More Indians are searching online for information on games, movies, books as well as grocery and food delivery services. In view of the ongoing lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, online searches related to these topics and more have surged, says web analytics firm SEMrush, which shared its search data exclusively with ET. Searches for […]

Image Credit: REUTERS/Adnan Abidi Three days after India imposed a nationwide lockdown, Devender Singh revved up his motorcycle to deliver meat and eggs to customers – but his heart was in his mouth as he closed in on a police barricade on a deserted New Delhi road. Beatings of delivery workers by overzealous police after […]

Zoom has tapped former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos as an adviser as safety and privacy concerns about its fast-growing video-conferencing app drive a global backlash against the company. That backlash includes a move on Wednesday by Alphabet’s Google to ban the desktop version of Zoom from corporate laptops. In a stark illustration of Zoom’s […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi Online firms foray into grocery delivery Social commerce startup Meesho, e-tailers like Snapdeal, Paytm Mall, Perpule and Shopclues as well as food delivery app Zomato, and real estate platform NoBroker have all launched delivery of essential grocery products on their platforms. What gives?Cracking the grocery delivery business has always been deemed tough […]

Online medical stores such as Netmeds, 1mg and PharmEasy, which have been struggling to take off in a big way for over three years mainly due to regulatory issues, have seen an unprecedented surge in sales across cities amid the Covid-19 crisis. While most brick-and-mortar pharmacies continue to function amid the countrywide lockdown to contain […]

Private sector lenders ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank, along with Fino Payments Bank led the pack of Indian banks in enabling digitization of country’s payment ecosystem in the month of February, a ranking chart issued by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to banks accessed by ET showed. Performances of several high street lenders […]

The government is in the final stages of notifying an amendment to the intermediary guidelines of the Information Technology Act (IT) 2000, which make social media firms in India responsible for the content on their platforms. According to two senior government officials, the law ministry has made minimal changes to draft amendments finalised by the […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi A slew of internet businesses have diversified into the groceries space, a category deemed tough to crack for e-commerce players, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Social commerce startup Meesho, etailers like Snapdeal, Paytm Mall, Perpule and Shopclues as well as food delivery app Zomato, and real estate platform NoBroker have […]

Education technology platform Vedantu has raised Rs 96 crore (about $12.5 million) as part of its Series C1 round, led by Chinese venture capital firm Legend Capital, with participation from Omidyar’s Ohana Holdings LLC. The investment follows a $42 million fund infusion led by Tiger Global Management in August last year, followed by a $24 […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi Surat-based Aarti Sharma (name changed), who sells garments through a social media platform and typically earns Rs 10,000 on average each month, has not shipped any order in the last three weeks. Five of the orders that she had shipped are stuck at warehouses in Mumbai and Calcutta, while two others are […]