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A hair care line, a company using recycled glass to replace lost coastal areas and a business that makes it easier to train employees are facing off against each other at theNew Orleans Entrepreneur Week pitch competition.

This year's event, which has been restyled "NOEW Fest," starts on Monday and continues through April 1, with the addition of a closing "fun day" of food and music at The Broadside in Mid-City. While most of the educational events will remain free.some of the fest events that take place through the week now require tickets, including the March 31 pitch final at Generations Hall in the Warehouse District.

Sydni Raymond will be there making the investment case for Bomb Ass Fro, the company she founded two year ago, inspired by her own quest for a way to deal with the bad hair days she has struggled through in the oppressive humidity of her native New Orleans.

Raymond, a Xavier University graduate, was fed up with having to buy so many products and decided she needed to create her own all-in-one solution. She recruited a chemist and together they began experimenting. In early 2021, Bomb Ass Fro was born.

If we win, the first thing I will do is get my inventory back up, said Raymond, who manufactures in Tampa and fulfills online orders from a local warehouse facility. I also plan to hire employees and expand my product line. Eventually, wed like to get into salons and retail outlets like Whole Foods.

Her competitors include Glass Half Full, a company founded in 2020 by then-Tulane University students Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz who were looking for ways to make glass recycling both useful and profitable.

"We're innovating in a traditional space (and) our business model is to have revenue at both the front end and the back end," Trautmann said.

Glass Half Full has a roster of residential and business clients who pay them to pick up glass and take it to their facility in the Desire area, where it is crushed into sand and gravel. The results are used in coastal restoration projects, or sold to landscapers, jewelry-makers and flooring manufacturers.

The company has done three coastal restoration projects so far: one on land owned by the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe; one at the Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge on the north shore; and another at the Bayou Bienvenue Wetlands Triangle.

Glass Half Full has gotten by so far on grants and "free money" from GoFundMe campaigns. Trautmann said a win would give them money to expand their pick-up program to Mississippi and eventually to open hubs in other Gulf states.

David Decuir said his company, iCan, came about while he was working for Danos. The Terrebonne Parish energy company wanted Decuir to run training and figure out a way to get employees new skills and monitor their progress. He started to use cloud services to put together comprehensive programs that make it easier to plot how employees are acquiring the skills they need for specific jobs.

Not only have the current owners of Danos invested in iCan, but that led them to start Danos Ventures and start backing other start-ups.

This year's winners will not be holding up big prize money checks, as in previous years, according to Jon Atkinson, CEO of the Idea Village, which produces NOEW. The checks have always been a bit misleading, as it is an "investment prize" that comes with strings attached: the winners have to meet certain investment goals and then the prize money is invested.

Last year's exceptionally large prize fund of $750,000 was made possible because of the largesse from companies like Levelset and Lucid, local startups that had been sold the previous year.

This year, the winners won't immediately know how much they will get as Idea Village is still finalizing a new investment platform that it hopes will provide a more predictable and sustainable source of prize money that can be spread more widely.

"NOEW 2022 was a special moment for IDEApitch," said Atkinson. The prize money pot was the largest of any start-up pitch competition in the country.

While this year's competition won't have big checks on stage, the Idea Village is working on implementing a more expansive funding strategy, with the support of last year's investors and the state's new State Small Business Credit Initiative program, Atkinson said.

He has promised competitors the prize money will be "comparable" to last year's.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to clarify that admittance to Ideapitch will no longer be free.

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"Bomb Ass Fro" up against glass recycling and skills software for this year's pitch prize - NOLA.com

MINNEAPOLIS - Stanford kicked off the 2023 NCAA Championships on Wednesday afternoon, competing in both the 200 medley and 800 free relays. The Cardinal tallied two top-10 finishes, taking 10th in the medley and seventh in the free.

Leon MacAlister, Ron Polonsky, Andrei Minakov, and Rafael Gu combined to record a 1:22.69 in the 200 medley relay, a season-best mark by more than a second. The Cardinal were in the first field of eight to race, taking first place in the heat.

