It’s Monday morning and time to do a quick wrap-up of the posts published on trak.in last week. If you were offline for any reason, weekly wrap-up is a great way to catch with all the tech buzz in India.
Leading smartphone company Xiaomi announced last week that it will now manufacture its devices locally in India, in a show of commitment to Honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ initiative.
This Raksha Bandhan, Facebook is going to be launching an online shopping festival named Tied Together. In the initiative, the company has tied up with media agency GroupM and will be setting up a website between August 12 and August 29.
Amazon India received a rude shock on the day their Freedom Sale opened last week, – their website crashed within first 2 hours of the opening of sale, as millions of Indians descended on the website.
Groupon India, the daily deals and local commerce company’s new name would be Nearbuy and the parent company Groupon would not hold majority of stake in it. Sequoia Capital would have the majority stake.
Within the next 90 days, 600 employees of Housing.com, or 23% of their entire workforce would be fired. As per a report in ET, the real estate startup is tightening their cash burns, and stepping up focus on core technology and product.
Foxconn has signed an MoU with Maharashtra Govt., which will bring in investments worth $5 billion (Rs 31,000 Crore) in the next 5 years, creating 50,000 direct and indirect jobs in the state.
In a surprise move of which no one had any inkling – Google has announced a major reorganization at the top. Google now has a new parent company, aptly called Alphabet (I love the name). Larry Page will be the CEO of the parent company, while Sergey Brin will be the President. Indian born Sundar Pichai will be the CEO of Google.
Ola, India’s largest cab aggregator app has forged a first of its kind partnership where Ola will make OnePlus2 available to customers for experience on demand.
Here is a shocking reality of Indian engineers based on the study by Aspiring Minds – 97% of Indian engineers cannot speak English and only 18.43% of all engineering graduates are eligible for a software engineer’s job in India.
Classifieds business Quikr is going beyond just that. They are now venturing deeper into automobiles vertical that will include cars, bikes and commercial vehicles. Called QuikrCars, it is going to be that one destination for all the car buyers and sellers.
Say hi to the new kid in the eCommerce town! Credit rating mechanism is here to make online shopping easier (and difficult to a few) for Indians. The eCommerce giants in the country are putting up quite some innovative techniques.
Dear netizens: LOL is now passé, because Haha is the new language of e-laughing. Facebook has come up with a unique study to determine how does netizens laugh online, or rather how can they exhibit their funny emotions in the best possible way.
Smartphone sales figures second quarter of 2015 will bring cheers to Indian smartphone vendors. According to IDC report for 2Q2015, smartphone shipments grew by 19% thanks to better than expected online sales.
Uber’s newest offer to entrepreneurs in India is UberPitch, wherein entrepreneurs can pitch their startup ideas to a VC and mentor inside an Uber cab! This 15 minute ride would be completely free of cost. To roll out this special offer, Uber has tied up with TVF Pitchers, the incredibly popular comedy-drama TV series created for the entrepreneurial community.
Facebook has shared that FbStart, their one year old program to help early stage mobile app developers has released more than $50 million as benefits to mobile startups based in Asia Pacific region.
The Twitter transparency report for period between Jan-Jun 2015 is out – and according to it, account information requests by Indian Government to Twitter have seen significant rise.
Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that Airtel is injecting scripts into users’ browsers to improve customer experience and has denied all allegations of unethical data capturing and forced pop-us ads.
Twitter Users can now exchange direct messages privately of up to 10,000 characters – with the idea being that Direct Messages should seem limitless! The 140-character limit on normal public tweets however, remains unchanged
In order to make their sellers more powerful and independent, Ebay has teamed up with Capital Floats, a digital financing firm based in Bangalore. Sellers on Ebay can now get loans upto Rs 1 crore, without any collateral.
Google has launched a new website – Android Experiments – that showcases some really novel and unusual Android apps developed internally by Google Labs or by some third party developers. Users can not only download and use these apps, but also contribute to the further development of these apps.
India’s first mobile wallet company Oxigen Mobile has announced a unique tie up with PVR Cinemas. Now customers can book their tickets at PVR cinemas using Oxigen Wallet!
Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport has become India’s first airport to offer fully paper-less e-boarding facility, which will make travelling seamless, without any requirement of human interface.
Aam Aadmi Party’s promise of free WiFi in New Delhi reached a new milestone yesterday. As per their newest assurance, every Delhi citizen will get 1 GB of free data per month, at a minimum speed of 1 MBPS.
Once you add the number to your Facebook profile, anyone who puts your number in the search bar can track your details such as name, address and even see your picture.
The Government of India will soon come out with a policy offering financial incentives of up to Rs 1.5 lakh on surrender of vehicles that are over 10 years old to check pollution and ease traffic, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari has said.
On the occasion of Independence day, we present before you 8 India-born CEOs who are currently heading global corporations having collective revenues of $300 billion+ annually.
And, don’t forget to check out our updated Indian startup funding and investment chart.
