SBM Bank India Partners with Karbon to Launch India's 1st Startup-Friendly Corporate Credit Card

SBM Bank India today announced its partnership with Karbon to come together towards the launch of Karbon Card – India’s first startup-friendly corporate credit card.

Each corporate credit card also comes with a state-of-the-art expense management solution bundled with top-notch reward program - comprising of relevant offers from AWS, Freshworks, MakeMyTrip, etc. Karbon Card also helps its customers network with venture capital players as well as empowering them to manage funds raised from their investors.

Commenting on the partnership, Sidharth Rath, MD and CEO, SBM Bank India, said, “We firmly believe in Collaborative Banking – as the future lies in coming together of like-minded institutions to expand the market by creating more value per interaction for the target customers. Our focus is in enriching the ecosystem through collaborations. Our partnership with Karbon is a testament to our commitment to lead this narrative. With Karbon Card we have taken one more step towards Collaborative Banking - realizing our vision of shaping banking to be a synergic platform for our customers and partners.”

Commenting on the launch, Peifu Hsieh, CEO, Karbon, said, “I'm happy to say that the relationship with SBM & Karbon has been amongst the best bank partnerships we have had globally. We have a great product in place with one of the most startup-friendly banks in the country. The close symbiotic relationship enables us to redefine the way Indian corporates spend, moving from just a credit card to a payment solution.”

About SBM Bank India:

The Government of Mauritius promoted SBM Bank India, is the first bank to receive universal banking license from the Reserve Bank of India to set up and operate as a Scheduled Commercial Bank offering banking services through the Wholly Owned Subsidiary (WOS) mode. SBM Bank India has a network of 6 branches located in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ramachandrapuram.

SBM Bank India has profound domain expertise, and is led by a core team comprising of industry veterans having over a century of cumulative experience in banking and financial services. The Bank offers a diverse suite of universal products and services to its customers which include Deposits, Advances, NRI Services, Treasury Products and Trade Finance Services. SBM Bank India stands poised to embark on a new journey, innovating in every sphere of its business, expanding its service proposition to include an extensive suite of retail and wholesale banking products and capital markets.

About Karbon

Karbon is a new age fintech operating in the corporate cards solutions space. Launched in June 2019 in India, they currently have more than 200+ customers who are some of the fastest growing start-ups in the country. Karbon is founded by a group of energetic and seasoned entrepreneurs who understand the pain points of building and running a startup. Backed by marquee angels and VC funds, Karbon is poised to serve the Indian startups to help them improve cashflow with credit, spend smarter with rewards and manage better with expense management.

10 Things in Tech You Need to Know from This Week

The tech sector had a buzzing week. If you had a busy schedule and missed out on your readings, here's IndianWeb2 giving you a quick recap of the top 10 things that happened in the tech sector this week.

1) Facebook Introduced ‘Wedge 100’, A New Open Source Technology To Make 100GB Internet Access A Reality

In order to further increase the popularity of Facebook and enhance the experience of its existing users, Facebook through its Wedge 100 project aims to make 100-Gigabyte data connection a reality via a new state of open source technology.

2) Banks open-source the Blockchain Platform developed by them

A group that includes more than 70 of the world's biggest financial institutions has developed a new blockchain platform named Corda. The code, which has the potential of becoming the industry standard for the nascent technology, is now available publicly. New-York based financial technology company, R3 CEV, brought the consortium together and made Corda possible.

3) Self-driving cars won't work in India

nuTonomy, a MIT startup which had recently decided to put self-driving cabs on the roads of Singapore, has predicted the concept might not work in India. The traffic situation in India is quite dense which makes it unfavourable for self-driving technology to deal with since the brains behind autonomous vehicles are computers, which function on a set of rules.

4) Telangana government planning to come up with IoT, Smart Technology Policy To Encourage Startups

In order to encourage IoT based product development companies and other innovations in Telangana, the state government has come up with a unique IoT and Smart Technology Policy.

5) Visa Open Sources Its Blockchain Platform

San Francisco-based Chain has released an open source version of its Chain Core software. The source code of Chain’s proprietary blockchain can be accessed on the startup’s webpage on the famous code-sharing website, Github. With its this initiative, the startup aims to transform the blockchain narrative from the PowerPoint presentation to the prototype. Prior to this, anyone wanting to use the Chain Core software had to join hands with one of Chain's collaborators, which includes names such as Nasdaq, Visa, Fidelity, Citigroup, and Capital One.

