By Brad Stone The last two weeks have been remarkably eventful for Jeff Bezos. First, the Amazon co-founder’s visit to India was met with street-side protests, a new antitrust investigation into “predatory pricing and unfair trade practices” and hostile comments from the government led by India Prime Minster Narendra Modi. Then last week, Bezos’s yearlong […]
Archives for January 2020
A fix for online child porn problem in India
A committee formed to look into the issue of child sexual abuse material on social media platforms has recommended that companies follow a uniform benchmark practice in regulating and taking-down such content. The Rajya Sabha panel headed by Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said social media platforms must target encrypted content to identify child sexual abuse […]
Six things to consider when using Video Indexer at scale
Your large archive of videos to index is ever-expanding, thus you have been evaluating Microsoft Video Indexer and decided that you want to take your relationship with it to the next level by scaling up. In general, scaling shouldn’t be difficult, but when you first face such process you might not be sure what is […]
Fueling intelligent energy with IoT
At Microsoft, building a future that we can all thrive in is at the center of everything we do. On January 16, as part of the announcement that Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030, we discussed how advances in human prosperity, as measured by GDP growth, are inextricably tied to the use of energy. […]
Club Factory accused of selling drugs without prescription
Chinese online retailer Club Factory, which was embroiled in a controversy, for allegedly sending goods to Indian consumers directly from China under the guise of gifts, has now been accused of selling Schedule H drugs on its platform without medical prescription. The office of the joint commisioner of Food & Drug Adminstration in Greater Mumbai […]
Zomato, Swiggy make ordering food costlier
Consumers who order food online are paying more for it. Food delivery apps Zomato and Swiggy – which control the market – have raised delivery fees over the last six months, introduced dynamic discounting, tightened order cancellation rules and hiked prices of their loyalty programmes. Along with reduced discounts overall, this has hit order numbers, […]
Sachin Bansal bets Flipkart fortune on banking services
Sachin Bansal, who acquired microfinance firm Chaitanya India last September after his momentous Flipkart exit, travelled to Jagalur, a small town in Karnataka, recently for a branch visit and decided to check out the competition, a government-owned regional bank. Jagalur, about 250km from Bengaluru, has a population of 25,000. The regional bank’s offices here were […]
Paytm moves against fraudsters, files FIR
To fight the rising menace of online fraud by cyber crooks resulting in consumers losing money, Paytm Payments Bank — which houses the Paytm e-wallet — has handed over 3,500 numbers to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), the ministry of home affairs (MHA) and CERT-In, the cybersecurity agency. It has also filed a […]
CAIT seeks probe into business models of 16 online platforms, e-commerce firms
A traders’ association has urged the government to probe the business models of 16 technology startups and ecommerce companies, including Flipkart, Amazon, Zomato, Swiggy and Oyo, arguing that incurring huge yearly losses and earning revenue were not healthy business practices. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) wrote to commerce minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday, […]
Why audit firm leaders need to practice what they preach
Firm leaders can improve audit quality by modeling the behavior they say they value, according to a new study performed with the backing of the AICPA Assurance Research Advisory Group. For example, if firm leaders work 80-hour weeks even though they encourage work/life balance among their employees, audit quality may suffer, according to the research, […]