Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd [Jio], the world’s fastest growing digital services company and Uber, the country’s preferred ride-sharing app, have announced a strategic partnership aimed at bringing the benefits of Jio Digital Life ecosystem to their users.
As part of the partnership, Jio and Uber will work together and explore various opportunities to progressively enrich and enhance the Digital Life experience of their users through complementary programmes.
JioMoney, the PPI wallet offered by Reliance Payment Solutions Ltd and Uber announced an agreement that will enable Uber riders to pay for their rides using JioMoney & thereby enhance the digital transaction ecosystem in India. Similarly, JioMoney users will soon be able to request and pay for Uber rides from within the JioMoney app. The partnership will give a major boost to cash-free payments in India and provide mobility options to millions of Jio users.
Uber will gradually rollout the JioMoney payment option for its users across the country. This integration provides a hassle-free payment experience to Uber riders and will be an added avenue for digital transactions for JioMoney’s rapidly growing user-base across India.
Jio aims to bring the benefits of evolving digital technologies to every Indian through an entire ecosystem that will allow Indians to live Digital Life to the fullest. JioMoney is an integral part of the Jio ecosystem and is fast emerging as a preferred option for digital transactions due to its ease of use, intuitive interface and growing acceptability. JioMoney’s integration with Uber will power the rapid migration of many more Uber transactions to the digital platform.
Madhu Kannan, Chief Business Officer, India and Emerging Markets for Uber said
We are delighted to partner with Reliance Jio to unlock synergies across two of the largest user bases in India. Digital payments have become part of our everyday lives and by integrating JioMoney as a payment option, our riders will have the ability to use a familiar and consistent payment experience. Through this strategic partnership we are looking to fast forward to digital solutions at scale for the Indian users.
To celebrate the association, JioMoney and Uber will offer exclusive incentives to every user paying for Uber rides through JioMoney. The users of JioMoney will enjoy the hassle free payment experience of JioMoney at multiple avenues along with attractive offers and coupons available through JioMoney app.
About JioMoney
JioMoney is a simple, smart and secure ‘one-app’ solution to everyday transactions on the go. It is much more than just a wallet. It empowers you to pay everywhere in a cash-free way. With JioMoney, users can do mobile and DTH recharges, make everyday payments at physical stores, send/receive money, pay insurance premiums, manage your finances, get great deals, and much more. For more information, please visit JioMoney.
Zendesk announced the launch of a new office in Metro Manila providing capacity for over 200 people, creating a Customer Experience Hub for the APAC region. The APAC region is a key focus for Zendesk with paid customer accounts growing by over 35% year-over-year as of the end of 2016. The number of employees grew by over 50% during the same period.
Zendesk chose Manila as its regional customer experience hub because of the access to a local pool of highly skilled, technical talent with strong English language ability. The local employees provide highly technical support and are part of a global team enhancing customer experience around the clock.
The launch of the new office in Manila shows our commitment to grow in what is an important market for us for both customer experience and sales. We are expanding into a space four times bigger than our previous location, with double the seats, in a unique and sustainable tower in Metro Manila. This investment also means we are able to contribute to local job creation.
Zendesk first opened its offices in Manila in 2014 with a small team focused on sales, support and pre-sales. Located in the heart of Southeast Asia, the Zendesk Manila office is now made up of a talented and skilled workforce that has expanded to five times the size since the initial launch.
The new office is located on the 30th floor of Bonifacio Global City in Net Park Building, a 48-story green and sustainable corporate tower in Metro Manila. It measures over 2,200 square meters and, with the increased capacity of the office, provides Zendesk’s Manila team the opportunity to continue to grow.
As part of the office opening, Zendesk also launched the Zendesk Neighbor Foundation in-region partnering with Hands on Manila, an umbrella organization that works to connect volunteers with a variety of nonprofit organizations.
CSR is a key part of Zendesk’s culture. The launch of the Manila chapter of the global Zendesk Neighbor Foundation continues our commitment to supporting the communities in which we operate. This year, the Zendesk Neighbor Foundation is planning to give approximately 4,000,000 PHP in grants in Manila, and the local team has committed to 1,000 volunteer hours to support local causes.
