Netflix is reminiscent of Star TV in the 1990s: Very Western in its gaze, very expensive, and clueless, notes Vanita Kohli-Khandekar.
Within days of announcing mega investments for building in Hyderabad its second data centre cluster in India, Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday said it is excited about the India market, where cloud adoption offers massive headroom for growth. Pledging its long-term commitment to the India market, AWS, Amazon's cloud computing unit, said it expects global uncertainties to accelerate the decisions by companies to opt for flexible, on-demand cloud infrastructure to pare costs, gain efficiencies and drive business innovation. "Cloud reacts well to uncertainty," Puneet Chandok, president - commercial business, AWS India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AISPL) told PTI.
'There will be partnerships between banks and fintech firms, but there will also be areas where they will be direct competitors.'
Microsoft will lay off 10,000 workers, about five per cent of its total workforce, its CEO Satya Nadella announced on Wednesday, terming it a hard choice that the tech giant had to make to remain a "consequential company" amid global economic uncertainties. Microsoft is the latest company after Facebook and Amazon to cut jobs as the bloodbath continues in the technology sector in 2023. Describing the current times as "significant change", Indian-origin Nadella said customers who accelerated their digital spend during the Covid-19 pandemic, are now optimising their digital spend to do more with less.
Karan Johar hosted a party at his home on Sunday night, April 24, in honour of Bela Bajaria, Netflix's vice president, International Originals.
After agonizing over this for weeks, he made a decision. When they met after work one evening, he startled her by blurting out, 'I think we should break up.' A moving excerpt from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's An Uncommon Love: The Early Life of Sudha and Narayana Murthy.
'We went from zero to about 10 million users in three months. Paytm came out with the wallet play and we came out with the UPI play.'
Health issues, divorce, court battles, moral turpitude, and more can all distract the CEO and impinge on a company's performance. So, how much of their private life should a company disclose? asks Amit Tandon.
These high profile companies have managed to pay next to no tax on their vast sales revenues generated in Europe.
Ronaldo was an unused substitute as United produced arguably its most complete performance of the season. The 37-year-old has scored just two goals in 12 appearances for United this season.
The party went on to say that the "the way the Aarey issue is being oppressed, it is nothing but dictatorship".
Super heroes, super cops, super fun. Sukanya Verma tells us it's all there on OTT this week.
'People are blowing up their entire retirement fund; they are selling their land and house to spend on one day for a marriage.'
Isha's stab at the bottom of the laptop pyramid shows she is a true Ambani.
Even the worst movies have a song, a scene, or a performance that makes all the effort of making a film worthwhile. This one should have been scrapped at script stage, declares Deepa Gahlot.
In a fresh twist in the fight to gain supremacy in the Indian retail market, billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Retail has slapped notices on Future Retail for terminating sub-leases of 950 stores it had taken over previously. In stock exchange filings, the Kishore Biyani-led debt-laded Future Group firms said they have been served notices to terminate the lease of 835 Future Retail stores and 112 Future Lifestyle stores. Last month, Reliance Retail had taken over store spaces for which the Future Group couldn't pay lease rent. These were then sub-let to the Future Group for operation.
Those on H-1B visas have to find a new job within 60 days or head back to India.
Apple Inc has announced the India prices of the new variants of its bestselling smartphones - launched on Tuesday - as it assembles the device in the country. The new iPhone 15 range starts at Rs 79,900 for the 128 GB variant (the same price as the iPhone 14 when it was launched last year) and goes up to Rs 199,900 for the top-end Pro Max with a 6.7 inch screen and 1 TB (terabyte) storage. The world's most valuable company also launched three new upgraded Apple watches, starting with the SE at Rs 29,900 and going up to Ultra 2 at Rs 89,900.
Google will lay off 12,000 jobs across the globe, its CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Friday, becoming the latest tech giant after Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon to retrench staff en mass amid the global economic downturn. In an email to employees, the Indian-origin CEO said: "I have some difficult news to share. We've decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles." Pichai said the layoffs at Google were carried out after a "rigorous review" of its operations.
70 per cent of surveyed respondents have experienced job related issues in the past 3 months.
Bambai Meri Jaan features horrific massacres and violence so brutal that it ought not to be seen on a home entertainment platform, warns Deepa Gahlot..
