We have always believed in you," IOC president Thomas Bach said.Another cauldron was lit in the city’s port area early Saturday that will be displayed for Rio residents to enjoy.There were times after the International Olympic Committee selected Rio ahead of Chicago, Tokyo and Madrid in 2009 when it seemed that the city of 6. The spreading health crisis of the mosquito-born Zika virus kept some athletes away.". After all, nowhere parties quite like Rio.Shoals of samba dancers flowed in a rainbow of colors, but many showed less flesh than normal for Brazil, seemingly mindful of their global TV audience. "It’s disappearing very quickly. Fewer than 25 foreign heads of state were listed as attending, with others seemingly staying away to avoid giving the impression of taking sides amid Brazil’s leadership uncertainty.After one of the roughest-ever rides from vote to games by an Olympic host, the city of beaches, carnival, grinding poverty and sun-kissed wealth celebrated Brazil’s can-do spirit, biodiversity and melting-pot history.

Her ouster less than four months ahead of the games for alleged budget violations was one of many spanners in the works of Brazil’s Olympic preparations and impacted the opening ceremony itself. Promises to clean up Rio’s filthy waters remained unfulfilled."But it wasn’t all doom and gloom.The cannonball-shaped cauldron was lit by Brazilian marathoner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima. The heavy bill for the games, at least $12 billion, made them unpopular with many. At his fifth and last Olympics, it was the first time the record holder of 22 medals had marched in an opening ceremony, having skipped previous ones to save energy for competition. Fireworks formed the word "Rio" in the skies.What it lacked in flash, Rio made up for with feeling.The honour of officially declaring the games open fell to Michel Temer, Brazil’s unpopular interim President, who was loudly jeered and faced shouts of "out with Temer".

The colossal Christ the Redeemer statue was bathed in Brazilian yellow and green. At the 2004 games, an Irish spectator wearing a kilt, knee-socks and a beret tackled de Lima while he was leading the Olympic marathon. When 40 per cent of the homes in Brazil have no sanitation, you can’t really be spending a billion reals for a show. "It is not a good message for the world. Only Brazil’s team, which marched last, drew a louder roar from the crowd than the refugees.The athletes were given tree seeds, plus cartridges of soil.After the grandeur of Beijing’s opening ceremony and the high-tech, socks manufacturing machines cheeky inventiveness of London’s, Rio’s was earthier and less swish but more sobering with its gloomy environmental look at the future and deliberate penny-pinching."Our admiration is even greater because you managed this at a very difficult time in Brazilian history. Just. Another woman pushed Nemati’s wheelchair.

As a consequence, Russia’s team was whittled down from a hoped-for 389 athletes to around 270. Creative director Fernando Meirelles said their budget, slashed by half as Brazil’s economic recession bit ever harder, "is 12 times less than London, 20 times less than Beijing.""It is pretty tacky to be overspending," he said.5 million people might not get its act together for the world’s greatest sporting mega-event. Heavily armed security stopped a small group of protesters from getting close to the stadium ahead of the ceremony. Their flag-bearer, Rose Nathike Lokonyen, fled war in South Sudan and ran her first race in a refugee camp in northern Kenya.The crowd roared when Bundchen sashayed from one side of the 78,000-seat arena to the other, as Tom Jobim’s grandson, Daniel, played his grandfather’s famous song about the Ipanema girl "tall and tan and young and lovely". When the seeds sprout, they will be planted in a Rio park.""In the end I feel good that I am not spending money that Brazil hasn’t got.Supermodel Gisele Bundchen shimmered to the tune of The Girl from Ipanema.

She was paralysed in a car accident as a teenager.With "USA" emblazoned on the back of his jacket, Michael Phelps carried the flag for the US team, the largest with 549 competitors. They were joined by a first-ever Refugee Olympic Team of 10 athletes, displaced from Syria, South Sudan, Congo and Ethiopia."The heat is melting the icecap," a voice intoned in the Maracana Stadium. Dancers, all hips and wobble, grooved to thumping funk and sultry samba beats.Iran picked a woman, archer Zahra Nemati, as flag-bearer for its team made up overwhelmingly of men.Greece, the historical and spiritual home of the games, led the march by athletes into the stadium.But with more than a dash of "gambiarra", the Brazilian art of quick-fixes and making do, Rio is ready.With a limited budget, the consequence of a biting recession that roiled preparations for South America’s first Olympics, Brazil laced its high-energy opening party for the games of the 31st Olympiad with a sobering message of the dangers of global warming. He was standing in for suspended President Dilma Rousseff.

