It’s Monday morning, and time to do a quick wrap-up of posts published on trak.in last week. If you were offline for any reason, this is a great way to catch up with all the tech buzz!
In a naked display of ‘talibanization’ of Internet freedom, Government of India passed orders to ban 857 pornographic websites all over the country last week. However after much hue and cry, the ban was partially lifted, which passed on the responsibility to the ISP’s. In a latest development, the ban has been completely rolled back, and most of the sites are visible to users now!
Snapdeal, Flipkart’s closest rival, has announced half a billion funding round from Chinese eCommerce major Alibaba, OEM phone manufacturer Foxconn and Japanese investment bank SoftBank.
There is something definitely wrong with Indian mobile wallet companies, as user experience continues to nose-dive. A Paytm user from Noida, Uttar Pradesh has claimed that Rs 200 was automatically debited from his Paytm account. A Mobikwik users wallet balance was used to make unauthorized pizza payment
Uber payments are getting easier. According to press release sent to us, Uber has finally added Debit card payments. So, going forward you can add the debit card to your Uber account and pay for your ride through it.
Motorola launched Moto G (3rd Generation) few days back in India for price of 12999 – we do a detailed review to let you know whether Moto G3 is a worth upgrade or not!
Here is a Trak.in reader’s experience after living in 4 different cities of Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai. He compares various aspects like Job, People, Food, Cost of living, Transport, Traffic, Residential areas, Localities, Climate, Outings, nearby-tourist places and Night life.
Cab hailing service Ola has now launched a Bug Bounty program for making its platform more secure. This is the first full-fledged bug bounty program launched by an Indian startup till date.
Snapdeal, has joined hands with HDFC Bank, India’s 2nd largest private bank, to launch India’s first co-branded ‘e-commerce’ credit card. Visa would be the payment processing partner for them.
As per CounterPoint Research’s latest report for Q2 2015, 20% of all phones sold inside India were ‘Made in India’. With Micromax commanding 14.4% share and Lava 8% share in the overall handset market, this figure is poised to go up from here.
Sponsored search ads will now be displayed on Google Play store as it will now be open to advertisers and developers. It had rolled out the pilot for a few in February, and is now officially rolling out ads on the store.
The brand TaxiForSure is now dying a slow death; infact if we leave aside some urban cities, then its almost dead. In a blog post, TaxiForSure announced that they are pulling out of 22 Indian cities, and transferring control to Ola.
Sony and Thompson, both have decided to resume manufacturing in India after a gap of 10+ years. PM Modi’s Make In India vision is now working like a magnet, attracting global corporations to start manufacturing in India.
Nielsen & Informate, a mobile intelligence company, have prepared a report which digs deep into the app-usage trends in India right now, and the results are pretty exciting. It gives us a hint of what convinced Rs 96,000 crore worth Flipkart to take the extreme decision of going app-only.
The Reserve Bank of India has said that it is planning to raise the spending limit on e-wallets. Considering the accelerated growth in mobile payments in the country, RBI will raise the spending limit to make it more convenient to the users who have to restrict their numbers and amount of transactions due to smaller limits.
Snapdeal has plans to have an extensive engagement programme with campuses before they go for final placements as they plan to hire more candidates next year, but is looking beyond B-school products.
Women and child development Ministry headed by Maneka Gandhi along with IT & Communication Ministry has asked every phone maker in the country to install a panic button in handsets, which will ensure women’s safety.
French researchers have found out a new way to invade any Internet user’s privacy, and the source is their battery. They demonstrated how the new HTML 5 specification being run on web browsers can potentially track any Internet user and hack their data.
The NRIs (Non Resident Indians) are having lots of taxation issues especially when it comes to sale or purchase of property, securities, investments settlement, filling of returns, other various compliances etc.
In one of the biggest 4G launches till date, Bharti Airtel today announced that they have made commercial launch of its high speed 4G services (also called LTE) in 296 towns across India.
MobiKwik has announced a partnership with Walmart. The exclusive partnership sorts allows MobiKwik to power 20 of Walmart’s Best Price Modern Wholesale stores in nine states.
For the first time in the history of Indian banking, Federal Bank has launched a Mobile App for Bank Account Opening. The App was jointly launched by CA. Nilesh Shivji Vikamsey, Chairman, Federal Bank, and Mr. R Venkataraman, Managing Director, IIFL.
In a new twist to the Indian netizens’s freedom of speech, Supreme Court has asked the Government to formulate stricter rules and regulations in order to control malicious campaigns and defamatory content on social media.
Vodafone has announced that they will now be offering double data on pre-paid data recharge packs, effectively bringing down the prices of their data offering to nearly half. They will also be launching their 4G services by Year end
At Zenfestival in Delhi last week, Asus had a global launch of 3 new Zenfone 2 variants. It included Zenfone 2 Deluxe, whose price starts from Rs 22,999, Zenfone 2 Selfie, whose price starts from Rs 15,999 and Zenfone 2 Laser, which starts from Rs 9,999
The day Facebook launched their new feature: Live broadcast for their Mentions app, Shahrukh Khan became the first Indian celebrity to use it. The video shot via Facebook Mentions has already crossed 1.2 million views at the time of writing.
With the help of India’s postal department, Indian farmers will now be able to sell paddy, cotton, pulses or any other farm products directly to the traders online that too without spending even a single buck on transport.
Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad informed Rajya Sabha that a penalty of Rs 10.8 crore has been imposed on several telecom companies for exceeding prescribed electronic frequency (EMF) limits from mobile towers.
Mobile phone users can now activate or deactivate data services by simply calling or even by sending an SMS to 1925. The said number is toll free and will be up and working from next month onwards.
Sensing a gap in supply of hyper local social network, which acts as a destination to check out localized news as well, V-Star has launched a new Android app called Cityscape, which perfectly fits this demand.
And, don’t forget to check out our regular updates on Indian startup funding and investments deals