Thursday, November 27, 2014

• Jack Ma was in India; reportedly met Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl: Ma is in India as part of a 99-member business delegation from his home town of Zejiang. He arrived in India last night and is reportedly scheduled to meet home grown e-commerce firm Snapdeal’s co-founder Kunal Bahl. There have been reports of Alibaba considering an investment in Snapdeal. Indeed the two firms already counts Japan’s SoftBank as a common and single largest investor.Jack Ma who was in a short India visit as part of a Chinese business delegation, said on Wednesday that Alibaba plans to invest more in the Indian e-commerce ecosystem and work with Indian entrepreneurs. India is one of the nine countries where Alibaba’s B2B marketplace is present. Besides China and India is it also present in the US, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Turkey, Taiwan and Vietnam. Its B2C ventures Taobao among others are presently only in home country China.

• Amazon UI too cluttered for you? Canopy has a Pinterest like skin on Amazon for curated community-driven shopping, recommendations : Canopy offers a cleaner, uncluttered interface for its shopping service – a big difference from Amazon.com itself. In its community, you can browse through products recommended by other users, see what’s trending, shop by category or brand, or even shop by personality type – the latter something that may come in handy as you struggle with your holiday shopping needs. Meanwhile, as you find products you like you can add these to collections within the app, which can later be accessed under your Profile section. Essentially, the service is like having a layer of curation overtop the massive Amazon.com catalog, presented in a more modern, almost Pinterest-like format.Canopy has seen around 22% average weekly growth in traffic over the past six months, says co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, and 35% weekly growth in gross revenue. (The company declined to go into detail on customer numbers or revenue figures, however.) Currently, Canopy makes money via affiliate fees, not product placements or ads, which has allowed the company to bootstrap its service to where it is today.

• Zomato is monetizing traffic using geo-targeted ads on its apps: Restaurant and event-listing site Zomato.com, run by Gurgaon-based Zomato Media Pvt Ltd, has added a new revenue stream by introducing advertisements on its mobile app. The revenue model is based on hyper-local advertising related to the user search criteria. What this basically means is that users searching for restaurants in a particular area will see ads for other relevant dining establishments in and around that location. According to the company, this allows restaurants to target customers already searching for dining options in their area. The new service is available across Zomato apps on the Android, iOS and Windows platforms.

• Samsung announces $2B buyback; some businesses to be exited; generational shift underway - shares surge: Shares of South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd opened sharply higher on Thursday on the news that it will buy back $2 billion of its own stock. Samsung shares were up 5.8 percent as of (7.02 a.m. EST) after opening 6 percent higher. Samsung announced the buyback plan, its first since 2007, after market close on Wednesday.