Meta’s grand WhatsApp fintech experiment in India has fizzled

7 July 2025 at 05:00

Meta’s fintech ambitions have failed to take off in India — the company’s largest market, with over 500 million WhatsApp users. When WhatsApp first began testing payments in India back...

India wants its own EV market, but needs China to get there

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

18 June 2025 at 05:00

India is betting on Chinese technology to keep its electric-vehicle transition on track. At a time when the U.S. is erecting trade barriers to keep Chinese EV giants at bay,...

India’s richest man can’t crack e-commerce, even with Shein

Rest of World

By: Kunal Purohit and Ananya Bhattacharya

23 May 2025 at 05:00

Online retail continues to elude India’s richest man. The Shein India app, launched by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail in partnership with the Chinese fast-fashion giant, has struggled to gain traction...

India’s richest man can’t crack e-commerce, even with Shein

Rest of World

By: Kunal Purohit and Ananya Bhattacharya

23 May 2025 at 05:00

Online retail continues to elude India’s richest man. The Shein India app, launched by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail in partnership with the Chinese fast-fashion giant, has struggled to gain traction...

Will India’s new satellite internet rules impact Starlink’s ambitions? We asked five experts

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

7 May 2025 at 07:03

India has just made it harder for Starlink to enter the market. Around two months after Starlink announced retail partnerships with the country’s leading telecom operators, India — home to...

Foxconn’s iPhone factory is fueling a real estate boom in a small Indian farming town

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

17 April 2025 at 05:00

Foxconn’s arrival is quickly changing a rural town in southern India into a real estate hot spot. Devanahalli, located on the outskirts of India’s tech hub, Bengaluru, is home to...

A Trump H-1B crackdown could hit Big Tech hard, with Amazon suffering most

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

24 March 2025 at 05:00

As U.S. President Donald Trump sends mixed signals on the H-1B visa program, Amazon could find itself in a tight spot. The $2 trillion tech giant has bagged the most...

Screaming customers, unpaid workers: Inside the chaotic demise of Indian online delivery pioneer Dunzo

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

20 March 2025 at 05:00

India’s booming quick-commerce sector saw a major casualty earlier this year. Dunzo, the first Indian startup to receive a direct investment from Google in 2017, shut down in January, leaving...

How Tesla blew its lead

Rest of World

By: Itika Sharma Punit and Ananya Bhattacharya

19 March 2025 at 05:00

Tesla is having a tough year. Once a world leader in the electric-vehicle market, the company’s sales across the U.S., China, and several European countries fell year on year in...

The decline of India’s largest EV company — in charts

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

13 March 2025 at 05:00

India’s largest electric vehicle company is in trouble. Shares of Ola Electric Mobility hit an all-time low on March 3 — down more than 60% from its peak in August...

Is Google Maps fatally misleading drivers in India? It’s complicated

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

5 February 2025 at 06:00

Earlier this week, an Indian politician urged the country’s Parliament to support homegrown alternatives to Google Maps — blaming the popular navigation app for fatal accidents. Incidents due to Google...

GPS maps in India can fail to account for the realities of the roads.

Non-Western founders say DeepSeek is proof that innovation need not cost billions of dollars

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

30 January 2025 at 10:15

During a trip to India in 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sparked controversy when he said it was “hopeless” for a young team with less than $10 million to compete...

DeepSeek has been celebrated by some outside of Silicon Valley as an affordable alternative to ChatGPT

The global struggle over how to regulate AI

Rest of World

By: Katie McQue · Laís Martins · Ananya Bhattacharya and Carien du Plessis

21 January 2025 at 06:00

In March 2024, a Brazilian senator traveled on a commercial flight to Washington, D.C. Marcos Pontes, a 61-year-old former astronaut, had become a central figure in the effort to regulate...

Global fact-checkers were disappointed, not surprised, Meta ended its program

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

10 January 2025 at 12:06

Meta’s fact-checking partners around the world are disappointed — but not surprised — by Facebook’s move to do away with fact-checking by trained teams. In a January 7 blog post,...

FILE -- Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 31, 2024.

Pakistan’s mass transit is failing. BusCaro thinks it has the solution

Rest of World

By: Zuha Siddiqui and Ananya Bhattacharya

16 December 2024 at 06:00

The day mass transit startup Swvl announced its decision to downsize operations in Pakistan in June 2022, its country general manager Maha Shahzad fully grasped the dire circumstances that female...

The most surprising tech champions of 2024

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou， Lam Le， Daniela Dib， Damilare Dosunmu and Ananya Bhattacharya

6 December 2024 at 06:00

Lesser-known tech companies were rewarded by changing headwinds outside the West this year. India’s homegrown EV industry, a Chinese video game that became a soft power success, and a U.S.-based...

India banned a Chinese app four years ago. Government agencies are still using it

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

26 November 2024 at 06:00

In October, a popular YouTuber tweeted out a document issued by the Election Commission of India that had been scanned using CamScanner, a Chinese document-scanning app. CamScanner has been banned...

Amazon and Walmart couldn’t kill India’s mom-and-pop stores. But rapid delivery might

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya and Adnan Bhat

12 November 2024 at 06:00

Mahadev Waghji Patel ran Choice Mart for nine years in an affluent neighborhood of Mumbai. His local customers relied on the store for their monthly groceries, and continued to come...

India’s electric cab companies can’t find enough cars to put on the road

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

22 October 2024 at 05:00

Rahul Mathur has sworn by BluSmart since its early days. The electric-taxi rideshare company was his preferred choice for the daily commute as a startup founder in Delhi two years...

India shuts down the internet far more than any other country

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

27 September 2024 at 05:00

On September 10, when the northeast Indian state of Manipur announced a five-day internet shutdown in response to student-led protests, citizens were livid — but not surprised. India has been...

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