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Kanye West Asks Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg For $1Billion For His ‘Ideas’

16Feb By reutersNo Comments

News

Kanye West Asks Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg For $1Billion For His ‘Ideas’

Rapper and fashion designer Kanye West, who says he is $53 million in debt, has asked Facebook Inc's Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to invest $1 billion into his "ideas." West asked his Twitter followers to urge Zuckerberg to support him. Mark Zuckerberg invest 1 billion dollars into Kanye West ideas — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 14, 2016 World, please tweet, FaceTime, Facebook, instagram, whatever you gotta do to get Mark to support me… — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016 Mark, I am publicly asking you for help… — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016 The rapper also asked Alphabet Inc CEO Larry Page to help him with his financial troubles. West, who claimed he was "still 53 million dollars in personal debt," said that people do...

Facebook director Andreessen sorry for India Internet remarks

11Feb By reutersNo Comments

News

Facebook director Andreessen sorry for India Internet remarks

Marc Andreessen, a prominent venture capitalist and Facebook Inc board director, apologised on Wednesday for tweets that condemned the Indian government for banning the social media company's free Internet service. India introduced rules on Monday preventing Internet service providers from having different pricing policies for accessing different parts of the Web, effectively dismantling Facebook's Free Basics programme, which offers a pared-back version of Internet service. Andreessen, who often takes to Twitter to offer his opinions, said the new rules denied India's poor access to the Internet. Only 252 million out of India's 1.3 billion people have Internet access. "Denying world's poorest free partial Internet connectivity when today they have none, for ideological reasons, s...

Google CEO Pichai Receives Stock Grant Worth About $199 Million

9Feb By reutersNo Comments

News

Google CEO Pichai Receives Stock Grant Worth About $199 Million

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai received restricted stock worth about $199 million, according to a regulatory filing by Google parent company Alphabet Inc. Pichai, who took over in August, received a grant for 273,328 Class C Google stock units on February 3. The valuation is based on the stock's closing price on that date. On the same day, Pichai sold 375 Class A common shares at a price of $786.28 each, and 3,625 Class C capital stock at a price of $768.84 each, the filing said.

First Indian Unicorn Startup is Going to Be Profitable in 2016

8Feb By reutersNo Comments

News

First Indian Unicorn Startup is Going to Be Profitable in 2016

Indian restaurant search and food delivery service Zomato, one of only a handful of Indian start-ups to succeed abroad, said on Monday. It had broken even in key markets including India and is on track to make a profit as early as June next year. The result comes as Zomato seeks $200 million in funding, a source close to the group said, in an increasingly tough environment for start-ups. Zomato, which makes money through advertising and its delivery service, said it had hit operational break-even in India, the UAE, Indonesia and three other markets in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Together, they account for the three-fourths of the company's revenue, co-founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal told Reuters. "The fundamental model of our business is that in mature markets we...

VR Firm Wevr Raises $25 Million From Samsung, HTC, and Others

6Feb By reutersNo Comments

FUNDING

VR Firm Wevr Raises $25 Million From Samsung, HTC, and Others

Virtual reality company Wevr raised $25 million (roughly Rs. 170 crores) from investors including HTC Corp and Samsung Ventures to fund the launch of a new platform for VR creators to distribute content, executives said on Friday. The platform, called Wevr Transport, is available now to a limited number of users in a test phase. It is designed to run on various virtual reality headsets through an app and on a website. Virtual reality video offers a 360-degree view that immerses people in fantasy settings. The technology has been touted for decades but never reached mass adoption. This year, Facebook Inc's Oculus unit, Sony Corp and others plan to introduce modern VR headsets. Wevr and other companies are making VR videos to lure audiences to the medium. Wevr Transport features ...

6Feb By reutersNo Comments

News

Twitter suspends over 125,000 accounts for ‘promoting terrorist acts’

Twitter Inc has shut down more than 125,000 terrorism-related accounts since the middle of 2015, most of them linked to the Islamic State group, the company said in a blog post on Friday. Twitter has said it only takes down accounts when they are reported by other users, but said that it has increased the size of teams monitoring and responding to reports and has decreased its response time "significantly." Twitter's announcement comes as many tech companies – led by Facebook – have taken stronger steps to police controversial content online in the face of threats from legislators to force the companies to report "terrorist activity" on their sites to law enforcement. Silicon Valley has been wary of engaging with government officials, concerned about endless demands for similar ac...

