Microsoft’s Teams chat and conferencing app gained more than 12 million daily users in one week, a 37.5% jump as more people worked from home during the coronavirus outbreak, the company said on Thursday. Teams had 44 million users as of March 18, Microsoft said, more than double the 20 million daily active users that […]

Retail therapy has taken a backseat in the tough times of the coronavirus pandemic. For fashion and lifestyle brands, which are already witnessing a steep decline in offline sales due to closure of malls in several states, sales are not happening through the ecommerce channel either due to poor consumer sentiment. While ecommerce sales of […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi The government has roped in technology company Google and instant messaging platform WhatsApp, and is in talks with Facebook to run massive information outreach campaigns to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, three government officials told ET. The US-based search giant will send close to 300 million notifications a day to users containing information […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi Food-delivery and restaurant discovery app Zomato is jumping on to the grocery bandwagon as the category sees a major uptick amid the Covid-19 outbreak. ET has learnt that Zomato is in talks to partner with e-grocers, Grofers and BigBasket, to sell food products and essentials on its platform by facilitating their deliveries. […]

Commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on Wednesday said that no timeline has been fixed to release the national e-commerce policy as e-commerce is a new subject. “Since e-commerce is a new issue, it has necessitated detailed consultations over the last few months to ensure that the policy is crafted in a manner that interests […]

India’s fledgling morning milk delivery startups are quickly consolidating as online grocery major Bigbasket is in talks to acquire Unilever Ventures-backed Milkbasket even as the Alibaba-backed company is in advanced stages of closing the deal to acquire another player in the space, DailyNinja, said three people briefed on the matter. Both are distress and majority […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi Last weekend, an audio message, purportedly from a lady whose father was an army doctor, went viral on WhatsApp. The message claimed that “army hospitals are in direct contact with the ministry of health, and they’ve been ordered to create quarantine facilities everywhere.” But that wasn’t the dangerous part of the message. […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi The Reserve Bank of India will soon treat all payment aggregators as regulated entities under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act (2007) under its direct supervision, bringing in tighter regulations for the country’s digital payment industry. The new set of guidelines for these companies include having minimum net worth of ₹15 crore […]

Illustration: Rahul Awasthi Consumers of mobile and home broadband services may soon have to brace for sharp slowdowns in data speeds, dropped video calls or heavy buffering as India Inc asks staff to increasingly work from home to contain the spread of Covid-19. Experts and analysts say existing telecoms infrastructure belonging to Bharti Airtel, Vodafone […]

More than 52,000 cases of credit, debit card and net banking fraud were registered in India in the nine months to December, with people losing over Rs 228 crore during the period, a 60% jump in money lost compared to the previous 12 months, the government said on Wednesday. In fiscal year 2019, around 52,304 […]