6) Indian Smartphone maker Karbonn is making use of Artificial Intelligence to boost e-commerce

While world’s top smartphone manufacturers are working on bringing Artificial Intelligence into smartphones, Indian Smartphone maker Karbonn has decided to use the technology to aid commerce. The company's new Fashion Eye smartphone allows users to click the photo of whatever garment they like after which the AI engine gets to work and gives the users information about where they can buy that particular garment or a similar one across online sellers.

7) New Open Source Tech May Soon Bring Free Calls For Everyone In The World

Free audio calls to everyone in the world might become a reality in the near future. All thanks to a man named Mikeal, who has been doing Open Source for over a decade now. The project, Roll Call, aims to give everyone in the world a power to make Free Calls for Everyone in the world.

As of now, the project offers the following features:

a) It offers reliable audio-only calls between multiple participants.

b) Users can drag audio files into the call window and play into the call.

c) It offers built-in call recording, with podcast quality recording of every participants local audio sent continuously to the recorder.

d) It has almost no reliance on infrastructure, the app is hosted in gh-pages on GitHub.

8) Internet of Things Takes Down the World Wide Web

The largest International platform, Internet, recently came under a attack caused by a large distributed denial of service (DDoS). The attack was facilitated by hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected devices—from Web cameras to routers—that had been hacked to contribute to the attack. This detail made many industry experts term the attack as the onset of the doom of the Internet.

9) IBM Acquires Sanovi Technologies to Expand Disaster Recovery Services for Hybrid Cloud

IBM has signed an agreement to acquire Sanovi Technologies, a privately held company that is known to provide services such as cloud migration, hybrid cloud recovery, business continuity software for enterprise data centers and cloud infrastructure.

According to industry experts, all these capabilities of Sanovi along with advanced analytics will enable IBM to bolster its Software Defined Resiliency strategy and delivery of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services for clients currently in the midst of a digital and hybrid cloud transformation.

10) ICANN Introduces .Google, .Apple,.ibm, and Other Branded Internet Addresses

Recent changes in the two-year old internet rule which had limited the use of top-level domains has now brought .xyz, .movie and .paris into existence in email addresses and websites.

The new rule is capable of giving brand names a whole new importance in their internet addresses. In fact, tech giant Google has already paved the way for companies to flaunt their brand names in the digital realm. The company recently published a new website, blog.google, that makes use of the .google domain name, rather than the commonly used .com.

Karbonn's Fashion Eye uses AI to boost e-commerce

We all have found ourselves in situations when we see someone wearing a particular garment and we develop instant liking for it and want it for ourselves. While it is easier to inquire when the person is a friend, it becomes a little awkward when we don't know the person. Well, not anymore.

One of India's leading smartphone manufacturer, Karbonn, is currently working on a unique use of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to aid commerce. They are calling it visual commerce.

“We are now dabbling with artificial intelligence, a first for commerce. So with our new Fashion Eye smartphone, users will be able to click the photo of a shirt after which the AI engine will throw options of where you can buy the same or a similar product across online sellers,” said KarbonnMobiles' Executive Director Shashin Devasare in a statement to a national daily.

It is interesting to note that while a number of world's top smartphone manufacturers are currently working on bringing AI into smartphones, Karbonn has decided to use the technology to aid commerce. This isn't something new, Karbonn has since its inception has had a very different opinion of the Indian market and believes that volume is what the country needs. “There are a lot of multinationals who think 250 million is a huge number, but it is their outlook. Our interest is in the next half a billion users, that is where Karbonn is focused," said Devasare.

Karbonn also believes that it is completely unfair that expectations from technology are going to be different for India's rural market. Though they do accept the fact that affordability is hugely different. According to them, while these customers might have agreed to make some compromises, but those aren't big enough to brand them as a completely different breed altogether. Hence, Karbonn is trying its best to address these differentiated customers. The company's aim is to bring out the smart telephone experience in a beautiful and simple manner.

According to Devasare, the Smartphone market in India has unfortunately started showing signs of having reached a tipping point, though it has only achieved a mere 30 percent penetration. The 3.9 percent growth that Gartner recorded in the first quarter of this year can easily be dedicated to the sales of the entry level smartphones.

