Archives April 2026

Merck Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Merck KGaA Germany, marks World Art Day 2026 through their Pan-African “Art and Fashion with Purpose” community, established by Dr. Rasha Kelej, CEO of Merck Foundation. On this occasion, the Merck Foundation also proudly celebrates the 6-year anniversary of this impactful community, which continues to harness the power of art and fashion to address critical health and social issues in Africa and beyond.

Senator Dr. Rasha Kelej (Ret.), CEO of Merck Foundation and One of 100 Most Influential Africans 2019 – 2025 shared, “I am happy to mark World Art Day 2026, and I firmly believe that art, fashion, and media are powerful tools for raising awareness and addressing critical social and health issues. We also proudly celebrate the 6-year anniversary of our ‘Fashion and Art with Purpose’ Community, established in 2020. Through this dynamic community, we continue to raise awareness on important health and social issues like breaking infertility stigma, supporting girl education, ending FGM & child marriage, stopping gender based violence, women empowerment and diabetes, hypertension & cancer awareness, while empowering artists across Africa and beyond to use their day-to-day creative work as a powerful tool for awareness, education, and driving a meaningful cultural shift within their communities.

Our community today brings together talented members from more than 25 countries. I am proud of what we’ve built together and the positive social impact it continues to create.”

Merck Foundation has launched many initiatives including their first-ever pan-African TV program, ‘Our Africa by Merck Foundation’, which uniquely highlights pressing issues across the continent through the voices of their ‘Fashion and Art with Purpose’ community.

‘Our Africa by Merck Foundation’ is a pan African TV program that is conceptualized, produced, directed, and co-hosted by Senator, Dr. Rasha Kelej, CEO of Merck Foundation to feature African Fashion Designers, Singers, and prominent experts from various domains with the aim to raise awareness and create a culture shift across Africa. The program has captured the attention and hearts of millions of viewers across Africa.

“Our Africa” has been broadcast on prime TV stations of many countries, and is currently on social media handles of Social Media handles of Senator, Dr. Rasha Kelej (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube) and Merck Foundation (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube).

Watch the Promo of the Program here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RIoIMbFd2Q

Beyond Our Africa TV Program, Merck Foundation in partnership with The First Ladies of Africa announces annually 8 important Awards, under two themes, for Media, Fashion Designers, Filmmakers and Musicians/ Singers, and potential young African talents in these fields. The themes of the two categories of awards are: 1) Breaking Infertility Stigma, Support Girls’ Education, End Child Marriage, End FGM, Stopping GBV and/ or Women Empowerment at all levels and 2) promote a healthy lifestyle and raise awareness about prevention and early detection of Diabetes and Hypertension.

Entries for the 2026 Awards can be sent to: submit@merck-foundation.com

A significant part of Merck Foundation’s “Art and Fashion with Purpose” Community is made up of the talented winners of Merck Foundation annual Fashion, Film, and Song Awards.

“I am proud and delighted to share that in partnership with my dear sisters, The First Ladies of Africa, we have so far recognized and celebrated 175 exceptional talents as our winners from 25 countries through our Fashion, Film, and Song Awards. Each winner has become a valued member of our ‘Fashion and Art with Purpose’ Community. Together, they continue to use their voice, art, and influence to spark meaningful conversation, challenge deeply rooted perceptions, and raise awareness about sensitive social and health issues across their communities,” added Dr. Rasha Kelej.

The 175 winners include 102 Fashion Award winners, 53 Song Award winners, and 20 Film Award winners, selected for their outstanding creativity and impact from 25 countries including Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, CAR, Congo-Brazzaville, DRC, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Also, as a part of the Community Awareness Programs, Merck Foundation has created over 30 songs with many African Artists, in English, French, Portuguese and also local African languages to address critical issues like breaking infertility stigma, empowering women, supporting girl education, ending child marriage, diabetes awareness, promoting a healthy lifestyle, and more.

Merck Foundation in partnership with The First Ladies of Africa has also launched 9 Children’s Storybooks in five languages – English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Swahili. Additionally, Merck Foundation has adapted their storybooks to create 6 Awareness Animation films in five languages – English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Swahili, with the purpose of reaching out to the communities to raise awareness on the important issues with an aim of instilling change at grassroot levels.

