Havas Group acquires digital agency Langoor

Havas Group has acquired independent digital agency Langoor for an undisclosed amount. Founded in 2010, the full-service digital agency is present across India, the Middle East and Australia.

Earlier this year, Havas acquired the leader in user experience and digital design in India, Think Design, making Langoor second acquisition in the country in 2019. The combined expertise of Think Design and Langoor boost Havas’ digital offer in the world’s fastest growing ad market.

Langoor Havas will have three key focus areas – health, business and vernacular – and will expand these services to markets outside of India in the coming months. Langoor's team of 170 specialists provide services across strategy, online marketing, website planning and development, data analytics, marketing automation, e-commerce and SEO.

Langoor adds an enviable strength to Havas Group with its distinctive approach of Creative Technologists who challenge marketing every day with their expertise in balancing, data, technology, strategic thinking and the power of creative.

Haptik acquires E-commerce Chatbot Buzzo.ai

Artificial Intelligence chatbot firm Haptik, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd, has acquired a Mumbai based conversational commerce start-up Buzzo.ai. The deal was valued at $3-4 Million.

Buzzo.ai offers personalized recommendations to users, based on insights extracted using artificial intelligence algorithms on user reviews across the web. Following this acquisition, Haptik will now be able to further enhance voice and chat commerce solutions for its customers globally, and leverage the platform to power multilingual experiences.

This is the second acquisition by Reliance Jio-owned Haptik in the last three months. Earlier in July, Mumbai-based Haptik acqui-hired Convrg, a Los Angeles-based startup that develops chatbots, to serve customers in North America.

Haptik lets customers chat with voice assistants to complete daily tasks such as online shopping, travel bookings, food delivery among others. The company claims to have reached over 100 Mn devices and processed more than 2 Bn conversations till date. Some of its notable clients and enterprise partners include Samsung, Oyo Rooms, KFC, Coca-Cola, Tata Group, and Club Mahindra among others.

Facebook to acquire CTRL-Labs

Facebook Inc. agreed to acquired CTRL-Labs, a technology startup that is building software to let people control a digital avatar using only their thoughts. The world’s largest social network is paying between $500 million and $1 billion.

The closely held four-year-old start-up, which has dozens of employees and has raised tens of millions in venture capital, uses a bracelet to measure neuron activity in a subject’s arm to determine movement that person is thinking about, even if they aren’t physically moving. That neuron activity is then translated into movement on a digital screen.

Technology like CTRL-Labs’s may someday be a crucial part of products like augmented reality glasses, where a user might want to control a computer without the need for buttons or a keyboard.

Facebook has been pushing deeper into augmented reality technology, including the development of a hands-free pair of AR glasses. In 2017, it announced a “brain-computer interface" that could someday let people turn their thoughts into actual text on a screen by monitoring signals in the brain. The CTRL-Labs technology is attempting to solve a similar problem.