India | Pixr8 News

15Nov By Gauri SinghNo Comments

INDIA

Jack Dorsey, on his Maiden Trip to India, Meets Political Leaders and Bollywood Celebrities

It has been a great pleasure for India to welcome the Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is on his maiden trip to India. However, the experts have been feeling that the social media platform Twitter has been missing several opportunities to make itself relevant in the country and this has been the basic purpose of the co-founder to visit the country. In its most recent earnings announcement in October, Twitter reported an annual increase of 29 percent in revenue to $758 million in India. However, its monthly active users fell to 326 million in the September quarter. "Twitter does not even account for 5 per cent of revenue from social media platforms in India," said Meenakshi Tiwari, a forecast analyst who looks at business technology and digital marketing at research firm F...

Tinder App Launches 23 New Gender Options in India

14Nov By Gauri SinghNo Comments

Tech

Tinder App Launches 23 New Gender Options in India

The popular dating app Tinder has launched 23 new gender options for users in India. This will enable the users to add gender information which they believe represents them most authentically. So far, Tinder users in India were offered only two options when selecting their gender: man or woman. For users who are identified as transgender, gender neutral or somewhere between or outside the gender binary posed an obvious challenge. "Users are best to assert their own identity and our latest update gives them the opportunity to decide how to express themselves authentically and it has been a good year in India for gender, sexuality and personal autonomy," Taru Kapoor, General Manager, Tinder India said. With this new update, the users will be able to type any word that describes their ge...

13Nov By Gauri SinghNo Comments

INDIA

Visa, Mastercard and American Express May Have to Pay Tax in India

International payment companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express now may have to pay around 15% tax on their India income. This may happen as they set up servers locally to comply with a central bank directive on data storage. The Reserve Bank of India had ordered payments companies to locally store data on all transactions taking place within India from October 15. Visa, Mastercard and American Express mentioned that they had taken steps to comply with the regulation. At present, all these companies are out of the tax net in India, as they do not have a ‘permanent establishment’ in the country. The companies work and offer their services here through offices in jurisdictions such as Singapore and store data on servers located in countries like the US and Ireland. As soo...

Amazon Partners Apple to Sell New Devices in India & other markets

10Nov By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Amazon Partners Apple to Sell New Devices in India & other markets

Amazon has struck a deal with Apple to directly start selling more Apple products in India and other markets like United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan among others. In the coming weeks, Amazon will start offering the latest editions of Apple's iPhone, iPad and other devices like Beats headphones in these markets. The online retail giant will however not offer Apple's HomePod smart speaker, that directly competes with Amazon Echo. CNET was first to report this deal. "We're working with Amazon to improve the experience for Apple customers on their site and we look forward to those customers having another great way to buy iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac and more," Apple said in a statement. Apple had earlier struck a deal with Amazon rival Flipkart and Infibeam to...

10Nov By Gauri SinghNo Comments

INDIA

Online Sale of Smartphones in India to Cross 50 Million Mark

The online sales of smartphone in India got a hype during the festive season sale on various e-commerce platforms and thus, it is all set to cross the 50 million mark in a year for the first time ever in 2018. The year was driven by discounts, buy-back offers and easy financing options offered by retailers such as Flipkart and Amazon and others especially at the time of the festive season. Research firm CMR estimated that online sales in the fourth quarter of 2018 will increase 60-65% year-on-year and on the other hand, sales in bricks-and-mortar stores are likely to fall 4-6%. Counterpoint Research has projected a 51% increase in online sales and 11% for offline. “With the onset of festival season, more smartphone vendors in partnership with e-commerce players are offering discount...

Elon Musk Plans to Bring Tesla Partially in India Next Year

5Nov By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Elon Musk Plans to Bring Tesla Partially in India Next Year

Tesla Motors' Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Elon Musk, has revealed the company's plans of expanding its overall market beyond North America, Europe, and China. The owner of the largest EV company stated that he recently asked his service team to expand to all population regions (not just major metros) in North America, Eastern Europe, China, and Japan by the end of next year. Any plans to make service outside Tesla serviced countries easier? — Anner J. Bonilla???️?? (@annerajb) November 2, 2018 The 47-year-old opened up about his firm's expansion plans after a user responded to a tweet in which Musk had revealed that Tesla and Panasonic are together the largest producer of batteries for electric vehicles in the world. In a follow-up tweet, Musk said the fir...

