Seller Protection for Online Services in India Now from PayPal

Indian merchants selling online services to countries outside of India including travel and event tickets, online tuitions, app development etc. will now be protected by PayPal. PayPal, a global leader in payments today announced the launch of Seller Protection for Intangibles- an expansion of its existing seller protection program that earlier only covered merchants selling tangible goods such as handicrafts, fashion, art, etc. 

The Seller Protection Program for Intangibles will cover two types of buyer complaints – ‘Unauthorized Transaction’, when a buyer claims that he or she didn’t authorize the payment and ‘Item Not Received’, when a buyer pays for the service but claims that he or she did not receive the service.  The PayPal Resolution Centre will investigate issues and work with the sellers to ensure that they are protected against this type of fraud in genuine cases.

Anupam Pahuja, Country Manager and Managing Director, PayPal India said: ‘PayPal enables small businesses, freelancers and other businesses to sell their products and services across the globe. A key objective for PayPal in India is to ensure that genuine sellers, small or big, are protected from unauthorized claims and chargebacks. Growing instances of online fraud act as a barrier for sellers selling online services and other intangible goods to clients abroad. With our Seller Protection Program for Intangibles, we aim to empower freelancers and merchants in India to sell with confidence and assure them that they have our support to grow.’

A large section of PayPal’s users in India are merchants and freelancers selling intangible products and services like online tuitions, software/ app development, event and travel tickets. With industry leading risk models and a strong technology backbone, PayPal is the only payments company offering such protection to sellers in India.

The facility is live in India from June 25th, 2016.

Rs 400 cr Quess Corp's IPO has Price Band of Rs 310-317 & Issue Open from June 29

The Bengaluru-based integrated business services provider Quess Corp (QCL) has announced a price band of Rs 310-317 per share for its three-day initial public offering (IPO), starting on June 29, 2016.

The firm, promoted by Ajit Isaac and Thomas Cook (India), is expecting to raise Rs 400 crore through IPO to fund its businesses, as well as pay off its debts.

The IPO of the company opens on June 29, and closes on July 1. The IPO consists of a fresh issue of equity shares aggregating to Rs 400 crore.

“We are planning to utilise the capital raised to pay off part of debt, fund capital expenditure requirements of the company and its subsidiary MFXchange US, working capital requirement, acquisitions and other strategic initiatives and general corporate purposes,” Quess Corp Chairman and Managing Director Ajit Isaac said.

The company will utilise Rs 50 crore to pay off part of its debt, Rs 160 crore for working capital, Rs 80 crore for acquisitions and other strategic initiatives, and Rs 70 crore as capex, he added.

Talking about acquisitions, Isaac said, the company has acquired 9-10 companies in the last five years in new line of businesses or in geographies, where it was not present. The shares of Quess Corp are proposed to be listed on the NSE and BSE.

Axis Capital, ICICI Securities, IIFL Holdings and YES Securities (India) are the Book Running Lead Managers (BRLMs) to the issue. The registrar to the Issue is Link Intime India.

Quess Corp (formerly known as Ikya Human Capital Solutions), established in 2007, has over 1,20,000 employees with a pan-India presence of 47 offices across 26 cities, as well as operations in North America, the Middle East and South East Asia, and serves over 1,300 customers.

The company’s presence pans across four segments, global technology solutions, people and services, integrated facility management and industrial asset management.

BT & Oracle to Provide Customers’ Reliable and Secure Direct Access to the Oracle Cloud

BT and Oracle today announced that they are working together to help organisations across the world take advantage of performance, cost and innovation benefits of the cloud. Oracle customers will be able to leverage the high performance, reliability, and security features of the BT Cloud Connect environment to gain direct connectivity to the Oracle Cloud.

While organisations understand the promise and many benefits of the cloud, many are concerned about security and performance issues associated with cloud technologies. This is especially true for business-critical enterprise workloads that frequently demand high levels of availability, security and performance. Together, BT and Oracle are aiming to remove those barriers to cloud adoption by providing options for connectivity from hybrid enterprise data centres to the Oracle Cloud. 

With BT Cloud Connect for Oracle FastConnect, customers can use a private connection based on BT’s IP Connect VPN service, which is designed to predictably, securely and consistently exchange large volumes of data between the Oracle Cloud and their own on-premises environment. BT will connect directly to Oracle’s Cloud locations in Amsterdam and London, giving customers access from anywhere in the world to services provided in European data centres. Through pre-provisioning via BT Cloud Connect, BT can cut the typical dedicated connection deployment time from months to days.

