Lenovo and Intel have announced a partnership with Paytm Mall, owned by Paytm Ecommerce Pvt Ltd. With a collective aim to reach out to 10 million Small and Medium Businesses [SMBs] by 2020, under this partnership, Paytm Mall will host a unique Lenovo brand store on its platform to drive discovery and instant purchases of the SMB range of laptops.

Image Source – PayTm Mall

The brand store will enable the customers to make instant purchases and avail exciting cashback offers. The consumers will have the advantage of a large assortment of readily available products under one umbrella, fast delivery and protection against in-transit damages. This collaboration will provide a seamless shopping experience with added online benefits for the consumer. The SMB customers can obtain a GST invoice which will help them claim input tax as well. Apart from this, there will option to purchase laptops on interest free EMIs. The platform is also offering low-cost extended warranty and lucrative purchase offers to SMBs.

Ashish Sikka, Head of SMB, Lenovo India said

SMBs are at the forefront of driving economic growth of the nation.  While SMBs are driving tremendous innovation, they still face challenges when it comes to adoption of the right IT infrastructure to gain operational efficiencies. With this association, we look forward to empower our customers with the right range of products and services which enhance their buying experience and improve productivity. This partnership also enables our partners and provides them with Paytm’s wide digital network leading to a superior quality shopping experience for our consumers.

Amit Sinha, COO – Paytm Mall said

We have announced the availability of SMB-focused notebooks on our platform in partnership with Lenovo and Intel. This partnership will enable the SME community to get the widest range of products, doorstep delivery and exciting offers all in one place.

Rahul Malhotra, Director – Retail, Intel India said

This initiative is in line with Intel India’s effort to engage with growing business to establish the relevance of technology in general, and PCs in specific. Lenovo’s Intel technology powered devices, combined with Paytm’s significant reach, will enable the 11 million plus SMBs in India to not only become more efficient, but also to explore newer business opportunities.

SMBs can choose from a broad portfolio of products that include Intel’s 8th gen powered E series, V330, ThinkPad T series, X series and the convertible range of the Yoga series. The price of products will range between Rs. 39,900 ~ Rs. 89, 692, depending on the configuration.

Bloomberg Media and Twitter launched TicToc by Bloomberg, the first-ever 24/7 global news network built for a social media platform that targets the next generation of on-the-go, mobile-first news consumers. TicToc by Bloomberg combines the global news gathering capabilities of Bloomberg’s 2,700 journalists and analysts across 120 countries, with the digital power and immediacy of Twitter, one of the world’s fastest and primary news distribution channels. To view TicToc by Bloomberg, follow @tictoc or visit live.twitter.com/tictoc

The first iteration of TicToc by Bloomberg will feature a mix of live video and reporting from Bloomberg journalists around the world, as well as breaking news content from consumers, curated and verified by Bloomberg editors with a real-time distillation of the related conversation on Twitter. The news experience is designed to be interactive, rich with Twitter content and consumable on any device. Coverage will focus on general interest news worldwide.

Justin B. Smith, Bloomberg Media CEO, said

We are seeing a shift in the media landscape today: more content companies are partnering with platforms to create hybrid businesses that better serve consumers and society. With TicToc by Bloomberg, we are fusing the best of Bloomberg and Twitter to build a fast and credible modern news experience. The launch of this new network further reinforces our strategy of driving innovation through exciting new products and services that touch a broad audience around the world.

John Micklethwait, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief, said

It’s early days, but what makes TicToc by Bloomberg unique is that consumers will be able to watch live news and the conversation around it at the same time, all while a dedicated team of Bloomberg editors verifies the facts. We’re leveraging our journalism and data to reach and inform an intelligent audience on Twitter around the world.

Anthony Noto, Twitter COO, said

Twitter is where people go for breaking news, and now our global audience can turn to TicToc by Bloomberg at any time to see what’s happening in the world no matter where they are. Combining the journalistic integrity of Bloomberg with the speed and global availability of Twitter makes this a collaboration we are really excited about.