3Nov By Gauri SinghNo Comments

INDIA

India’s PM Narendra Modi Launches 59 Minutes Loan for MSMEs as Diwali Gift

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced a number of measures and services for the people of our country including the most interesting and valuable one under which, the small and medium enterprises will be able to sanction loans of up to Rs 1 crore in just 59 minutes through a special portal. This has basically been done to give a boost to the nation's second-biggest employing sector. For a long time, the Prime minister has been looking upon and taking efforts for the startups of our country and he has launched yet another measure that will be really helpful for the small businesses. The programme was unveiled as part of 12 new decisions to aid the sector which, the PM said, were like "Diwali gifts for MSMEs". "As we speak, somewhere in the country your entrepreneurial bro...

QSR Startup Charcoal Eats to Foray into the International Markets

2Nov By Gauri SinghNo Comments

News

QSR Startup Charcoal Eats to Foray into the International Markets

Quick service restaurants startup Charcoal Eats which currently operates only in India is foraying into international markets starting with the Middle East and Europe. The company at present offers its services in about 30 locations across 11 cities in India. The company is expecting to enter the Middle East through Bahrain with about 8-10 outlets and then expand to other countries in the area. Along with the Middle East, the company would also reach the areas of the United Kingdom with 4-5 outlets by March next year. “Going forward, we will maintain a dual focus for India expansion - opening more outlets in metros (Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata); and expanding into tier II cities, which we see as the future growth engines for the food space. Charcoal Eats int...

After Smartphone, China’s OnePlus to Capture India’s Smart TV Market

31Oct By Gauri SinghNo Comments

Tech

After Smartphone, China’s OnePlus to Capture India’s Smart TV Market

Chinese technology giant OnePlus is set to enter the market, intensifying competition in a space which has already been disrupted by the entry of Xiaomi, another Chinese player. Chinese players have been dominating the Indian market for a long time and now, OnePlus is expecting to capture the smart TV segment as well. Consumers of India’s growing segment of Smart TVs can expect even better times going forward with China’s OnePlus. Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePus stated that the positioning of TVs has to be the flagship and India will be one of the first markets to get them. "We are good at the flagship segment and user experience. We will be able to carve out a space for ourselves in India,” he said. The company had recently announced the formation of a new division to develop Smar...

Facebook Rolls Out Digital Literacy Library for the Young India

30Oct By Gauri SinghNo Comments

Tech

Facebook Rolls Out Digital Literacy Library for the Young India

For a long time now, Facebook has been making efforts to cope up for the mistakes that the company made in the recent past and as part of its efforts to train 3,00,000 people in India on digital literacy, it has launched Digital Literacy Library. This is a collection of lessons in six local languages - Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. This announcement was made at Facebook's South Asia Safety Summit. The Ministry of Women and Child Development together with Facebook summoned a group of leaders in safety and technology and was joined by around 70 organizations from over five countries that include India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. “The launch of the Digital Literacy Library, the child safety hackathon and several offlin...

Foodpanda Reaches 50 Indian Cities & Aims to Make it 100

26Oct By Gauri SinghNo Comments

BUSINESS

Foodpanda Reaches 50 Indian Cities & Aims to Make it 100

Online food delivery player Foodpanda has reportedly expanded its delivery network to 30 more cities in India which has further increased its existence to 50 cities across the country. With this expansion, the company mentioned that its delivery network is now live in cities like Jodhpur, Kota, Udaipur, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Dehradun, Allahabad, Varanasi, Surat, Vadodara, Aurangabad and Bhopal among others. Along with this, Ola-backed Foodpanda is also planning to expand the network to 100 cities by the end of November. Across these cities, the foodtech firm claims to have more than 125,000 delivery partners on its platform as of now. "While our network now covers all metropolitans and major tier 1 & 2 cities across the country, we are excited about introducing the supe...

24Oct By Gauri SinghNo Comments

INDIA

India Tops Google Play Store Downloads in Last 7 Years

With the growing number of Android users in India, the country saw 36.9 billion app downloads from Google Play Store between January 2012 and August 2018 which marks as the highest among all countries, according to mobile app analytics firm App Annie. This study was done on the 10th anniversary of the Google Play Store. India accounted for 11.2% of the Google Play Store pie worldwide, given that global downloads for the period were 330 billion. Following India, the US was in second position with 35.1 billion downloads. The further positions were held by Brazil (25.2 billion), Russia (15.9 billion), Indonesia (14.6 billion) and Mexico (12.7 billion). On an annual basis, India became the No. 1 downloader from Google Play Store in 2016. Taking into account both Google Play Store and Apple ...