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Tag: Bengaluru

  • ZEE set to onboard over 500 tech experts for digital hub in Bengaluru

    ZEE set to onboard over 500 tech experts for digital hub in Bengaluru

    New Delhi: Media and entertainment conglomerate ZEE Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (ZEE) is set to expand its digital footprint by setting up a cutting-edge technology hub in Bengaluru to drive innovation and exponential growth for its integrated platforms.

    Taking strategic steps in the digital transformation journey of ZEE 4.0, the innovation centre in Bengaluru will onboard over 500 experts with a strong expertise in the field of design, technology, data & cyber security. The Company has already on-boarded as many as 120 experts to drive the change and enhance its overall tech prowess.

    The products and solutions designed by the team will lead the Company’s digital pivot, driving exponential growth across platforms, it said on Wednesday.

    According to the company, the innovation centre in Bengaluru will help build a strong cohort of design, tech, data and talent to cater to the new-age consumer seamlessly across connected devices, built on futuristic tech stack that will enable engineers & data scientist to unlock innovative technology-led solutions.

    Speaking on this development, ZEE, president – technology and data, Nitin Mittal said, “In order to build an awesome user experience across platforms, it is imperative to build design thinking, enhance tech capabilities to serve the ever-evolving needs of the consumer and leverage data to personalize the options for them. As a digitally adept data-first company, the new technology hub set up in Bengaluru will create an environment that sparks innovation. The centre will be focused on developing world-class tech products & data solutions by creating synergies across our businesses, promoting innovative thinking and driving collaboration. We are looking for sharp, like-minded innovators who think new, act agile and create with passion to join us and shape the next.”

    ZEE, head HR – digital platforms, technology & head – employee engagement, Aditi Vashisht said, “Human Capital is the most precious asset for us at ZEE and we are building the ZEE 4.0 team across our digital arm to drive higher innovation as well as capitalize on the immense growth opportunities in the M&E landscape. ZEE has always been an Academy of Talent in the M&E Industry and the new tech hub is designed with a unique employee value proposition focused on culture, collaboration & innovation. The tech hub will be an amalgam of a cross functional talent pool of like- minded individuals ready to challenge the status quo and lead innovative solutions in the digital ecosystem.”

    The new ZEE 4.0 version of the company will focus on reinventing existing business models, maximising its core, expanding into adjacent spaces and exploring new areas of business. 

  • IKEA enters Bengaluru with eCommerce & mobile shopping app

    Mumbai: Swedish home furnishing retailer IKEA on Thursday announced the launch of its eCommerce services and mobile shopping app in Bengaluru. The people of Bengaluru will now be able to choose from over 8,000+ functional and sustainable home furnishing products and solutions from the furnishing giant’s website.

    This announcement comes soon after the brand opened its second IKEA India store in Navi Mumbai in December 2020, and the recent online entry into Gujarat. IKEA’s much awaited Bengaluru market entry, led by eCommerce and mobile shopping app is the first step in entering the market and marks a significant milestone in the Swedish retailer’s new retail direction which aims to bring it closer to where people are, focusing on both digital and physical formats with an omnichannel approach.

    IKEA already has an online presence today in Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Surat, and Vadodara.  

    The IKEA online store will provide solutions, inspiration and ideas which reflect the home furnishing needs of the many people in Bengaluru. The newly launched IKEA mobile shopping app features product recommendations, ratings, and reviews, along with easier searching and browsing experience. The app also allows customers to add the products to their shopping list even while physically browsing through the products in the store. Customers can also find a built-in barcode scanner which will help them learn more details about the products, including materials and dimensions.

    IKEA India CEO & chief sustainability officer Peter Betzel said, “Karnataka is a very important market for IKEA and Bengaluru is one of the largest home furnishing markets in India. We will bring a complete omnichannel offer to the market and are excited to take the first step now with the launch of our eCommerce channel and meeting the many people in Bengaluru with their aspirations and dreams for a better life at home. IKEA will also open a big IKEA store, close to 400,000 sq. ft. in Nagasandra within a year. The store will be connected to the Nagasandra metro station, supporting faster and greener commute for the many people to the IKEA store. Over time, we will also open a city centre store within Bengaluru to be even more accessible and connect with many more people.”

    Over the next five years, across different IKEA businesses in Bengaluru, the company plans to engage around 2500 workers directly with 50 per cent diversity across all levels and will generate close to 1200 indirect jobs linked with its business operations. IKEA works with nine Home Furnishing suppliers in Karnataka including a social entrepreneur engaging 1200 local artisans, thereby increasing its local sourcing footprint in the state. 

