Tag Archives: india

Sankalp Phartiyal / Reuters : Sources: Flipkart board approved in-principle to engaging Walmart on ~$15B bid with Alphabet investing too; Amazon bid unlikely to win due to competitive issues   —  MUMBAI/BENGALURU/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian e-commerce firm Flipkart's board is yet to finalize a deal to sell a controlling stake …

Nick Statt / The Verge : Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann postpones Vine successor v2 indefinitely, citing need for funding, logistical issues conflicting with early-stage startup he runs   —  Citing funding and logistical issues  —  Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann announced today that his planned sequel to the popular …

Linda Sui / Strategy Analytics : Analysis: 345M smartphones shipped in Q1 2018, down 2.4% YoY; iPhone X was world's best-selling smartphone with 16M units shipped this quarter   —  According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics Smartphone Model Tracker (SMT) service, global smartphone shipments reached 345 million units in Q1 2018.

Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed : GoDaddy takes down Richard Spencer's website altright.com, says it has “encouraged and promoted violence in a direct and threatening manner”   —  Richard Spencer speaking at the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts on Oct. 19, 2017, in Gainesville, Florida.  —  Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Ubergizmo HMD Global Launches Nokia 6.1 In The US Ubergizmo Fans of Nokia-branded smartphones in the United States will soon be able to pick up a new device. HMD Global, the Finnish company that's now making Nokia devices, today announced that it's going to start selling the Nokia 6.1 in the United States. It's ... and more »

Leica Camera has announced the locations for the 2018-2019 Destination travel photography workshops: India, Colombia, Hawaii and Romania.

The future of e-commerce pricing in India may hinge on this deal.

Walmart’s strategy to get itself fighting fit against Amazon saw one more development today. This morning, UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s announced a deal with Walmart to buy a majority stake in Asda, Walmart’s wholly-owned UK subsidiary. The deal values Asda at £7.3 billion, and (if it closes) will net Walmart £2.975 billion in cash, a 42 percent share of the combined business as a “long-term shareholder”, and 29.9 percent voting rights in the combined entity, which will include 2,800 Sainsbury’s, Asda and Argos stores and 330,000 employees in the country. The news underscores how Walmart, off the back of a challenging quarter of e-commerce sales in the crucial holiday period (news that shook investors enough to send Walmart’s sock tumbling ), is still trying to figure out the right mix of its business to fight off not just current retail competition, but also whatever form its competition might take in the future. At the moment, the one big common rival in both of those scenarios is Amazon. In the US, Walmart has been trying out multiple routes for consumers to shop in new ways that address the kinds of options that the likes of Amazon now offers them. Targeting different geographies and demographics, Walmart has made big bets like its $3 billion acquisition of Jet.com ; expanding its own new delivery services , and payment and return methods; as well as running pilots with various third parties like Postmates and DoorDash . Internationally, it’s a different story. Walmart has a significantly reduced presence — its international business in aggregate is around one-third the size of its US business, $118 million in FY2017 versus $318 million. And with no clearly dominant position in any of its international markets, this has led the company to consider a variety of other options to figure out the best way forward. “This proposed merger represents a unique and bold opportunity, consistent with our strategy of looking for new ways to drive international growth,” said Judith McKenna, president and CEO of Walmart International, in a statement. “Asda became part of Walmart nearly 20 years ago, and it is a great business and an important part of our portfolio, acting as a source of best practices, new ideas and talent for Walmart businesses around the world.