TicToc by Bloomberg recreates the visual presentation of news for a mobile, social world through the use of video, data, and graphics. Users will have access to two types of news content

  • Breaking News – TicToc by Bloomberg will cover global breaking news when consumers need it and when an event warrants it. Live coverage for key events will be presented alongside real-time distillation of the facts and Tweets about the event.
  • Global News Update – An hourly update of global news will be available in short, digestible clips, refreshed at the top of each hour. The segment will be comprised of top global news so that consumers are constantly up to speed on the stories that matter. It will also include slightly longer clips that put news into context, providing deeper analysis of the top news stories of the moment. At launch, top-of-the-hour news coverage will be updated from 6AM to 10PM EST, expanding to 24 hours in early 2018, while weekend coverage will include regular news updates, prioritising live breaking news events.

The global news update will be available for replay and refreshed each hour with evolving stories from around the world. Relevant Tweets, curated and verified by Bloomberg, will run below the video programming, allowing consumers to see accurate Tweet conversations around the news.

To support TicToc by Bloomberg, Bloomberg is building a dedicated team comprised of editors, producers, social media analysts, product developers, engineers, designers, and marketers that will leverage Bloomberg’s global resources.

Seven sponsors have signed on as the Founding Partners of TicToc by Bloomberg – AT&T Business, CA Technologies, CME Group, Goldman Sachs, INFINITI, SAS, TD Ameritrade. TicToc by Bloomberg will feature branded native content and unique integrations woven into the video programming, created by Bloomberg in partnership with each sponsor.

Bloomberg currently live streams three of its daily Bloomberg Television programs on Twitter.

Aeris, a pioneer and leader in the Internet of Things [IoT] market has formed a partnership with MapmyIndia, India’s leader in premium-quality digital maps, GPS navigation, tracking, location-based apps and GIS solutions, to jointly address the market by offering geo-spatial intelligence based IoT solutions in India.

With this breakthrough alliance, both companies said they have decided to pursue opportunities jointly by developing solutions and offering services leveraging their respective areas of core competence.

The landmark agreement will redefine the contours of the overall IoT solutions market while addressing business challenges such as ubiquitous tracking through connectivity leading to truly IoT-led businesses change. The global IoT market is expected to cross $200 billion by 2020. The IoT market in India stood at USD 5.6 billion with 200 million connected devices in 2016. This is expected to grow to USD 15 billion with 2.7 billion devices by 2020 presenting a significant opportunity for technology and service providers.

Grounded on the mutual strengths of both the companies, the combination will create solutions that will transform specific aspects of how businesses and employees work using IoT, allowing companies to achieve newer levels of efficiency, effectiveness & customer satisfaction.

Rakesh Verma, MD, MapmyIndia said

The world is moving from automatic to autonomous operations. The era of IoT is here and MapmyIndia, as always, is taking the lead. The partnership with Aeris, a pioneer in the IoT space, will go a long way in making the Indian businesses globally competitive. I am confident that the combination of MapmyIndia’s best-in-class mapping & GIS solutions and the pioneering IoT prowess and global experience of Aeris will be a big boon for not just the Indian businesses and enterprises but will benefit the whole country. This will act as a catalyst towards realizing the Prime Minister’s vision of Digital India.

Dr. Rishi Bhatnagar, President, Aeris Communications said

This agreement marks a major milestone for both companies. “We are witnessing the evolution of the IoT ecosystem globally with businesses recognizing the need to invest in technologies and solutions based on IoT. Our tie-up with MapmyIndia is primed towards helping businesses leverage the potential of IoT to realize business benefits that are multi-dimensional, innovation driven and transformative. I am confident that this will change the way verticals operate and companies perform.

About MapmyIndia

MapmyIndia’s mission is to make the world better through maps and location technologies. Founded in 1992, the company is India’s leader in premium quality digital map data and APIs, GPS navigation, tracking, location apps, and GIS solutions. MapmyIndia is an ISO 9001-2012 company with 750+ people that pioneered digital mapping in India. Using the state-of-the-art panoramic mapping technology that captures, analyses and publishes the world in 3D and 360-degree photo-realistic clarity, the company has built its proprietary, Industry grade MapmyIndia Maps. It has fully monetized maps offerings through consumer apps, navigation devices, licensing, map APIs, tracking and analytics. Some of the leading companies like Flipkart, Ola Cabs, Toyota and Mahindra & Mahindra are using MapmyIndia maps. For more information, please visit MapmyIndia

Yahoo announced the 2016 Year in Review (YIR) for India. The YIR is a look at the year’s top trends, happenings and events, which caught the imagination of Internet users in India. In its ninth year now, this review is based on users’ daily search habits and an editorial selection of what they read, recommended and shared most on Yahoo.