One of the ways to steer past this problem is to provide the customers with an optimised hardware experience while also dedicating time to make the software relevant and rendered in terms of user-interface and the right language. In fact, language can be considered as the biggest hurdle for adoption of smartphones in the Indian market. This is the reason that Karbonn has always dedicated good focus on the language feature. It's K9 Smart entry-level device, which offered its customers native access to Indian languages and showed that the feature prompted an impressive 93 percent users to switch on the data and at least 50 percent of them to started using the language in their phone's operating system, has been bestowed with the title of being a top seller in terms of volume.

The Indian Smartphone maker has now decided to join hands with Indus OS in order to bring 21 languages to some of its new phones.

Google to tie up with Micromax, Karbonn and Spice to launch smartphones under $100 (Rs 6,000)

Google, the internet giant has decided to partner with Indian handset-makers Spice, Micromax and Karbonn to launch $100 (Rs.6,000) Smartphones. Some of these Smartphones are expected to be launched in early September.

This news was announced in Google’s annual developer conference on Wednesday by the company’s senior vice-president Sundar Pichai. If experts are to be believed, this move by Google will shoot up the Indian brands popularity and credibility all over the world. It will also increase the already stiff competition in the entry-level Smartphone market of the country.

This initiative by Google has been named the Android One initiative. Under this initiative, the Indian handset-makers will be provided with hardware reference models so as to create high quality Smartphones that too at low cost.

According to Sundar, the Smartphones will be first unveiled in India and then launched globally. These phones can be expected to run a standardized version of Android which will permit faster updates.

Pichai while showcasing a 4.5 inch Micromax device with dual SIM slots, FM radio and expandable memory also added that Google is also currently working with Indian carriers so as to make these Smartphone users available with affordable data packs.

The first batch of these Smartphones can be expected to hit the Indian markets in somewhere around early September. In all possibility, these phones can be co-branded as the tech giant may not want to venture into the hardware business again after no additional follow ups on Nexus and selling off Motorola.

These Smartphones will take the low end phone market competition, where Samsung and Nokia are already functioning to an all new level.

Whatever may be the case, the customers are expected to gain considerably from the tech giants this move. The customers are expected to get more value and the overall experience is set to become better and faster as with the standard Google platform, the updates will be quicker.

Google’s this initiative has not come as a surprise, as everyone wants to reap in the fruits of the booming Indian Smartphone market. According to the data made available by IDC, the Smartphone market in India tripled itself in the first quarter of this year with 17.59 million devices being shipped compared to 6.4 million during the same time interval last year.

Top Image - [Flickr]

Google to tie up with Micromax, Karbonn and Spice to launch smartphones under $100 (Rs 6,000)

Google, the internet giant has decided to partner with Indian handset-makers Spice, Micromax and Karbonn to launch $100 (Rs.6,000) Smartphones. Some of these Smartphones are expected to be launched in early September.

This news was announced in Google’s annual developer conference on Wednesday by the company’s senior vice-president Sundar Pichai. If experts are to be believed, this move by Google will shoot up the Indian brands popularity and credibility all over the world. It will also increase the already stiff competition in the entry-level Smartphone market of the country.

This initiative by Google has been named the Android One initiative. Under this initiative, the Indian handset-makers will be provided with hardware reference models so as to create high quality Smartphones that too at low cost.

According to Sundar, the Smartphones will be first unveiled in India and then launched globally. These phones can be expected to run a standardized version of Android which will permit faster updates.

Pichai while showcasing a 4.5 inch Micromax device with dual SIM slots, FM radio and expandable memory also added that Google is also currently working with Indian carriers so as to make these Smartphone users available with affordable data packs.

The first batch of these Smartphones can be expected to hit the Indian markets in somewhere around early September. In all possibility, these phones can be co-branded as the tech giant may not want to venture into the hardware business again after no additional follow ups on Nexus and selling off Motorola.

These Smartphones will take the low end phone market competition, where Samsung and Nokia are already functioning to an all new level.

Whatever may be the case, the customers are expected to gain considerably from the tech giants this move. The customers are expected to get more value and the overall experience is set to become better and faster as with the standard Google platform, the updates will be quicker.

Google’s this initiative has not come as a surprise, as everyone wants to reap in the fruits of the booming Indian Smartphone market. According to the data made available by IDC, the Smartphone market in India tripled itself in the first quarter of this year with 17.59 million devices being shipped compared to 6.4 million during the same time interval last year.

Top Image - [Flickr]