Daily News Roundup: Vinculum, ShopAlike, Facebook, Walmart

Accel Partners & IvyCap Ventures invests in SaaS platform – Vinculum

Vinculum, a SaaS company which provides multi channel fulfillment software products and niche domain services for eCommerce and brick n mortar retailers has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in Series B round from  IvyCap Ventures with participation of existing investor Accel India Ventures, the company is planning to expand into the US market. The new funding round will enable the Vinculum to expand their sales team and extend their leadership position in Asia Pacific to other geographies.

Ashish Wadhwani, managing partner at IvyCap, will join the board of Vinculum as part of the investment.

Its suite of products include Vin eRetail^TM  – a cloud based, multi-channel fulfillment suite with rich functionality and business process configurability to meet the requirements of eCommerce retailers, retailers going online, Brick n Mortar retailers globally. It consists of Merchandising, Store inventory management, Order fulfilment, Warehousing, Reverse logistics, Analytics/Dashboards and is offered on a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Vin MDM^TM– A rule based engine for Master Data Management, which predicts, anticipates and cleanses data inconsistencies in Items, Suppliers and Customers data masters and ensures consistent master data across the enterprise. Vin Stores^TM – a suite of store solutions covering Work force Scheduling and Analytics, Queue Busting solutions (Mobile Check out), Stock take and Receiving on handhelds, Price checker among others.

Product comparison portal, ShopAlike enters India

Axel Springer backed product comparison portal, Visual Meta GmbH, has recently expanded to India with the launch of its website ShopAlike.in in the country. This would be its first expansion beyond the Europe.

Visual Meta GmbH was launched in 2009, since then it has been operating multiple shopping platforms across Europe under the brands LadenZeile and ShopAlike. On their websites, Visual Meta incorporates products from thousands of online retailers with the focus on fashion, furniture and lifestyle. The advanced product search allows users to find the desired products quickly and compare items.

In India, few of its partner shops include – Flipkart, Firstcry, Homeshop18, Infibeam etc.

Facebook India launches tracker for upcoming polls

Facebook India has recently launched election tracker for the upcoming polls, the feature will track mentions of candidates and parties throughout the election period.

On the page, the live-stream of candidates for the 2014 elections can be viewed; one can even take a poll on the issues and compare how much the Facebook community is talking about leading candidates and parties.

Walmart to launch ecommerce website in India

Walmart is soon going to launch its ecommerce operations in India, states a report by ET. As per the report, Walmart India’s COO Arvind Mediratta and including global veteran and V-P for operations in the India office, Steve Rodrigues with a team of 15 -17 are currently working on the launch of the portal which is expected to go live in next 3 – 4 months.

According to the people close to the development it will be following a marketplace model, but it’s yet to finalize the name.

The company declined to confirm about the development. “Our experiences worldwide support the fact that ecommerce is an important and growing area that meets our customers’ shopping needs. Toward this, we encourage the government of India to consider opening ecommerce for FDI,” said Walmart India spokesperson to ET.

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