Google Search Chief Amit Singhal To Quit, To Be Replaced By AI Head

4Feb By reutersNo Comments

News

Google Search Chief Amit Singhal To Quit, To Be Replaced By AI Head

Reuters- Google parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) said Amit Singhal, the longtime chief of its Internet search business, will leave the company and be replaced by the head of the technology giant's artificial intelligence business. John Giannandrea, currently a vice president of engineering, will replace Singhal, a 15-year Google veteran, once he leaves on Feb. 26. "Search is stronger than ever, and will only get better in the hands of an outstanding set of senior leaders who are already running the show day-to-day," Singhal wrote in a blog post. The appointment of Giannandrea, who joined Google in 2010, underlines the growing importance Silicon Valley is attaching to artificial intelligence technology. Giannandrea led Google's machine learning efforts, applying the technology to produ...

Flipkart’s Myntra unit expects to turn profitable in fiscal 2017

28Jan By reutersNo Comments

Story

Flipkart’s Myntra unit expects to turn profitable in fiscal 2017

Myntra, part of Indian's biggest e-commerce company Flipkart, said it expects to turn profitable by the end of next financial year as the online fashion store looks at slashing discounts and curbing supply-chain costs. Shopping online is becoming more popular in India due to the rising use of cheaper smartphones and India's e-commerce sector is expected to grow to $220 billion by 2025. However, fierce competition to win customers through deep discounting has led to mounting losses for Flipkart along with rivals Snapdeal and Amazon. Myntra now plans to reduce discounts by 3-4 percentage points and the company expects to lower the number of products that are discounted on its website. Myntra's 60 percent of revenue in the next financial year would come from products sold at full ...

Corbis Entertainment Owned by Bill Gates Sold to Visual China

23Jan By reutersNo Comments

ACQUISITION

Corbis Entertainment Owned by Bill Gates Sold to Visual China

Chinese image licensing company Visual China Group said it acquired on Friday the image division and content licensing unit of photo library Corbis Entertainment, owned by Microsoft Corp's co-founder Bill Gates. The company signed another deal with media service provider Getty Images to distribute Corbis' images and content to customers, thus bringing in a major photo library and an image distributor to China. Getty Images would distribute Corbis' content, creating a collection of over 200 million images and videos and certain archived historical contents for creative and editorial use. Following the sale of its image assets, Corbis will be rebranded and its other businesses will operate under a new brand name. As per the deal, Visual China's division, Unity Glory, will own and m...

Jeff Bezos’ Space Company Blue Origin Successfully Re-flies, Lands Rocket

23Jan By reutersNo Comments

News

Jeff Bezos’ Space Company Blue Origin Successfully Re-flies, Lands Rocket

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space transportation company, Blue Origin, successfully launched and landed a suborbital rocket for a second time, a key step in its quest to develop reusable boosters, the company said on Friday. The rocket that flew on Friday was the same vehicle that made a successful test launch and landing two months ago, demonstrating reuse, Bezos said in a statement posted on Blue Origin’s website 10 hours after the flight. “I’m a huge fan of rocket-powered vertical landing,” Bezos wrote. “To achieve our vision of millions of people living and working in space, we will need to build very large rocket boosters. And the vertical landing (system) scales extraordinarily well.” Fellow tech titan Elon Musk’s SpaceX in December successfully returned a rocket to a landing pad...

Facebook launches real-time sports platform

23Jan By reutersNo Comments

News

Facebook launches real-time sports platform

Facebook Inc is tackling the sports arena with a new platform called Facebook Sports Stadium, which the social media site said will provide real-time updates on games, popular posts from fans, statistics and commentary from experts. "With 650 million sports fans, Facebook is the world's largest stadium," it wrote in a post on Wednesday announcing the feature. Facebook, which said it had an average 1.01 billion active daily users as of September, reports its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, Jan. 27. The new service appears to be an effort to encroach on Twitter's territory. The micro-blogging site has long been a popular destination for so-called "live-tweeting" games. MichaelAaron Flicker, president of XenoPsi, a New York City-based marketing firm, said the new product is ...

China’s Richest Man Will Develop $10 Bln Industrial Park in India

22Jan By reutersNo Comments

BUSINESS

China’s Richest Man Will Develop $10 Bln Industrial Park in India

Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group said on Friday it would develop a $10 billion industrial park in northern India, its first project in the country. The company owned by China's richest man Wang Jianlin said it would be the lead investor in the project's initial infrastructure and also ask Chinese firms to take part. Construction on the first phase of the 13 square km park in Haryana state is due to start this year, the company said. "Haryana State will provide Wanda with the most preferential policies," it added in a statement. Dalian Wanda is aggressively spending on projects and acquisitions ranging from entertainment to financial services in a bid to diversify away from its core, but slowing, domestic real estate operations. The conglomerate which posted $44 billio...