It’s Monday morning and time to d a quick wrap-up of the 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 India.
Telugu movie industry has found a new savior in the form of K.T Rama Rao, who is the Cabinet Minister for Panchayat Raj & IT for Telangana State. In one of the major crackdowns on stopping the spread of pirated movies, he has asked Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block around 1000 websites which allow sharing of pirated movies, especially Telugu flicks.
Anil Ambani led Reliance Communication has today officially agreed merger of Sistema Shyam Teleservices (SSTL’s) wireless business MTS with itself in a cashless deal valued at around Rs 4,500-5,000 crore according to a ET report.
World’s largest social networking site Facebook, along with state run telecom operator BSNL have come together to setup 100 WiFi hotspots providing internet to rural Indians. Facebook will invest Rs 5 crore per year on this joint venture – the monies will be used to buy bandwidth from BSNL.
India Post first debuted Cash on Delivery service in December 2013. In the first year since the debut they collected over 280 crore. In 2015, India Post has managed to take the total number of CoD collections to Rs. 800 Crore.
Paytm has some huge, massive plans for Indian ecommerce; and Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm has just revealed them to the outside world. As per reports coming in, Paytm will invest close to Rs 5000 crore ($755 million) into Indian ecommerce industry, which will aim to increase the number of sellers on their platform to 1 million by 2018. This investment will be spread across three years.
The much awaited, the much talked about GOSF or The Great Online Shopping Festival conducted by Google will not make its appearance in 2015… Google has killed it!
Mashable, one of the most popular tech to telecom, education to entertainment news website in the world has launched a local India edition in partnership with India.com. Mashable India will have a dedicated editorial team in Mumbai and New Delhi.
2016 is nearing, and so is Project Loon to Indians, just like Google had stated back in 2013. Indian government has been hard to please in the past. Now, with the government’s digital avatar on the forefront, leading tech giants are making the most of the opportunity.
Samsung today launched their new Budget series Smartphones in India – the Galaxy On5 and Galaxy On7. Theses phones are the first from Samsung to be manufactured in India.
Microsoft reportedly is all prepped up to release the first ever update to Windows 10. With this update, it is anticipated that Cortana will be available to Indian users as well by the end of this month, among the many other improvements
It has been found that more than 41.3% of all goods sold in China via online medium are fake and counterfeit. Alibaba, which is China’s biggest ecommerce portal, sold $45 billion of fake products last year. They grossed $112 billion worth of Gross Merchandise Value last year.
Make in India will now focus on high end research work and the first step has already been taken by associating all IITs in the country with Make in India vision. An annual corpus of Rs 250 crore has been created, which will ensure that India gets all the benefits of Make in India research work and help to create path breaking innovations.
[Event] In order to bring about an entrepreneurial impulse among students in the country; E-Cell of NIT Trichy in association with CitrusPay and AugRay is organizing “Epiphany” – simultaneous ideation bootcamps powered by Headstart Network in 8 major cities, and internship drives in 3 major cities.
According to counterpoint research report for 3Q 2015, 4G LTE smartphones witnessed a rise of whopping 2400 percent compared to last year. Overall Smartphone growth also remained quite healthy with a growth rate of 20 percent annually and 12% sequentially in Q3 2015 (July-Sept).
Snapdeal has launched an autonomous platform ‘Snapdeal Motors’ to include more Automobile companies like Hero Motocorp, Mahindra and Mahindra, Suzuki Motorcycles and Datsun in its portfolio across diverse segments.
Just hours before the closure of this special bounty program, a team of hackers have claimed to remotely jailbreak an iOS 9 powered iPhone and have won this bounty program. Zerodium, which call themselves as ‘premium exploit acquisition platform’, announced via Twitter
Forbes magazine has just released their ‘Powerful People List’ for 2015; and one of the most remarkable ascents has been of PM Modi, who has climbed 6 spots to become world’s 9th most powerful person. Last year, he was ranked #15 in this list.
Microsoft’s largest ever customer conference in India – Future Unleashed – witnessed slew of announcements including partnerships with multiple eCommerce sites in India, various startup initiatives and launch of Microsoft Lumia 950, Lumia 950 XL and Microsoft Surface Pro 4 in India.
Before the impending 4G service launch in December, Reliance Jio is showcasing their prowess in regards to their next generation 4G internet services delivered through WiFi Hotspots.
Indian Railways has decided to gradually phase out pantry cars from all trains. The move will start from long distance trains, which have been traditionally powered with a pantry car to provide fresh food for their passengers.
As per a McKinsey report on gender parity, it was revealed that India may lose Rs 46 lakh crore by 2025, if this wide scale inequality is not rectified. By improving gender equality in jobs and working culture, India can add $700 billion or Rs 46 lakh crore to its GDP by 2025.
With poor sales of Android One devices since launch, Google is contemplating a revamp to the program by removing a lot of standardizations and restrictions on the current Android One OEMs.
Google is now considering Apple’s strategy of having tight control over the hardware and software of its phones. It is now planning to co-design its own application processors and camera chips for its Android lineup.
Acknowledging the fact how Virtual Reality can help the viewers experience what’s happening in the videos, YouTube has now launched its support for VR videos.
Facebook is going to introduce its standalone news collator app ‘Notify’ next week. The news app goes head-on with Apple’s News app, Snapchat’s Discover service and Twitter’s Moments service to provide a single source of news from multiple sources.
As per Global Competitiveness Report for 2015-16 by World Economic Forum (WEF), India has a brighter economic future, compared to China. This new claim has been made after India jumped an impressive 16 places in the global ranking, to stand at #55 this year.