To listen to the Merck Foundation songs, read Merck Foundation storybooks and watch Merck Foundation animation films, click on the below links:

https://merck-foundation.com/our-programs/Merck-Foundation-More-Than-a-Mother/Local-Songs-and-Children-Stories

https://merck-foundation.com/videos/animation-films-by-merck-foundation 

Click the link below to Download Merck Foundation App

https://www.merck-foundation.com/MF_StoreRedirection

Join the conversation on our social media platforms below and let your voice be heard

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Website: www.merckfoundation.com

BPTP Limited announces the award of the construction contract for its residential development, Downtown 66 in Sector 66, Gurugram, to NCC Limited.

The contract, valued at approximately INR 488 Crore, pertains to civil structure and finishing with a total construction area of approximately 1,79,302 Sq.mtr. The scope of work includes towers, and other amenities, aligned with approved project plans and defined project specifications.

Commenting on the development, Manik Malik, CEO & President, BPTP Limited, said: “BPTP has awarded the construction contract for Downtown 66 to NCC Limited an established player in the construction sector. This engagement reflects our strategic emphasis on partnering with seasoned contractors for project execution, aligned with design imperatives and project requirements.”

Located along Golf Course Extension Road, Downtown 66 forms part of BPTP’s development portfolio in Gurugram. The project is planned with a focus on modern design, holistic and multi-generational living, sustainability, connectivity, and occupier requirements, and is being developed in compliance with applicable laws, approvals and regulatory framework.

Downtown 66 is envisioned to bring together design-led planning, sustainability discipline and engineering integration. The project includes collaboration with global and domestic consultants, including AEDAS Singapore (Principal Architect & Interior Design), Coopers Hill Singapore (Landscape), Nulty Studio Dubai (Lighting), End Point Dubai (Signage), GreenTree (Green Building), Manish Consultant (Structural Proof), BES (Façade), RSMS (Building Bye-laws), ATN Consultants (Kitchen Design), Sanelac (MEP), RWDI (Wind Tunnel), and Proion (Fire Safety). The development is being planned in alignment with India’s highest seismic considerations of Zone V for high-rise structures, viz-a-viz Zone IV as stipulated by Indian Codes and has received IGBC Platinum pre-certification, based on current design parameters.

NCC Limited has extensive experience across residential, commercial and infrastructure developments and will lead project execution in line with the defined scope of work. NCC is also engaged by other real estate developers in the region for their marquee residential and commercial projects.

Omdia forecasts that V (formerly VIDAA), the smart TV operating system developed by Hisense, is set to overtake LG’s webOS in European shipments in 2025, signaling a significant shift in the competitive dynamics of the smart TV market.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260415032885/en/

Europe TV OS Platform Share of Shipments

VIDAA’s rapid growth has been driven by the strong momentum of Hisense and its expanding footprint across Europe. The company has significantly increased its market share in recent years, supported by competitive pricing, broader distribution, and high-profile global marketing campaigns.

This growth is now translating into platform scale. Omdia data shows VIDAA steadily closing the gap with LG’s webOS, with shipments expected to surpass it this year.

“The European TV OS market is undergoing a structural shift,” said Maria Rua Aguete, Head of Media and Entertainment at Omdia. “Chinese manufacturers like Hisense and TCL are not only gaining share in hardware, but are now scaling their own platforms, challenging the long-standing dominance of Korean players.”

While Android TV continues to lead the market, benefiting from broad adoption across multiple brands, the competitive landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented. Both LG’s webOS and Samsung’s Tizen have seen gradual declines in share as alternative ecosystems gain traction.

The rise of VIDAA reflects a broader industry trend, with Chinese TV brands gaining ground on Korean manufacturers in both shipment volumes and platform influence, reshaping the smart TV ecosystem in Europe.

“Samsung and LG have built large installed bases over the past decade, reaching tens of millions of households,” said David Tett, Principal Analyst at Omdia. “However, Chinese vendors are rapidly expanding their installed base, driven by strong shipment growth across Europe.”

This increasing fragmentation presents new challenges for advertisers and content providers. As audiences spread across multiple platforms, achieving scale will require more sophisticated, multi-platform strategies.