Modeled after Zendesk’s CSR program at its San Francisco headquarters, the Manila community volunteer hour commitments will focus on charities that promote workforce development and technical literacy, and improve education and professional development for underserved youth.
The new Asia Pacific headquarters joins four other Zendesk offices in the region: Zendesk’s Asia Pacific Development Centre based in Melbourne, the APAC commercial headquarters in Singapore, and a sales office in both Tokyo and Bengaluru.
About Zendesk
Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. More than 94,000 paid customer accounts in over 150 countries and territories use Zendesk products. Based in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. For more information, please visit Zendesk
A new partnership to invest in health care services beyond conventional hospital services, has been launched by CDC Group Plc, the UK’s Development Finance Institution and Manipal Education and Medical Group
The two institutions, have come together to invest an initial Rs 500 crore in innovative opportunities in India, Africa and elsewhere in South Asia, with aspirations to invest even more in the future.
The platform will target a wide range of out of hospital care services/companies, from those providing diagnostic services through to comprehensive home healthcare services. Companies in the molecular diagnostic space in India and infectious diseases investigations in Africa have been already identified for investment by the partnership.
The partnership’s primary focus will be on building scale through acquisitions and will back entrenched market players and strong management teams. The platform will support firms that are currently constrained to grow beyond a certain level due to management and financial limitations. The CDC/MEMG platform will provide such companies access to professional management and creating value by being part of a broader network.
While this partnership will incubate and grow businesses in ‘Healthcare Beyond Hospitals‘, both MEMG & CDC will continue independently to pursue investing in the conventional hospital space in the targeted markets.
While traditional hospitals will continue to deliver high end care and inpatient services, healthcare providers have realised the need to evolve alternate formats which will complement hospital services and where care can be delivered in ‘Out of Hospital’ set ups and closer to patients’ homes. The companies we are looking to back will be heavily reliant on new technology to improve quality of service and access. High quality care, fair pricing and patient convenience – these are Manipal’s core principles and will drive our investment thesis. The potential of investments through this platform to create a strong development impact, is one of the primary drivers for his partnership with CDC.
CDC is committed to supporting the growth of the healthcare sector in India because of the jobs created and the innovations that can improve access and bring higher quality care for all patients. We are elighted to be working with Manipal, a strong operational partner, who have pioneered healthcare delivery and education in India. We will provide long-term finance to the next generation of businesses that can help transform healthcare services beyond the hospital space.
DigitalOcean, the cloud for developers, have released LoadBalancers, one of the most requested products from customers. LoadBalancers is a highly available product that enables developers and small businesses to distribute traffic across their infrastructure to achieve100% uptime for their productionworkloads.
DigitalOcean is approaching one million registered users with more than 40,000 active teams since releasing its cloud five years ago. With workloads becoming more complex, DigitalOcean is focused on delivering the tools and performance that are required to seamlessly deploy, scale and manage any sized application.
We are quickly expanding the capabilities of our cloud to support larger scale-out applications. With Load Balancers, we are providing developers and businesses with a simple service for maximizing the availability and reliability of applications without disrupting the end user experience. Load Balancers is the first major new product DigitalOcean has released this year. Over the coming year, you’ll see us continue to release a number of important products and features to meet our customers’ high availability, data storage, security, and networking needs.
Load Balancers on DigitalOcean can be created effortlessly from the control panel or API-no additional installation or configuration needed. Using Load Balancers to distribute connections enables developers and small businesses to scale their applications horizontally by sending traffic only to healthy Droplets, ensuring no single point of failure and increasing availability across their infrastructure.
With Load Balancers, developers have access to the following:
Support for multiple protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP
There are various ways in which you can trade in the stock market and one goal that most of the trader’s eye for is the method of trading where they can make some long term investments that prove to be profitable. Although every trader works through their sets of rules and it is possible that an idea or tip works for someone and falls stall for the others, there are a few general things that you can take a note of to keep your long term investments profitable. Check out some of such aspects in the sentences that follow.
For all those investors who want to place safe bets, the first thing to do is understand which share is reliable and which is not. If you are going to put in your money in something, it is quite obvious that you won’t invest a small amount. So since the amount of money is huge, it is important to understand that you put the money only in those companies that are known names and popular for performing in a great way even when the market is unstable of affected by certain conditions. Sure there will be cases when the shares would dip, but considering the brand value, the prices would only stay up.
