Weekly Wrap-Up: Facebook WhatsApp Acquisition, Interim Budget, World’s Longest WiFi Zone & More…

It’s Monday morning and time to do a quick wrap-up of posts we published on trak.in last week.

Airtel customers in Bangalore can now pay Rs 1000 to get 10GB 4G services on their Apple phones, and can experience incredible speed and data access.

Finance Minister P Chidambaram has presented the Interim Budget for the year 2014-15. This is not the actual Union Budget, which will be tabled in the month of July, 2014, after the new Government takes over. Here are the highlights of the interim budget

Bigcommerce, one of the fastest growing software-as-a-service ecommerce platform have made their entry into India to capitalize on her fast growing ecommerce space.

FreshDesk has launched a 2 day event called “Save The Hacker” that will offer IT guys a platform where they can work on their ideas and get mentorship from Industry experts. Also, they stand to win Rs. 1 Lakh purse for best code!

Starting April, India’s leading online fashion retailer Myntra will open up Marketplace for third party vendors to start selling their products on Myntra.

SlickLogin is an Israel based startup, which plans to disrupt the authentication mechanism normally used on the Internet. It was launched at the Disrupt SF 2013 Battlefield last year, and sensing the immense benefits this app offers, Google has decided to acquire the company.

Shrinking revenues and sliding market share has forced Mozilla to include display advertisements in its popular web browser Firefox.

TRAI has published their monthly telecom subscription report for December 2013. According to it, India added 5.16 million new subscribers in the last month of 2013 taking the total tally of mobile subscribers in India to 886.30.

Suddenly there has been a spurt of new smartphone launches that have large capacity mobile batteries. Is this the new marketing mantra for mobile manufacturers?

It’s Official – Bharti Airtel has acquired Loop Mobile. The deal is valued at Rs. 700 crore as per report appeared in Moneycontrol today.

In the 14th chapter in the #ProductivityHacks series we will discuss methods to determine your limiting factors, and will suggest ways to remove them for better productivity and better results.

According to Gold Demand Trends Report for the year 2013, Indian consumers bought 975 Tonnes Of Gold In 2013, a 13% rise compared to 2012. Globally, 3756.1 tonnes worth $170 billion (Rs 10,20,000 crore) of Gold was purchased by consumers.

Brand Finance, a brand valuation firm has come out with its 2014 report on most valuable and powerful brands. According to them, Ferrari is most powerful, while Apple is most valuable brand. Tata is India’s top brand for 2014

In the latest BSNL defacement, Pakistani hackers with handle “P4k-M4d-HuNt3RS” have hacked into two BSNL subdomains of BSNL – and http://vas.bsnl.co.in/.

Lenovo has officially put up on their website that ecommerce websites like Snapdeal, Flipkart and Amazon are not their authorized dealers and products brought from these sites may not be entitled to warranty. Toshiba is also in process of doing the same.

In the 15th chapter in the #ProductivityHacks series currently running on Trak.in, we talk about how you can “divide & rule” concept to improve your productivity & efficiency!

Facebook has bought Whatsapp for $16 billion. Facebook will pay around $4 billion in cash and the rest of the sum in Facebook shares. Also, over the span of four years, facebook will give Whatsapp employees and founders an additional $3 billion making the total purchase price $19 billion.

Facebook is bringing together the top political contenders for 2014 Indian general elections on their “Facebook Talks” platform. In this live season, anyone can participate and ask people like Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav on how they will govern India and what are their priorities and agendas.

We try to decipher and offer you 5 reasons as to why Facebook offered whopping $19 Billion to acquire WhatsApp.

The app named Mati Katha was developed a budget of Rs 2.39 Crores (first phase) by agricultural experts in association with the state information technology agency WEBEL.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has unveiled world’s longest stretch of free Wi-Fi zone in Patna, which is the capital of Bihar. If you are travelling from Patna to Danapur, then between NIT-Patna on Ashok Rajpath to Danapur you can get absolutely free Wi-Fi connectivity. This 20 Kms stretch is the longest free Wi-Fi zone, anywhere in the world.

Bangalore based mobile payment solutions company Ezetap has announced that they have raised USD 8 million in funding, led by Helion Advisors. Silicon Valley based Social+Capital Partnership and Berggruen Holdings have also participated in this round.

Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp is strictly business (and market dominance or they just didn’t want anyone to do so) and Facebook has every intention to make money out of it.

Google has partnered with ASI (Archeological Survey of India) to open up street view of over 30 Indian heritage sites like Taj Mahal, Qutub Minar and others for global tourists on Google Maps.

Housing.com, one of the fastest growing online real estate & map based search platform has today announced a unique offering called “Housing New Projects”.  This new offering comprehensively shows various upcoming and existing real estate projects in 3D format, superimposed on maps.

With Facebook acquiring WhatsApp, it looks like Facebook is stamped its supremacy over Mobile Messaging and Social Arena. What are the choices that Google has now to tackle this threat?