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CannaTech Cape Town Announces Southern Sky Group as Platinum Sponsor at Upcoming Cannabis Summit

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CannaTech is proud to announce that South African cannabis market leader, Southern Sky Group, will be a Platinum Sponsor at our upcoming Cape Town Cannabis Summit this November 24-26.

Southern Sky Group (formerly Southern Sun Pharma) is an Africa-focused cannabis business led by a seasoned team of executives with a significant track record of building shareholder value, both in North America and Africa. With cannabis production licenses and operations across the continent, the recent launch of the high-end CBD retail store – Goodleaf – combined with the acquisition of Africanpure, a leading, local online CBD retailer, Southern Sky is uniquely positioned to supply the African and European market with premier cannabis products.

South Africa became the third country in Africa to legalise medical cannabis in February 2017. Last September, the country initiated a process of legalising cannabis for personal recreational use, joining Uruguay and Canada at the forefront of the Green Rush. Final recreational cannabis regulation is still a grey area, however significant boosts in the sale and import of growing and manufacturing equipment, and the expansion of local cannabis-ready businesses indicates that stakeholders anticipate a cannabis boom in the very near future. This potential boom was further augmented this May by the dramatic decision to remove cannabidiol (CBD) entirely from South Africa’s drug scheduling system. For at least the next year, all products containing a daily dose of 20 mg of CBD or less will be fully legal and this exemption may be extended beyond the trial period. All of these conditions contribute to making South Africa a fertile market for CBD products, and the perfect location for CannaTech’s Cannabis Summit.

The exemption of CBD is a dramatic regulatory change and one that is opening the floodgates for cannabis-derived products to enter the market. Capitalising on the transformational shift in the global cannabis industry, Southern Sky has leveraged international innovation with local execution and expertise to build out fully integrated cannabis cultivation and processing facilities.

Following South Africa’s full legalization of CBD, Southern Sky’s retail arm Goodleaf, opened the country’s first high-end brick and mortar CBD store on May 31 in Cape Town’s beautiful city centre. The flagship store offers a range of premium hemp-derived CBD products including vaporizers, tinctures and topicals from leading international brands. Goodleaf is committed to offering safe, natural, traceable, and legal products of the highest standard: all products are lab tested to ensure maximum safety and to certify that they are 100% THC free. In addition to locally produced brands, Goodleaf also acts as the South African distributor for well known global products such as Cura Select and others. In a press statement last month, Jonni Katz, Head of Brand and Retail for Southern Sky and CEO of Goodleaf stated:

“We’re excited about what Goodleaf brings to the market. The flagship Goodleaf store offers consumers a well-curated and unique experience in an exclusive downtown space. This store will be the first of a number of premium cannabis stores that we intend to open in high-end retail locations across South Africa.”

The storefronts will also serve as venues for educational and social functions, pop-up events, and other gatherings. Goodleaf is more than just a retail store, it is an integral part of Africa’s growing cannabis industry, promoting product excellence, disseminating information, and curating an immersive experience for consumers.

Southern Sky is further expanding the local South African cannabis ecosystem with its recent acquisition of Africanpure, a Cape Town-based company offering high-quality CBD oil products. The online retailer is known for its affiliation with South African Olympic Gold medal swimmer Roland Schoeman, nicknamed “The Rocket” for holding the world record in 50 metres freestyle.

As Platinum Sponsors of CannaTech Cape Town 2019, Southern Sky is excited to contribute to the positive growth of sub-Saharan Africa’s emerging cannabis ecosystem, while positioning South Africa at the centre of the global cannabis conversation.

 

SOURCE CannaTech

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Ottonomy.IO Unveils High Information Navigation Mapping for Autonomous Robots at NVIDIA GTC 2022

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CTO & Co-Founder Pradyot Korupolu of leading autonomous delivery robotics company, Ottonomy.IO, will be presenting at the NVIDIA GTC 2022 virtual conference. In his session he will discuss autonomous navigation solutions in the event’s “Automotive transportation-autonomous robotics” Industry segment, focusing on moving towards high information navigation maps.

The consumer facing retail and restaurant industry has seen a huge surge in robots operating in everyday, regular human environments (both indoors and outdoors). Ottonomy.IO has deployed robots in multiple consumer environments including airports, retail spaces and campuses.

“With a strong track record in autonomous driving technologies, our team has been able to translate principles of vehicle autonomy to near-term practical use cases for consumer environments,” says Pradyot. “Leveraging high information maps as an input to our contextual navigation engine, Ottonomy.IO has the most robust navigation suite running in live conditions for both indoor and outdoor navigation for restaurants, retail spaces and airports.”

While new use cases are on the rise, data sets are still limited. Pradyot will discuss fusion tools and techniques that Ottonomy.IO’s delivery robots use to bridge this gap, while operating safely and efficiently in crowded and complicated environments. The presentation at the conference will be in the Automotive Transportation-Autonomous Robotics track of NVidia’s 2022 conference addressing “efficient camera and lidar fusion” as a way to get high-Information navigation maps.

These high information maps achieve several objectives:

  • Thin layer of condensed information maps useful for intelligent navigation.
  • Optimized for edge hardware running the mapping and localization pipelines.
  • Real-time fusion of multimodal sensors, specifically 3D lidars and RGB cameras.
  • Navigation maps that combine both metric and semantic distance.
  • information of the environment as an input to Ottonomy’s Contextual Navigation.

