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Ola, Uber drivers in major cities to go on an indefinite strike from today

The transport wing of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena has called for an indefinite strike of drivers of cab aggregators Uber and Ola starting Monday midnight.

Scores of commuters could be inconvenienced due to the indefinite strike starting from Monday.

The strike has been called by the Maharashtra Navnirman Vahtuk Sena which has claimed that several drivers are not being able to cover costs due to falling business.

Union leaders said that drivers in other cities like New Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune among others would also be participating in the strike

"Ola and Uber had given big assurances to the drivers, but today they are unable to cover their costs.

They have invested Rs 500,000 - 700,000 and were expecting to make Rs 150,000 a month.

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Raj Thackeray calls for 'Modi-mukt Bharat'

Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray on Sunday called for a 'Modi-mukt Bharat.

Addressing a rally on the occasion of Gudi Padwa in Mumbai's Shivaji Park, Thackeray said, 'Today, we have to gear up for the third independence. All the political parties must unite to make Modi-mukt Bharat a reality.

In an hour-long speech, the MNS chief also warned about attempts by certain elements to spark nation-wide riots in future.

Voices of a "united opposition" gained even more momentum after the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) lost two crucial seats in the Uttar Pradesh by-polls.

According to the experts, joining forces is the only way to dethrone the Modi-led government in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

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Putin wins 75 per cent of vote: partial results

Vladimir Putin has been re-elected as Russian president with 75 per cent of the vote after half the votes were counted, partial results showed today.

Putin's nearest competitor, Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, was on 13.2 per cent, according to data from the central election commission.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Clik Here To know More –Russia

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MARKETS LIVE: Indices open marginally higher, Nifty reclaims 10,200 mark

The domestic indices opened marginally higher on Monday despite weakness in their key Asian counterparts.

The market participants will closely watch key developments in the parliament following the no-confidence motion moved by TDP after it broke away from the BJP-led NDA following the Centre's refusal to grant Special Category status to Andhra Pradesh.

In major political development, the YSR Congress and TDP is likely to push for acceptance of their notices for no-confidence motion against the central government when Lok Sabha begins on Monday amid no signs of a let-up in the Parliament deadlock.

In the global markets, Asian share markets slipped into the red on Monday as caution gripped investors in a week in which the Federal Reserve is likely to hike US interest rates and perhaps signal that as many as three more lie in store for the rest of the year.

Japan’s Nikkei extended early losses to drop 1.3 per cent, while the MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan eased 0.5 per cent.

While Wall Street had bounced on Friday, the major indices still ended lower for the week. The Dow lost 1.57 per cent, the S&P 1.04 per cent and the Nasdaq 1.27 per cent.

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Govt mulls allowing airlines with negative net worth to bid for Air India

The government is likely to relax the eligibility criteria for Air India disinvestment by allowing airlines with negative net worth to bid. However, non-airline companies may be told to satisfy minimum net worth conditions to prove their financial strength.

The evaluation committee of Air India, after discussions with the Ministry of Civil Aviation, had suggested that all bidders be mandated to fulfil a minimum net worth criterion, a source said.

However, when the Core Group of Secretaries on Disinvestment (CGD) met over the last two weeks to finalise the bidding norms, some members pointed out that setting high net worth as an eligibility condition would block the prospects of many airline companies.

In fact, the difference in opinion between the two government bodies has led to a delay in the announcement of the expression of interest.

The core group has now suggested that a company with a proven track record of running a successful airline be allowed to bid even its net worth is negative.

The CGD is headed by the Cabinet secretary and comprises secretaries to the Departments of Economic Affairs, Revenue, Expenditure, Public Enterprise, Corporate Affairs, Legal Affairs, and Civil Aviation.

Click Here To know More – Air India

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Xiaomi Redmi 5 vs Micromax Bharat 5 Pro: Who wins value-for-money battle?

China-based smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi on March 14 announced the Redmi 5 in India. On the same day, home-grown electronics company Micromax announced a new budget offering, the Bharat 5 Pro. Both the smartphones compete in the same price segment of sub-Rs 10,000.

