TinyOwl had closed its offices in Hyderbad, Pune, Gurgaon, Chennai and Hyderabad in dramatic circumstances in October, with a founder being held hostage in the Pune office for over 48 hours by the laid off employees. Now with all the offices lying vacant, TinyOwl’s founder has taken to Facebook to find new owners for them.
E-retail has caught the imagination of the Indian public, and how. “Flipkart” has become the most searched term on Google India, dethroning IRCTC, which had been the most searched term in 2013 and 2014. Interestingly, three other e-retail companies feature in the top 10.
Bangalore based food tech startup Eatlo has not been operating since 15th December 2015. The app has been throwing up an error message when users try to log in. The menu on the homepage has also not been updated since then.
Zomato had revealed the results of its porn marketing campaign with much fanfare. The company had decided to advertise on porn websites to promote its night time deliveries. And the campaign, however unconventional, had worked. Zomato had managed to draw people to its site at record low costs. It had seemed like a perfect startup hack – an insight into consumer behaviour that had demonstrable results. Yet Zomato’s taken the campaign down a day after it was announced.
Prominent angel investor Zishaan Hayath has claimed that Grofers delivery boys are cheating consumers by creating fake bills. In a Facebook post, Hayath said that his mother made a large order from Grofers which included 3 packets of pulses. However the delivery boy only got them 2 packets, but the bill was of the same amount as his order. The store had generated a bill with different prices such that the order totaled to the same amount.
Uber has expanded its operations in India to 4 more cities, bringing up its total count to 26. The new cities added are Ajmer, Jodhpur, Udaipur and Mangalore.
Indian startups are all out to woo Bharat. After Snapdeal had announced that it was going to be available in 11 Indic languages amidst much fanfare, it is now the turn on classifieds site Quikr to follow suit. The company has announced that its platform would be available in 7 Indian languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati and Marathi.
India’s food tech companies aren’t exactly known for their great customer service. The Facebook pages of Foodpanda, Swiggy and the like are littered with rants from irate customers who’ve been left hungry when their orders haven’t been processed as they’d have liked. The latest entrant in the food ordering game though is trying to do things differently. When a Zomato customer complained on twitter that he hadn’t received an order, he was in for a surprise.
The firing season for Indian startups is not quite over. After the flurry of layoffs last month when Zomato, TinyOwl and Helpchat had fired employees, there had been a lull in the bad news coming in from India’s startup space. Not any more.
It has been reported that realty startup Grabhouse has fired an undisclosed number of workers. These layoffs are chiefly in the operations and data collection teams.