News Roundup: 10 Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week [17August -22 August]

Paytm, finally, received licence from RBI to set up payments banks. This decision of RBI will help Paytm in further driving the overall commitment to financial inclusion for the unbanked segment, modernize payment systems and build more trust for our services. Other than Paytm, 10 more companies have received this licence.

Let’s have a look at the important developments of the week

Flipkart Launches F1-Stop For Its Sellers

Flipkart One Stop (F1-Stop) will enable sellers with necessary information and procedures to kick start and grow their business online. It will offer an array of services to the sellers ranging from registration, training, cataloguing, packaging and financial assistances.

Gigstart Founders Launches Pluss App

Pluss is a hyperlocal delivery startup for health and medical needs. It let users place orders through calls, whatsapp or the Pluss website. Pluss has four main product categories – Baby Care, Pet care, Personal Wellness and Daily Essentials.

Delhi Transport Department Joins A Petition Against Ola

This move comes after the judge had asked the state government to file a status report on the ban issued on the taxi aggregator. According to Senior Commissioner’s statement, “Ola has constantly declined to obey the High Court orders on the ban, which is why the contempt petition was filed against the cab hailing service.”.

SBI Launched Its Mobile Wallet App, SBI Buddy

With SBI’s Buddy App, customers will be able to access sellers’ App directly without downloading the latter separately.  For this SBI has already tied up with several merchants to let users access the merchant’s’ store directly through its App.

Paytm Partners With InMobi

With this collaboration, Paytm marketplace merchants will have a reach to 120 Mn mobile internet users on InMobi’s Miip (discovery commerce platform). This will help merchants to increase their businesses manifold by reaching out to the entire mobile internet community in India.

Times Internet Launched A New App: AstroSpeak

This app enables users to seek specific astrological advice around career, personal and financial needs from over 100 plus experts.

Nikesh Arora Makes $483Mn ‘Personal Bet’ In SoftBank

President and chief operating officer of Softbank, Nikesh Arora’s plan to buy $483 Mn (60 Bn yen) worth of company’s shares, is one of the biggest purchases of employer stock by a professional manager.

Uber Partners With Bharti Airtel

Both companies, customers will now enjoy free high-speed internet from Uber, powered by Airtel 4G and riders will be allowed to pay for their trips with Airtel’s mobile wallet, Airtel Money. Beginning from Mumbai city, Uber riders can use 4G Wifi ‘UberWiFi’ in cabs. This service will soon be rolled out for all Uber riders pan India.

Flipkart hires Google executive Mayur Datar

Mayur Datar will now serve as the principal data scientist of Flipkart. Datar will join next month and will report to chief technology officer Peeyush Ranjan, who had also joined Flipkart from Google earlier this year.

Lets have a look at other developments of the week:

Lookup launched its Services In Delhi

Lookup has collaborated with Delhivery to provides supply chain solutions to online and offline retailers. Through this partnership, Lookup will drive customers to these stores, help them in discovery and engagement through their chat platform while their inventory management will be taken care of by Delhivery.

Connect India Launches Last Mile Distribution Services in India

Long term vision of CI is that, this distribution platform will also work towards generating Re Commerce (rural enterprise) by empowering small rural artisans and producers to sell their produce through various e-commerce platforms.

Inuxu Revolutionizes Remarketing With Its High Impact Ad Units

These high impact ad units are powered by Inuxu’s in-house product adgebra. With this technology, advertisers will now be able to use Inuxu’s ‘in-screen’, ‘in-image’ and ‘innovative mobile ads’ for remarketing campaigns as well.

CaratLane To Spend INR 60 Cr On Marketing, Branding And Opening New Stores

CaratLane will spend INR 40 Cr. on television and print marketing campaigns for the whole next year and another INR 20 Cr. in increasing the number of offline stores three times as part of its omni-channel strategy.

Click Labs Launches SaaS Product, Tookan

Tookan is a delivery management solution that streamlines delivery operations for SMB’s and early stage startups to manage their mobile workforce. It is Click Labs third SaaS product.

MakeMyTrip Launches Rail Booking Services In 5 More Languages

The passengers will now be able to opt from Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Gujarati to book rail tickets. With this, MakeMyTrip plans to reach about 62% of India’s population.

Dish TV Brings Video On Demand Service Via DishFlix

DishFlix is a subscription-based video on demand service aimed at premium customers. With DishFlix, consumers can watch a set of 50 preloaded movies without commercial break and without an internet connection.

Flipkart Takes Nikon India To High Court

Nikon had put a statutory warning on its website advising people not to buy its products through online stores like Snapdeal and Flipkart, which consequently provoked Flipkart to file a case against the company.

Zostel Launched Services In Vietnam

Itl is the only contemporary startup in the Indian travel & hospitality space to have managed to expand its operations internationally.

Ola Launched A New Program, Ola Select

Ola Select will provide loyal Ola users with a series of benefits such as free in-cab Wi-fi, free upgrades and special discounts including a variety of exclusive benefits from the partner brands like Myntra, Snapdeal and Cleartrip.

Tolexo Announced An Investment Of $2 Mn In Mobile Technology

Tolexo has launched a B2B ecommerce app for 47 Mn SMEs. With this, the company has also announced investment to be used for building the mobile product, framework & technology, to accelerate the development.

Kalyan Jewellers Forays Into Ecommerce

In a bid to beef up its presence, Kalyan Jewellers  would be launching its ecommerce operations within the next two months. According to a company statement, the online SKU (stock keeping units) will have two lakh designs and plan is to make ecommerce channel  as an important integrator to the offline business.

Personal Safety & Immediate Assistance App, One Touch Response goes live on the Apple app Store

With over 10,000 users already, a private personal safety and immediate assistance service, One Touch Response (OTR) provides its users with a one-tap mechanism to ensure their personal safety via on call assistance within seconds, which is backed by a trained physical response team that arrives within minutes in the NCR region.

MobiKwik Partners With StoreKing To bring financial inclusion In Rural India

This partnership will benefit 10Mn rural users who will now be able to make payments via the MobiKwik mobile wallet in these 10,000 retail stores, as well as make payments for online purchases on the StoreKing ecommerce platform. StoreKing is an assisted ecommerce platform that partners with a network of Kirana stores located in rural areas to establish a tablet-based wireless internet connected point-of-sale terminal.