Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj is a writer for TechCrunch, based in Bangalore.
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India’s Snapdeal Now Gets Over Half Its Sales Through Mobile As M-Commerce Goes Mainstream
India’s largest e-commerce marketplace, Snapdeal, now gets over half of its sales from mobile-based transactions, up from just 5% from the same platform nearly a year ago. In a statement, Snapdeal said that 45% of the transactions seen on mobile now come through the native applications while the remaining 55% come through the mobile site. Also, the average ticket size of orders… Read More
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Sherpalo Partner Launches $90M India Fund As Ram Shriram, Kleiner Shift Focus Away From India
Sandeep Murthy, a general partner at Sherpalo who managed the firm’s India investments, is launching two new funds — Lightbox Ventures I that has already acquired stakes in 6 startups, and Lightbox Ventures II, which will be a $90 million fund focused on early stage investments. Ram Shriram, a founding board member of Google and one of the Silicon Valley’s early investors… Read More
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Concur Increases Stake In India’s Cleartrip, Buys Out Sherpalo and Kleiner
Travel and expense management company Concur wants a bigger pie of the $3 billion Indian online travel market. The company has just concluded negotiations with Sherpalo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins to acquire additional stake in the Indian online travel startup Cleartrip. In April 2011, Concur had invested $40 million in Cleartrip, to tap into India’s booming online travel booking… Read More
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InMobi Launches Native Ad Platform To Woo Publishers Looking Beyond Facebook, Google
Native mobile advertising is on fire, especially for independent ad networks looking to challenge their much bigger and established rivals. InMobi, is today launching its native ad platform joining the rage and attempting to woo publishers and advertisers seeking to create their own unique ads outside these bigger networks. Over next few years, InMobi will invest around $100 million in… Read More
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Avaz Raises $550K In Seed To Help Autistic Children Communicate Using Visual Tools
Over half a million children with autism in the next decade will become adults, underscoring a growing challenge that needs to be dealt in the future. But with 1 in 68 children now affected with autism, it’s already the most prevalent neurological disorder in the world that needs more innovations to help people cope with the disorder. Read More
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Big Data Startup Frrole Raises $245K Angel Round, As Crowdfunding Platforms Seek Growth In India
Frrole, a big data startup that specializes in Twitter-based analytics, has raised $245K in Angel funding from investors including Sharad Sharma (former head of Yahoo! R&D centre in india), Google’s India MD Rajan Anandan and Eka Software founder Manav Garg. Based in Bangalore, the startup raised this capital on LetsVenture, a crowd funding platform launched last year to help… Read More
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Data Analytics Startup Beckon Raises $8M As Marketers Look Beyond Generic Tools
Beckon, a California-based startup that helps marketers track their spend using data analytics, has raised $8 million in Series A funding from August Capital and Canaan Partners. The latest funding brings total capital raised by Beckon to $10 million to date (including $2 million seed round from August). As we wrote earlier this year, Beckon helps marketers consolidate all data and… Read More
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Guy Kawasaki Joins Australian Design Startup Canva As Chief Evangelist
Guy Kawasaki, who held the chief evangelist title at Apple during late nineties, is joining Australian design startup Canva, making a comeback into the role after nearly two decades of advising entrepreneurs and founding Alltop in 2008. “Macintosh democratized computers; Google democratized information; and eBay democratized commerce. In the same way, Canva democratizes design,”… Read More
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India’s Snapdeal Acquires Fashion Discovery Site Doozton, As Battle For Online Fashion Heats Up
Online fashion retail is fast becoming the next battlefront for India’s growing e-commerce startups. With two of the biggest Indian e-commerce companies — Flipkart and Myntra — preparing to merge as part of $330 million deal, rival Snapdeal is now pushing aggressively to get its piece of action in the online fashion retailing space. Less than two months after eBay… Read More
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TPG Growth Commits $100M With India’s Smile To Help Internet Cos Tap Emerging Markets
TPG Growth has committed around $100 million in a joint venture with India’s Smile Group for helping Internet and e-commerce companies build and scale their businesses across emerging markets such as India and Africa. TPG and Smile will co-invest through their joint venture, Katalyzers, which will work with Internet companies in the marketplace, classified listings, local commerce… Read More
