Weekly Wrap-up: Reliance Jio Call Data, Amazon Prime Video, WalMart Flipkart Investment & More…

It’s Monday morning and as is customary, it is time to do 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 from last week!

$493 billion conglomerate General Electric is shedding it’s 124 year old legacy; They have launched an Industrial Internet of Things platform: Predix, is actually on it’s way to change the future with it’s advanced cloud based Platform as a Service offering for industrial machines.

Government’s has received another setback in its attempts to make Aadhaar Card as mandatory requirement for availing various public welfare schemes and accessing services such as rail tickets and registration of businesses.

Airbnb, a popular global marketplace for rental properties, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Gujarat Government to boost tourism and invite more tourists to western most state of India. Every state in India has its own tourism initiatives, like Kerala and Madhya Pradesh.

At exactly 9.12 AM IST on Monday last week, Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C35) took off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, carrying eight satellites into different orbits. This was ISRO’s longest ever launch mission spanning 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Apple has been in the news lately for having severe flaws in iTunes backup. They are also report having low iPhone 7 sales and some reports suggest Apple working on a secret project called ‘Project Titan’

MediaTek has announced three new processors – P20 and P25 octa-core processors for the mid-range smartphones and X30 deca-core processor for the high-end smartphones. P20 and P25 chipsets will be replacing the P10 and X30 chipset will be replacing the X25 chipset.

The social media was shocked when it was revealed that half a billion passwords from Yahoo’s database had been hacked; and the scariest part is that the breach happened in 2014, and was reported few days back.

Amazon is gearing up to launch ‘Prime Video’ service in India and has now signed up Dharma productions and reserving streaming rights for 4 of their upcoming movies. The deal includes Dharma Production’s all previous movies as well

According to the Anonymous hacktivist group, Reliance Jio is still selling user’s call data in US and Singapore for direct advertising. According to Anonymous, two specific applications My Jio and Jio Dialer, are sending user information to an ad network called Mad-Me.

SEBI has suggested to ban en-masse circulation of ‘free’ stock market tips and insider news to gullible investors. Besides, they have also planned to ban games, contests and tournaments based on the volatility of stock market.

To counter part Reliance Jio – Vodafone, India’s 2nd largest network is trying to stop their users to migrate by providing more 4G data. Vodafone is offering free 10GB 4G mobile services at the expense of 1GB plan. Basically, with each new 4G smartphone, you will get 9GB 4G of free data when recharge for 1GB 3G/4G data plan.

Now Coolpad has launched a new ‘beast of a smartphone’ on 30 September 2016. The company has been teasing about it for more than a week as the unveiling was earlier slated to happen on 23 September, but it has now been pushed by a week to the last day of this month.

Various leaks suggest that Google will launch the new OS, named Andromeda OS, a combination of Chrome OS and Android OS , with Pixel 3 being the first device to get it out-of-the-box. Unfortunately, Pixel 3 has been scheduled to launch in Q3 2017, so users will have to wait a year to test the OS.

At a time when more and more Chinese and Japanese manufacturing majors have started shifting their base to India, a leading nationalistic Chinese tabloid, which is known to be state-sponsored, has expressed their worry over India’s power and fame when it comes to manufacturing industry.

Similar to free WiFi access at railways stations, Google wants to add more points with its new project, Google Station. At the Google for India event in New Delhi on 27th September, Caesar Sengupta, VP of Google’s Next Billion Plan, said that the company is opening the platform to anyone who wants to contribute to the network.

As per the show-cause notice sent by the Environmental Ministry, Amazon and other ecommerce portals have broken laws mentioned in the Hazardous and Other Waste (Management & Transboundary Movement) Rules and E-Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2016.

Flipkart calls its Big Billion Day, that sees huge price drops in some categories and some neat discounts in other categories. Amazon India calls it Great Indian Sale that has lightening deals and will have Prime deals from this year onwards. Snapdeal’s Unbox Diwali Sale is not a match to the above two but comes quite close in terms of order volumes.

One of the most interesting rule applied under GST is monthly tax filing by tax-payers. As of now, Service tax, VAT filings are done quarterly, and Income Tax filing is done on an annual basis. However, businesses whose annual revenues is more than Rs 50 lakh can opt for Compounding Scheme, wherein filing has to be done quarterly.

Google has now launched Play Music Store in India, which allows you to purchase music and store it offline.The music store has been available in a lot of other countries, so the service is not something new. The app Google Music on Android is the default music player that comes with a music store options, which had been disabled until now.

As had been expected, BlackBerry has bid farewell to its hardware business and it will not be manufacturing any smartphones from now on. Hardware was something BlackBerry was very proud of at one point of time, and then its software features rose to fame.

As per reports coming in, though unconfirmed, Walmart is all set to invest $1 billion into Flipkart and acquire a minority stake in India’s biggest ecommerce portal. This will mark Walmart’s re-entry into the consumer ecommerce business, after their partnership with Bharti fell off.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) has approved Project Saksham, which will integrate GST with Central Board of Excise and Customs’ (CBEC) IT system. A total of Rs 2256 crore would be spent on this integration, and the initial boost would ensure that the integration allows pan-India roll out of GST before April 1, 2017.

The festive season is here and online e-commerce giants including Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, etc. are all gearing up with the best deals to lure consumers. The competition in this space has reached its peak, with ecommerce sites trying to outdo each other with the offer of bigger discounts, faster delivery times and attractive deals.

For the first time, Apple is partnering with an Indian e-Commerce giant Flipkart, for customers to pre-order and buy latest iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. Pre-ordering will start from today at 23.59 hours (i.e 11.59 PM) on Flipkart. You can check out their official Page here.

The nation erupted into a never-seen-before patriotic zeal and every political party, institution and citizen supported the Indian Govt. on it’s decision to wipe out terror; even if that meant intruding into PoK territory.

As per reports coming in, Xiaomi is now aiming for this offline market in India, and have made plans to open whooping 1000 retail outlets of their own in India by 2020.

Betting on the advanced camera technology, Sony India has launched the flagship Xperia smartphone, Xperia XZ, that comes with a 23MP primary camera with triple image sensing technology that captures images with three times the precision and a 13MP wide angle front camera.

Obeying High Court’s directions, WhatsApp is expected to delete user data with Facebook, that includes your contact list, profile picture and name. WhatsApp has said that it has every intention of following the Delhi High Court directives.

Patna High Court has given a landmark judgement, which will protect and conserve ecommerce industry in the state; and most probably sets a tone which will help its cause it other states as well.

And finally, do not forget to check out our Startup Investment and Funding page – Over 70 companies raised funding in the month of September. You will also find details of over 2000 startup deals struck since start of January 2015.