The Oracle Cloud is used by many of the world’s largest organisations. It supports 70 million users and more than 34 billion transactions each day and runs in 19 data centres around the world. With the Oracle Cloud, customers can take advantage of the broadest and most integrated public cloud portfolio across all layers of the IT stack, while also having the choice to bring the Oracle Cloud into their own data centres via the recently announced ‘Oracle Cloud at Customer’ offering.  Oracle FastConnect is part of Oracle IaaS, and intended to enable organisations to quickly meet IT and business goals by leveraging a set of core capabilities such as elastic computing, networking and storage.

This news builds on BT’s Cloud of Clouds portfolio strategy by allowing its multinational customers to connect to the cloud through a centrally managed high-speed network with highly predictable performance, reliability and embedded security features.

 Luis Alvarez, CEO Global Services, BT, said: “Direct and reliable access to data and applications hosted in cloud environments has become critical to organisations as they embark on their digital transformation journeys. We are accelerating our drive to be the world’s leading cloud services integrator and I am proud that BT is becoming the first global network services provider to offer direct access to the Oracle Cloud.” 

“Cloud is the fastest growing part of Oracle’s business,” said Thomas Kurian, president of Product Development, Oracle.  “This partnership will help our customers leveraging the Oracle Cloud execute on their business strategies by taking advantage of the breadth and depth of BT’s global network and its Cloud Connect offering for their high bandwidth connectivity needs.”

BT and Oracle aim to offer the service in the final quarter of calendar year 2016.

Jugnoo Updating its iOS App - Jugnoo & Integrates it Services with SIRI

Ensued by Apple’s inviting move, welcoming third party apps to integrate with Siri, Jugnoo integrates with the popular iPhone voice assistant, making auto booking easier than ever before. Updating its iOS app, Jugnoo patrons can now rest their geeky fingers and simply say "Hey Siri, book an auto with Jugnoo app" to book the auto-rickshaws. This is an attempt to reinstate amongst all Jugnoo iOS users that booking a ride is not a dull process.

Talking about Jugnoo’s past initiatives on various platforms, Samar Singla, Founder and CEO Jugnoo said, “Last month we introduced Jugnoo Bot in integration with Facebook messenger that increased our traction by over 10%. It was an effort to give our users choices instead of imposing our app on them to book autos. Integration with ‘Siri’ The Personal Digital Assistant of Apple", was also inspired by similar line of thoughts of giving our users options, while making the booking process easier. No more fiddling with the phone to book an auto, as auto-rickshaws are just a shout away!”

The feature will be available for all iOS 10 iPhones. Furthering its move, Jugnoo is also working towards getting a similar feature for the Android and Windows phones as well. With this launch, Jugnoo once again established that innovation is the way forward in the company.

DSU & Autodesk Partner for New Design and Innovation Center for Students

Dayanand Sagar University (DSU) has partnered with Autodesk, Inc., a world leader in 3D design technology, to launch a first-of-its kind, Design and Innovation center within its campus at Hosur Road. The 4,000 sq. ft center can accommodate 50-75 people and is equipped with high end workstations and design software for the manufacturing, AEC and entertainment industry. 

Aimed at fuelling the synergy between Skills and Design Thinking, the center houses a maker space with CNC machine, laser cutting machine, 3d printers, hand tools and other mechanical equipment, available to students, makers, entrepreneurs and design/ engineering professionals. DSU has also announced the introduction of Autodesk’s Fusion 360 in its post-graduation program and a product design course based on Fusion 360 for 120 undergraduate students beginning from July 2016.

DSU and Autodesk, hosted a three day design hackathon – “Designathon”, at the newly unveiled Design and Innovation Center, which was attended by 50 students from 40 Design and Engineering colleges. The students showcased 40 human centered design projects around transportation, medical, agriculture, construction etc.

The center will be focused around reskilling and up-skilling existing and future workforce from these industries. It will also provide an innovation platform fuelling startups, by providing access to leading design technology, funding and an environment to encourage innovation with leading industry and academia support. Autodesk is looking forward to scale up the Design and Innovation Center at DSU in the future and also has plans to launch similar centers in other parts of the country as well.

Five Lakh Registrations for Le 2 and Le Max2 Ahead of Flash Sale on Lemall & Flipkart on June 28

Within a few weeks of launching its second generation Superphones, Le 2 and Le Max2, LeEco has received a tremendous response from users securing a record-breaking number of 525,000 registrations on both LeMall.com, LeEco’s own ecommerce marketplace and Flipkart. The much-awaited first flash sale of the Superphones is scheduled for tomorrow (June 28), leaving few hours for consumers to register.