  • Covid takes its toll on 65-year-old iconic luggage brand

    Mumbai: The pandemic has taken its deathly hold not just on people’s lives but also their livelihoods. Business organisations across different sectors are struggling to wade through the detrimental impact of Covid-19, and many others are facing closure. One such casualty has been the Chennai-based luggage retailer, Witco.

    After running for nearly 65 years, the iconic luggage retail chain has announced its decision to shut shop after it could not recover from the severe downturn caused by the ongoing pandemic. “We regret to inform you that we have closed down our business. The decision to close down this business was not an easy one, but unfortunately due to COVID-19 and the restrictions on international travel it was not sustainable for us,” the company wrote on its website.

    The company’s mainstay was international travel which contributed a significant portion to revenue. “While domestic travel resumed to some level towards the end of last year, International travel did not pick up and this impacted our sales,” the company’s MD VP Harris told Moneycontrol.

    The initial three months of the last financial year were a complete washout because of the lockdown, and the company could recover only 25-30 per cent of business after the economy reopened. “Given our rentals, employee salaries, and other expenses, we would have not been able to survive even if we had done 50 percent of our pre-Covid business,” he added.

    According to Harris, Witco’s downward spiral began with demonetisation, announced by the government in November 2016, which worsened further, after GST impacted its sales. The pandemic and lockdown proved to be the final nail in the coffin for the retail chain. The brand also tried to take the e-commerce route to survive and registered on Amazon and Flipkart but that too did not yield returns, shared Harris.

    Travel & tourism has been one of the worst affected sectors due to the pandemic. The market share for travel-related accessories and equipment has also taken a huge hit. While most sectors are still hopeful of recovery by the end of this financial year, the travel sector remains apprehensive and could take a long time to revive, according to industry experts. Consequently, the outlook for related segments such as luggage, too, remains grim.

    The brand with a strong presence in Chennai also had stores in Trichy, Kozhikode, Bengaluru and Kochi. Witco offered not only travel bags, but also laptop bags, backpacks, school bags, as well as handbags, from renowned brands like Samsonite, Delsey, American Tourister, Nike, Puma, VIP, Skybags, Baggit, Hidesign, Wildcraft and more.

    The sudden closure of the brand has left its decades-old customers dismayed. Several of them reminisced on social media, and shared childhood memories of shopping at the stores before starting the academic year of school and college or for their first trip abroad.

    “This is super sad. Witco was that one stop that you always window shopped and ogled in Forum Mall. It was also the place where we bought the first two large samsonite boxes that every graduate student buys before he goes to the US (and that was 18 years ago!),” shared one of the customers.

    Another tweeted, “This is terrible news. the 65-year-old brand shuts down. I fondly remember trips to Anna Nagar Witco ahead of school reopening to purchase school bags. One such backpack bought in 2002 is still in use.”

  • Brandie appoints Junaid Hakim as national director, India

    Brandie appoints Junaid Hakim as national director, India

    New Delhi: Social media word-of-mouth marketing platform, Brandie, has appointed Junaid Hakim as national director for India. He will be based in Bengaluru.

    Hakim joins from MediaCom, where he was the general manager and headed the media mandate for Dell till November, 2020. In his new role, he will oversee Brandie’s growth in the Indian market and develop stakeholder engagement, drive sales and new business development.

    “The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally impacted the marketing industry and highlighted the growing importance of word-of-mouth marketing and customer advocacy,” Brandie’s co-founder, Pranav Kosuri said. “Junaid’s vast experience, strategic perspective, and operational focus will play a vital role in strengthening Brandie’s core leadership team and ensure our continued fast growth and adoption amongst agencies and brands in one of our core markets.” 

    Talking about his new role, Hakim said, his focus in the first six months at the organization will be to drive awareness and education around Brandie, to boost product adoption. 

  • CupShup launches BTL activation across 3000 corporates for edtech major upGrad

    CupShup launches BTL activation across 3000 corporates for edtech major upGrad

    MUMBAI: CupShup, an independent advertising start-up, has joined hands with upGrad to help corporates upgrade their skills in today's fast-changing technology landscape. upGrad is one of India’s largest online higher education company, which provides online programs in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Marketing, MBA in collaboration with some of the most reputed universities in India and internationally, like IIT Madras, IIIT Bangalore, BITS Pilani Deakin University, Liverpool Business School among others. The company’s core differentiator is its deep investment in technology and the learning experience, as well as a high-touch model to ensure the highest rates of completion by any online player in the world and a focus on successful career transitions for its learners.