Don’t always follow the hot tips
There are many stock advisors who’d tell you the shares you should invest in and the once that are great for the long term. There are chances that whatever they say might be true, but there are possibilities when nothing of that sort happens. So instead of trusting the hot tips blindly, do some research of your own? As an investor, you should know that any investment that you have kept untouched for over 3 years is considered long term. So pick out on a few shortlisted options and then sit down to research upon their previous performances of 3-5 years. Studying their graph would tell you what you need to do.
Avoid cheap stocks
Try to avoid buying shares that are cheaply priced as the amount of fluctuation in them would be low. Also, no matter if the quantities are high; the brokerage would also be high on your trades thus keeping the profits low. One should always understand that a company whose stock is cheaply priced would always be exposed to a lot higher amount of risk in comparison to the expensive stocks.
Stick to your strategies
If you have picked up a certain investment strategy, trust it and stick with it. It makes no point jumping from one idea or strategy to another just because you don’t trust the initial ones enough. One strategy can be judged only when you have allowed it to stick around for some time so that you can at least monitor its result.
Since patience is the key to long term investments, you’d earn great profits only if you allow your stocks to grow and nurture without being disturbed.
About the author
Vijayalakshmi is a Consultant at Alice Blue Securities Pvt Ltd, which is enabling young and new traders to enter the Indian stock market. Alice Blue offers a host of services to both young and seasoned traders to trade in the stock market, commodity market and the forex market.
CashKaro–India’s largest Cashback & Coupons siteis back with its 3rd edition of #SheCEO – an initiative to empower Womenpreneurs of India. From students aspiring to be entrepreneurs to startups led by women, #SheCEO aims to provide a strategic platform to help women get the right mentorship, introduction to industry experts & investors and also network with counterparts.
Through this campaign, three women entrepreneurs and five female students will be selected and mentored on entrepreneurship, business planning, funding issues, and importance of social media to connect & network with potential partners. The month long campaign will call for participation from start-ups led by women as well as women students who have a bent towards entrepreneurship. The entries will be adjudged by a panel of experts based on their submission.
The initiative has gained a lot of support and appreciation from the industry over the years. This year they have some of the most renowned names as partners from the fraternity namely YourStory, SHEROES, SACC India, Delhi Startups, TLabs, Rodinhoods, India Angel Network, Startup Oasis, Mumbai Angels Network, Jaarvis Accelerator & HealthStart.
#SheCEO is all about recognizing, rewarding and further encouraging entrepreneurship among women from all walks of life. Scaling up small businesses is tough for many women who kick off their ventures very well but stumble at the first post due to lack of support. We believe there are excellent businesses that women can create with the help of knowledge and support and mentorship. We hope #SheCEO provides aspiring women entrepreneurs and students a platform to network, celebrate and grow to march forth & build amazing businesses!
The #SheCEO campaign kick started from 9th February 2017 & submissions will be accepted till 6th March 2017 [11:59 PM IST]. For more details about the campaign, please visit CashKaro Women’s Day
RailYatri.in, a train travel marketplace, has launched milk delivery service for train travellers. For the first time in India, warm milk will be delivered in specially designed spill-proof thermo packages. The milk for babies can easily be ordered through the RailYatri app and delivered at the designated stations.
RailYatri.in analysis found that in more than 80% instances, trains are not prepared to serve baby food or milk to passengers. Long delays and uncertainties that often mark train travel add to this persistent problem leaving travelling parents in a big fix.
Manish Rathi, CEO and co-founder, RailYatri.in said
Train travel can have some severe hurdles when you are travelling with an infant. Our effort is to make sure no mother goes through the agony of seeing her hungry baby cry. Keeping such emergencies in mind, we will now deliver warm milk for babies in hygienic, spill-proof packages. We already serve great meals for the entire family, so why should the little ones’ need be unattended.
Parents usually carry their baby’s food and milk along. However, in case of unforeseen situations like long train delays or if someone forgets to carry baby food, you now do not have to worry about milk for your child. We have taken special care to deliver milk in the best condition, with emphasis on hygiene and quality packaging.
