In no particular order, here are MediaNama’s top 10 stories of the week ended 10th June 2018
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Nazara gets betting license in Kenya; plans sports betting, fantasy sports games launches
IPO bound Nazara Technologies Limited (Nazara) is planning to launch sports betting, sports fantasy, Sports Arcade and Sports Real Money Quiz in Kenya, after acquiring a betting license in the country. It has set up a subsidiary called NZWorld Kenya Limited, in which it holds 70% stake, and has acquired the license from the Betting Control Board of Kenya. Read it here
Facebook removing ‘Trending’ news from News Feed
Facebook is getting rid of its ‘Trending’ tab in users’ News Feeds on the platform. The company announced the upcoming change in a blog post on Friday. Less than 2% of clicks for publishers came from the trending tab, Facebook said. “From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful. Read it here
Vodafone–Idea Merger: Idea Cellular receives DoT approval for 100% FDI
Idea Cellular has received approval from the Department of Telecom to increase its FDI limit to 100% from 67.5%. The company says that this approval is for the total foreign investment of upto 100% in Idea Cellular Ltd., “and total indirect FDI in its relevant subsidiaries – Aditya Birla Telecom Ltd. and Idea Cellular Infrastructure Services Ltd.” The Vodafone–Idea merger has already received statutory approvals from SEBI (August 2017), NSE, BSE, CCI (July 2017), National Company Law Tribune Mumbai and National Company Law Tribune Ahmedabad. Read it here
Apple snipes at Facebook, takes on digital addiction and revamps Siri: WWDC 2018 highlights
Apple started its annual developer conference, WWDC 2018 with a keynote that offered a peek into all the latest updates to its mobile, desktop/laptop, wearable and TV platforms. The company also highlighted other key initiatives focused on improving privacy, security, and also decided to climb on board the digital wellbeing train. Read it here
Saregama exceeds expectations, sells 389,000 units of Carvaan
It’s been a decade since tape cassettes have done significant business for music labels. In that decade, the explosion of digital music has meant that cassette decks and physical music were pretty much dead. So when Saregama launched a physical music player in 2017, it had been a long time since they had any significant direct relationship with individual customers. Read it here
Justdial earnings call: Healthy growth, increase in ad spend, focus on tech, & more
Online classifieds and e-commerce company Justdial reported a net profit of Rs 39 crore for the quarter ended 31st March 2018 (Q4 FY18). Net profit was up 53.6% on a year-on-year (YoY) basis and 36.3% on a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) basis. It reported Operating revenue of Rs 200.5 crore, showing a growth of 10.3% YoY and 1.9% QoQ. Read it here
Election Commission puts voter rolls behind captcha code
In January, the Election Commission ordered all states’ chief electoral offers to put voter rolls listed on ECI’s websites behind a captcha, ETTech reports. The January order also said that voter rolls must be displayed as an image as opposed to text. These changes were made to make it harder for people to access voters’ personal information, and to frustrate attempts at crawling this information automatically. Read it here
UIDAI now lets you download your Aadhaar update history
The UIDAI has added enabled an option to download one’s Aadhaar update history. The facility is meant to be useful in case of migration and applications for other identification documents, jobs and social security benefits, among others.
Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of UIDAI told The Economic Times that the updated history can be downloaded from the UIDAI website and can be used to support the assertion of address and other demographic and biometric data. Read it here
Indian government sends notice to Facebook following reports of data sharing deals with device makers
The government of India has sought an explanation from Facebook over reports of the latter’s data sharing partnerships with phone makers. According to a report on the Economic Times the social media company has been given time till June 20 to respond to the notice issued by the government. Read it here
Google reaches goal of having WiFi in 400 railway stations in India
In 2015, Google unveiled Google Station, a program for WiFi hotspots across many train stations in partnership with Indian Railways and the ISP RailTel. On Thursday, Caesar Sengupta, who heads a wing of the company focusing on emerging markets like India, announced that the program’s goal of covering 400 stations has been completed. Read it here