    With CupShup’s support, the team distributed more than 3 lakhs cups in 10 cities including Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai earlier this year. The team plans to successfully tie-up with 1000+ corporates by the end of this quarter. The cups were distributed with some unique and innovative taglines, in major corporate & tech parks, motivating corporate employees to take up these programs to ‘rise up’ in their careers.

    In addition to cup branding, other branding options like lift, pedal lock were explored to generate brand awareness. Career counsellors from upGrad visited the corporates to interact with professionals and advise them on the need for upskilling.

    Commenting on the campaign, CupShup, co-founder Sidharth Singh said, “Corporates now understand the importance of upskilling to grow in their respective careers. Our campaign with upGrad is very relevant as it is targeted at the corporates and focuses on the benefits of upgrading their skills and how can one select the right path to sustain themselves in the corporate."

    upGrad chief business officer Abhishek Arora said, “Discussing career choices and growth prospects becomes more contextual in workplace than in an informal environment. CupShup has helped us to reach our core TG in the right context, which has helped us to scale our business. While we have started with a 10-city campaign, we plan to scale the activity to more cities in the coming quarters.”

  • Kinetic India boosts Birla Estate’s launch in Bengaluru

    Kinetic India boosts Birla Estate’s launch in Bengaluru

    MUMBAI: Having established itself as a global leading player in the Out-Of-Home (OOH) media industry, Kinetic Worldwide partnered with Birla Estates for its launch in one of the largest micro-markets in the city of Bengaluru. 

    Pioneers across a diverse set of industries, Birla group ventured into the real estate arena with Birla Estates back in 2016. Living up to the Birla legacy, in a mere span of three years, it has been established as a change-maker.  One such quintessential example is Birla Alokya, integrating the unique concept of ‘Villaments’ – Smart homes designed for the future. Villaments offer Villa like spacious luxuries with all the modern apartment like lifestyle, a popular trend fast catching up in the city of Bengaluru, it is indeed becoming a lucrative housing option forconsumers.

    Promoting a prime property at Soukya Main Road (Whitefield) with great proximity to IT hubs and retail spaces, Kinetic capitalized on this very aspect of location. Strategically acquiring all available media formats closer to the location of the property, it set about creating brand awareness with impactful media and life-size billboards at high traffic junctions, across the city.

    Complimenting the innovative stays, this campaign was executed in Bengaluru with appropriate spends. Further, to give the consumers an indication of the property locations, bus shelters were converted and branded with signages, showcasing the distance and directions from the location in a clutter breaking manner. Thus, building a high reach and impactful messaging amongst the consumers and vividly positioning the thought of the brand. 

    “Out-of-home advertising today is a strategic choice with ample opportunities to create impactful brand awareness. As a progressive real estate brand, we believe that clutter breaking OOH compliments our innovative life designed homes at Birla Alokya very well. We are thus positive traction”,as said by Birla Estates Corporate Marketing Spokesperson. 

    “According to CREDAI, Karnataka has been identified as a hot spot for the real estate industry to boom. Bengaluru being a prime city, gathering attention for brand promotions is quite a task. 

    Associating with a trusted brand like Birla Estates only made it easier for us to drive a simplistic campaign for maximum brand awareness and retention” says Nandini Nayyar, Regional Head-Westat Kinetic India. 

  • CupShup leverages the power of India’s most favorite social habit to promote Dice Media’s web series What The Folks! season 2

    CupShup leverages the power of India’s most favorite social habit to promote Dice Media’s web series What The Folks! season 2

    MUMBAI: CupShup, the venture known for the popular technique of converting tea and coffee cups into a platform for brands, has launched a campaign promoting Dice Media’s newest web series What The Folks! Season 2. The series is a modern take on how families grow together despite their differences. What The Folks! Season 2 will be a crazier, funnier and a warmer journey of a family dealing with challenges thrown at them. In a bid to promote the series, CupShup will reach out to over 200 corporates across Mumbai, Delhi NCR, and Bengaluru.

    Banking on the popularity of the characters in the series and their likeability among the masses, CupShup has embarked on a unique plan of action. Five different creatives have been used in different paper cups, which carry quirky one liners about each character in the series. The campaign will be carried on till 5th November 2018.

    Speaking about this, Mr Sanil Jain, Co-Founder, CupShup, said, “What The Folks! is an extremely popular web series and people across all age groups identify with it and the characters therein. Another habit that every Indian identifies with is drinking tea. There thus could not have been a more perfect amalgamation than to promote the series and its characters through paper tea cups. The already famous series will only grow in popularity and resonate across the cities.”

