India’s startup community has joined the ongoing clamour against Facebook’s Free Basics program. A total of 9 influential startup founders have written to TRAI voicing their concerns about Facebook’s move. These include CEO of Indian unicorn startups Flipkart, Paytm and Zomato.
Carpooling is the flavour of the season. The established players in the cab hailing market Uber and Ola have launched their own versions, and a slew of carpooling apps have come up. Now the oldest cab-hailing service has jumped on the carpool bandwagon. Meru has launched its own ridesharing service. The pilot version of the project will be kicked off in Delhi-NCR.
Fortunately the startups wave has struck the animal lovers who’ve turned entrepreneurs to help your pets in every way. From booking their spas to buying the best of pet accessories, these startups are creating a whole new industry which hitherto was confined to the neighbourhood pet shop. Though petcare in India is nascent and not as mature as in western countries, the Indian petcare industry is growing at about 26% a year, fuelled by a significant increase in spending by Indians on pets in the last few years
We reached out to all the pet startups in India and got a lowdown from all of them on what they do, for you to bookmark.
The layoffs in India’s food tech sector are well on their way to continuing onto 2016. After Zomato had fired 10% of its workforce, and TinyOwl had let go of 100 employees which resulted in its cofounder being held hostage in their Pune office for 2 days, Foodpanda has fired around 300 of its staff in India. This represents 10% of its workforce.
Flipkart has another addition to the ever-expanding list of items available on its site. Soon, buyers will be able to buy motorcycles and cars from the online retailer.
Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are slowly cementing their place as the locations of choice for IT firms setting up offices in India. After Google, Amazon and Uber had announced plans of setting up major offices in Hyderabad, Microsoft promised to set up a Centre of Excellence in Visakhapatnam. The company will also work with Telangana government’s startup incubator T-Hub.
Uber is purportedly trying to bring some cheer to your Mondays by rolling out the “Uber Puppies” programme, an initiative in which users can request a 15 minute play time with puppies.
Since its inception in the form of small sheets of paper, coupon offerings has changed drastically with the advent of eCommerce and online marketing. There are new ways, through which retailers have started using coupons. Digital coupons now not only serve the purpose of deals and discounts, but helps in increasing customer loyalty and brand building.