At the same time, new entrants such as Titan OS are gaining traction, highlighting how quickly the European TV operating system landscape is evolving.

ABOUT OMDIA

Omdia, part of TechTarget, Inc. d/b/a Informa TechTarget (Nasdaq: TTGT), is a technology research and advisory group. Our deep knowledge of tech markets grounded in real conversations with industry leaders and hundreds of thousands of data points, make our market intelligence our clients’ strategic advantage. From R&D to ROI, we identify the greatest opportunities and move the industry forward.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260415032885/en/

Riskified (NYSE: RSKD), a leader in ecommerce fraud and risk intelligence, today announced an innovation-led partnership with Rue Gilt Groupe (RGG), a premium and luxury off-price ecommerce company, to implement risk-aware identity intelligence to transform RGG’s customer experiences. By integrating Riskified’s real-time identity risk scores directly into customer service workflows, RGG is enabling agents to instantly distinguish between loyal members and professional abusers, delivering a better experience for trusted customers while surgically mitigating losses from fraud and abuse.

For years, Customer experience (CX) leaders have faced a difficult compromise: offer instant resolution to drive loyalty or implement rigid rules to stop the rising tide of fraudulent refund claims and return abuse. This challenge is amplified by the rise of Generative AI, which has scaled the opportunity for exploitation through synthetic identities, doctored photos, voice spoofing, and increasingly persuasive social engineering scripts.

Riskified identity intelligence addresses this gap by extending the company’s policy abuse prevention capabilities, including Policy Protect, into customer service workflows, directly within the CRM or service console agents use. By leveraging an identity engine that parses more than 5 billion historical transactions across our global merchant network, this identity clustering solution provides a high-confidence view of the unique individual behind every email, order, account, address, claim, and phone number. Of identities with multiple claims, 13% have activity across more than one merchant, and those identities are associated with 7x more accounts on average than identities with no claims. This makes a network view of identity critical for detecting repeat and coordinated abuse.

When a customer contacts a service center with a refund claim or a high-risk request such as a package reroute, agents are provided with a real-time identity risk score. This gives agents immediate visibility into risk signals and the trustworthiness of the individual behind the request, helping them make faster and more accurate decisions in the moment. As more large enterprises deploy AI agents on the front lines of customer service, real-time identity risk becomes even more important. It helps prevent manipulation and abuse while reducing false positives that can negatively impact customer satisfaction.

“When you know exactly who you’re dealing with, you no longer have to choose between protecting the business and delighting the customer. Riskified’s identity intelligence improves our ability to do both,” said Maria Vargas, SVP of Member Experiences at Rue Gilt Groupe. “By bringing Riskified’s risk and identity insights directly into our Zendesk service console, we are giving our frontline teams the confidence to fast-track our most valuable members for instant resolution, while applying the necessary friction to deter serial abusers who hide behind fake or stolen accounts.”

Riskified identity intelligence is already delivering significant operational impact. Merchants using Riskified’s Policy Protect solution have seen up to a 30% reduction in complaint rates and in several instances a 7-figure reduction in refund and return costs by automating decisions for low-risk identities and providing clear guidance on higher-risk cases.

This reflects how concentrated policy abuse can be. Using Riskified Policy Protect, Ring, Amazon’s smart home security system, was able to determine that 600 individuals were responsible for $4M+ in abuse each year, with some committing as much as $150K annually. This demonstrates how a small group of repeat offenders can drive outsized losses. Read Amazon Ring’s success story here.

“The future of retail hinges on delivering fast, exceptional experiences to loyal customers while protecting against increasingly sophisticated abuse,” said Jeff Otto, Chief Marketing Officer at Riskified. “Our partnership with Rue Gilt Groupe represents the next evolution of CX. With risk-aware identity intelligence, service teams, both human and AI, can instantly reward trusted customers and accelerate resolution, while stopping bad actors. Every interaction is powered by network-scale intelligence to maximize lifetime value and prevent leakage.”

Join the webinar, The Risk-Aware CX Revolution, live on Tuesday, April 23, 2026, or on demand. Learn how Riskified identity intelligence gives customer service teams real-time insight into who they’re interacting with, helping merchants fast-track trusted customers, block serial abusers, and protect revenue, and how Rue Gilt Groupe transformed its customer service workflow.

