Tag: india

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India seeks new regulator for non-personal data

India should set up a data regulator to oversee how companies collect, process, store, monetize and even destroy non-personal data (or data that has been anonymized), a panel tasked by New Delhi has recommended in a draft report.

The eight-person panel said that companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Uber have benefited from a combination of “first mover advantage,” “sizable network effect” and “enormous data” that they have collected over the years.

This dominance has “left many new entrants and startups being squeezed and faced with significant entry barriers,” said the draft report, which has been made available to industry players for consultation before it is submitted to the nation’s IT ministry next month.

New Delhi, which appointed the aforementioned committee last year, has in recent years moved to better understand and control how technology companies make use of data and devise new guidelines for several sectors including e-commerce.

India has emerged as battleground for global giants such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and ByteDance that are looking to court hundreds of millions of first-time internet users in Asia’s third-largest economy.

Last month, New Delhi banned 59 apps and services developed by Chinese firms citing security and privacy concerns. On Monday, Google announced it plans to invest $10 billion in India to help accelerate the adoption of digital services.

In the draft report, obtained by TechCrunch and embedded below, the panel said that a data authority that provides centralized regulations for all non-personal data exchanges is required to closely evaluate and oversee the aforementioned aspects.

“Market transactions and market forces on their own will not bring about the maximum social and economic benefits from data for the society. Appropriate institutional and regulatory structures are essential for a thriving data economy and a well-functioning data society,” the report said.

The proposed regulator will have “integration” with “raw data pipes” of tech companies, and will be able to exercise its legal power to make data sharing requests.

The draft report also recommends that companies provide their users with metadata of information they are collecting or processing from them so that “users may identify opportunities for combining data from multiple data businesses and/or governments to develop innovative solutions, products and services.”

“Every data business must declare what they do and what data they collect, process and use, in which manner, and for what purposes. This is similar to disclosures required by pharma industry and in food products,” the draft report recommends.

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Google makes education push in India

Google said on Monday that it has partnered with CBSE, a government body that oversees education in private and public schools in India, to deliver a “blended learning experience” across 22,000 schools in the world’s second largest internet market by the end of this year.

The Search giant, which today also announced plans to invest $10 billion in India in the next five to seven years, said it will train more than 1 million teachers in India this year and offer a range of free tools such as G Suite for Education, Google Classroom, and YouTube to help digitize the education experience in the nation, which like other countries, closed schools earlier this year to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

“We must acknowledge that not everyone has access to internet,” said Sapna Chadha, Senior Marketing Director at Google India, at an online event Monday. She said the company is working with partners to bring education through TV and other mediums.

Google’s Monday announcement follows a similar effort from its global rival Facebook, which partnered with CBSE earlier this month to launch a certified curriculum on digital safety and online well-being, and augmented reality for students and educators in the country.

The Android-maker also announced that Bolo, an education app it launched in India last year that helps students develop reading and comprehension skills, is expanding to 180 countries in nine languages under Read Along brand.

Google to invest $10 billion in India

More to follow…

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A glint of hope for India’s food delivery market as Zomato projects monthly cash burn of less than $1M

Food delivery startups in India have been struggling to make financial sense for years. They have each lost as much as $50 million a month to win and sustain customers by offering discounts. And unlike some other markets, food delivery startups have been severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

But Zomato, one of the two market leading startups operating in the space, today offered a rare sign of hope for the market after it said it had severely cut its cash-burn as it looks to become profitable.

The Gurgaon-headquartered firm said it estimates it would lose less than $1 million in July, the lowest in years for the 12-year-old firm that acquired Uber Eats’ India business earlier this year.

Zomato also shared its performance for the financial year that ended on March 31, 2020, and the quarter that ended on June 30.

In FY 20, the startup said its revenue surged 105% to $394 million compared to the year before while its losses at EBIDTA-level — a popular metric used by businesses that does not account for interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — ballooned to $293 million, up from $277 million the year before.

But the startup said the coronavirus pandemic, which has significantly reduced the number of orders customers place on the platform, has also helped it to improve its unit economics.

In the quarter that ended last month, Zomato clocked $41 million in revenue at an EBIDTA-level loss of $12 million. In the month of June alone, the startup’s revenue stood at $17 million at an EBIDTA-loss of $1.5 million.

