Amazon Acquires Indian Payments Processor Emvantage

Amazon.com Inc said it has acquired Indian payments processor Emvantage Payments Pvt Ltd for an undisclosed sum.

Emvantage's employees will join Amazon's India unit that will use the company's technology on its e-commerce website, Amazon said in a statement.

Amazon has been rapidly expanding into India's fast growing e-commerce segment that is likely to grow to $220 billion (roughly Rs. 15,04,800 crores) by value of goods sold by 2025.

Tata Group's retail firm Trent Ltdlast week said online retail giant Amazon has picked up 26 percent stake in its publishing arm Westland for Rs. 9.5 crores.

"The investor would subscribe to Westland's share capital such that it holds 26 percent of the Westland's share capital on a fully diluted basis, for an aggregate amount of approximately Rs. 9.5 crores," Trent Ltd said in a BSE filing.

Under the definitive agreements signed by Trent, Amazon.com NV Investment Holding LLC and Westland, Amazon will have a right to appoint a director on the Board of Westland and also have the option to acquire the remaining 74 percent of shares at a later date.

Rival Snapdeal on Monday announced it had raised $200 million (roughly Rs. 1,362 crores), giving it a valuation of around $6.5 billion (roughly Rs. 44,457 crores). The firm is looking to ramp up investments in logistics and infrastructure in the fast-growing domestic e-commerce sector.

The fundraising, led by Canada's Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and funds advised by Iron Pillar, comes at a time when there are increasing worries about incremental funding among Indian startups.

In December, Snapdeal co-founder had told Reuters the company is looking to increase spending on logistics and technology to better compete with rivals.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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