In its annual Google for India event today, Google unveiled Navlekhā, a platform for offline news publishers to digitise their print publications. This works by letting publishers use Optical Character Recognition to convert the text on their publications — even if it was not originally typed in Unicode — and publishing articles as posts online (here's a sample page by Google). Google will provide free hosting to publishers on the platform, and will allot .page domain names, which Google has the exclusive rights for, to those who apply. The service is available in Hindi for now, and will expand to other Indian publishers soon, the company said. Google said it would also provide AdSense for publishers to monetize on Navlekhā online. The company said that Navlekhā would boost the web presence of offline publications in India without any online presence. According to its estimates, around 135,000 print publications in India don't have an online presence. Tez rebranded to Google Pay Google's UPI payment app Tez will be rebranded to Google Pay to be consistent with the company's payment offerings around the world. Caesar Sengupta, who heads Payments and the Next Billion Users team at Google, said that governments around the world had requested Google's help in building a payment product like Tez. Google Pay will now also have an in-app process for applying for loans for users on partnered banks. Additionally, the company said it's partnering with Pine Labs and BillDesk, who develop POS machines, to spread to more physical stores.…