Mrs. Gayatri Chaudhary, a passenger travelling from Old Delhi to Gorakhpur in the Avadh Assam Express once shared her unfortunate experience
As a customary practice I had packed baby’s milk and food in adequate quantity for the journey. It was all fine, before the train reached Hardoi. The train was stranded in the middle of nowhere and all we learnt was that there was a massive signalling problem ahead and we were stranded for over 9 hours. My husband sought help from the train’s pantry, but they too did not have excess milk. So, he kept disembarking at every stop in search of any baby food. After many failed attempts, he found some milk from a station side tea stall. All this while, I was going through the agony of trying to console my hungry 10 month old daughter. I would never forget that feeling of helplessness!
Ordering milk is a just few taps away and can be done through the RailYatri app anytime, anywhere. And once you order, milk will be delivered right at your berth without you bothering about getting off the station and collecting it.
With multiple payment options, you can also order milk for your near and dear ones who are travelling without you. Getting warm milk for your child on your train travel is a step forward towards simplifying train journeys for each passenger, and this has been RailYatri’s constant endeavour.
About RailYatri.in
The brainchild of seasoned experts from IITs and IIM-Kapil Raizada, Sachin Saxena & Manish Rathi with over 20 years of engineering experience-RailYatri is changing the ecosystem of train travel in India.intelligent travel provides the most comprehensive information on trains, passenger amenities at stations, platform information, speed of the train, personalized alerts, and much more via the mobile apps, mobile web and SMS.For more information, please visit RailYatri
There was an era of MS-DOS [Microsoft Disk Operating System] in the 80’s & 90’s when our computer systems used to have around 512 MB of RAM. In fact, this was considered as a very high end configuration during those times! However, with the advent of time the OS was replaced with operating systems that offered rich GUI’s with support of CLI [Command Line Interface]. Fast forward now, we have so many operating systems for PC’s i.e. Windows, Linux [with various distributions], MAC, etc. Not only has the demand of an average user changed but there has been a gradual shift in the expectations of the developers.
Important applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. that are used by millions of users are now accessible without local installation of those softwares. This is all possible due to the advent of Cloud Computing that has been a buzzword for quite a few years! Thanks to cloud computing, companies can now focus on core business instead of spending time & effort on costly server infrastructure.
In a nutshell, there has been a gradual shift to ‘Pay Per Use‘ or ‘What You Use Is What You Pay‘ economy. Cloud computing eliminates the expense required for buying quality hardware, reduces overall cost, guarantees better reliability and performance [depending on the maximum up-time mentioned by the cloud service provider].
According to the latest data by Synergy Research Group, Amazon Web Services [AWS] continues to remain the market leader followed by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, Google, etc. [Source]. Though AWS from Amazon is considered the ‘Big Daddy’ of the game, smaller [and rising] players like DigitalOcean are upping their game by following a very different strategy [that does not directly confront with Amazon].
DigitalOcean : Overview
DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider founded in 2011 and headquartered in New York with data centers worldwide. The company is founded by Ben and Moisey Uretsky who earlier founded ServerStack, a managed hosting business and while surveying the cloud hosting market, they realized that most of the hosting companies were serving the enterprise market leaving a void that needed to be filled!
Unlike AWS that targets variety of customers, products from DigitalOcean cater to solving developer needs. DigitalOcean became one of the fastest growing cloud-hosting companies offering SSD virtual machines [Source]
They have data centers located in 12 countries around the world with one server located in Bangalore which is a huge boon to the growing startup [and developer] community in the city!
DigitalOcean – Data Center locations
DigitalOcean : Droplets, Pricing and more
The Virtual Private Servers [VPS] are termed as Droplets and each droplet that you create is considered as a new VPS. For the review, we created a VPS/droplet with 20 GB space, 512 MB RAM and running Ubuntu 16.04. The installation process was very simple and it took us couple of minutes to setup the droplet.
Droplet Installation – To create a droplet, you need to login to the Digital Control Panel. On successful login you need to click on the ‘Create Droplet’ button. You would be prompted with the available linux distros that you can use to create your first droplet.
Once you have zeroed in on the distro, you need to select the right storage option that suits your requirements. There are variety of options available as shown below:
The plans are very flexible and you can change the Droplet’s plan based on your future requirements. If you are a newbie who is testing the waters of cloud computing, then you can opt for the least expensive plan that offers 512MB of RAM with single core & 20GB of SSD storage. As seen above DigitalOcean offers a very different pricing model, something that even looks very lucrative to developers!
