BlackBerry has announced BlackBerry Q5 smartphone and made couple of software announcements at the BlackBerry Live 2013 event that concluded yesterday. Here’s a quick lowdown of everything that BlackBerry announced - BlackBerry World: BlackBerry World now has over 120,000 apps for the new BlackBerry 10 OS. It has also added Skype, SoundHound, Bloomberg Hub, iHeartRadio, among others. The [...]

Pankaj Gupta, former COO at Spice Digital*, has joined mobile VAS company GoBindas as its CEO. Gupta was with Spice Digital for almost five years, and joined GoBindas earlier this month. Gupta confirmed his move to MediaNama. He takes over from Rakesh Mahajan, who leaves on the company on Friday. Before joining GoBindas, Mahajan was the [...]

It looks like e-commerce woes are far from over in the country. Several e-commerce firms like Flipkart, Jabong and Zovi are laying off employees in a bid to cut its costs, reports The Economic Times, citing multiple sources with direct knowledge of the development. The report states that Flipkart has laid off 250 employees, which accounts [...]

Dave McClure’s 500 Startups has announced the Spring 2013 batch of its Accelerator Program. The accelerator mentioned that this is the sixth batch overall and includes about five startups from India, the highest among other countries besides USA. It also noted that around 20 companies are from outside the United States and accounted for two-thirds [...]

Ajay Chacko has been appointed the COO of the Network18 group. Chacko has been with the group for over 9 years and is presently President of A+E Networks I TV18, the joint venture between A+E Networks, US and TV18. He will continue to hold responsibility for the venture, and also, according to Network18, “be responsible [...]

Media company HT Media has reported digital revenues of Rs 19.24 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2012. The loss before tax was at Rs 30.51 crore for the quarter. For the year ended March 31, 2012, the company saw digital revenues of Rs 31.19 crore and a loss before tax of Rs 30.29 crore. HT [...]

S Mobility* reported a significant decline in its total revenue: Rs 394.3 crore for the quarter ending March 31, 2012, down 18.94% from Rs 486.4 crore in the previous quarter and down 28.7% from Rs 553.3 crore in the same quarter last year but was profitable at an operating level: reporting a profit of Rs 2.2 [...]

We’re really excited to announce that the second edition of our #NAMA conference will be held in Mumbai on the 28th of June 2013. Mumbai is important to us – it’s a city that has at its core the media and content business that constitutes so much of what we focus on: content in the [...]

Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC) is launching free Wi-Fi service for passengers through satellite link up in 100 Shivneri AC Volvo buses connecting Mumbai to Pune competing with a similar plan by railways for the Mumbai-Pune Deccan Queen, reports Times of India. The report states that passengers can provide requisite details like their email id [...]

It appears that mobile customization service app Zedge has been blocked on certain Internet Service Providers and mobile operators in India.(Hat tip - Harish Krishnan) The app displays the following message to certain Vodafone Mumbai users:  ZEDGE is currently blocked by certain Internet Service Providers and Mobile Operators in INDIA due to decree issued by the [...]

The VAS and Data Revenues accounted for 37% of Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Ltd (TTML)’s total wireless revenues for the quarter ending March 31, 2012, up from 33% in the same quarter last year and 37% sequentially. Remember that the VAS and Data Revenues segment for Tata Teleservices include earnings from its EVDO based (USB data card) connectivity business Tata Photon. Also, TTML is [...]

UCWeb, China based mobile internet and software services company, which plans to invest $170 million (Rs 940 crore) in expanding its global operations, will be deploying a majority of its investment in India to build a mobile internet ecosystem, reports Times of India. In the next three years, UCWEB plans to invest $500 million in the Chinese and [...]

Revenues from the news business for TV18 declined year on year at Rs 551.8 crore, down from Rs 629.4 crore last fiscal, but were significantly more profitable at an operating level: the News business reported a profit of Rs 104 crore, compared with Rs 50.3 crore last fiscal. Operating margins for the segment improved to [...]

Coming off a strong festive season, Network18′s Digital Commerce revenues declined only marginally (around 3%) at Rs 81.9 crore for the quarter ended March 31st 2013 (Q4-FY13), down from Rs 84.4 crore the previous quarter. Given how lop sided commerce can be in favor of the festive season, they’ve done quite well; year on year, [...]

  [Video] Mohammad Imthiaz on hoppr’s dash to 4.5 mn users Mohammad Imthiaz founded Y2CF Digital Media 2010 after leading telecom services operator Bharti Airtel’s non voice business for seven years. The Gurgaon-headquartered company’s first product, hoppr, a location-based service, was launched last May. Just a month after the service was launched, Bharti SoftBank (BSB), [...]

Online video streaming service, iStream.com is struggling to raise a Series B round of funding in a tough market for fund raising, and the company is exploring various options, its CEO Radhakrishnan Ramachandran told MediaNama, not specifically commenting on whether the company is shutting down. MediaNama had heard from reliable internal sources that the company is laying [...]

RCOM has reported today 7.2 million 3G subscribers and 29.4 million data connections for the quarter ending March 31, 2012, and a 21% increase in data traffic quarter on quarter. That’s the highest increase in data traffic reported so far, and RCOM, in its conference call, is claiming to be the largest mobile Internet operator [...]

U.S based athletic apparel and accessories company, Yoga Smoga has raised Rs 5 crore from Mumbai Angels and a group of unnamed US based angels, reports Economic Times. Its currently not clear where the company plans to use the funds raised. Started by Rishi Bali in 2010, Yoga Smoga designs, manufactures and sells eco-friendly athletic [...]

After shutting down its podcasting app Aurality last November, Aurality founder Janhavi Parikh seems to have now launched a online gift card site Giftery.in. Note that Parikh had stated plans to pivot the company to a new business in November 2012, although she hadn’t disclosed any specific information on this new business. Aurality had raised $300,000 in March 2012 in seed [...]

CaratLane Trading Pvt Ltd, which runs an online diamond jewellery portal CaratLane.com, has raised 15 million in Series C funding round from Tiger Global, MediaNama and other sites, including India Digital Review and NextBigWhat were informed by sources (perhaps the same source). The documents we received indicate two rounds of funding, wherein the company raised Rs 27.31 [...]

Telecom operator Reliance Communications has reported 7.2 million 3G subscribers and 29.4 million data customers for the quarter ending March 31, 2012. The company also posted a significant increase across all the data usage parameters for the quarter. Some highlights from the RCOM’s data related usage parameters for Q4-FY13: - Data traffic on its network has increased by 21% to [...]

MediaNama would like to thank its sponsors: CCAvenue, E2E, Flipkart, PayU, Saavn, Spice Digital and Times Internet for their support. Earnings-Mar13 - LinkedIn Q1 2013: $24M APAC Revenues; 218.3M Users Globally Data - IMPS Data: 49.90M Mobile Money IDs, Just 343,532 Txns In April 2013 Investment & M&A - Updated: FoodPanda Raises Over $20M From AB Kinnevik & Phenomen Ventures [...]

In the first part of our interaction with Gautam Shewakramani, Founder & CEO, AudioCompass, speaks about their products & services, pricing, and product response, among others. In the second part of the interview, he speaks about the technology being used, their indic language services, partnerships, marketing, competition, international roll-out and scaling. Technology Medianama: How do you use GPS? Shewakramani: On some [...]

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