It was a cold December night in 2004, and like millions of Indians, a young Ayush Bisaria watched David Blaine perform his bag of tricks on AXN. Blaine would approach people on the streets, and blow them away by makings cards disappear, showing superhuman strength, and for one dramatic trick, levitating spookily above the ground. Bisaria was mesmerized.
After selling hotel rooms, buses, and even gold loans on its platform, Paytm is now going to be offering movie tickets for sale. The company has tied up with PVR, INOX and multiple other cinema houses to sell movie tickets.
Over 80 bike taxis on the Uber platform have been seized after the company hasn’t complied with Karnataka government’s orders which declared them to be illegal. Uber continues to operates its bike taxis in the city, while Ola, Ridingo and Hey Bob have stopped services.
The Karnataka government has come out with a policy that aims to regulate the vehicle aggregators in the state, but Uber doesn’t agree with all its proposals.
Mu Sigma CEO Dhiraj Rajaram has been sued in the US for misleading an early investor about the prospects of the company. Patrick G. Ryan, who at one point held 17.5% of shares in Mu Sigma, claims that Rajaram cheated him of millions of dollars by downplaying Mu Sigma’s growth prospects, which caused him to sell back his stake for an amount much less than they were worth.
Indian starups, having made their marks on their home turf, are now slowing eyeing foreign lands. After Practo had expanded into Indonesia and Singapore, and Oyo had opened its first international hotel in Kuala Lampur, Rebus is now planning to expand to as many as four countries in South and South East Asia.
Nine months after the Housing board had fired CEO Rahul Yadav under dramatic circumstances, cofounder Advitiya Sharma has announced that he’s quitting the company. During Yadav’s tenure, Sharma was seen has the public face of the company, making numerous appearances on television as he talked about the prospects of Housing.
Uber’s made the process of getting around really easy, but it could now help you find investors for your next startup. With UberPITCH, the company is trying to connect startup founders with venture capitalists and mentors.
Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has been known to speak his mind. “In this country, there’s no f*cking better brand than us!”, he’d roared at a Paytm party recently, before claiming that his company had achieved numbers in 2 years that others took 5 years to reach. It had seemed a dig at Flipkart and Snapdeal then, but now it turns out that he really doesn’t think very highly of these companies.