Updat: This post has been updated to indicate that DP World invested in 2016. The firm is based in the UAE. Virgin Hyperloop One and DP World are launching a new joint venture, DP World Cargospeed, two years after the high-speed transportation technology developer tapped the UAE-based shipping company in a $50 million financing. The company’s stated goal is to deliver palletized cargo more efficiently by combining super high-speed promise of hyperloop transportation with new logistics technologies to accelerate deliveries along Virgin Hyperloop One’s planned routes between Mumbai and Pune in India; in Saudi Arabia, and in the United Arab Emirates. Introducing DP World Cargospeed pic.twitter.com/KvnzdKZ0NE — Virgin Hyperloop One (@HyperloopOne) April 29, 2018 Announced with much fanfare and in the presence of Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem and Virgin Hyperloop chairman Richard Branson, the new company is basically built on buzzwords like “on-demand” and the promise of future performance. Right now there’re only 10 kilometers of Virgin Hyperloop track being built (and they’re all in India). Although there’s not much more than a bunch of pontificating palaver around hyperloop technologies now, the startup companies and their corporate backers do present an compelling vision of the future of transportation. As China sinks billions into a new silk road to connect the world to its powerful new economic engine, incredibly fast, incredibly efficient logistics will become increasingly important — especially if it can be made more environmentally sustainable by harnessing renewable energy. “The global growth of e-commerce is driving a dramatic shift in both consumer and business behavior. On-demand deliveries are a novelty today.  Tomorrow  it will be the expectation,” Branson said in a statement announcing the new company. “DP World Cargospeed systems powered by Virgin Hyperloop One will enable ultra-fast, on-demand deliveries of high-priority goods and can revolutionise logistics, support economic zones, and create thriving economic megaregions.” .

The company is said to be in talks to acquire Flipkart, India’s leading online retailer, to counter Amazon’s push into the country.

High-profile U.S. startup accelerator Y Combinator is making a push to bring more China-based startups into its program after it announced its first official event in the country. YC has made a push to include startups from outside of North America in recent years. That has seen it bring in companies from the likes of India, Southeast Asia and Africa, but China remains underrepresented.  According to YC’s own data , fewer than 10 Chinese companies have passed through its corridors. YC counts over 1,400 graduates. “Startup School Beijing” is scheduled for May 19 in the Chinese capital at Tsinghua University. The event will be free to attend — though attendees might apply for a ticket — with the goal of showing the benefits of participation in its U.S. program. To help make its case, the organization has pulled in star graduates like Airbnb and Stripe while its president Sam Altman himself is scheduled to appear. The event will include sessions with graduates, YC partners and “live on-stage office hours.” That’ll see three companies picked from the audience to get advice and tips from the attending partners, as happens in the program.

Kubernetes has gained in popularity quickly over the last 18 months, but like many highly technical solutions it requires a level of expertise many companies are lacking. A Bangalore/San Francisco startup called Hasura hopes to simplify all of that with a managed Kubernetes solution built with developers in mind. Today, the company announced a $1.6 million seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from GREE Ventures. Kubernetes is a tool that helps companies running containers juggle or orchestrate them. This level of organization is required because the number of containers can grow quickly. If you think of a conductor telling the musicians when to come in and when to leave, Kubernetes plays a similar role for the container system. (For a more complete explanation of containers, see this article .) The company has focused on getting developers up to speed with the latest technologies quickly. “Our focus from the beginning has been making the application development super fast. How we do that is placing our APIs on top of a PostGres database to deploy any kind of code,” Tanmai Gopal, Hasura CEO and co-founder explained. Gopal says the idea is to be more than a managed Kubernetes provider by giving developers the tooling they need to get going without having to build the underlying code for every application. “We are going to be the last mile. We’re not just managing the Kubernetes cluster for you. You should have Kubernetes to have control over your containerized applications, but you also need developer tooling to build on top of it faster,” he said

Tom Jackman / Washington Post : Federal appeals court upholds a 15-month prison sentence for e-waste recycler Eric Lundgren for making Windows restore disks   —  A California man who built a sizable business out of recycling electronic waste is headed to federal prison for 15 months after a federal appeals court in Miami rejected …

Mat Honan / BuzzFeed : Amazon launches a $79 Echo Dot Kids Edition with kid-friendly Alexa and one year of FreeTime Unlimited, a bundle of curated content with a Parent Dashboard   —  Rose Wong for BuzzFeed News; Allyson Laquian / BuzzFeed News  —  There's a new version of Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant, that's designed just for kids.

Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge : Opera launches Touch, a mobile browser designed for one-handed use, and Flow to keep the mobile browser in sync with an updated desktop browser   —  Opera is releasing a new Android web browser today with a couple of clever interface choices meant to make it easier to use than other mobile browsers.