About Rue Gilt Groupe

Rue Gilt Groupe is the premier off-price e-commerce portfolio company, connecting more than 35 million members with coveted designers at an exceptional value. Two complementary brands, Rue La La and Gilt, utilize world-class merchandising, technology and marketing to strategically support our brand partners and inspire members daily. Our approach to retail brings excitement to online shopping and the best-in-class experience that today’s customers demand.

About Riskified

Riskified (NYSE:RSKD) empowers businesses to unleash ecommerce growth by outsmarting risk. Many of the world’s biggest brands and publicly traded companies selling online rely on Riskified for guaranteed protection against chargebacks, to fight fraud and policy abuse at scale, and to improve customer retention. Developed and managed by the largest team of ecommerce risk analysts, data scientists, and researchers, Riskified’s AI-powered fraud and risk intelligence platform analyzes the individual behind each interaction to provide real-time decisions and robust identity-based insights. Learn more at riskified.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260415885217/en/

Following its 2026 Annual Member Summit, AMGTA today released Additive Manufacturing in Resource-Efficient Manufacturing Systems, an independent report establishing how additive manufacturing should be evaluated, communicated, and deployed across part, system, and enterprise levels.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260415976875/en/

The report establishes a structural argument for how additive manufacturing should be evaluated — not at the part level alone, but across part, system, and enterprise levels where AM’s most significant advantages in resource efficiency, supply chain resilience, and capital allocation actually materialize. It draws on six years of sustained observation across both sides of the AM ecosystem — technology developers and manufacturing users — producing findings that neither side could reach from its own position. It is designed for use in investor presentations, policy discussions, procurement conversations, and organizational decision-making.

The report was presented to and discussed with AMGTA’s global membership at the 2026 Annual Member Summit, held April 13 in Boston, alongside the companion Strategy 2030 document.

Standard cost comparisons of additive manufacturing against conventional manufacturing capture the same direct production costs on both sides while systematically excluding costs that conventional manufacturing embeds as invisible background — tooling capital committed before demand is known, inventory carrying costs, minimum order quantity waste, and obsolescence write-offs. The result is a structural bias that makes AM appear more expensive than a complete evaluation would show.

The report identifies this as a framing and measurement problem, not a technology problem, and provides the evaluative structure organizations need to conduct complete comparisons across all three levels at which AM creates value.

As the only global, independent organization focused exclusively on the intersection of additive manufacturing and resource-efficient manufacturing systems — with no equipment to sell, no materials to promote, and no national interest to advance — AMGTA occupies a structural position no other organization holds. This report could not have been produced by a technology provider without reading as advocacy, or by a manufacturer without reading as justification. It required the vantage point of both sides simultaneously.

“The technology is proven. But the current adoption curve doesn’t reflect it—and one major reason is that the industry has been evaluating AM against a standard that was never designed to capture what AM actually changes,” said Sherri Monroe, Executive Director of AMGTA. “This report is the result of six years of watching that gap play out across industries, applications, and geographies. It is the argument the industry has needed and that only an organization with no commercial interest could make.”

“When I founded AMGTA, the goal was to create something the industry didn’t have: an independent, non-commercial voice that could make the case for AM’s value in the rooms where the real decisions get made,” said Brian Neff, Chair of the AMGTA Board of Directors. “This report is that voice. It makes the argument we’ve been building toward—complete, rigorous, and designed to hold up under scrutiny from finance, procurement, and policy. This is what six years of membership made possible.”

The report is available at www.AMGTA.org. The companion Strategy 2030 document—What We Do and Why Membership Matters—is available to AMGTA members.

About the Additive Manufacturer Green Trade Association (AMGTA)

The Additive Manufacturing Green Trade Association (AMGTA) is the only global, independent organization focused exclusively on the intersection of additive manufacturing and resource-efficient manufacturing systems. Founded in 2019, AMGTA convenes technology developers, manufacturing users, and ecosystem partners across five continents to establish evidence-based understanding of where and how additive manufacturing strengthens resource and operational performance. AMGTA has no equipment to sell, no materials to promote, and no national interest to advance. www.AMGTA.org

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260415976875/en/