News Roundup: 10 Startup Stories That You Don’t Want To Miss This Week [8 August – 13 August]

Online fashion retailer, Myntra started working with a new seller called Tech Connect Retail Pvt. Ltd. Tech-Connect Retail Pvt. Ltd. owned by former Bharti Airtel Ltd CEO Sanjay Kapoor.

This move will enable Myntra to comply with new regulations for ecommerce firms. The new guidelines issued in March stated that ecommerce entities need to ensure that they do not permit more than 25% of their total sales from one vendor or a particular group of companies.

Important Developments Of The Week

Printo Launches Mobile-Driven Platform

Bengaluru-based printing retail company Printo launched a mobile-driven platform called Print Instantly or Pi, that lets users access home delivered printouts through their app.

Founded by BITS Hyderabad graduates Saksham Sahai and Siddhant Panda, the company aims to address the latent need for instant printing.

The app is an on-demand printing service which integrates with email, cloud and local storage on mobiles. It acts as a backend service for print shops and a front-end for customers to place their orders.The app is location-specific and connects users with the nearest suppliers. It allows users to print pictures, documents and posters from their phones. They can collect the order or have it delivered at home as well.

Now Place Orders On Zomato and Swiggy Via Google Search

Google India, announced that users can now place food orders on their phone directly via Google search. When anyone will search for a nearby restaurant, if it’s listed with either Zomato or Swiggy, then they’ll see an option to “Place an order” in the search results.

One can also book a table with Google Search by clicking on a partner’s link who will then be redirected to their site to make a reservation. The feature is currently live with over 11,000 restaurants across 10 cities in India: Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Chandigarh.

GoJavas Suspends Operations

GoJavas temporarily suspended operations, citing technical issues. The firm is partially owned by ecommerce biggie Snapdeal. GoJavas which works with more than 450 companies, stopped servicing its clients almost a week ago.

Founded in 2013 by Vijay Ghadge, GoJavas is an ecommerce logistics supply chain company based in Gurgaon. It facilitates ecommerce delivery to 2500+ pincodes.

Grofers Responds To Notice Sent By Students

In its response to the notice sent by the students, whose job offers were revoked, Grofers “denied any commitment to provide jobs to the students.”

Earlier this year, Grofers had revoked the offer letters of over 67 students from colleges all over India – DTU, NIT Allahabad, PEC Chandigarh etc. As claimed by the students, they had already shifted to Gurgaon after receiving confirmation on June 27 in order to begin their professional life. However, on June 30, their offers were revoked.

PMO Unveils MyGov App

PM Narendra Modi unveiled the PMO app. The app aims to strengthen the connectivity between Central Government and the citizens.

MyGov is a platform that empowers the citizens of India to contribute towards Surajya (good governance). To date, it has reached 3.53 Mn registered users, 182.09K submissions in 492 tasks and 3.40 Mn comments in 590 discussion themes.

RBI Launches Website Sachet

The Reserve Bank Of India in order to curb illegal and unauthorised pooling of funds by unscrupulous firms has launched a website – Sachet. It will help people to get information about legalised entities that allowed to collect public deposits/provide investment management services, entities barred from doing so, besides receiving on-the-ground information on illegal entities. The portal will also facilitate filing and tracking of complaints.

Brakes On Surge Pricing In Delhi

The Delhi government is planning to impose a fare restriction on app-based cab aggregators including Ola and Uber. They will be barred from charging tariffs over an upper ceiling set by the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi in the near future.

Later the Delhi High Court on Thursday set August 22 as the deadline, for app-based cab aggregators to completely withdraw surge pricing. To facilitate the same it directed a special committee, set up by the Centre to examine all issues related to existing permits given to taxis and cab aggregators. The committee will include one senior official each from the Ministry of IT, Central Pollution Control Board and Delhi Traffic Police. The committee will get three months to submit its report.

HDFC Launches Reward Debit Card With Times Internet

Times Internet (of the Times India Group) and HDFC Bank have launched the Times Points HDFC Bank Debit Card. Mastercard is the transaction partner for the same. The exclusive co-branded card is targetted at those customers looking for the best deals, discounts and rewards while being as well as shopping online.

BigBasket Now Starts Selling To Kiranas And Hotels

Online grocery seller BigBasket has entered B2B space and will sell its products to kirana (local grocery) stores, hotels, and restaurants.

The company presently has 1,000 kirana stores on board, apart from various hotels and restaurants across the country. For BigBasket, exploring the B2B model is aimed at achieving volumes as margins are thinner in this segment compared to its consumer-focussed business which garners 20%-23% margins

Other Developments Of The Week

eKincare launches marketplace for healthcare services

eKincare a HealthTech startup launched a marketplace for healthcare services. Users can upload photos of their existing medical records from which eKincare extracts the information and assesses the person’s medical condition, predicts the future onset of chronic diseases and offers personalised recommendations.

Alibaba Cloud Partners with HTC

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group announced a strategic partnership with HTC Corporation. Together, both companies will explore high scalable and price-competitive virtual reality (“VR”) solutions for customers worldwide.

Through advanced cloud computing technology of Alibaba Cloud, the companies will focus on developing breakthrough innovative solutions to tackle bandwidth allocation, data transmission and data processing needs in areas such as VR video production and VR broadcasting. The partnership will also bring together industry developers to build a VR cloud ecosystem, and extend ‘Viveport’, HTC’s VR app store to Alibaba Cloud’s cloud computing platform.

