E-commerce majors Amazon and Flipkart are in talks with Hopscotch to buy a significant minority stake in the six-year-old company that sells kids’ apparel online, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Hopscotch has appointed Barclays as the investment banker to raise up to $60 million (Rs 428 crore) to fund its expansion […]
Archives for February 2019
Facebook taps user data to defend network, workers from threat
Facebook gathers intelligence from its platform to identify people who threaten the firm or its workers, the social network said on Thursday in response to media reports of the security tactic. CNBC reported that it interviewed more than a dozen former Facebook security employees, some of whom questioned the ethics of what was portrayed as […]
Brightcove to acquire Ooyala’s online video platform business
Nasdaq-listed Brightcove, a leading provider of cloud services for video, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the online video platform (OVP) business of Ooyala, a provider of cloud video technology. Brightcove is acquiring Ooyala’s OVP technology, including video content management and publishing platform Backlot, analytics, live, and underlying IP and associated patents. As […]
Alibaba-backed Paytm wants to cash in on Amazon’s India distress
By Saritha Rai India’s online retail industry has been in turmoil since the government implemented stringent new rules to rein in major players like Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart. Amid the uproar, Vijay Shekhar Sharma — whose two-year-old Paytm Mall is backed by Alibaba Group — is quietly devising ways to outstrip his rivals. The new […]
Paytm parent pledges all assets to borrow from ICICI Bank
One97 Communications, which owns digital payments major Paytm, has pledged all it current assets and mutual fund investments to ICICI Bank in order to be able to borrow up to Rs 1,400 crore for working capital, according to documents filed with the Registrar of Companies. Working capital is needed for every corporate entity to function, […]
China ride-hailing giant Didi to lay off 15% employees this year: Source
Didi Chuxing will lay off 15% of its staff or about 2,000 people this year, a source said, marking the ride-hailing firm’s first major cut back as it grapples with regulatory scrutiny and public backlash over the murder of two of its users. Didi CEO Cheng Wei said at a meeting with management that the […]
India biggest APAC market, outpacing China in growth: Booking.com
India is the biggest market for travel portalBooking.com in Asia Pacific and is outpacing China in supply growth, a trend the company expects to continue this year as well, a top executive said. “We enjoyed healthy double digits growth in India in 2018 and we expect the same this year as well. We have grown […]
AWS launches five new bare metal instances to give customers greater cloud control
AWS has unveiled five new EC2 bare metal instances to run high-intensity workloads, such as performance analysis, specialised applications and legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments. The new instances – m5.metal, m5d.metal, r5.metal, r5d.metal, and z1d.metal – have all been designed to run virtualisation secured containers such as Clear Linux Containers. Each offers its […]
Prominent investors stock up on eBay, then activists flex muscle
An eBay sign is seen at an office building in San Jose, California May 28, 2014. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach eBay‘s stock price slumped for most of last year but a number of prominent hedge funds were so convinced that change is on the horizon for the e-commerce company that they established new or added to existing […]
U.S. negotiating multibillion-dollar fine with Facebook: Report
The U.S. government and Facebook are negotiating a settlement over the company’s privacy lapses that could require the online social network to pay a multibillion-dollar fine, the Washington Post reported on Thursday. The newspaper said that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Facebook had not agreed on an amount, citing two people it said were […]