Instead of gold, he fell back to take bronze.In a video preceding the show, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the games "celebrate the best of humanity" and appealed for an Olympic truce, calling on "all warring parties to lay down their weapons" during the two weeks of sporting achievement.On behalf of all 11,288 competitors (6,182 men; 5,106 women), Brazilian two-time Olympic champion sailor Robert Scheidt pledged that they won’t take banned drugs — an oath likely to ring false to fans after the scandal of government-orchestrated cheating in Russia.Graphic projections of world cities being swamped by rising seas set Rio de Janeiro’s otherwise fun and festive gala apart from the more self-congratulatory and lavish celebrations that Beijing and London wowed with in 2008 and 2012

Even ten years ago, if someone ever saw you talking to a machine, they had one word for you -- lunatic, or other variants of this word, depending on your choice of regional dialect. Today, things have changed. Millennials are uber comfortable talking into and hearing back from a machine, and if the non-millennials do not catch up, they are going to be called lunatics the next time they ask directions from a human being!Voice assistants, from day one, had massive potential, from changing web surfing behaviour to making voice the virtual keyboard to all the information in the world. A major step was taken a few days back in India, to kick-start the next wave of voice-enabled computing. Amazon India, at its Voxcon event, revealed that Alexa will now understand and speak in Hindi!

With this development, Alexa now becomes that virtual Salwar-clad all-knowing, ever-responsive girl who can now converse with millions of middle-class Indian households. From typical activities like playing music to dimming lights, the powers of Alexa can now be leveraged to turn up family soaps, get Ramayan or Quran recitations, and become the central family compute device for entertainment and information. On one hand, mass adoption of Hindi voice computing opens up huge opportunities for rural computing at the grassroots, and on the other, allows brands to build an application with Hindi voice at the centre pillar.Global IoT brand Tuya Smart envisions a smart home where every device talks (literally) to each other.

The company has created a solution where a small piece of hardware can be plugged into anything from a fan or an AC or a TV or even a washing machine, to make it voice-ready. Tuya takes care of the entire back end mesh of connectivity formats and standards, giving the manufacture an affordable option to smarten socks machine Manufacturers their electronic devices, and the consumer, more devices that listen to you.On the software side of things, there are companies like Agrahyah Technologies that voice-enables companies that already have non-voice websites or apps. From car comparisons to mutual fund plans, this Indian company has voice-enabled over 100 brands and hopes to grow massively in the coming months. And then we have companies like Hungama, that have unlocked unique insights on Indian consumers of digital entertainment, and are looking at voice to give them a platform for growth.

Unlike the rest of the world, music is categorized in India, not by the singer, but the actor that has acted in the song, and Hungama has voice-enabled results to suit this global deviation just for India. The company also believes that entertainment video consumption is at an all-time high in India and Hindi voice will only grow it further.Alexa behn now has an Indian visa and can speak Hindi fluently. Between her and her sisters at Apple and Google, the threesome is ready to rock India with Hindi. Next step: regional languages. Lets wait to see which sister jumps on to that bandwagon!--IndiaTechOnline

Machine learning algorithms gather knowledge at an oversize scale, consolidate this knowledge and establish patterns during this knowledge from its own disposition history. Based on these patterns it judges whether a borrower is credit worthy or not and regulate the process of loan decisioning engine. So AI may help you make credit decisions at scale but it is Machine Learning that helps you improve your algorithms and ensure that you are one step ahead of the industry in understanding credit and market patterns. There are few platforms which offer help in credit analysis. CoinTribeCoinTribe is a leading online loan disbursement platform that provides quick and easy collateral-free loans to small businesses and individuals.

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Satya MicroCapitalSatya MicroCapital is an NBFC-MFI serving low-income entrepreneurs in India’s rural and urban areas. The firm provides prompt, convenient, and affordable collateral-free credit to unbanked and underserved people through a strong credit assessment and centralized approval system.HappyHappy assess over 1000 variables about the merchant to underwrite his micro business. Its credit model is based on the merchants level of business engagement with the partner, his behaviour towards borrowing, APIs, demographics & business trends. If the merchant is doing healthy business with the partner, he is likely to get a big credit line from Happy Loans. Promising a unique borrowing experience to Indians, Happy Loans provides customized loan offerings to microenterprise owners to meet their specific demands.

It even offers micro business loans that start at as low as Rs. 2,000 for durations as short as 30 days.MoneyTapMoneyTap is Indias first app-based consumer credit line. The "Credit Line" means that the bank will issue a limit of up to flat knitting machine Suppliers Rs. 5 Lakh, without any collateral or charging any interest. Against this limit, using the MoneyTap app, consumers can borrow as little as Rs. 3,000 or as much as Rs. 5 Lakh and repay it as EMIs from 2 months to 3 years. The app securely connects with the banking systems to give them not only an instant approval but also a credit limit, depending on individual credit history