While the Redmi 5 offers a modern look because of its futuristic 18:9 aspect ratio screen, the Bharat 5 Pro centres around the battery. Business Standard compared the Micromax Bharat 5 Pro and the Xiaomi Redmi 5 on ke parameters, and here is what we found:

Where the Redmi 5 is ahead of Bharat 5 Pro

The Redmi 5 looks similar to the recently launched the Redmi Note 5. The smartphone looks modern with its 5.7-inch 18:9 aspect ratio HD screen. The metallic chassis looks plush and the form factor is better than most of the budget smartphones, except the Huawei Honor devices.

In terms of performance, the Redmi 5 uses better innards with three RAM and storage options to choose -- 2GB/16GB, 3GB/32GB and 4GB/64GB. The Redmi 5 features MIUI 9, which is an optimised Android Nougat-based operating system.

It runs smoother and offers a lot of features and customisations in comparison with the unknown Android Nougat-based skin that the Bharat 5 Pro boots.

ALSO READ: Xiaomi Redmi 5 with 18:9 display now in India

Where the Bharat 5 Pro beats Redmi 5

Click Here To know More - Redmi 5 Price

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Spotify to launch music streaming service in India to stay ahead of Apple

The world’s largest music streaming service, Spotify, is looking to bring its service to India, one of the fastest-growing internet markets in the world, as it looks to boost growth and stay ahead of rival Apple.

Announcing Spotify’s plans to list on public markets on April 3, CEO Daniel Ek said the Stockholm-based company was planning an entry into some of the largest markets in the world. Spotify is taking a rather unusual path to go public and will directly sell shares to the public.

"We are working on launching in some of the biggest markets in the world, including India, Russia, and Africa, which have a very rich musical culture," Ek said during his presentation. He said that post IPO, the company would continue to focus on growth rather than turning on the profit machine.

While no further details were divulged on when Spotify could launch its service here or its pricing in the country, the company did disclose in its IPO filing last week that it has leased office space in Mumbai. The company has also made ex-Googler Akshat Harbola as its Head of Market Operations in India.

Plans to enter India and other fast-growing markets comes as industry analysts say Apple’s rate of signing up new paid subscribers is far outstripping that of Spotify’s. In the US, the largest music streaming market in the world, Apple Music could beat Spotify in the next few quarters to become the leading player there.

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Nobody can come close to Madhuri: Jacqueline on 'Ek do teen'

Actress Jacqueline Fernandez, who has recreated the evergreen track "Ek do teen" on-screen for "Baaghi 2", says nobody can come close to Madhuri Dixit's performance in the original song.

"I can't wait for Madhuri ma'am to watch the song. It is my tribute to her. Her performance in the original is unmatchable. Forget me, no one can ever come close to her," Jacqueline said in a statement.

The foot-tapping "Ek do teen" song first featured in the 1988 film "Tezaab".

For the new version of the song, three choreographers -- Saroj Khan, Ganesh Acharya and Ahmed Khan -- came together on the set.

Ahmed is also directing the film. He was keen to retain Saroj's famous hook steps and even urged Manish Malhotra to keep Madhuri's pink outfit in mind while designing Jacqueline's costume for the new song.

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Hyundai to invest Rs 65 bn in developing e-SUV, 8 other products over 3 yrs

Korean automobile major Hyundai is planning to invest around Rs 65 billion over the next three years in developing new products, including an electricsports utility vehicle (SUV). The company also plans expand its capacity by 50,000 units at its facility near Chennai through debottlenecking.

Hyundai Motor India Ltd (HMIL) Managing Director & Chief Executive Y K Koo said the proposed investment would be towards developing nine new products over the next three years. The company has so far invested Rs 210 billion in India.

The line-up of the proposed new products includes two facelifts, two new segments and four full models, besides an electric vehicle.

One product, to be launched in the second half of the present year, will be positioned between the Eon and the Grand i10. While there are market rumours that it would be the Santro, Koo said the company had not decided on the name yet. "People, including customers, politicians and dealers are asking for the Santro, but we have not decided yet," said Koo.

As for the proposed electric vehicle the company is planning to launch by next year, Hyundai is currently studying the market. The product would likely come with charging kits.

The company had showcased an electric sedan at the Auto Expo 2018, but Koo said customers were looking for an SUV.

"We are looking at bringing Kona EV to India and targeting to sell around 50 units a year to start with, said Koo.