In the 800 free relay, Stanford occupied lane one in the third heat of the event. Andrei Minakov, Ron Polonsky, Luke Maurer, and Preston Forst took the 800 free relay duties, with Minakov leading the group off with the third-fastest Stanford 200 free this season (1:32.54).

The team combined for a 6:11.49, narrowly behind Stanford's top mark this season at the NC State/GAC Invite.

The Cardinal returns to action tomorrow with the first individual events taking place. Stanford will compete in the 500 free, 200 IM, 50 free, and 1-meter diving in prelims at 10 a.m. with finals starting at 6 p.m.

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Two Top-10 Finishes - Stanford University Athletics - Stanford Athletics

Character.AI, an artificial intelligence start-up founded by two former Google employees, is capitalizing on venture capitalists' unquenchable thirst for deals in technology's hottest space.

The two-year-old company said on Thursday that it raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who helped created the architecture used in popular chatbots, left Google in 2021 and founded Character.AI the same year.

Character.AI said in a press release announcing the funding that its technology gives "users the ability to create a fully-customizable and personalized AI companion with a distinct personality and values."

The financing round follows major efforts by Google and Microsoft to develop and embed chatbot software into key products, bringing AI-generated responses into things like search, documents and email. Big tech companies and VCs are rushing into the market after Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November and saw the free experimental service go viral.

In January, Microsoft announced a ChatGPT-integrated Bing search engine. Earlier this week, Google launched a test version of its chatbot Bard.

"There are some overlaps, but we're confident Google will never do anything fun," Freitas told Axios, regarding Bard. "Because we worked there.

Character.AI said the fresh capital will allow it to expand its "compute abilities resulting in a more sophisticated model with advanced reasoning and greater accuracy." The money will help the company grow its 22-person team and add technical abilities. The company said it's nearing 100 million site visits per month, a four-fold increase in two months."

The 10-figure valuation for a company that's reportedly pre-revenue is reminiscent of other recently hyped technologies like crypto (or more broadly Web3) and social audio. Andreessen Horowitz has been a significant player in driving up prices in both markets. The firm announced a $4.5 billion crypto fund in mid-2022 as the digital currency market was in freefall. A year earlier, it added to its investment in audio app Clubhouse, valuing the early-stage startup at $4 billion. The Clubhouse buzz quickly quieted as the post-lockdown economy reopened.

Character.AIdidn't provide additional comment.

Sarah Wang, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in the release that Character.AI is rapidly and dramatically advancing generative AI, with the potential to transform how humans connect not just with AI, but more broadly reinvent how we interact with technology as a whole in our everyday lives.

Other investors include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, A Capital and SV Angel.

Jill Chase, who leads AI investments at Alphabet's late-stage venture group Capital G, previously told CNBC that Shazeer is the type of person who "can go into their basement for 18 months and change the world."

"I've spent a lot of time with Noam," she said. "He is an exceptional technologist."

Watch: AI arms race

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Ex-Google employees' A.I. chatbot startup valued at $1 billion after Andreessen Horowitz funding - CNBC

Enterprise software vendors big and small are moving quickly to adopt the technology behind ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence tool developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

San Francisco-based startup Klarity Intelligence is among early adopters that are marketing new tools targeted at finance departments in particular.

Its very clear that this is a technology that can bring immense value to finance teams,Nischal Nadhamuni, chief technology officer and co-founder of Klarity Intelligence, said in an interview.

Klarity, which focuses on helping businesses to automate document-heavy workflows, is leveraging OpenAIs technology in a new demo product available for free on the internet, with plans to unveil an enterprise-ready version within coming weeks.

The upgrade will allow clients to more quickly and easily perform functions such as validating billing and revenue data, according to Nadhamuni.

ChatGPT is an AI-driven natural language processing tool capable of interacting in a conversational way and producing responses to questions across a number of subject areas. The technologys popularity is rapidly increasing, even as some worry about risks such as data security breaches.

Klaritys demo product incorporates a new model of the technology, known as GPT-4. However, the tech startup is working to address data security issues and other potential concerns before making the upgraded system available to its clients, which include online video conferencing company Zoom Video Communications Inc. and cybersecurity firm Cloudflare Inc.

