News Roundup: 5 Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week [26Jan

Last week began with bad news for ecommerce portals, as the Kerala Tax Department conducted raids and fined all big online shopping portals for evading taxes. Among the companies, the biggest penalty Flipkart faced the biggest penalty of INR 47.15 Cr.. Other retailers that faced similar fines were Jabong (INR 3.89 Cr), Vector Ecommerce, which has a stake in Myntra (INR 2.23 Cr), and Robemall Apparels, which operates Zovi.com (INR 36 lakh). The tax officials also made it clear that they would be scanning other ecommerce players who might as well face similar fines.

Multilingual Keyboard with 11 Indian Languages Launched By Reverie Language Technologies

Besides this, Reverie Language Technologies launched an app named “Swalekh” which allows users to type in 11 Indian Languages The app is compatible with all Android based devices and provides the option of typing in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and English.

India Post Plans To Venture Into Ecommerce Space

India Post revealed its plans of getting into ecommerce within the next 6 months. The new venture which is a part of modernization initiative worth INR 5,000 Cr., would although work similar to ecommerce portals like Amazon or Ebay, but the portal would be moderated and scrutinised.

Free Voice Call Launched By Hike

Hike launched free voice calling feature for its users on its Android app. The feature would be available on other OS by the end of Q1 2015. The company claims to have optimised the voice calls so that they consume very little data, hence giving more minutes per MB.

Transport Department Rejected Taxi providing apps’ License Applications

And, the bad just got worse for taxi providing apps Uber, Ola and TaxiForSure as the transport department rejected their license requests due to certain gaps found in their application forms. According to a govt. official, “it will take at least 10 days for companies to fill in all the gaps in the applications, which will then be reconsidered by the department.”