New Delhi Jun 18 (PTI) Edutech platform Unacademy on Thursday said it has appointed Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar to its board of directors.

"With this announcement, the organisation brings in his deep operational experience in building Flipkart and Udaan to propel the growth of Unacademy. Sujeet is also an investor in Unacademy and has been a mentor for the organisation since its inception," a statement said.

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As a member of the board of directors, he will be advising on operational growth and business strategies, it added.

Kumar is the co-founder of Udaan, an online B2B marketplace, and was instrumental in Udaan becoming the fastest Indian start-up to achieve the Unicorn status in just three years. Prior to Udaan, he headed operations for Flipkart's largest seller and captive logistics business.

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"He (Sujeet) was one of our first angel investors who went on to personally invest in many rounds of Unacademy. Sujeet has been a great support for the founders of Unacademy and over the years he has mentored us on leadership, growth, and on building a diverse organisation that will democratise education," Unacademy co-founder and CEO Gaurav Munjal said.

**** BharatMatrimony launches online video chat

BharatMatrimony on Thursday said it has launched 'Live in-app video chatting' to help customers connect with each other and move their matchmaking conversations forward as people practice social distancing amid COVID-19 pandemic.

The new feature for premium members is to address the challenge of members currently being unable to meet in-person outside home, due to the lockdown restrictions, a statement said.

The video chat feature provides privacy controls to the individuals and allows matches to connect via video call without exchanging phone numbers. Members will have privacy options wherein they can specify who can initiate video call with them.

"As the lockdown has forced people to stay indoors, we had to find a way to let our matches connect safely and take the next step to finding their life partner. We believe that this will remain a most-used feature even after the lockdown and social distancing ends," Murugavel Janakiraman, founder and CEO of Matrimony.com, said.

**** IBM launches Watson Works to address challenges of returning to workplace

IBM on Thursday announced Watson Works, a curated set of products that embeds Watson AI models and applications, to help companies navigate aspects of the return-to-workplace challenge following lockdowns put in place to contain the spread of COVID-19.

Watson Works provides data-driven insights to help employers make informed decisions on workplace re-entry, facilities management, space allocation and other COVID-related priorities, a statement said.

"We have designed Watson Works to help businesses navigate the workplace with the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis as effectively as possible," IBM Senior Vice President, Cognitive Applications, Blockchain and Ecosystems, Bob Lord said.

Applying AI models and applications is especially useful in this context, where there are so many different sources of information businesses must consider, and every aspect of the situation is in flux, he added.

**** TCS collaborates with IBM to power digital and cognitive enterprise transformations

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and IBM on Thursday said they have expanded their global alliance to help clients accelerate their digital and cognitive enterprise transformations to IBM public cloud using IBM Cloud Paks.

As part of this partnership, TCS will establish an IBM Enterprise Cloud Architecture Unit, which will include technical professionals from both the companies, a statement said.

TCS and IBM plan to co-develop solutions designed to help clients migrate workloads across applications, analytics, data estate and platforms using IBM Cloud Paks, enterprise-ready containerized software solutions running on Red Hat OpenShift, it added.

Raman Venkatraman, Global Head - HiTech & Professional Services Industry Unit at TCS, said the company is investing in its alliance with IBM to co-create accelerators and other assets to further enhance the speed to market of its customers' modernisation initiatives and drive their transformation to become cognitive ready enterprises leveraging the new IBM public cloud ecosystem.

TCS is part of the IBM public cloud ecosystem, an initiative to support global system integrators and independent software vendors to help clients modernise and transform mission-critical workloads with Red Hat OpenShift for any cloud environment, including IBM public cloud.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)