And all Le 2 or Le Max2 buyers can get a 1990 Rs worth CDLA earphones for free on June 28. Given the unmatched value proposition of features and content at an extremely attractive price, both Superphones have stirred up the Indian smartphone market.

The first flash sale for Le 2will commence tomorrow at 12 noon, registrations for which will close tomorrow at 11 am. For Le Max2, registrations are open until 1pm tomorrow and this will be followed by its flash sale at 2pm. So here’s the last chance to secure the Superphones that have already made a dent in the smartphone industry in India.

At a time when brands are under strain to talk about their specs that are hardly different from their competitors’, LeEco stunned the smartphone industry by launching its next gen Superphones that includes content ecosystem, membership program, and guarantees buyers of futureproofing to the hilt. The unprecedented response and demand for both Le 2 and Le Max2 can be attributed to the distinct features that set them apart from any other smartphone in the industry.

With its entertainment centric ecosystem, the company has already made huge inroads in Indian market, selling more than 5 lakh units of its Superphones in just 100 days.

When it comes to entertainment, Le 2 and Le Max2 users have an access to a content library of 2000+ movies and 3000+ hours of curated shows, 150+ live TV channels and very soon to 1.9 million songs with lossless audio.  The Superphones come bundled with one year LeEco membership program, worth 4900 Rs, that besides the above mentioned benefits, users can also enjoy a 5T clouds drive space, 50+ Big Ticket International Live Concerts, exclusive Live Streaming of Major Entertainment Events and Music Concerts Worldwide along with 7500+ hours of world class entertainment. LeEco will also give users a chance to tune into these top International Live Concerts – Live and Offline – in Lossless Audio.  Surely, the content membership alone makes Le Max2 and Le 2 a must-buy.

Both Le 2 and Le Max2 come with USB Type-C audio port featuring CDLA (Continual Digital Lossless Audio) standard, patented by LeEco and a world first.This cutting-edge CDLA technology is all set to redefine the audio experience for users.To accelerate this audio revolution in the smartphones industry, in the first flash sale, LeEco will be giving away free CDLA earphone, worth Rs. 1990 to all Le 2 and Le Max2 buyers.

Both the Superphones come packed with powerful processors in addition to flaunting best-in-class specs! Le 2 comes with Snapdragon Qualcomm  Snapdragon652 processor and Le Max2 comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor.

During the flash sale of Le 2 and Le Max2 on June 28, users can look forward to some amazing offers:

1.       10% SBI cashback (Applicable only on Flipkart. Users can avail a discount of maximum Rs.1200 per card. The 10% cashback, valid on 28 June, is also applicable on EMI transaction on SBI Credit Cards)

2.       Both Superphones include a one-year LeEco membership worth Rs 4900

3.       Free CDLA Earphones worth Rs.1990 (Introductory offer, applicable only in the first flash sale)

gTag – GPS Schoolchild Locator - Innovative Tool in the Parents Hands

Clove Digital has introduced gTag, a GPS schoolchild locator, that comes in strong ABS + Polycarbonate design with locking features and white colour glossy finish. gTag offers innovative tool to locate schoolchild in a device that’s taggable to bag, with GSM SIM choice and with no subscription charges.

“gTag is an innovative product that will provide visibility of schoolchild’s outdoor movements to parents. gTag is a hardware device plus an android app which gives instant updates as to when the child reaches or leaves places marked by parents,” said Anuraag Renjith, Clove Digital’s founder.

 “gTag is handy and easily taggable to a child’s school bag. Freedom to choose GSM SIM helps parents identify right network with coverage in child’s route. In today’s chaotic times with traffic woes growing on a daily basis, to have a device that can help parents know their child’s exact location while travelling is a great help. We are sure more and more parents will endorse this product in the coming months.” added Anuraag.

gTag provides reassurance to parents by throwing more light into the outdoor movements of children. Parents can mark up to 6 places in regular route taken by child and be informed when child reaches or leaves marked places. gTag empowers parents with complete real-time information on child out of home.

In case of an emergency, parent can choose to see real-time location of the child on map view using gTag android app.

How does the device work? once a parent buys the gTag, they need to insert an active data SIM and charge the gTag. An account at www.clovedigital.com needs to be created or via the android app gTag from play store. After signing in, the parent can add child with the gTag ID printed inside the box. It allows them to mark places like school, home, road junctions en route, etc. in the map and receive instant notifications on the child’s movement in or out of these places.

Pricing and Availability 

gTag is available in White glossy finish at MRP Rs 6490 from amazon.in and www.clovedigital.com. Data plan required could be either prepaid or post-paid from any of the service providers. gTag uses approx. 50MB data per month.