The list of Top Newsmakers, usually ruled by politicians and Bollywood stars, saw the entry of Indian Sportswomen including PV Sindhu, Sakshi Malik, Dipa Karmakar who won laurels and dominated the headlines during Rio Olympics. Also featuring in the list was wrestler Vinesh Phogat, one of India’s best bets for a medal, who bowed out of the Olympic games at a crucial juncture due to an injury. Other top newsmakers included Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Arnab Goswami and Indian politicians Arvind Kejriwal, Jayalalithaa and Subramanian Swamy, as well as Rohit Khandelwal the first Indian (and Asian) to win the Mr. World title.

The Unnamed Soldier’ became the ‘Personality of the Year’ for being perennially at the forefront of national consciousness. From thwarting a terrorist infiltration into the Pathankot Air Force Station to facing September’s militant attack in Uri that led to a precise and surgical retaliation from India, or being in the midst of the controversy surrounding the One Rank-One Pension scheme – the soldier was in the news all year long.

Prime minister’s demonetisation initiative, Cyrus Mistry’s dramatic exit from Tata Group and Reliance Jio’s 4G network launch were the most significant Financial Events that shook India. In fact, RJio launch made Mukesh Ambani one of the top Business Newsmakers of 2016 as well.

Sunny Leone reigned supreme as the Most Searched Personality for the fifth consecutive year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the Most Searched Politician followed by Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. The US presidential election was widely followed in India, with Donald Trump ranking as the fourth most searched politician in the country.

Salman Khan continued to be the ‘Boss’ landing the top spot for the Most Searched Male Celebrity of 2016, while stand-up comedian Kapil Sharma came in at No.2. A surprise entry in the list was Tanmay Bhat, co-founder of AIB for his controversial snapchat video.

The buzz around Bipasha Basu‘s wedding to Karan Singh Grover ensured her position as the second Most Searched Female Celebrity. Deepika Padukone took the third slot followed by Katrina Kaif at No.4.

Our sportswomen also pipped the cricketers in the Most Searched Sportsperson, with PV Sindhu and Dipa Karmakar at number one and two spots. The only cricketers that made the Top 10 were Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli.

Indians’ all-consuming obsession with cricket continued with ‘IPL 2016’ becoming the Most Searched Newsy term, followed by Rio Olympics and Freedom 251, the mass market phone that was much talked about for its revolutionary pricing but couldn’t sustain prolonged interest.

Kareena Kapoor Khan’s maternity wardrobe was much in vogue, while Ranveer Singh’s quirky outfits won him several accolades, making the duo the Most Stylish Male and Female Bollywood Actors of 2016. Amongst the Top Box Office Disasters, Anil Kapoor’s son Harshvardhan Kapoor’s launch movie ‘Mirzya’ was a major letdown for movie enthusiasts. Ashutosh Gowariker’s highly anticipated period drama ‘Mohenjo Daro’ and Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Fan’ were other big movies to fail miserably at the box office.

Click on the Infographic to Zoom

Autonomous vehicles was the Most Significant Technology Innovation of 2016, with several companies announcing their foray into driver-less cars. If people’s searches are a window into the future, areas we may see growth in moving forward include Virtual Personal Assistants, Virtual and Augmented Reality and Fitness Trackers.

See Year in Review: 2016 for the complete lowdown on 2016’s biggest moments for online India.

Yahoo 2016 Year-In-Review
Yahoo 2016 Year-In-Review

About the Yahoo India 2016 Year in Review Methodology

To develop the Yahoo Year in Review, our editors analyze user’s interest patterns on what they searched for, read, recommended and shared. It takes into account a number of factors including absolute volume and growth from previous periods to see which themes and trends bubble to the surface. Individuals and their preferences always remain anonymous.