As India eases its nationwide lockdown, which it enforced in late March, more workers are moving back to the larger cities. Zomato said this has helped the firm increase the number of orders on its platform. The startup said it expects its revenue generation this month to be at 60% of the levels before coronavirus wrought havoc to the industry.

In the quarter that ended in June this year, each order on Zomato earned it — made a contribution margin of — Rs 27 (36 cents), compared to loss of Rs 47 (62 cents) a order during the same period last year, claimed Deepinder Goyal, co-founder and chief executive of Zomato.

Goyal cautioned, however, that the current contribution margin is not sustainable and he expects it to go down to Rs 15 to 20 per order over time.

Zomato, which eliminated its workforce by 13% in May and slashed salary across the board, said it had reinstated existing employees back to their earlier pay level and its projection takes that into account.

The firm competes with Prosus Ventures-backed Swiggy, which has also eliminated even more jobs in recent months and made other efforts to improve its financials. The two firms, both of which together have nearly $2.5 billion, are struggling to find new investors as many VC and PE firms lose appetite for food delivery in India.

More to follow…

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Whether or not the Trump administration bans TikTok, it’s already helping Facebook

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. is “looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, including the Chinese-owned company TikTok, comparing it to other Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE that have been deemed national security threats by the current administration. “With respect to Chinese apps on people’s cell phones, I can assure you that the United States will get this one right, too,” Pompeo said.

The fear is the app could be used to surveil or influence Americans, or else that TikTok parent ByteDance could be made to provide the Chinese government with TikTok’s data on its U.S.-based users — of which there are at least 165 million. India, calling TikTok a “threat to sovereignty and integrity,” decided to ban the app late last week, saying it had similar concerns.

Though security experts disagree over how concerned the U.S. should be about TikTok, the move would would undoubtedly hobble what has become one of the fastest-growing social media businesses on the planet, with 800 million monthly active users worldwide, half of whom are under age 24. In the meantime, the mere suggestion of a ban is proving a boon to TikTok’s biggest rival, Facebook — and notably at a time when the U.S. company faces growing scrutiny over its decision not to take action on multiple controversial posts from Donald Trump.

The threat is already prompting some to speculate that Pompeo’s warning was politically motivated. In a new interview with Axios, for example, L.A.-based talent manager John Shahidi observes that TikTok users have said they were partially responsible for a Trump rally in Oklahoma two weeks ago that failed to deliver huge crowds.

Shahidi — whose agency currently oversees nine “channels” on TikTok that collectively enjoy than 100 million followers — doesn’t doubt the two are related. “I’m on TikTok a lot,” Shahidi says of the short-form video app, and “there are no Trump supporters, no official Trump account; no one who is from his team is on TikTok.”

Is it “just coincidence that we’re heading toward [the election], and the one app that doesn’t support him — with everything happening in the world — we’re going to talk about taking down TikTok?” he asks.

Already, TikTok influencers are more actively promoting their other social media channels to their followers as a kind of contingency plan. Soon to join them is rising social media star Pierson Wodzynski, a 21-year-old who ran track in high school and was taking a break from studying communications in college when, in January, a friend invited her to participate in a show on AwesomenessTV, a YouTube channel that has more than 8 million subscribers.

The show’s set-up centered around nabbing a date with social media star Brent Rivera, who has 13 million YouTube subscribers, 19.8 million Instagram followers, and more than 30 million TikTok fans. But afterward, Wodzynski found herself with the L.A.-based talent agency that Rivera cofounded two years ago called Amp Studios and in recent months, aided by special guest appearances by Rivera, she has built a substantial fanbase herself, with 500,000 subscribers on YouTube, 455,000 Instagram followers, and a stunning 4.1 million fans on TikTok.

Wodzynski says her followers seem to like the comedy bits she develops, such a recent series on the “things that go wrong when you’re running late,” and another on the “Appdashians,” wherein each character is a different social media company. (Notably, Facebook is the old grandmother character.)  Says Wodzynski, who comes across as both confident and affable, “I’m so unbelievably myself [on social media], it’s crazy.”

She is also concerned about the TikTok’s future in the U.S. Partly, she simply enjoys it. (“It’s just a great app to escape, and it’s so different, with a vast music library and editing software that other apps don’t have.”) But it’s also the source of most of her income, she says, explaining that she helps promote the brands with which Amp Studios works, including Chipotle. (“A lot of times it’s me dancing to a popular song and holding the product, or developing a creative advertisement so it looks enjoyable.”)