Click Here To know More – Hyundai Car Price

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Google Pixel 2's AI image technology is open source; Google Pixel 2 portrait mode feature

engine and software giant Google, a has open-sourced its artificial intelligence-based ‘Semantic Image Segmentation’ technology – a technology used in the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL portrait mode to achieve shallow depth-of-field effect without the need for a secondary camera.

“Today, we are excited to announce the open-source release of our latest and best-performing semantic image segmentation model, DeepLab-v3+, implemented in Tensorflow. This release includes DeepLab-v3+ models built on top of a powerful convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone architecture for the most accurate results, intended for server-side deployment.

As part of this release, we are additionally sharing our Tensorflow model training and evaluation code, as well as models already pre-trained on the Pascal VOC 2012 and Cityscapes benchmark semantic segmentation tasks,” stated a blog post shared by Google.

In the blog post, Google explained what the technology was and how it worked to achieve the result. According to the post, the semantic image segmentation assigns a semantic label, such as road, sky, person, dog, etc, to every pixel in an image. These labels then pinpoint the outline of objects, and thus impose much stricter localisation accuracy requirements than other visual entity recognition tasks such as image-level classification or bounding box-level detection.

Click Here To know More - Google

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Wallets on the wane as Unified Payments Interface and regulations take over

It’s been termed as a David versus Goliath fight ever since it started. With the entry of prepaid wallets in the payments ecosystem, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) ushered in a new era where small transactions were no longer dependent on heavy paperwork or two-factor authentication. Then came demonetisation and Indian payments wallets turned billion-dollar entities riding on the wave of digital transactions. But, all that seems to have come to a halt.

On October 2017, the central bank issued a master circular directing prepaid instruments issuers (PPIs) to make sure their customers comply with full know-your-customer (KYC) norms by February 2018. But wallets seem to be floundering to get even a fraction of their users to do their KYCs. While giants such as Paytm have tried to offer incentives, the industry as a whole hasn’t managed to reach a double-digit percentage of KYC-compliant users even in the second week of March, insiders say.

“The figure of KYC-compliant wallets rests at around 8-9 per cent by all estimates. Even the RBI was told about this in a representation in February but there’s no response from the central bank,” said a payments industry professional who didn’t wish to be named on account of being a part of the deliberations. As a result of the KYC norms, people cannot load more than Rs 10,000 a month in their wallets and are barred from transferring the amount to a bank account or sending money to others.

“The challenge is that there’s a temporary glitch in digital payments in the country,” said Navin Surya, chairman, Payments Council of India.

Surya said digital payments grew about 30 per cent and wallets 100 per cent last year and this was sustainable only if norms supported non-banking entities such as PPIs.

Click Here To know More - UPI

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Over 2,000 Sevilla fans fill Old Trafford with dreams of qualifying

The stands of Old Trafford stadium on Tuesday were abuzz with around 2,200 Sevilla fans, fervently hoping for an away win in the second leg game against English football giants Manchester United in the Champions League round-of-16.

A Sevilla victory would mean qualifying for the quarterfinals for the first time in six decades, and the historic chance has drawn the largest crowd of Sevilla fans so far to attend an away match in the Champions League knockout stage, reports Efe.

Emotions were running high after the first leg ended in a goalless draw, with a mixture of both fear and hope despite facing one of the toughest teams in European soccer.

The official Sevilla expedition arrived in Manchester on Monday with the first group of 100 fans, who have steadily increasing with the arrival of more groups.

The Andalusian supporters are looking forward to the clash with Man United, pushing aside the memory of three recent unsuccessful attempts to reach the Champions League quarterfinals.

Click Here To know More – Sevilla FootBall Team

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Netflix, Amazon join regional bandwagon with Marathi, Bengali, Tamil movies

Regional content, be it films or documentaries, comedy or music, has been firing up the Internet in India for a few years now.

With cheap data and easy access to content, small local libraries such as Hoichoi (for Bengali content) and national home grown platforms such as Alt Balaji, Voot from Viacom 18, Hotstar from Star India and, besides of course the dedicated channels for several Indian languages on YouTube, have flourished.

Now Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hotstar are raising their stakes in the game, commissioning original shows and going all out to acquire regional films for their libraries. Could this sound the death knell for local entertainment platforms or will the entry of the big brands help deepen the language market further?

