Business Today April 24, 2016

You might have noticed that in the past few months, the news coming out of India’s $17-billion e-commerce sector has been decidedly mixed. While there are reports of new rounds of money being raised at higher valuations and new unicorns being created – ShopClues was the latest one to achieve that distinction in January 2016 – it has often been drowned out by news of sackings in the e-commerce sector, ugly spats between founders and their investors, closures of companies in the food tech and grocery space, and others. Recently, a Morgan Stanley mutual fund wrote down the valuation of its investment in the poster boy of India’s e-commerce sector, Flipkart. For some time now, a degree of realism has been also creeping into the Silicon Valley, which most high-profile…

The Man at the Helm of Infosys This refers to your cover story on Vishal Sikka of Infosys (Re-imagining Infosys, April 10). The man at the helm was among the top 50 CEOs in Glassdoor’s annual Employees’ Choice Awards for the Highest Rated CEOs in 2015. He is probably the right man to bring back Infosys into the high-growth mode, which was lagging behind on growth prospects for many years. No doubt, the company had lost its direction on many fronts. Employee morale had taken a hit and its conservative attitude added to the problems. But the million-dollar question is: Will the company revive its lost glory under the leadership of Sikka? Wait and watch! Namita M., Faridabad NITI Aayog: A Toothlesss Tiger This refers to your article on…

AUCTIONS, AUCTIONS... It is time to sell off properties and recover dues. The Supreme Court recently asked SEBI to sell off Sahara group properties worth an estimated `40,000 crore in order to recover dues that it owes investors. Meanwhile, SBI Caps has been trying in vain to auction off Kingfisher House in Mumbai. And the service tax department is trying to hawk Mallya’s private Airbus A319 to recover its own dues... FLIPKART VS SNAPDEAL A twitter spat broke out between Sachin Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart and Kunal Bahl, co-founder of Snapdeal, over the fate of their respective companies. Bansal tweeted that Alibaba’s reported decision to start operations directly in India was a poor reflection on its investments – alluding to Paytm and Snapdeal. Bahl snapped back that Morgan Stanley “flushed…

4-5 MAKING INDIA COMPETITIVE WHAT: CII Annual General Meeting and National Conference WHEN: April 4-5, New Delhi WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Building National Competitiveness being the theme for this year’s conference, expect attendance of a galaxy of leaders from industry and government. Finance minister Arun Jaitley will be the chief guest for the inaugural session. Other sessions will including speakers such as Roads Minister Nitin Gadkari, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu and Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, among a host of other ministers, bureaucrats and CEOs. 04 PROTECTING BRANDS WHAT: FICCI Conference on Digital Advertising: Protecting Brand Integrity & Stimulating Content Creation WHEN: 4 April, New Delhi WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Sessions are aimed at online advertisers to help them protect their brand image from inadvertent association…

Think about the often-pointless rigmarole of attending to work e-mails, then waiting for responses or following up and you know why productivity and e-mails don’t really make the best bedfellows. This is a problem Slack is looking to solve by enabling real-time messaging between teams of all sizes. The lure is disarmingly simple – Slack promises to make work teams more productive by largely reducing the need for meetings and e-mails. It is like a chat/messaging app that can be used across multiple platforms and devices, with robust features such as one-to-one and group messaging, file sharing plus integration into several popular apps and web services. The key to Slack is that it is fun to use – a word typically not associated with any sort of enterprise software. Slack…

Test Mode Facebook has added a new feature that alerts a user if someone creates a fake profile using their profile photo and name, according to US-based digital media website Mashable. Facebook began testing this feature in November last year and has, so far, launched it in about 75 per cent of its markets. The company plans to expand it to other markets, too, soon. By this feature, Facebook would be able to detect fake profiles being created and send the concerned user an alert automatically, asking him to indentify whether the profile is impersonating him or not. The impersonated accounts will also be checked manually by the Facebook team. Going Live Google has decided to join the live video app bandwagon, which is quite the rage today, by creating…