INNOVATIONS FOR BUSINESS
TECH NOTES
by Mike Hunter
Persefoni Creates Intelligent Carbon Tracking Software As companies worldwide strive to fight climate change by curbing carbon emissions, they lack the tools for calculating and reporting organizational carbon footprints with the same confidence that they manage their financial transactions. Persefoni provides companies across all industries and sectors a detailed picture of their carbon footprint to improve understanding of how and where to operations. The Mesa-based company is the first to connect the entire sustainability disclosure and reporting cycle via an AI-native carbon footprint management platform. The platform integrates thousands of data points across the business value chain to calculate organizational carbon footprints in real-time, which to date has been a largely manual process. With advanced analytics and AI models built into the Persefoni platform, organizations receive data-driven insights that suggest optimization opportunities for future planning and forecasting. At the recent SXSW Pitch® event, Persefoni was selected as the winner of the Enterprise & Data category, as the best technological innovation for its category-creating ClimateTech SaaS platform, which helps large enterprises and institutional investors calculate, report, and reduce their carbon footprints. Launched in August 2020, Persefoni is rapidly accelerating the ClimateTech market segment as a leading provider for large enterprises and institutional investors seeking to better understand the most effective way to measure and reduce their carbon footprint. The company is already working with leading investors like global Private Equity firm TPG to manage the carbon footprint of its $85 billion dollar portfolio and is on track for significant expansion this year. “We’re a diverse, global team bound by the common cause of fighting climate change, and we’ve brought together some of the best people from both the software and sustainability worlds,” says Kentaro Kawamori, CEO and co-founder of Persefoni. “What gets measured gets done, and Persefoni is continuing to build and equip organizations with the necessary tools for understanding, and ultimately reducing, the environmental impact of their operations.” Persefoni persefoni.com
MAY 2021
22
INBUSINESSPHX.COM
Residential Proxy Prevents Intellectual Property Violations Tech-savvy retailers are utilizing IP address hopping to improve their website performance and grow their operations scale. While the technology helps genuine brands thrive, it could simultaneously be giving away a significant share of their business to counterfeit frauds. What we are seeing is, with most physical stores closing down due to COVID-19 and online traffic rising, retailers have been looking for ways to successfully move their operations online. Web scraping and its applications in business intelligence, testing site performance and ad verification have helped many genuine companies thrive; unfortunately, it has also become an essential tool for counterfeit fraud. While the exact figures of online fraud increase are still being determined, the European Payments Council reports an uptick in e-commerce fraud. Simultaneously, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Americans have already lost more than US$145 million to fraud related to the coronavirus. Among many types of fraud, e-commerce website cloning is one type of malicious activity that the increasingly available web scraping services have enabled. The way it works is, fraudulent actors identify a high-demand retailer, use a residential proxy to copy its website rapidly, and upload it to one or several website domains similar to the original. These cloned websites then present identical merchandise as the original. To tempt shoppers into committing to a swift purchase, the owners of these fraudulent websites often reduce the prices and present it as the “big sale.” Consequently, unsuspecting buyers purchase these items and receive counterfeit products. In response to these pernicious trends, some
Web scraping is the process of extracting a website’s underlying HTML code, enabling the scraper to replicate the website’s content. It can be done manually, or automated using bots.
residential proxy providers have taken security measures to prevent e-commerce fraud. To avert the potential dangers, residential proxy providers have enabled their users to utilize web scraping to detect potential intellectual property violations. One of the services we provide at IPRoyal is allowing our users to scan the web for copies and counterfeits of their products. This way, if the user suspects that malicious actors are running a copy of their website and are selling counterfeit items, they can immediately take measures to protect their customers from fraud. Offering a way to obtain and process large amounts of data quickly, residential proxy providers help companies get a better overview of their competition and boost their customer conversions. However, at the same time, they could be unsuspectingly (or voluntarily) assisting fraudulent users in reaping millions in profit. At IPRoyal, we’ve always worked with genuine companies and individuals only. To make sure that stays the case, we have implemented an advanced user identity verification process and have been checking to make sure that we are not enabling website replication, DDoS attacks and other forms of illegal activity. If the situation persists and more businesses move online, there will be more instances of ecommerce fraud. And, while industry-wide regulations are nonexistent, it will be up to network infrastructure providers how far this issue escalates. —Karolis Toleikis, CEO of IPRoyal (iproyal.com), which provides tailored solutions to address business intelligence, VPN, wireless, data centers, hosting, marketing agencies, ISP, colocation providers and more
Photo courtesy of Daniel Igdery on Unsplash
systematically lower the environmental impact of