You can view Ottonomy.IO’s presentation at NVidia GTC 2022 on Wednesday, March 23, 2022 at 10:00a.m. EST. To gain access to the session, register for NVIDIA GTC conference here.

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Artificial Intelligence

Algonomy to Unveil Its Algorithmic Decisioning Platform that Drives Real-time Customer Engagement at Scale During Retail’s BIG Show 2022

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Algonomy, a leader in algorithmic decisioning, will showcase its expanded platform that features new and advanced uses of AI that enable real-time customer engagement during the National Retail Federation’s Annual Convention and Trade Show at the Jacob K. Javits Center from Jan. 16-18, 2022.

Working with some of the world’s largest brands such as eBay, McDonald’s, Price Chopper, Tiffany & Co., Pizza Hut, Domino’s, HP and Boots, Algonomy leads the industry when it comes to creating a data-centric single view of today’s digitally native consumer, and decisioning intelligence to drive hyper-personalized engagement.

The retail technology solution partner will have several demonstrations for marketing, commerce and merchandising leaders available in its booth (#6403) throughout the three-day exhibition, including:

Social Proof Messaging

One of the main highlights of the company’s latest release is Social Proofing, technology that gives retailers the ability to build credibility and aid consumer decisions using social approval. Social Proofing offers a way to create trust, urgency and reliability during the shopping journey and is algorithmically optimized in real-time to provide shoppers critical information on trending products through views, purchases, inventory levels and more. The product is enterprise grade and self-serve for marketers.

Visual AI Deep Recommendations

Visual AI helps companies replicate in-store personal shopping experiences on digital commerce properties, and uses deep learning to help online shoppers find products that resemble what they like and also get complete-the-look recommendations. Using product images that do not require historical events and behavioral data to generate relevant product recommendations, Visual AI is unlike traditional recommender engines.

Real-Time Customer Data Platform

The CDP is the foundation of the company’s Algorithmic Decisioning Platform, enabling intelligence-infused decisions by integrating demand and supply to create granular customer segments. In addition to identity resolution and built-in customer analytics, this enhanced version comes with real-time capabilities such as data ingestion, profile updates, audience discovery, decisioning intelligence, and audience activation.

Algorithmic Catalog Enrichment

This new capability will help e-commerce retailers create rich high-quality product catalogs, thereby helping shoppers select products that meet their nuanced requirements. Algorithmic Catalog Enrichment also uses deep learning and image-based feature extraction techniques to automatically identify product attributes and metadata from descriptions and images. In addition to reducing the burden of manually updating product attributes, a well-developed catalog improves product discovery and search results, and eases shopper decision-making, leading to higher conversions and reduced instances of product returns.

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Artificial Intelligence

As organizations look to respond to COVID-19, Avanade launches tool to help businesses accelerate their adoption of artificial intelligence

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Companies looking to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic should focus on accelerating their adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve resilience and prepare for the future, according to Avanade, the leading digital innovator on the Microsoft ecosystem.

Newly published research carried out for Avanade by independent research firm Vanson Bourne, shows that only one percent of companies are fully “AI Mature”. But those who are successful in fully integrating AI into their businesses can experience up to five times return on investment through a combination of increased productivity, improved process efficiency and lower operating costs.

To help companies assess where they are on their AI journey and rethink how to accelerate it, Avanade has developed a specialized tool that measures an organization’s AI maturity across five key areas of AI adoption, including:

  • AI Strategy
  • AI Talent & Culture
  • Digital Ethics
  • Data Supply Chain and Analytics
  • Technology and Process

The tool then uses the assessment information, together with data collected from the Avanade AI Maturity Survey of 1700 senior business and IT decision-makers across 15 countries, to plot the company’s position and highlight key areas to develop and insert AI for business optimization.

“While uncertainties around the human impact of AI have diminished significantly in recent years, most companies are still grappling with how to implement it to achieve meaningful, sustainable business outcomes,” said Simon Thomas, Avanade Data and AI lead. “With business resilience currently being tested to its fullest, organizations need to rethink and accelerate their integration of AI to take full advantage of it benefits, whatever the future holds. Our AI assessment tool can help them start and take that journey.”

Avanade’s research showed that while most companies recognize the potential of AI to have a positive impact on their businesses, many executives are struggling to successfully implement it:

  • AI Strategy:  95% of respondents find AI is critical but a third (32%) cite building AI strategy as one of the top three barriers, and a similar amount (35%) are looking externally to get help creating their strategy.
  • Talent and Culture:  80% of respondents agree that business culture and change are THE make or break for AI’s long-term success, and over half (54%) are struggling with recruiting AI talent and/or shifting their culture.
  • Digital Ethics: 96% find that ensuring “digital ethics by design” is necessary to implement AI and 66% are implementing a digital ethics framework.
  • Technology and Process:  61% of respondents have experimented with automation and advanced analytics, with half of those using computer vision (35%) or virtual agents (34%).
  • Data Supply Chain: 65% of organizations say that their data quality needs improvement.

Summaries highlighting each of the five areas explored by Avanade’s research are available on Avanade.com.

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