It’s taken nine years, and Rs. 1,500 crore in investments, but Zomato says it’s finally reached an important milestone — the company is finally profitable. “Zomato is now a profitable company,” declared CEO Deepinder Goyal in a blogpost. “Yes, throughout the 24 countries where we operate, and across all our businesses, we are starting to make money. Our core advertising business in India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East – the three key regions for us,…

Flipkart might’ve just found a way to nullify one of Amazon’s biggest advantages. Flipkart is now offering a discounted Hotstar subscription to its users through a new scheme that it calls Festive Pass. Arch-rival Amazon had launched its Amazon Video service last year, through which it offered its Prime subscribers a vast selection of movies, TV shows and original programming for Rs. 499 a year. Through the Festive Pass, Flipkart customers will be able to…

The birds might have been angry, but they’re also about to become very rich. Rovio, the company behind the smash hit game Angry Birds, has announced it’s going public. The company will list of Finland’s stock markets on 29th September, with an initial price at Euro 10.25-11.50 per share, it’ll command a total market cap of over $1 billion.   That’s a lot of money for a company that’s best known for building a game that…

It’s not only Snapdeal’s investors and employees who are skeptical of its turnaround plan — it’s now getting trolled by its competitors too. ShopClues cofounder Radhika Aggarwal has said that Snapdeal is trying to ape its business model, but is unlikely to succeed. “They spent over $2 billion trying to be Flipkart and now they are spending half a billion dollars trying to be like ShopClues. We will have to see where they land up,” she…

Facebook now isn’t even being subtle about its intentions to turn Messenger into a tool to let people communicate with businesses. A new Facebook update positions a “Businesses For You” section right into the chat bar on desktop. This follows a recent update in which people who own Facebook pages found the pages’ chat icons available right on top of the chat bar. The upshot of these two updates is that on Facebook’s chat bar,…

USPTO 5960411 might seem like an innocuous set of letters, but for twenty long years, they held the key to one of the most powerful technologies in e-commerce. In 1997, Amazon.com was still a small online retailer. These were the early days of the internet, and Amazon had been one of the pioneers, calling itself the earth’s largest bookstore. It had then filed for an unusual patent. Amazon said it had developed a means of enabling users…