Weekly Wrap-Up: E-Commerce Insights, Entrepreneurship Ministry, E-Commerce FDI, Smartphone Sales & More…

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

For the first time in the history of Independent India, a new Ministry of Entrepreneurship has been created which will help to produce more entrepreneurs and business men in India.

Mobile based taxi booking and rental company Uber has come to Pune. They are now present in 6 Indian cities including Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and now in Pune.

A few of the hugely popular Moto G mobile phones are unable to connect to the Indian mobile networks. The reason behind this as cited by Motorola is that a batch of mobile with particular IMEI numbers are not registered with mobile carriers. This effectively means that these devices can’t be recognized by the networks as trustworthy devices.

Samsung has announced world’s first Tizen powered smartphone: Samsung Z. And if the experts are to be believed, it could be a great new alternative for Android!

Goa, a popular tourist destination, may become the first state in India to get Google’s full 3D map imagery that will give you a 3D street view of every nook and corner

Given that there is a lot of interest amongst people. we decided to find out the current pecking order of ecommerce players in terms of traffic and sources from which they generate the traffic.

Here is a detailed take on where Indian consumer services stands today, what are the drivers and challenges for this sector and what is the road ahead for it!

Indian public sector telecom operator BSNL today announced launch of Facebook access to users on their network which will not need any internet connectivity. The service will be offered based on USSD Technology.

Ericsson has once again come out with their advanced research, which aims to understand global mobile usage, and the trends governing it’s expansion. Here are some interesting insights from their report:

Sequoia Capital has invested $15 million or about Rs 90 crore into an Indian mobile gaming company: Octro, developers of mobile games like Teen Patti, Tambola and several other popular Indian games.

FDI in E-Commerce in India may open up as early as July and is expected to be announced by the Govt during upcoming 2014-15 union budget, reports Reuters.

The current smartphone sales in India can be compared to a tsunami as during Q1 of 2014 (January-March), the industry witnessed an increase of 186% of sales compared to same period, last year.

Here is a quick overview of what was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2014 (WWDC 2014) which was held last week. It included OS X Yosemite, iOS 8, healthkit and Swift Programming language.

Videocon Telecom announced today that it has partnered with Huawei, a China based ICT solutions provider. Under the new partnership, Videocon Telecom will make use of Huawei’s existing EPC technology to provide 4G LTE connectivity in India.

In a major blow to the dynamic home shopping industry in India, Star Network has sold it’s stake in their venture: Star CJ Network and has quit the industry. Providence Equity Partners has bought Star Network’s stake for an undisclosed amount.

IIT Kanpur has launched their 2nd supercomputer which is India’s 5th most powerful supercomputer as of now. After a series of intense testing and analysis, IIT Kanpur’s deputy director S C Srivastava, along with Ashish Dutta, head of the Computer Centre unveiled this supercomputer recently.

India has lowest internet penetration of all major countries in Asia Pacific, which currently stands at just 17.4 percent. And, when you make a comparison with other Asia-Pac countries, this number looks even worst.

Google has just announced the launch of Project Tango tablet, which is a 3D tablet equipped with several advanced features such as motion sensing capabilities and powered with the mighty Tegra processors.

Newegg, one of the largest online PC hardware retailers in the world, is planning to expand their e-commerce business by launching in India. Newegg’s CMO, Soren Mills, revealed at Computex 2014 in Taiwan that India is one of the six new countries where Newegg plans to launch operations.

Google has updated their Translate app yesterday and this update brings Phonetic input support for 8 Indian languages of Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu. We tested out this new update on our Nexus 7 tablet running 4.4.2 version, and interestingly we could not get it to work properly.

Indian recruiters are right now on a hiring spree as May witnessed 19% more hiring activity compared to last year. In fact, such is the buoyant mood of the market that hiring activity in the month of May has been the best so far since February last year.