We want to be able to test more internally before we do that, Nadhamuni said. Among other security protocols, Klarity is using end-to-end encryption and has opted out of any of its customer or user data being used by OpenAI for ChatGPT model training, he said.

In a related move, finance tech startup Brex has announced plans to launch new ChatGPT-style tools for CFOs.The new tools, which are set to be made available later in 2023 through Brexs Empower platform, expand on work the company has done with Scale AI during the past year to automatically parse receipts and invoices, extracting data to enable automatic policy enforcement, the company said in a March 7press release. Strict privacy controls will be maintained as the new features are rolled out, it said.

Other early ChatGPT adopters include bigger companies with more far-reaching tools.Last week, Microsoft said it was planning to bring ChatGPT-like features to Microsoft 365, its product suite that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails. The software giantannounced in January that it was extending a partnership with OpenAI, making a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in the startup company.

Earlier this month, Salesforce Inc. unveiled a ChatGPT app for its Slack business messaging platform.

Meanwhile, Google is experimenting with a ChatGPT competitor known as Bard.

Klarity said on March 15 that it began using GPT-4 in a demo platform that allows users to extract data from PDF documents and graphs that can then be reviewed and analyzed in minutes. That announcement came just a day after GPT-4 was released to the public. Prior to that, Klarity had been experimenting with the technologys previous iteration, GPT-3.5.

Beginning in April, all new Klarity customers will get the GPT-4 driven platform, and existing ones will be offered migration options, the company said in a press release.

Klaritys platform can extract the payment terms in a PDF contract and automatically populate them into an invoicing system, the company said. It also helps ease order management, billing and revenue recognition reviews, processes that have traditionally been performed manually by large teams of analysts who reconcile data between systems and documents for accuracy and completeness and then populate long revenue checklists, according to the release.

Previously, the company used its own custom AI models to create document summaries for finance and accounting teams that pulled out high-level details such as licensed products, payment terms, addresses and non-standard language, the release said. With GPT-4 embedded across the platform, customers now will have the ability to instantly set up new extraction fields within minutes, as well as use AI capabilities in the tool to compare data such as party names, dates, and addresses, it said.

The enhanced platform also allows users to chat with their documents, according to Nadhamuni. For example, the platform could be asked to search revenue contracts for refund upon termination for convenience clauses.

This is a very damaging clause, because it means your customer can end the contract and be entitled to a refund, so you want to know if your contract has one of those, he said.

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Software vendors race to bet on ChatGPT craze - CFO Dive

CHANDIGARH: Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar said on Friday that Auto Appeal Software (AAS) is playing a pivotal role in the timely delivery of services to the citizens. Since its launch on September 1, 2021, this system has not only brought radical changes in the age-old manual system of the government functioning but has also ensured transparency and accountability of the officers.Khattar shared this while interacting directly with the beneficiaries of Auto Appeal Software (AAS) through audio conferencing here.He said that the revolutionary changes brought by the present state government have certainly given a big sigh of relief to the common man not only in terms of getting their work done in a time bound manner but also saving their time to make rounds of the government offices.The chief minister informed that presently 384 services of 33 departments have been on boarded on AAS. For this, the officers of the Right to Service Commission deserve appreciation.He said that due to the implementation of AAS, an automatic appeal is made on behalf of the citizen to the First Grievance Redressal Authority if the service is not provided on time. If the First Grievance Redressal Authority does not dispose of the appeal within 30 working days, the appeal automatically goes to the Second Grievance Redressal Authority. Similarly, if the appeal is not disposed of within 30 working days, the appeal automatically is forwarded to the Right to Service Commission, shared Khattar.The Chief Minister said that regular monitoring of the AAS software is done by the Right to Service Commission. A total of 6,54,799 appeals have been filed under AAS from September 5, 2021, to March 17, 2023. Out of these, 6,10,145 appeals have been disposed of, informed Khatta

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Auto Appeal Software playing key role in ensuring hassle-free and timely delivery of services to citizens - Times of India