“Your urging has the flavour of reducing this meaningful constructive exercise designed to produce informed decisions into a crudely majoritarian and orchestrated opinion poll.” This isn’t a school headmaster admonishing an errant student. It’s TRAI letting Facebook know what it thought of its Free Basics poll that generated 9 million responses.
Over the last year, India has seen a mushrooming of chat apps that aimed to connect consumers directly with businesses. Services like LookUp, Haptik and Helpchat all had business models that involved setting up and easy, phone-based communication channel between users and local businesses, and had met with varying levels of success. But the industry is now likely to be upturned. Whatsapp, the global chat behemoth with 70 million Indian users, is looking to enter the space in a big way.
India’s fledging hyperlocal delivery startups now have some competition – and it’s not from another yet another superfunded startup trying its luck in the already crowded space. It’s from Mumbai’s iconic dabbawalas, who’ve been delivering food to Mumbai’s office-goers since 1890.
Flipkart appears to have put the final nail in the coffin of its app-only push that it began in May last year. Its latest sale, centered around Republic Day, will be available on both desktop and app. There’s also a company-wide move to make all products and services available on desktops, company insiders tell OfficeChai.
Housing employees hadn’t received the shares that Yadav had promised them. And now it turns out that they might not receive the shares at all – at least not in the traditional sense. On 12th January, the company announced in an email to the staff that they would get their share of Yadav’s gift in the form of phantom stock units.
Amazon is experimenting with cycles to deliver last-mile orders. Orders under the radius of 3-5 km will be delivered through this mode. The delivery team would be provided with geared bikes to carry packages of up to 7.5 kg per trip.
It’s an idea that’s going to make a lot of noise in the online payments world. Paytm is going to soon launch “Sound Pay”, a feature that will allow money transfers using ultrasonic sound waves.
With the government batting for startups with its Start Up India initiative, could banks have been far behind? India’s largest public sector bank, State Bank of India, has opened a branch that caters exclusively to the needs of startups. Called SBI InCube, the branch is quite appropriately situated in India’s throbbing startup hub of Bangalore.
Flipkart’s new CEO appointment and its subsequent management rejig has had an unexpected fallout – Chief Product Officer and former Google executive Punit Soni shall be soon leaving the company. When contacted, Soni said that he couldn’t talk about the matter at the moment, but said that “India has unique opportunities and unique challenges.”