FlexiLoans Technologies partners with Ola

Online lending platform, FlexiLoans Technologies, has partnered with Ola, to provide quick, flexible and adequate loans to Ola’s driver partners. FlexiLoans will offer Ola’s driver-partners immediate business and need-based loans up to INR 1 lakh, with affordable monthly installments and a disbursal time of just 30 minutes. This tie-up is exclusively for Ola Stardrivers, which includes Ola’s top rated driver partners. The scheme is launched in Mumbai and Bengaluru in the first-phase.

Ola Launches Ola Rentals

To simplify intra-city travel Ola, launched ‘Ola Rentals’; hourly packages on Ola Lux, Ola Prime Sedan & SUV and Ola Mini.  ‘Ola Rentals’ enables users to save the effort of booking a cab time & again within a single day. The service is available in 35 cities currently and will soon be rolled out in 100 cities across India.

Wydr Partners With Union Ministry of Textiles

Performance-based wholesale marketplace, Wydr partnered with the National Handloom Development Corporation (NHDC). Mandated by the Union Ministry of Textile, this association is aimed at enabling the Indian artisan community to connect with retailers and big distributors across the country. Wydr is tasked to assist in online B2B ecommerce for products certified under the ‘India Handloom Brand’ by NHDC. This national level effort by the Union Ministry of Textiles is intended to educate, train and enable cooperatives and weavers to directly sell their products online.

LatestOne Launches Managed Marketplace

LatestOne.com has expanded its business model to a managed marketplace and will now list products from over 500 mobile and tech accessories vendors, gradually over the next 3 months. With this initiative, LatestOne.com plans to increase the size of its catalogue from 10,000 to 30,000 unique products. LatestOne.com has also announced the opening of its third fulfillment centre in Mumbai. LatestOne.com has delivered more than one million orders and currently processes an average of 3,500 b2c orders per day on an inventory based model.

Mindshare And Culture Machine Launches “Content Lab”

Media agency, Mindshare, a part of GroupM is partnering with Culture Machine to launch ‘Content Lab’ as part of their Content+division. Under this partnership, Mindshare’s clients will have access to Culture Machine’s patent pending Big Data content platform, Intelligence Machine (IM), as well as its programmatic Content tool, video machine (VM), in addition to the latter’s team of analysts, data scientists, machine learning experts, channel management, audience growth and in-house content studios across North and South India.

Both firms will work together to co-create unique and differentiated content for the digital environment. The motive to create ‘Content Lab’ is to use best practices in digital content marketing by marrying cutting edge data science with content creation, across languages, nation-wide.

Jugnoo Launches ‘Ready-To-Eat’ Meal Delivery Service

Chandigarh-based on-demand auto rickshaw aggregator Jugnoo, has launched meal delivery service ‘Meals’. This is a part of the company’s recently launched Fatafat app and will enable users to order ‘ready to eat’ meals for lunch. Customers would be able to choose from a daily-changing handpicked menu that includes sandwiches, meal combos and desserts, among others without any minimum order price.

The new launch offers meal delivery service throughout Chandigarh, Panchkula and Mohali, taking orders between 12 midnight to 12 noon. People can choose between two delivery slots, the first one being 12:30 pm-1:30 pm and second between 1:30 pm-2:30 pm. The company is planning to launch meals for evening snacks and dinner as well, within a week’s time.

Snapdeal Powers Next Day Delivery In 104 Cities

Snapdeal announced that it’s next day delivery service is now live in 104 cities across India. This includes all metros and Tier I, Tier II and select tier III cities including smaller cities like Chitradurga, Sirsa, Ongole, Rudrapur, Shimoga, and Salem. The next day delivery service will be available on an assortment of more than 9.2 lakh products across 450 sub-categories, including electronics, daily needs, health, home care, among others. To power its next day delivery service, Snapdeal has been working with its 3PL partners to extend capacity and optimise its logistics framework.

Delhi Chapter Flags Off LLOYD-SHEROES Summit

Delhi hosted the fourth Edition of the SHEROES, on August 10. The Summit’s theme was Work Life Bank Balance.  One of the early sessions was a CXO panel discussion, which included business leaders Pankaj Bansal (co-founder and CEO, PeopleStrong), Shilpa Sharma (co-founder, Jaypore) and Radhika Ghai Agarwal (co-founder and Chief Business Officer, ShopClues).

Another high point of the LLOYD-SHEROES Summit was a panel discussion on the ‘Future of Work’, the participants of which included SocialCops co-founder Prukalpa Sankar; Entrepreneur and Investor Kashyap Deorah; journalist and writer Bee Rowlatt, and UrbanClap’s  Vice-President (Business Development) Apoorv Jain. After the New Delhi session, the LLOYD-SHEROES Summit will travel to Bangalore (August 20,Saturday) and Mumbai (August 27,Saturday).

Flipkart Now On Kotak Mahindra Bank’s Mobile App

Kotak Mahindra Bank users can now shop from Flipkart’s mobile site on its mobile banking app. This will give customers a secure in-app shopping environment. This move strengthens its mStore which already allows booking of air tickets, hotels and bus tickets. Shopping on Flipkart via Kotak’s mStore has its advantages. Customers can shop seamlessly and check-out faster with a choice of relevant payment options, as billing and delivery details are already available with KMB. Furthermore, in-app shopping reduces transaction failures, and allows them to track cancellations and refunds in the same window. They only need to register once on the app to start shopping.

The Flipkart in-app shopping feature is currently available on the Android platform and will soon be available to iOS users.