Internet giant Google is investing $10 billion in India's digitisation fund, its CEO Sundar Pichai has told Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a step that will recognise India's leadership on fintech and will support small and large businesses in India, the US and around the world. Pichai met Prime Minister Modi in Washington on Friday and also announced the opening of Google's global fintech operation centre in the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) in Gandhinagar. "It was an honour to meet Prime Minister Modi during the historic visit to the US. We shared with the Prime Minister that Google is investing $10 billion in India's digitisation fund," Pichai said.
The idea behind starting Chingari is not to build a TikTok clone but to position itself as a super app for India like WeChat.
Two months after TikTok ban: Influencers busy rebuilding their fan base as homegrown apps enjoy 'gold rush'.
TikTok is up against not just government sanction but also a set of feisty home-grown brands that have raised the 'vocal for local' banner to stake claim to the platform's vast small-town reach, point out T E Narasimhan and Sai Ishwar.
Beside RIL's Jio Switch and Jio Browser, smaller Indian app companies who have been overwhelmed by TikTok are again seeing a big rush - even though till the second week of June they might not have been even listed in the top 100 apps in the country.
The ban in India would hit Chinese internet companies that were making headway in the world's fastest-growing mobile market.
ShareChat on Thursday said it has raised $502 million (about Rs 3,725 crore) in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tiger Global, valuing the homegrown social media platform at over $2.1 billion. Snap Inc (which owns photo-messaging app Snapchat) and existing investors Twitter and India Quotient, among others, also participated in the funding round in Mohalla Tech, the parent company of ShareChat and short video app, Moj. Founded in 2015, Mohalla Tech has raised over $766 million across six fundraising rounds.
Chingari, Roposo, Khabri and Trell are seeing huge traction as people are looking at options to earn incentives from home. Music streaming app Gaana, which is strongly placed in the market with 150 million users, recently opened up its short video platform for subscribers.
After India banned 59 Chinese apps last month, at least three more China-based video apps - Snack Video, Likee Lite, and Zili - have now made it to the list of top 10 downloaded apps in India on Google Playstore.
First it was called content-led commerce. Then it came to be known as influencer-led commerce. And its latest iteration is creator economy. This evolution of the terminology for online personas impacting buying decisions -- through blogs, memes, bite-sized videos, and podcasts -- has happened over the past five to seven years.
20 inspiring quotes from Indian start-up journeys
They encouraged start-ups to pay for acquiring customers rather than focusing on the business fundamentals.
Gamification has the potential to trigger immediate positive responses to learning that an organisation wishes to impart.
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