Wodzynski says she is “ready for anything,” and that if the U.S. bans the platform, she trusts it will do so for legitimate reasons. “There are many other roads to take your content,”  she says. The importance of diversifying across social platforms is something that Max Levine, who cofounded Amp with Rivera, gives to all of the firm’s talent, he says.

“‘Diversify’ is a good mantra for life,” says Levine, who claims he learned this lesson early when Vine — the once-popular video app that Twitter acquired, then subsequently shut down — “fizzled and died.” Levine points to early Vine stars like Logan Paul and Rivera himself who “were smart and focused on building platforms on Instagram and YouTube” and who not only emerged unscathed when Vine was shuttered but whose popularity ballooned afterward.

He says that Amp’s clients have always “promoted other socials on TikTok,” to steer them to YouTube videos, for example, and that he’d prefer that they not start being more aggressive on this front. “They’ve been doing it naturally over time. I think if every other TikTok mentions [a call to action], it could be a lot.”

Still, a few minutes on TikTok underscores that growing percentage of its users has begun talking about Instagram, which requires far less effort than does developing a fan-pleasing YouTube video. With the threat of a ban in the air, Wodzynski — who says she saw her view count go down with India’s recent ban of TikTok — isn’t immune to the impulse. “Actually, later today I will be posting something on Tiktok about this whole banning thing and reminding people that if they want to follow my Instagram and Youtube that ‘this is what I post there,'” she says.

“I do that pretty regularly, but I’m gong to step it up in more in the coming days and weeks.”

In the meantime, Facebook is already putting together its newest playbook. Just yesterday, in India, Instagram rolled out a video-sharing feature called Reels to fill the void left by TikTok that sounds very much like a clone. The in-app tool invites users to record 15-second videos set to music and audio, then upload them to their stories. As CNN notes, Facebook began testing the feature in Brazil last November. The feature is now available in France and Germany, too.

India not only indefinitely banned Tiktok but 58 other apps and services provided by Chinese-based firms, including Tencent’s WeChat. But the country’s government enjoys a good relationship with Facebook, which recently nabbed a 10% stake in local telecom giant Jio Platforms.

In fact, in February, before a trip to India, Donald Trump talked about Facebook and ranking that both he and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoy on the platform. He said Modi is “number two” on Facebook in terms of followers, and that he is number one as told to him directly by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

As reported in the Economic Times, Trump said at the time: “I’m going to India next week, and we’re talking about — you know, they have 1.5 billion people. And Prime Minister Modi is number two on Facebook, number two. Think of that. You know who number one is? Trump. You believe that? Number one. I just found out.”

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Freshworks acquires IT orchestration service Flint

Customer engagement company Freshworks today announced that it has acquired Flint, an IT orchestration and cloud management platform based in India. The acquisition will help Freshworks strengthen its Freshservice IT support service by bringing a number of new automation tools to it. Maybe just as importantly, though, it will also bolster Freshworks’ ambitions around cloud management.

Freshworks CPO Prakash Ramamurthy, who joined the company last October, told me that while the company was already looking at expanding its IT services (ITSM) and operations management (ITOM) capabilities before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, having those capabilities has now become even more important given that a lot of these teams are now working remotely.

“If you take ITSM, we allow for customers to create their own workflow for service catalog items and so on and so forth, but we found that there’s a lot of things which were repetitive tasks,” Ramamurthy said. “For example, I lost my password or new employee onboarding, where you need to auto-provision them in the same set of accounts. Flint had integrated with a Freshservice to help automate and orchestrate some of these routine tasks and a lot of customers were using it and there’s a lot of interest in it.”

He noted that while the company was already seeing increased demand for these tools earlier in the year, the pandemic made that need even more obvious. And given that pressing need, Freshworks decided that it would be far easier to acquire an existing company than to build its own solution.

“Even in early January, we felt this was a space where we had to have a time-to-market advantage,” he said. “So acquiring and aggressively integrating it into our product lines seemed to be the most optimal thing to do than take our time to build it — and we are super fortunate that we made placed the right bet because of what has happened since then.”

The acquisition helps Freshworks build out some of its existing services, but Ramamurthy also stressed that it will really help the company build out its operations management capabilities to go from alert management to also automatically solving common IT issues. “We feel there’s natural synergy and [Flint’s] orchestration solution and their connectors come in super handy because they have connectors to all the modern SaaS applications and the top five cloud providers and so on.”