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‘Political Siri’, Big Data Startups Rise Amid Indian Elections
With nearly 814 million people set to vote over the next few weeks in India’s general elections, the biggest democratic exercise on the planet, political parties are scrambling to out-innovate each other. Amid all this, some technology startups are finding a killer app for their products, especially given the massive outreach programs required by political leaders for wooing their… Read More
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Indian Software Product Startups Pitch Ideas To Fortune 500 CIOs
After years of working with India’s over $100 billion IT services industry for maintaining their software systems, application development and back office work, CIOs of Fortune 500 companies are now looking to tap into the country’s software product ecosystem. And this time, it’s not just about setting up a corporate accelerator like Target did and Coca Cola is… Read More
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India’s Flipkart Nears $330M Myntra Deal, As Common Investors Push To Fight Amazon, eBay
India’s biggest e-commerce company, Flipkart, is in the final stages of completing a merger deal with the country’s fast growing online fashion retailer Myntra, in what could potentially create a much stronger entity for fending off aggressive rivals Amazon, Walmart and the eBay-backed Snapdeal. At least three people directly familiar with ongoing talks said the Myntra board… Read More
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Facebook’s India User Base Crosses 100M, Set To Become Its Biggest Market
India is inching closer to overtake the U.S. as Facebook’s biggest market, at least in terms of the number of active users. With over 100 million users as of March 31, India is now the only country where Facebook can aspire to have 1 billion users, thanks to a growing base of Internet users (currently around 200 million) and increasing proportion of mobile phone subscribers in its over… Read More
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Pitney Bowes Launches Startup Accelerator In India To Hunt For Its Next Big E-Commerce, Mobile Ideas
Pitney Bowes, the 94-year-old producer of stamp postage meters attempting to become an e-commerce platform, is the latest to tap into India’s engineering talent for incubating startup ideas. The accelerator program will be conducted jointly with India’s technology industry association, Nasscom, as part of its year-old startup incubator called “10,000 Start-ups”. For… Read More
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India’s Homeshop18 Files For $75M Nasdaq IPO, Ahead Of Bigger E-Commerce Rivals
Homeshop18, an Indian TV shopping and online retail company owned by media conglomerate Network18 Media, has filed for $75 million IPO on Nasdaq, ahead of much-awaited listings of bigger e-commerce rivals in the country such as Flipkart and Snapdeal. In October last year, Homeshop18 had raised $14 million in fresh round of funding from Korea’s GS Home Shopping among other investors. Read More
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Appiterate Raises Seed Funding From SAIF Partners, Joins Growing List Of A/B Testing Startups
Testing design and content features on-the-go to identify what users want is nothing new — it’s over a decade old process used by Google (and now Facebook among several others) to tell which products are likely to succeed. While both Google and Facebook are known for running dozens of A/B testing at any point in time to find what’s the most popular design or feature in a… Read More
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Harvard-Backed Experfy Wants To Create A McKinsey In The Cloud For Big Data Talent
There is a scramble to find the right big data talent, especially for short-term data projects currently being outsourced to big consulting companies such as Accenture, Deloitte apart from several niche suppliers. According to this McKinsey analysis, the U.S. alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills… Read More
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India Fines Google For Not Complying With Antitrust Probe
India’s competition watchdog has imposed a fine of $166,000 on Google for delay in submitting details needed as part of a two-year-old antitrust probe. The probe focuses on whether Google abused its dominant position in the business of Internet search and advertising. “The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has imposed a fine of Rs. 1 Crore upon Google for failure to comply… Read More
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Mobile Users, Women Shoppers Fuel India’s E-Commerce Boom
Among everything else that’s driving e-commerce growth in India, the ease of buying things sitting inside homes, avoiding the hazards of traffic snarls, worsening air pollution and finding a parking slot, will easily rank at the top, no matter how simplistic it sounds. India’s e-commerce industry has seen its most action-packed period over past few months — several hundreds… Read More