Sulekha is the leader in the 200 billion dollar services market in India. They connect users with local service providers both online and on their mobile platform. Sulekha has adopted Exotel’s User Virtual Number (UVN) technology to safeguard their customers’ privacy and to bring better experience to their customers.

One of the biggest problems their customers faced was persistent calls from certain service partners, even after their requirement was fulfilled. The deployment of Exotel’s unique technology enabled them to mask the user’s real phone and communicate using a dynamic virtual number. This way, even if a service provider tries to reach the user after the user has requested Sulekha to stop calls, the Service partner will get a ‘regret’ message which ultimately protects customer privacy.

User Virtual Number (UVN) technology also prevents the service partner from storing and circulating the customer’s contact number.

In addition to safeguarding customer privacy, UVN allows Sulekha to track advanced analytics about connect rates, response rates and talk-time to understand if the customer’s service request is fulfilled or not.

Speaking about the development, Satya Prabhakar, Founder and CEO, Sulekha said

Exotel’s Virtual Number (UVN) technology helped us to assign dynamic virtual phone numbers for all user-service partner combinations. We can now keep a track of the connect rates and response rates between service partners and the user and ensure a better experience to both the parties.

Shivku, Co-founder and CEO, Exotel said

One of the biggest problems that Sulekha faced was the lack of control on the conversations that happened between the user and the service partner over the phone. Exotel’s User virtual number (UVN) technology gives them more control and helps them understand the customer’s experience better.

BankBazaar, India’s leading personal finance marketplace, announced a tie-up with Truecaller -the Swedish smart-calling app. With this association, BankBazaar users can now log on to the platform through their Truecaller credentials instead of Facebook or Google for a quick and frictionless registration experience. For banks and financial companies partnering with BankBazaar, this means applicants whose applications they receive are vetted twice over-once by Truecaller and once by Bankbazaar – so that only genuine customers reach them.

BankBazaar, which recently launched completely paperless processes for availing loans and credit cards from select partners, understands the importance of a frictionless experience when it comes to product purchase, and this integration with Truecaller is expected to further ease the users’ financial journey.

Explaining the strategy behind the tie-up, Rati Shetty, CPO, BankBazaar.com said

At Bankbazaar.com, we value a simplified, friction-free, smooth, and efficient customer experience above all else. Our integration with Truecaller enables convenience in the experience so user does not need to go through a manual form filling process but simplifies the process via Truecaller’s one-click login to speed things up.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Truecaller was founded in 2009 by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam. Truecaller’s main features and services include caller ID, spam blocking and dialer functionalities. By tying up with Truecaller, BankBazaar is adding another verification layer for its customer base that shops for personal finance products over its platform. Truecaller has more than 130 million users in India. If an applicant for a financial product is vetted by this database, the chances that they are spammers come down drastically. This is an added incentive for the BankBazaar’s partner financial companies, as it improves the quality of applications by making them easier to verify.

Priyam Bose, Director of Worldwide Developer Relations at Truecaller, said

Minimising friction is a critical metric, especially during user on-boarding in mobile apps, which leads to user delight and deep engagement apart from propelling growth. Truecaller’s TrueSDK has become the right fit for users and app businesses alike in fulfilling this critical need with its flexible and one touch phone number based sign in. With BankBazaar, we are truly committed to offer a smooth and trusted user registration experience for millions of users.

BankBazaar.com hosts the widest range of financial products from over 50+ of the biggest public and private sector banks, NBFCs, and mutual funds players in India. It gets an average of 7,000,000 visitors per month. The company raised USD 80 million through funding from investors such as Amazon.com, Fidelity Growth Partners, Mousse Partners, Sequoia Capital and Walden International.

About BankBazaar

BankBazaar.com is ranked as the best financial website in India by the Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). BankBazaar.com has also been recently awarded the Emerging Brand of the Year Award at the 7th CMO Asia Awards for Excellence in Branding and Marketing in Singapore. It is India’s first neutral online marketplace that gives you instant customized rate quotes on loans, credit cards or any other personal finance products. It simplifies the loan application process. BankBazaar.com services are available through the web-portal, made-for-mobile web service, or the BankBazaar app available on the Android play store and iOS app store. Apart from these, it gives the consumer the latest news/trends and insights into managing finances better. For more information, please visit BankBazaar

Genpact Limited is collaborating with the Center for Collective Intelligence [CCI], a research unit of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] which examines how the latest technologies are changing the way people work together. The goal of this expanded collaboration is to generate non-incremental innovation in information-based operations through a new online community enabling the crowd-sourcing of ideas.

