Reliance Industries to merge Jio Music with Saavn; Government sends strong message to Facebook

Sunday March 25, 2018 , 2 min Read

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in a release, put a strong statement about Facebook and the use of its data. It said it is deeply concerned about reports of data breach and is committed to ensuring the protection of the fundamental right to privacy, and safety and security of data for every citizen of India.

Reliance Industries has inked a strategic deal with New York-based music-and-artiste platform Saavn to merge its own digital music offering, Jio Music.

The deal is valued at $1 billion, with Jio Music’s implied valuation at $670 million. Reliance will acquire part stake from Saavn’s existing investors, Tiger Global, Liberty Media and Bertelsmann, at an investment of $104 million.

Reliance Industries will put in an additional $100 million to make the resultant entity, Jio-Saavn.

Of the $100 million, $20 million would be invested upfront, and Saavn co-founders Rishi Malhotra, Paramdeep Singh, and Vinodh Bhat would continue to “drive growth” in the new entity.

Social media and other digital channels are a repository or reviews and any brand not paying attention will take a severe beating. With thousands of reviews out there, understanding each one becomes a challenge. To address this, Santosh Thota, the Founder of SmatSocial, built a platform that uses AI with natural language processing (NLP) to understand customer feedback on product and services from various social media platforms and review forums.

Kolkata-based Khushnud Khan and Jaipur-based Rishi Raj met while working at India’s ecommerce big daddy Flipkart. Bit by the entrepreneurial bug, they started Arzooo in October 2016, which is India’s first reverse auction-based ecommerce platform. Once a consumer chooses what product he wants to buy, he puts the URL or model ID of the product on the Arzooo website to create a demand for the best price. Alternatively, he can also choose the product from the Arzooo catalogue and create a demand.