Interestingly, this follows the appointment of another Web18 executive, Surya Mantha as the Managing Director of Saregama in November 2012. Mantha served as the Web18 CEO for almost four years (October 2006 – March 2010) before moving on to

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has launched an online recharge facility for smart card users at www.dmrcsmartcard.com. The organization has partnered with ICICI Bank to launch this automated fare collection process and ICICI Bank has also integrated its payment gateway to the website. The deal period or the financial terms of the partnership were however not disclosed. When [...]

NDTV subsidiaries, NDTV Worldwide and NDTV Convergence have picked 37.55% stake and 33.2% stake respectively in the group’s upcoming e-commerce venture, NDTV Ethnic Retail Ltd for a total consideration of Rs 4.2 lakhs on March 26, 2013. This was disclosed by the company in its latest quarterly results (pdf). In February 2013, NDTV had informed that NDTV Worldwide [...]

The Indian government has approved Rs 3,436.16 crore for Phase IV of the UID (Aadhaar card) scheme. This fund includes Rs 1,600 crore to cover the cost of enrolling an additional 40 crore residents, Rs 490 crore updation services, Rs 1,049 crore for printing and dispatch of Aadhaar letters and Rs 247.16 crore towards additional cost for [...]

A total of 7.33 million Prepaid Payment Instrument  (PPI) transactions worth Rs 4.73 billion were generated, as of February 2013, according to the latest numbers from the Reserve Bank of India. This includes 5.41 million m-wallet transactions worth Rs 1.47 billion, 1.89 million PPI card transactions worth Rs 1.88 billion and 0.03 million paper voucher transactions worth [...]

Consim Info which operates the matrimonial site BharatMatrimony.com, has spun off its real estate portal IndiaProperty.com as a separate entity, reports The Economic Times. The report cites Indiaproperty.com CEO Ganesh Vasudevan who said that the demerger was effective from April 2012, but due to court processes, it took 12 months for the company to complete the demerger. Vasudevan said [...]

The Interbank Mobile Payment Service saw a decline of 4.05% in the total transactions taking place between March and April 2013, with a 1.41 % increase in total number of Mobile Money IDs (MMID) issued, according to data published by the National Payments Council of India. The transaction volumes decreased substantially month on month from 358,038 to 343,532, even [...]

Nokia debuted a new version of its Asha platform, unveiled Nokia Asha 501 and announced a few developer initiatives at a press conference in New Delhi. Here’s a quick lowdown of everything that was announced at the event: Nokia Store Stats: Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia store has registered a cumulative 2 billion downloads in the last [...]

Started in 2011, AudioCompass is a startup that offers audio and multimedia tour design and development, technology support and site operations to tourist destinations. It offers audio guides for Agra Fort, Taj Mahal, Bombay Star Home Tour, Mumbai Heritage Tour (Footsteps of the Raj), Khajuraho, Hyderabad’s Salar Jung museum and Sanchi among others. In our [...]

Financial services provider Geojit BNP Paribas has partnered with the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) to launch a stock trading Facebook app suite called Flip Social, reports DNA. The report states that the app was developed by Geojit BNP Paribas subsidiary Geojit Technologies and offers a stock trading application, investment tutorials and a stock market game that aims to provide [...]

AOL-owned technology site TechCrunch has partnered with PlatformPlay to bring its series of two-day conferences to India by the end of this year. PlatformPlay informs that it will be collaborating with the TechCrunch events team to organize the TechCrunch conference series in three Indian cities, starting with Bangalore in November of 2013, followed by Mumbai in April 2014 [...]

According to Naukri.com‘s Job Speak Index, which is an indicator of job listings on its portal, the hiring activity in the Media sector (which includes Internet and Mobile sectors, according to the company’s classification) has increased by 6% in April 2013, when compared to the hiring activity in March 2013. The Naukri Job Speak index for the sector [...]

Google has added support for Marathi language for its Google Translate service. With this, Google Translate now supports eight Indian languages including Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Globally, Google Translate supports a total of 70 languages at present. Google however notes that this language is still in experimental stage and therefore the translations are expected to be less accurate [...]

XiaoMi is a smartphone company that is a rage in China: its Mi branded handsets sport a highly customized Android deployment (called MIUI), and are linked to a range of cloud services provided on top of the handset, have their own market (as opposed to Google’s play store), and have around 200,000 pieces of content, [...]

by Maria Xynou We live in an Internet Surveillance State with us constantly being under the microscope. However, law enforcement agencies would not be capable of mining our data, intercepting our communications and tracking our every move if they did not have the technology to do so. I started looking at surveillance technology companies since an investigation of the [...]

AR Rahman & Shekhar Kapur’s media startup Qyuki has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding from former Disney India MD (Digital) Samir Bangara, reports Gizmodo India. Bangara has confirmed this investment to MediaNama. What we’ve also heard from sources that Bangara is being brought in as the new CEO of Qyuki, replacing the existing CEO Poonacha Machaiah. [...]

Browser company Opera Software has partnered with seven Indian mobile manufacturers to preload the Opera Mini mobile browser on the upcoming Android-based handsets, phablets and tablets from these manufacturers. Among its partners include Celkon, Karbonn, Lava Mobiles, Intex, Fly Mobiles, Zen Mobiles and HCL ME tablets. Opera informed that Opera Mini will be the exclusive third party [...]

Rocket Internet-backed online food ordering service FoodPanda has raised (pdf) more than $20 million investment from a group of investors which include Investment AB Kinnevik and Phenomen Ventures. The company plans to use this investment to expand to other countries and optimize its customer service. Its worth noting that AB Kinnevik owns 24.2% stake in the parent company Rocket Internet. Launched in [...]

Bangalore based Tachyon Technologies has launched an Android application called Quillpad Hindi Facebook Chat, that lets users chat with their friends on Facebook Chat in Hindi, irrespective of whether the Hindi font is installed. The app is currently available as a free download on the Google Play Store.    We tried the app on our Android device [...]

OxiCash, an online wallet service by the payments solutions provider Oxigen Services India, has partnered (pdf) with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to launch a non-banking money transfer service – OxiCash Money Transfer. While the deal period of the partnership was not disclosed, OxiCash informed that this service will allow users to transfer money to any bank account and receive money [...]

It looks like Gizmodo.in and Lifehacker.co.in, the Indian edition of Gawker Media’s technology focused sites Gizmodo and Lifehacker has gone live, in beta, with content that appears to have been added and compiled over a period of time. (h/t Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan) Content: At the time of writing this post, Gizmodo India offers a mixture of International content sourced from its parent [...]

NASDAQ-listed Sify Technologies has appointed C.R Rao as its Chief Operating Officer (COO). Rao replaces CVS Suri who has been Sify’s COO since August 2006. The company said that Rao will be responsible for all operational and delivery duties across Sify’s multiple businesses. Prior to this appointment, Rao was serving as the company’s Vice President – Strategy, Admin [...]

Mobile operator Tata DOCOMO has partnered with the online music streaming service Saavn* to launch music-oriented data plans to its 2G and 3G prepaid GSM subscribers. While the deal period or financial details of the partnership were not disclosed, Tata DOCOMO informed that it will be bundling Saavn’s music streaming service with its Internet plus data plans on [...]

Shortly after raising $7 million from Bharti Softbank, messaging app Hike has partnered with the handset maker Nokia to preload its app on select Nokia devices, reports PTI (via The Hindu Business Line). The report said that as part of the agreement, Nokia will preload Hike messaging app on Lumia 510, Lumia 720 and all its Nokia Asha [...]