The next step in setting up the droplet is very crucial as it can have a major impact on the performance (and reduce latency). In this step, you select your nearest data-center region. For our test, we selected Bangalore as the preferred location 🙂 Amazon that offers AWS has a server in Mumbai that offers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) [Source] but they do not have a server in Bangalore!
Once the Droplet region is selected, you would be prompted with additional options like setting up backups, IPV6 enabling, etc. You can name your droplet for easy identification purpose and also set up an SSH key. You can now breath a sigh of relief for completing the ‘simple’ task of setting up your droplet.
We could setup the droplet in a couple of minutes, thanks to the awesome UX of DigitalOcean that made the task look very simple.
Pricing – As stated earlier, pricing offered by DigitalOcean caters to a range of customers (particularly developers). Pricing starts at USD 5 per month and goes all the way upto USD 640 per month where you get 640 GB SSD storage! On Amazon’s EC2 platform, the closest equivalent [of the most popular droplet that offers 30GB SSD disk, 2TB transfer] is a t2.small instance which starts at USD 0.026 per hour, almost double the cost of a DigitalOcean droplet [Source].
Effective Pricing, high performance machines, simplicity and developer focused approach are the pillars of strength for DigitalOcean.
DigitalOcean – Vibrant Community
DigitalOcean has a very vibrant Community where you can find a host of tutorials that cater to a range of topics centered around DigitalOcean. They also have an active YouTube channeland a very active topic on Quora (Moisey Uretsky, Cofounder at DigitalOcean being one of the active contributors of that topic! You can follow their official blog here
DigitalOcean – Backups, Performance and more
Backups can be enabled for the droplets with just 1 USD per month. As per this particular thread on Quora
Backups on DigitalOcean are strangely infrequent-which could worry you depending on how your backup plan is. Right now they do it once every 3 days, which is fine for my personal blog, but not for any applications I work on. Amazon requires a laborious setup to do backups that isn’t as straight forward as “click here to buy backups”.
In this case I have been using both. A DigitalOcean Droplet with daily backups to S3 and Glacier. This in my circumstances has been offering the best combination of offerings for small-midscale projects.
From a performance/value perspective, DigitalOcean follows a bulk pricing model. For customers who need higher RAM, they don’t necessarily have to upgrade to a larger sized Droplet. They could merely choose from DigitalOcean’s High memory plans which provide larger amounts of RAM and which would be relevant for use cases such as running databases, in-memory caches, etc. For more information on the plans, please visit High memory Droplet pricing. For customers who need more storage than what is available by default in a Droplet, they could use DigitalOcean’s Block Storage offering which provides highly available SSD based storage without having to scale the number of cores. The block storage volumes can be attached to their existing Droplets, and the pricing starts at just $0.10/GB per month. For more information on the plans, please visit SSD Block Storage pricing.
From a developer’s point of view, debugging [apart from development] is a very crucial phase in the life cycle of a product 🙂 DigitalOcean has an exhaustive Developers Sectionwhere you can find the API documentation and insights into how to use those Tools. A sample snapshot of the CPU load on the droplet that we installed is below:
DigitalOcean – Offerings for Indian Startups
In India, DigitalOcean has partnered with several top-tier accelerators, incubators and VCs based in India to support the startups from their portfolio with infrastructure credit.
DigitalOcean – Conclusion
DigitalOcean is not a direct competitor to the behemoths e.g. Amazon, Azure, Salesforce, etc. of the Cloud Computing since it addresses the needs of a very specific market – The Developer Community. With One click app support, developer can even skip the installation as well as configuration and get started with the deployment of code using any one of the pre-built images supporting various languages. A snapshot of their 2016 achievements below
If you are a developer looking for affordable linux servers that support only a few well-known tools, than DigitalOcean could be an ideal match. Unlike AWS, Azure, etc. that provide Infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS], Platform as a service [PaaS] & Software as a service [SaaS]; DigitalOcean provides reliable as well as affordable IaaS platform for developers!
If you are an existing customer of DigitalOcean, please leave your feedback in the comments section…
