s La Colombe, Juice Press, PLNT Burger, Café d’Avignon.

Waze users will see dropped pins on the map for Too Good To Go business partners. When selected, these pins will give information about the business and the initiative. The participating partners will offer “surprise bags” of surplus food, costing around $3.99-$5.99 each, that users can pick up. Earlier this month, Too Good To Go partnered with JOKR, a ghost grocery store chain to offer similar $5 surprise bags of surplus products.

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SAP Startup Spotlight: Clarifruit | e3zine – E-3 Magazine International

SAP invests in a lot of promising startups, and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all of them. E-3 Magazine has selected the most interesting companies to showcase in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series. In this article, we will take a look at Clarifruit.

Elad Mardix is the CEO and co-founder of Clarifruit. Previously, he had a distinguished career working for J.P. Morgan in both New York and Hong Kong, where he ran J.P. Morgan’s Asia Technology investment banking franchise. As a senior tech banker, Mardix had the privilege of partnering with some of the world’s most brilliant tech entrepreneurs, taking innovative companies public, advising on transformational M&A transactions, and helping those entrepreneurs realize their dreams. In this interview, he talks about what Clarifruit does and what’s next for the startup.

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Mentor Spaces Now Available on SAP Store

Mentor Spaces has announced that its community-driven mentorship platform for underrepresented talent is now available on SAP® Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. Mentor Spaces provides mentorship technology to businesses that use SAP® SuccessFactors® solutions to scale diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

“As a participant of the HR and future of work program at SAP.iO San Francisco, we are thrilled to be continuing our partnership with SAP,” said Chris Motley, founder and CEO of Mentor Spaces. “With Mentor Spaces, human resources and DEI professionals have the opportunity to leverage the power of scalable mentorship technology to easily attract, hire and retain underrepresented talent. We are proud to be working alongside SAP to help advance the careers of underrepresented talent.”

Mentor Spaces facilitates conversations with experts aligned to one’s professional interests and goals through both Q&As and live sessions. The power of Mentor Spaces’ technology enables companies to enhance brand, engage colleagues, and mentor historically marginalized populations to cultivate diverse talent pipelines. Organizations that partner with Mentor Spaces benefit from up to a 30 percent increase in employee retention, a 50 percent decrease in time spent on admin and talent sourcing, and a significant increase in employee engagement.

SAP Store, found at store.sap.com, delivers a simplified and connected digital customer experience for finding, trying, buying and renewing approximately 2,000 solutions from SAP and its partners. There, customers can find the SAP solutions and SAP-validated solutions they need to grow their business. And for each purchase made through SAP Store, SAP will plant a tree.

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Spring 2021 Cohort Reflections: How SAP.iO Helped These Founders Start-up With SAP

This Spring, our team helped 50 startups launch partnerships with SAP. I took some time to read through notes we received from these incredible founders and am excited to amplify their experiences with SAP.iO.

Tom Coburn, CEO of Jebbit recently participated in SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv’s Consumer Engagement program and shared that “The SAP.iO accelerator program was extremely well organized and well run. It was easy for myself and my management team to participate in while very busy running our company and gave us an incredible fast track to learn more about SAP and build relationships with the right teams for us.”

Like Jebbit, many startups that go through our programs have already participated in an early-stage accelerator like TechstarsPlug and Play Accelerator and Y Combinator so they can dive right in and leverage our carefully curated paths to help them launch a successful partnership with SAP.

Vue Storefront, a Y Combinator grad, completed an integration to SAP Commerce Cloud during their time at SAP.iO. Their CEO, Patrick Friday, shared that the “SAP.iO program has given us a lighting speed introduction into the whole SAP ecosystem and connected us with the right people on their side. We had detailed workshops and ongoing Q&A sessions throughout the whole process which boosted the speed at which we are working on the integration.”

Dr. Zara Nanu, CEO of Gapsquare leveraged our network to reach new markets. She shared that “The SAP.iO Foundry has been invaluable for improving our market reach through integration, connecting us to a wider pool of customers.” Since 2017, our team has worked as the “matchmakers” of the enterprise software world to bring together startups and customers to drive innovation and we’re thrilled to see our alumni thrive.