    Adding her comments, Aditi Shrivastava, co-founder of Pocket Aces said, “After a successful partnership last year, we were excited to repeat our collaboration with CupShup this year. Corporates are the perfect target audience for What The Folks!. The idea is to grab their attention while they're sipping on their day's cuppa and to remind them that some great content to indulge in is just a click away. Our online reach is about 50 million per week and offline partners such as CupShup help us make our engagement with audiences that much more personal.” Shrivastava adds, “It also helps extend visibility for our partner brands Epigamia and Pepperfry to this audience. So it's a win-win-win, the way we see it”

    The paper cups are a cue which triggers people to start talking about something; discussions that may not happen when they see a hoarding. Using this vantage point, CupShup hopes to receive tremendous response from the target audience for the web series. Giving the age-old medium a new lease of life, CupShup has delivered various other advertisements earlier worth half-a-million dollars for many other brands over the past three years.

    Once it has dug its feet in colleges and corporate offices, CupShup plans to make use of this access to provide other kinds of marketing services. For starters, CupShup helps its clients place some of their sample products at offices for potential customers to try.

  • Bharti Airtel acquires AI start-up AuthMe

    Bharti Airtel acquires AI start-up AuthMe

    MUMBAI: Indian global telecommunications services company, Bharti Airtel, confirmed on Wednesday that it had acquired AuthMe ID Services. AuthMe is a Bengaluru based start-up company concentrating on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
    Bharti Airtel global CIO Harmeen Mehta said, “We are thrilled to bring on board a bunch of highly talented people who share our passion for building exciting digital solutions that benefit our customers”.
    The core team of the Bengaluru based start-up company will join the telecom chief as part of the ‘acquihire’ deal. The employees of AuthMe will become a part of Airtel X labs in Bengaluru. The negotiation amount has not been disclosed yet.

    Mehta looked full of promises as he said, “We are rapidly scaling up Airtel X Labs, our digital innovation factory, and these new solutions will accelerate our journey towards rolling out intuitive digital products, particularly in vernacular languages, for our 430 million plus customers.”
    With this, Airtel has also obtained the intellectual property rights for two flagship solutions Callup AI and Fintech OCR. Callup AI is a chat and voice assistant which uses AI to solve consumer queries through email, chat and phone calls. Fintech OCR is an overall Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline built for financial documents. It is designed for handling KYC documents, bank/credit card/loan statements, mark sheets. It can also understand any language with standard fonts.

  • CNN-News18 Launches ‘#VoiceOfBengaluru’ Initiative

    CNN-News18 Launches ‘#VoiceOfBengaluru’ Initiative

    New Delhi: As the major political parties finalise their electoral candidates, the battle for the upcoming Assembly Elections in Karnataka has begun.  Amidst the high-stake contest, CNN-News18 has launched the ‘#VoiceOfBengaluru’ initiative. 

    Continuing with its legacy of empowering the common man, CNN-News18, through ‘#VoiceOfBengaluru’, aims to encourage the people of Bengaluru to voice their issues. Participants are required to give a missed call. The winners will get an opportunity to feature on the channel during election programming and becoming the actual voice of Bengaluru.

    Apart from on-air promotions, the campaign has been promoted extensively on social and digital media. This is being further amplified through direct outreach to the viewers through other partnerships. To participate in the ‘Voice of Bengaluru’, viewers can give a missed call on 7065-421-421 and share their opinions.

    Keep watching CNN-News18 for more updates.

  • BARC to host digital measurement roadshows in Delhi, Mumbai & Bengaluru

    MUMBAI: After setting up a robust TV viewership measurement system, BARC India is gearing for a successful launch of EKAM, its digital viewership measurement venture. In keeping with its policy of transparency and inclusivity, BARC India, is hosting a series of multi-city roadshows for members of the digital ecosystem. This is part of the planned rollout of its digital measurement products under the EKAM brand.

    BARC India in the past had conducted four roadshows at several stages before launching its TV viewership measurement service. The aim behind these roadshows is to constantly engage with the stakeholders and understand their needs.

    Themed “EKAM: Unifying Measurement”, this is the first digital roadshow which has been planned to familiarize the industry with EKAM digital measurement products. These roadshows will also provide a platform for exchange of views on industry expectations and how the EKAM suite of products will meet those goals.

    The EKAM roadshows will be held in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru between 31 July and 2 August.

    “We are aware that industry has expectations as well as several questions with regard to digital measurement. Through our direct engagement programs, we will hear them and also use the opportunity to familiarise them with our plans,” said Romil Ramgarhia, CBO, BARC India.

    “Currently, different platforms use different metrics to measure digital viewership. BARC India, being a third-party digital measurement body will bring in uniformity. The roadshows reinforce BARC India’s philosophy of transparency and inclusivity,” added Jamie Kenney, Business Head- Digital, BARC India.