“India is one of the largest internet markets in the world and we have seen strong growth since our launch,” says Jessica Lee, vice president, Communications–Asia, Netflix. The availability of regional content on Netflix has increased significantly since its launch and a range of titles, old classics to modern hits in Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam and other languages, are a part of the library. Ditto for Amazon and the rest.

Experts say that the Indian market appears to be hugely lucrative given the vast numbers of Internet users and untapped potential, but when Indian and international over-the-top platforms look to grow their presence in the country the multiplicity of languages is a challenge.

Click Here To know More – Amazon Prime

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Google launches voice maps in six Indic languages, to add new users

Concerned about government regulations over privacy rules affecting growth in India, Google said on Tuesday that the ecosystem of location-based services was still evolving globally.

As part of the internet giant’s “Next Billion User” initiative, it has customised its voice navigation in India, which will include six indic languages — Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam — apart from Hindi.

The company has launched a host of features in its already available services. The move will add a new set of users in tier-III cities as well as in the rest of the Indian market.

Speaking about the concerns over privacy issues, the company said it follows the law of the land where it operated.

“The entire space around location technology and services is dynamic. The ecosystem is still evolving. Some of the concerns that governments have are not specific to one country as everyone wants to protect their citizens.

We work in multiple countries and abide by the law of the land,” Google Maps Next Billion Users Director Suren Ruhela said.

He added regulations and laws needed to be balanced to ensure that the pace of innovation was not affected. He further said that some of the concerns that governments had over security were not specific to one country.  

Click Here To Know More – Google Map

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Facebook likely to boost happiness in autistic adults, says study

Using Facebook in moderation can boost happiness in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a study has found.

The finding could not be generalised to overall use of social media, however, because the same was not true of those who used Twitter, researchers said.

Researchers from Fielding Graduate University and University of Virginia in the US found that while happiness and Facebook use increased together up to a certain point, the beneficial effect of social media use then waned.

The researchers propose that that ability to interact with others on Facebook, instead of in more challenging face-to-face interactions may help protect these individuals against mental health issues associated with ASD such as depression.

"Some studies report that up to 50 per cent of adults with ASD have co-occurring social anxiety disorder. Facebook may provide a safe starting point for training and refinement of conversational skills," said Brenda K Wiederhold, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, in which the study was published.

"Increased self-confidence in one's abilities may lead to eventual translation of these new skill sets into improved face-to-face interactions," said Wiederhold.

Click Here To know More - Facebook

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Axis Bank to be able to process payments over WhatsApp soon

Axis Bank Share

India’s third largest private sector bank Axis Bank on Tuesday said it would soon be able to process payments over the popular chatting application ‘WhatsApp’.

The bank also termed the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) as a “huge opportunity”.

“We are the market leaders in terms of innovation, and we do believe that UPI is a huge opportunity. We are working in terms of creating a differentiated environment for our customers,” Axis Bank Executive Director -Retail Banking, Rajiv Anand said.

Click Here To know More – Axis Share Price

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Xiaomi Mi TV 4A series sale on Flipkart, Mi.com today: All you must know

Xiaomi Mi TV 4A series with 32-inch and 43-inch models will go on sale on Tuesday, a week after they were launched in India. Last month Xiaomi debuted its 55-inch "Mi TV 4" in India.

"Both the variants feature the company's own 'PatchWall system' that has been redesigned for India and brings together over 15 different content partners across 12 Indic languages, thus resulting in a rich library of video content ever integrated on a smart TV in India", the company said in a statement. 'PatchWall system' will give users over 5,00,000 hours of content to watch from a library of video-on-demand providers with over 80 per cent content being free.

Both the 32-inch and the 43-inch Mi TV 4A versions will be up for grabs from Mi.com/in, Mi Home Stores and Flipkart.

1. Price

Xiaomi Mi TV 4A price: Rs 22,999 for 43-inch Xiaomi Mi TV 4A price: Rs 13,999 for 32-inch

These are introductory prices, as the Mi.com site shows higher slashed out prices at Rs 24,999 and Rs 14,999, respectively. Both televisions will go on sale in the country from Tuesday, March 13, via Mi.com, Flipkart, and Mi Home stores. The second sale is on Friday, March 16. The company has promised adequate stocks starting with the first sale itself, and promised two sales a week thereafter, on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Click Here To know More - Xiomi