We are proud that our programs are the fastest way for entrepreneurs to launch a partnership with SAP and Chris Motley, Founder and CEO of Mentor Spaces agrees. During SAP.iO Foundry San Francisco’s Future of Work program, Mentor Spaces built an integration to SAP SuccessFactors and launched on the SAP Store. While reflecting on his experience, Chris shared that “The SAP.iO program reduced our time to market by at least one year!”

FortressIQ also joined the 120+ startups with solutions available on the SAP Store. Through a new integration, companies are now able to combine FortressIQ’s user-level process data with SAP Process Insights system-level process data to fast-track transformation initiatives. Jay Sivachelvan commented that “SAP.iO was a game changing experience for our startup, turning what would have been a 12 month journey into a 3-month, white-glove experience.”

Interested in collaborating with SAP and our global customer base? Apply for our upcoming Fall 2021 programs today!

Gapsquare, a pioneer of machine learning into gender pay disparity, is acquired by XpertHR

Inequalities between women and men in the workplace have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and are likely to persist in the near future, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). The World Economic Forum estimates globally it will take 267.6 years to close the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity.

So it’s even more crucial that the global gender and ethnicity pay gap be “squared away” by entrepreneurs passionate about the issue.

Gapsquare, a U.K. startup that’s been addressing this issue since 2017, has been among a handful of startups addressing these concerns via machine learning around the issue.

Its analytics software, which analyses and tracks pay disparity, pay equality and pay gap data, has now been acquired by XpertHR, a part of RELX, for an undisclosed sum. TechCrunch understands from sources that Gapsquare never raised institutional venture funding.

The Gapsquare platform — along with co-founders Dr. Zara Nanu and Ion Suruceanu — will be joining the XpertHR team. Gapsquare previously counted Vodafone, Condé Nast and Serco as clients, amounting to data from tens of thousands of employees.

Gapsquare’s model is to provide HR and Reward professionals with actionable insights about their company’s existing pay gaps.

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Cogniac Provides Trimac Transportation with AI Visual Operations Intelligence Platform

Cogniac Corporation (“Cogniac”), a San Jose, California-based provider of enterprise-class Artificial Intelligence (AI) image and video analysis, today announced its partnership with Trimac Transportation (“Trimac”), one of the largest transportation service companies in North America. The partnership implements Cogniac’s proprietary visual data processing platform throughout Trimac’s document identification and filing processes.

Cogniac designed, and is deploying, the document imaging solution to boost operational efficiencies within Trimac’s billing process. With 3,400 team members and more than 140 branches located throughout North America, Trimac is seeking to leverage Cogniac’s machine vision to drive efficacy in the classification and organization of the millions of documents uploaded, digitally filed, and invoiced throughout the year.

“We believe our AI vision is an excellent fit for Trimac’s unique needs in operations,” said Vahan Tchakerian, Chief Partnership Officer at Cogniac. “By utilizing our platform’s abundant collection of visual data, Trimac will be able to glean important information more quickly and efficiently from uploaded documentation. Our technology is designed to drive productivity at enterprise scale by advancing the management of operational logistics.”

Trimac’s integration of the Cogniac system will provide support and process infrastructure to allow Trimac to focus on their commitment to providing high-quality bulk shipping solutions with a secure supply chain, by accelerating the document digitization process, optimizing workflows, and allowing the company to strategically redeploy employees throughout a range of operations.

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Accredify Integrates with SAP SuccessFactors to Assist Companies in Employee COVID-19 Health Verification

Accredify, a Singapore-based firm that creates and issues verifiable documents, today announced that it has signed an agreement with multinational software corporation SAP, to be integrated as an application on its Human Resource Management System, SAP SuccessFactors, which leverages SAP.iO open innovation model to revolutionise the future of work. By integrating Accredify as an app on the SuccessFactors marketplace, clients will be able to verify an employee’s COVID health credentials through Accredify’s verification portal.

