Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj is a writer for TechCrunch, based in Bangalore.
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Latest from Pankaj Mishra
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Mobile Shopping App Paytm Challenges E-Commerce Rivals In India, As Smartphone User Base Explodes
India’s nearly 100 million smartphone users are beginning to shop online at a pace that the country’s biggest e-commerce companies such as Flipkart and Snapdeal are expecting the mobile traffic to surpass their desktop user base anytime this year. And as these e-commerce marketplaces shift their models to woo customers buying on mobiles, Paytm — a mobile shopping app —… Read More
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Google Faces Antitrust Heat In India
Google could face a penalty of up to $5 billion if found guilty by the Competition Commission of India in a two-year old probe launched to investigate if the company abused its dominant position in the business of Internet search and advertising. India started antitrust investigation against Google in 2012 based on complaints from the advocacy group, CUTS International, and a local matrimony… Read More
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As Flipkart Hits $1B GMV Milestone, Indian E-Commerce Becomes The Next Frontier For Amazon, eBay
Flipkart, India’s biggest e-commerce company, has just hit the billion dollar milestone in annual GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), a goal the founders had forecast to achieve only by 2015. In an internal note sent to employees, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, the former Amazon employees who founded Flipkart in 2007, said this reflects 100x growth since March 2011 when the company was doing… Read More
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Coming Out Of Stealth, MyCrowd Aims To Create World’s Biggest Marketplace For Freelance Projects
MyCrowd, a startup that helps companies find freelance talent for specific tasks through Google Docs, PowerPoint and other software applications, is raising $500,000 in a seed round from unnamed angel investors to add more connectors including Evernote and expand beyond its existing base of around 10 million specialists. MyCrowd’s in-app functionality allows users to identify and hire… Read More
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Zoho Seeks To Disrupt IT Helpdesk Market By Offering ServiceDesk For Free
With enterprises looking to achieve cost savings as their top priority in managing their IT systems, the IT help desk market is getting commoditized very fast, leaving little room for any disruptive innovation. ManageEngine, a division of Zoho, is offering its flagship IT help desk software — ServiceDesk — for free starting today, underscoring just how competitive and commoditized this… Read More
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Walmart Planning E-Commerce Marketplace To Enter India, Challenge eBay, Amazon
India’s e-commerce industry is on fire. After eBay doubled down on its India play by investing $133 million in Snapdeal a week ago, the world’s biggest retailer, Walmart, is now looking to build a marketplace for tapping into the country’s e-commerce industry, which is expected to grow sevenfold to $22 billion over next five years. As this report says, Walmart has already hired a… Read More
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Reflektion Raises $8M From Intel, Nike To Help Retailers Predict What Shoppers Will Buy Next
Reflektion, a predictive analytics startup that helps retailers such as O’Neill improve customer conversion rates, has raised $8 million in Series B funding led by Intel Capital and Nike. The startup plans to use this additional funding in beefing up sales, marketing and also launch its e-commerce and business intelligence products. Predicting what customers plan to buy has been the Holy… Read More
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As India User Base Nears 100M, Facebook Hopes To Earn Big Revenue From SMBs
India is set to become Facebook's biggest market in terms of number of users later this year, but don't expect that to translate into ad dollars for the Palo Alto company anytime soon. India's online advertising market maxes out at around $360 million, making it difficult for the company to translate this horde of users into a billion-dollar business. Read More
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What Can Indian Startups Learn From The Facebook Acquisition That Didn’t Happen
Little Eye Labs was not the only acquisition Facebook was chasing in India last year. Salorix, a social media analytics startup that had raised $3.5 million in Series A from Inventus Capital Partners and Nexus Venture Partners in November 2011, was approached by Facebook in October last year. But by December, the acquisition talks were stalled. After several months of negotiations, Salorix… Read More
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HackerEarth Raises $500K To Help Startups Find Great Programmers
HackerEarth, a Bangalore-based startup that helps other startups hire programmers through technical challenges, has raised $500,000 in seed funding from Angelprime incubator. Launched in late 2012 by former Google engineer Sachin Gupta and his IIT batch mate Vivek Prakash, HackerEarth helps India’s growth-stage startups find technical talent they so desperately need. Unlike in the Silicon… Read More
