Baby and maternity products retailer, FirstCry.com, which is owned by Brainbees Solutions Pvt Ltd., has received funding of undisclosed amount from eminent industrialist Ratan Tata. Tata has already invested in over a score of companies including Snapdeal, Paytm, Ola and CarDekho in his personal capacity.
Eight Indian startups are a part of Google’s first ever Launchpad Accelerator that began on Monday in Silicon Valley.
Housing.com has appointed Snehil Buxy as its Chief Product Officer. Buxy was a part of the original 12 member founding team of Housing. The 26 year old was also close to former CEO Rahul Yadav.
“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.
The name for your company, product or the brand is probably going to be one of the most important decisions you’ll make in the process of starting a company, only second to the business itself. It will be the name you would mentally verbalise a 100 times a day and hope for it to become a household name in due time. So what are the factors one should keep before naming their company? We asked a few startup founders and did our research and found the following patterns:
While the founder Deep Kalra was in spotlight at the startup India event, the Nasdaq-listed travel company MakeMytrip had a run-in with the tax authorities of India. According to the Directorate General of Central Excise Intelligence (DGCEI), MakeMytrip has failed to deposit all of the service tax the online travel aggregator has collected from the public. An executive from the company was taken into police custody for the same and later released on bail.
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.