The partnership follows concerns raised amongst corporations about the provision of an affordable and efficient method to verify an employee’s COVID health status as businesses prepare to reopen physical office spaces safely.

Employees simply have to upload their COVID medical credentials such as vaccination records or swab test results into Accredify’s verification portal on the SuccessFactors platform. Employers will be notified instantaneously once a COVID medical record has been uploaded and verified, and will be able to keep track of an individual employee’s COVID medical records on the platform.

Accredify’s app will be available to all clients subscribed to the SuccessFactors platform. As Accredify’s verification portal is agnostic to the different COVID medical standards and schema issued globally, enterprises using SuccessFactors will be able to verify medical records that have been issued by healthcare providers around the world. Currently, there are more than 7,400 clients around the globe who utilise SAP’s SuccessFactors platform.

“People are our business and core to the success of any organisations globally. Every employee experience matters, and more so as we are returning to the new normal. Workplace health and safety management measures will be top of mind, and companies who are intending to enhance existing policies or implement new processes will need to leverage technology to enable a seamless, exceptional employee experience,” said Eileen Chua, Managing Director, SAP Asia Pte. Ltd., Singapore.

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EON announces strategic investment from SML — ushering in a new era for connected products across fashion retail

Fashion retail’s leading Connected Product Cloud, EON, has redefined the competitive landscape in retail when it revealed that SML, one of the world’s largest retail technology companies, has participated in the company’s recent $2.1 million investment round.

For EON, a software company that enables brands to connect to their products through Digital IDs, the strategic investment and partnership of SML, who pioneered retail’s existing product identification systems, is a powerful signal to the industry. Many of retail’s largest brands are already digitizing their products on the EON Cloud, which provides the technology essential to connect directly to customers through each product, and scale new applications, business models and services. Now backed by SML, EON is well-positioned to usher in a new era of retail – connecting brands and customers in ways never-before-possible and powering industry’s at-scale transformation to sustainable and circular commerce.

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Customer Experience Is Key As Consumers Share More Online Reviews

While many things changed in 2020, in the e-commerce industry things may have shifted particularly drastically, with an impressive spike in online shopping on a global scale. Pandemic lockdowns catalyzed a process that was already underway in pre-Covid times — the transition from in-store to online shopping.

As consumers get increasingly more comfortable with researching and purchasing products online, they are also becoming more used to expressing their feedback through online product reviews and social media. Recent research indicates that in 2020 there was a surge in product reviews in multiple markets; more on that to follow.

What does this change mean for e-commerce companies? How can businesses leverage this change? In this article, I’ll share a bit about what our company noticed while doing research on the beauty industry and what I think e-commerce executives can do to make sure their brands stay relevant.

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SEDNA raises $34m in Series B funding to realise its mission of reimagining email

SEDNA, an intelligent communications system for high-performance teams at companies like Glencore, Norden, and Bunge, has secured $34m in Series B funding.

The funding will allow SEDNA to expand its investment in the global supply chain space while also increasing value in new verticals where overwhelming communication makes work harder. Customers fully implementing SEDNA in complex environments save over ten hours a week per user.

Backed by global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with the participation of Series A investors Stride.VC, Chalfen Ventures and the SAP.iO fund, the Series B financing enables SEDNA to develop its product, data science, and go-to market functions and work toward its goal of becoming the leading intelligent communication system where global businesses get work done with speed, context, and clarity.

The increase in digital communication channels and remote, fragmented workforces has created unprecedented challenges for organisations dealing with enormous volumes of information while simultaneously needing to work quickly and securely. SEDNA’s intelligent communication system allows companies to break down silos and work across their organisation within a single digital workspace – improving certainty and promoting seamless collaboration across teams doing complex, multi-party work.

Building on its dominant position in the global supply chain market, SEDNA will help teams that run complex processes in other verticals to get work done faster. Examples abound in markets such as B2B SaaS, business banking, settlement, claims, treasury, and risk management, where SEDNA has already won customers like Starling Bank.

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