As of December 2021, Netflix India stood at an estimated 5 million subscribers against 46 million for Disney+Hotstar and 19 million for Amazon Prime Video.
While the market for satellite broadband currently is small, the potential is large as an estimated 30 per cent of the country does not have reliable terrestrial broadband services.
Murders, miracles, mission IIT, Sukanya Verma suggests everything you can catch on OTT this week.
Experts say the new guideline is likely to hurt foreign players more, especially card companies such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express who process and store credit card transaction data outside of India.
Things may not always look bright, but the sun won't stay out forever is a running theme conveyed across its short films about people from various walks of life in all their varying moods and musings, applauds Sukanya Verma.
The increasing involvement of Big Tech in the financial system could give rise to concentration risk and there are potential spillovers, which call for closer attention, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Tuesday. "...enormous amounts of consumer data is being generated and leveraged upon by a few entities (the so-called Big Tech) by virtue of their huge customer base. "Such developments raise concerns on concentration risk and potential spillovers as their level of engagement with the financial system strengthens in the years to come," Das said at the Global Fintech Fest 2022.
'The cast and crew of Tandav unconditionally apologise if it has unintentionally hurt anybody's sentiments.'
In a short span of time, with the help of Amazon, Cloudtail was able to devise a model that could protect it from the vagaries of online retail business.
After a rather dull April when there were hardly any theatrical or OTT releases, May would be a lot more crowded with a dozen odd movies and web series arriving.
RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das on Friday said the entry of big tech firms into the financial sector poses systemic concerns like overleveraging at the borrowers' ends.
E-commerce firms Amazon, Flipkart, and others are expected to witness blockbuster festival season sales of around $9 billion this year, surpassing pre-pandemic sales of $5 billion in 2019. The pandemic has accelerated the shift to e-commerce, with more consumers shopping online at a higher frequency than last year, observed analysts. This year's festival sales (gross merchandise value or GMV) are expected to grow 30 per cent year-on-year (YoY) to $4.8 billion during the first week of the season and potentially clock over $9-billion GMV during the whole festival month, revealed consulting firm RedSeer's e-commerce festival season report.
Home-grown mobile phone company Lava International has become the first Indian brand to launch 5G smartphones for domestic consumers. The smartphone launched under the brand name 'Agni' has been developed by Lava in India and is getting manufactured at its plant in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. "The purpose of launching Agni is to give Indian consumers the choice of a made in India 5G smartphone for Indians by an Indian company. "We wanted to establish before people that there can be an Indian brand which is technology oriented. "We are second in the world to launch a 5G smartphone on Mediatek Dimensity 810 chipset," Sunil Raina, president & business head, Lava International told PTI on the sidelines of the launch.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday said India is a very special and important country with a remarkable entrepreneurship culture, as he sought to push deeper the just-launched payments services that allow users to make payments over WhatsApp. Last month, Facebook-owned WhatsApp received approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for rolling out its payments services in India. In 2018, WhatsApp started testing its UPI-based payments services in India -- a global first -- with about a million users.
The race to get a New Umbrella Entity (NUE) licence for digital payments may get crowded. As many as six consortiums are said to be in the fray to apply for an NUE licence, which would create a for-profit National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)-like body for retail payments. A consortium led by Financial Software and Systems (FSS), a leading provider of payment products and payment processor, is in talks and may file an application to the RBI for an NUE license, said sources aware of the development. The other constituents of this group include Indian Bank, Central Bank of India, India Post Payments Bank, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard), and a few small finance banks.
Spy dramas, social comedies, star-studded delights, new seasons of beloved series -- Sukanya Verma lists a fun, fun weekend for you on OTT.
The hour-long episodes lurch from adrenaline-pumping to yawn-inducing, observes Deepa Gahlot.
'We want to achieve overall profitability, and then we would go for an IPO.'
Jubilee's irresistible celebration of cinema and all its good, bad, ugly ways lives up to its title, applauds Sukanya Verma.
The lyrical beauty of the songs, the exceptional frames that bind beauty and poetry make Neelavelicham a near-perfect tribute to the legendary writer who marvelled at imperfection and despised grammar as much as he hated his writing being edited, observes Divya Nair.