But Flint’s technology will also help Freshworks build out its ability to help its users manage workloads across multiple clouds, an area where it is going to compete with a number of startups and incumbents. Since the company decided that it wants to play in this field, an acquisition also made a lot of sense given how long it would take to build out expertise in this area, too.

“Cloud management is a natural progression for our product line,” Ramamurthy noted. “As more and more customers have a multi-cloud strategy, we want to you give them a single pane of glass for all the work workloads they’re running. And if they wanted to do cost optimization, if you want to build on top of that, we need the basic plumbing to be able to do discovery which is kind of foundational for that.”

Freshworks will integrate Flint’s tools into Freshservice and like offer it as part of its existing tiered pricing structure, with service orchestration likely being the first new capability it will offer.

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TikTok saw a rise in government demands for user data

Earlier this year, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance joined the raft of American tech giants that publish the number of government demands for user data and takedown requests by releasing its own numbers. The move was met with heavy skepticism, amid concerns about the app maker’s links to China, and accusations that it poses a threat to U.S. national security, a claim it has repeatedly denied.

In its second and most recent transparency report, published today, TikTok said it received 500 total legal demands, including emergency requests, from governments in the first half of the year, up 67% on the previous half. Most of the demands came from the United States.

TikTok also received 45 government demands to remove contents. India, which submitted the most takedown requests, earlier this month banned TikTok from the country, citing security concerns.

But noticeably absent from the report is China, where TikTok is not available but where its parent, ByteDance, is headquartered. That’s not an uncommon occurrence: Facebook or Twitter, neither of which are available in China, have not received or complied with a demand from the Chinese government. Instead, ByteDance has a separate video app, Douyin, for users in mainland China.

TikTok spokesperson Hilary McQuaide told TechCrunch: “We have never provided user data to the Chinese government, nor would we do so if asked.”

“We do not and have not removed any content at the request of the Chinese government, and would not do so if asked,” the spokesperson said.

But the company’s efforts to fall in line with the rest of the U.S. tech scene’s transparency efforts is not likely to quell long-held fears held by the company’s critics, including lawmakers, which last year called on U.S. intelligence to investigate the firm.

TikTok continues to contend that it’s not a threat and that it’s firmly rooted in the United States.

Earlier this week, the company said it was withdrawing from Hong Kong in response to the new Beijing-imposed national security law.

What India’s TikTok ban means for China

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Flipkart invests $35 million in Indian giant Arvind Fashions’ unit

Flipkart on Thursday announced it has invested $35 million in Arvind Fashions for a significant minority stake in one the decades-old Indian firm’s subsidiaries as the Walmart-owned firm looks to widen its hold on fashion e-commerce in the world’s second largest internet market.

The e-commerce firm, which operates market-leading fashion e-commerce firm Myntra, said it was acquiring a stake in Arvind Fashions‘ Arvind Youth Brands, which operates Flying Machine brand in India. The two companies said today the new investment strengthens their partnership as they look to serve demands and needs of the “fashion-conscious youth” in India.

91-year-old Arvind Fashions runs of the nation’s largest fashion brands, carrying apparels from Polo Assn, Arrow, GAP, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Aeropostale, the Children’s Place and Ed Hardy among other local and international firms.

“Flying Machine is a brand that is known in households across India, popular with the youth and synonymous with value and style. Through this investment, we look forward to partnering with the team at Arvind Youth Brands to continue to grow the market for its portfolio of products and enhance the strong brand equity that has been built over the last few decades,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, chief executive officer of Flipkart Group, in a statement.

The partnership with the Flipkart Group is aimed at helping Arvind Fashions accelerate its online growth strategy, said J. Suresh, managing director and chief executive of Arvind Fashions.

“Given the strong existing relationship with the Flipkart Group, and their presence in online fashion, it was an obvious choice for us to enter into this engagement through which Flipkart and Myntra will be our preferred online partner for the Flying Machine brand, while we continue to grow our offline sales through channels like exclusive brand stores, department stores and multi-brand stores,” he said in a statement.

More to follow…

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What India’s TikTok ban means for China

For more than a decade, China has limited how foreign tech firms that operate inside its borders do business. The world’s largest internet market has used its Great Firewall to block Facebook, Twitter, Google and other services in the name of preserving its cyber sovereignty.

The walled-garden approach has helped homegrown giants like Tencent and Alibaba Group win the local market, while giving the Chinese government a better hold on what gets communicated on these platforms. China has even suggested that other nations deploy similar measures.