The Intelligent Operations Exchange [IOX] community helps participants “stumble into” innovative uses of leading edge technologies in business process operations. The Genpact & MIT CCI collaboration first began in 2012 to identify novel technology-based practices for process operations & contributed to the maturation of groundbreaking practices such as Operations Network Analytics which applies big data social network analysis to large organizations in order to improve the effectiveness of operations.

IOX’s unprecedented use of “crowdstorming” [crowdsourcing + brainstorming] drives a deliberate collision of creative and serendipitous perspectives of thousands of people with diverse backgrounds such as Industry experts, MIT scientists, Genpact practitioners & clients. When confronted with novel technologies & asked to find applicability in their own world, this community will become the first place for process operations professionals to unleash their creativity.

The IOX community is exploring the application to business process operations of technologies across hardware, software, and analytics – such as wearable devices & remote-controlled tele-presence robots, personal automated assistants, rapid automation & collective intelligence activities like prediction markets. Genpact, MIT CCI & the community will continuously evaluate and select high-potential ideas for further investment and development.

As per Gianni Giacomelli, senior vice president for product innovation & chief marketing officer, Genpact :

The underlying pace of technological change is accelerating & the real obstacle to change is the ability of leaders to re-imagine the fabric of their business processes and make their operations “intelligent” – able to predict, act and learn from experience. With MIT’s Center for Collective intelligence, we want to ‘innovate innovation’ in a space where subject-matter experts often silo themselves into narrow domains, dampening the power of a key ingredient of innovation: diversity

The collaboration will involve senior executives from the Genpact Research Institute on Intelligent Operations, a specialized think tank already harnessing the collective intelligence of Genpact, its clients & partners. The Genpact Research Institute conducts research on important topics related to the future of enterprise’s operating models, from front to back office, across nine industries.

For more information, please visit the following link

Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, became the first in the industry to launch an app compatible with the Android wearable technology. The app will support viewing Flipkart wishlists on the wearable gear. Another significant feature with this update is that the app will now support push notifications from Flipkart on the gear.

This, however is possible only if users enable push notifications to be viewed via the gear. Possible future updates of the app include accessing order tracking related information, price drop notification & personalized offer notification.

Moto 360, which is back in stocks, was launched last month & Flipkart is now the exclusive retailer in India for three globally leading wearable technology brands – Garmin, Motorola and Martian. The latest version of this app will be compatible with all the three brands & will be the first app from India to be listed on the Android wearable technology store.

The current features available in the latest app are:

  • User Interface : Brand New User Interface and faster app
  • Happy Shopping : No Hassle Returns, 100% Buyer Protection
  • Choice of Payments : Cash on Delivery, Credit/Debit Card, EMI, NetBanking, PayZippy
  • Smarter Search : Look up products, categories or brands using text, voice or by barcode
  • Explore Your Way : Quickly switch between List, Grid and Full Screen views
  • Pinpoint Products : Find what you want with the sort and multi-filter functions
  • Never Miss an Offer : Get access to personalized and exclusive app-only deals
  • Personalized Alerts : Get notifications on personalized offers, price drops, order status & exclusive launches
  • Product Suggestions : Relevant recommendations based on your shopping history
  • Share with Friends : Suggest links to interesting products on Facebook, Twitter, Google+
  • Examine Closely : View products in great detail with the large, multi-perspective images
  • Do More with Images : Save images to your phone or instantly share them with friends
  • One-touch Wishlist : Add products to your Flipkart Wishlist with just one tap

To use the Flipkart wishlist on wearable devices, perform the following steps :

  1. Update the Flipkart application to the latest version from the app store
  2. Connect your wearable device to the phone
  3. Wishlist will automatically get installed on the wearable
  4. To download or review the app, please click here