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IBM Doubles Down On Cloud Services With Cloudant Acquisition
IBM is attempting to make up for its delayed push in cloud services by acquiring Cloudant, a YC alum and a cloud specialist in the area of NoSQL, database-as-a-service. This acquisition, the terms of which were not disclosed by the companies, comes a year after IBM acquired SoftLayer for around $2 billion, and also announced it will invest an additional $1 billion to enhance its cloud portfolio in… Read More
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Target Accelerator’s First Batch In India Bets Big On Social Commerce, Mobile And Analytics
Target is finally launching its Accelerator Program for Indian startups with five companies that can help the retailer test and build technology solutions across 3D imaging, mobility, personalized search and social media conversations with customers. The Minneapolis-based retailer has been facing heat recently because of a large data breach last year, and had to delay the launch of its… Read More
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BlueTalon Raises $1.5M In Seed To Offer Single-Click Data Collaboration For Enterprises
BlueTalon, a big data startup that helps companies analyze information from both internal and external databases on-the-fly, is raising seed funding of $1.5 million from Data Collective. With the new funding, BlueTalon is also appointing Eric Tilenius, a former executive-in-residence at Scale Venture Partners, as its new CEO. Before joining Scale, Tilenius was CEO of two venture-backed… Read More
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With $8M In Fresh Funding, Ezetap Is More Than Just A Square For Emerging Markets
There are almost 900 million active cell-phone users in India now, and from newer startups to some of the biggest companies in the world, everybody is chasing the next mobile disruption that could potentially result in a business model for all of the emerging markets. One such startup is Ezetap, a mobile payment company backed by some of the biggest names in the VC industry, including Chamath… Read More
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Beckon Wants To Help Marketers Make Sense Of Data And Track Spend On-The-Fly
There is Salesforce.com for sales professionals, numerous off-the-shelf packages for finance and HR professionals and thousands of apps for several other enterprise utilities. But marketeers still don’t have a single dashboard to monitor their spend and its impact across different campaigns and functions. And while there are several marketing tools and dashboards that offer custom reporting… Read More
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ThreatStream Raises $4M From Google Ventures To Add Realtime Cybersecurity Intelligence
ThreatStream, a SaaS-based cybersecurity startup backed by top Cloudera executives, has raised $4 million in Series A funding from investors led by Google Ventures. The other investors participating in the latest round of funding are Paladin Capital Group, Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly and Hugh Nijemanze, former CTO and founder of ArcSight. The new funding will be used to add a new layer of… Read More
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Cloud Security Startup Elastica Comes Out Of Stealth With $6.3M From Mayfield
Elastica, a cloud security startup launched in 2012, is coming out of stealth mode with $6.3 million in Series A funding from the Mayfield Fund. The startup is also launching its new apps that offer real-time threat detection and even post-incident forensic analysis. As more enterprises embrace SaaS and other cloud-based services, they are increasingly feeling the need to have a different… Read More
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Siemens Launches $100M Fund To Back Startups Aiming To Disrupt Manufacturing
Siemens Venture Capital, the corporate financing arm of Europe’s biggest engineering company, is launching a new, $100 million fund to back early-stage startups working in the areas of industrial automation and other digital technologies that can transform manufacturing. This comes after Siemens made two notable startup investments over past few months — in 3D visualization startup… Read More
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With $770K In Seed Funding, Playbasis Wants Businesses In Asia To Gamify
Playbasis, a Thailand-based gamification startup that helps companies engage with customers and employees through cool rewards and social games, has raised $770,000 in seed funding from Ardent Capital, 500 Startups and Axis Capital. The startup plans to use this funding to expand its footprint in Asia this year. Read More
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Indian Music Streaming Startup Dhingana Shuts Down
Dhingana, the Indian music streaming startup battling to stay alive for past few months, has finally shutdown. We have been trying to speak with Dhingana CEO Rohit Bhatia for past few weeks, but he’s been requesting more time for bringing clarity on the startup’s future. Dhingana is among the top-funded music startups in India. It raised $7 million in Series B funding in October… Read More