Be careful what you ask for: Last week, dozens of Chinese firms got a front-seat view to the challenges their global counterparts face in their territory. With a press release, India declared that the world’s second-largest internet market was shutting the door to dozens of Chinese firms for an indefinite period.

India said it would ban 59 apps and services, including ByteDance’s TikTok, Alibaba Group’s UC Browser and UC News, and Tencent’s WeChat over cybersecurity concerns.

New Delhi is open to meeting these firms and hear their defenses, but for now, local telecom operators and other internet service providers have been ordered to block access to these services. Google and Apple have already complied with India’s order and delisted the apps from their app stores.

India’s order is already shifting the market in favor of local firms, several of which have rushed to cash in on the app ban. A crop of recently launched short-form video sharing services have amassed tens of millions of users just this week.

But depending on how long the ban remains in place, the move could also derail a big funding source for thousands of Indian startups. The vast majority of India’s unicorns count Chinese VCs as some of their biggest and longest-term backers. New Delhi’s order could also change how American giants, many of which are already bullish on India, review the market moving forward.

Today, we will explore various ways India and China’s situation could play out and impact various stakeholders. But first, some background on how tension escalated between the two nuclear-armed nations.

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Facebook expands Instagram Reels to India

As scores of startups look to cash in on the content void that ban on TikTok and other Chinese apps has created in India, a big challenger is ready to try its own hand.

Instagram said on Wednesday it is rolling out Reels — a feature that allows users to create short-form videos (up to 15 seconds long) set to music or other audio — to a “broad” user base in India.

Video is already a popular way how many Indians engage on Instagram. “Videos make up over a third of all posts in India,” said Ajit Mohan, the head of Facebook India, in a call with reporters Wednesday. And in general, about 45% of all videos posted on Instagram are of 15 seconds or shorted, said Vishal Shah, VP of Product at Facebook.

So a broad test of Reels, which is also currently being tested in Brazil, France, and Germany, in India was only natural, he said, dismissing the characterization that the new feature’s ability had anything to do with a recent New Delhi order.

India banned 59 apps and services developed by Chinese firms citing privacy and security concerns last week. Among the apps that have been blocked in the country includes TikTok, ByteDance’s app that has offered a similar functionality as Reels for years.

TikTok identified India as its biggest market outside of China. Late last year, TikTok said it had amassed over 200 million users in the country, and the firm was looking to expand that figure to at least 300 million this year.

In the event of TikTok’s absence, a number of startups including Twitter-backed Sharechat, Chingari, and Mitro have ramped up their efforts and have claimed to court tens of millions of users. Sharechat said it had doubled its daily active users in a matter of days to more than 25 million.

Gaana, a music streaming service owned by Indian conglomerate Times Internet, rolled out HotShots to showcase user generated videos. Gaana had more than 150 million monthly active users as of earlier this year.

But Instagram, which has already attracted tens of thousands of influencers in India, is perhaps best positioned to take on TikTok in the world’s second largest internet market. Instagram had about 165 million monthly active users last month, up from 110 million in June last year, according to mobile insights firm App Annie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch. Mohan declined to comment on Instagram’s user base in India.

Mohan said he is hopeful that Instagram Reels would enable several content creators in India to gain followers globally.

In the run up to the launch of Reels, Facebook has secured deals with several Indian music labels including Saregama in India.

More to follow…

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Facebook-backed Unacademy acquires PrepLadder for $50 million

Indian online learning platform Unacademy said on Tuesday it has acquired Chandigarh-based startup PrepLadder for $50 million as the Facebook-backed edtech giant scouts for deals to expand its presence in the country.

PrepLadder, which employs about 150 people, offers courses aimed at medical students. The two-year-old startup, which never raised any capital from external investors, has more than 80,000 subscribers, said PrepLadder co-founder Deepanshu Goyal.

The acquisition of PrepLadder comes as both Unacademy and Byju’s — the two edtech leaders in India — have engaged with several startups in recent months to further their dominance in the nation. In a call with reporters today, Gaurav Munjal, co-founder and chief executive of Unacademy, said he was open to talking with more startups to see opportunities to work together.

Facebook-backed Unacademy, which began as a YouTube channel in 2015, has amassed over 30 million learners on the platform, more than 200,000 of which are paid subscribers. More than 700,000 users access its app and website each day.

More to follow…