Tata Indicom and Paymate have tied up to provide Indicom subscribers with flight ticketing services. The agreement is currently limited to domestic air tickets. Paymate has also partnered with Kingfisher for an SMS based ticketing service says thisET report. Nikhil adds: Will there be such a thing as exclusivity in…

HT Media’s job portal Shine.com has gone live…the tagline - “Shine is a place to grow”. The site, currently in beta, is at present accepting registration from job seekers. I did a couple of random jobseeking searches on Google (NSDQ: GOOG) - it doesn’t appear as if they’re doing Search…

Sulekha.com, the grand-daddy of Indian community portals, which had raised $10 million from Norwest Venture Partners is considering an IPO in 2009. Business Standard reports that the company expects to have revenues of around $30 million by then. It appears that they’re taking the tried and tested route to monetization…

Sherpalo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) have together picked up 15 percent stake in the Future Group’s (Pantaloon) e-commerce portal Futurebazaar.com, Ram Shriram, founder of Sherpalo Ventures told ContentSutra in an interview today. Shriram said that they’re investing in the hybrid offline-online ecommerce model. The Future Group…

Agencyfaqs, a portal targeting advertising, media and marketing professionals has launched a classifieds marketplace called Freelance Exchange. It’s currently in beta, and by the looks of it, they will be asking freelancers to pay to sign up - since they currently have a 60 day free trial period for freelancers,…

Sequoia Capital funded company Apnaloan.com is launching a portal - Apnainsurance.com. I think the launch is timely, perhaps a little late, as the financial year is coming to a close. This is the time when most insurance co’s sell policies, a means for individuals to save on income tax payment.…

Expedia India has announced the launch of its India operations, with Sharat Dhall as its Managing Director. The site Expedia.co.in (Expedia.in redirects to it) is currently focusing on hotel bookings and travel deals. That’s a fairly limited segment—Cleartrip CEO Sandeep Murthy had said recently in an interview that the market…

—PayMate becomes the second Indian mobile payment co to enter Sri Lanka: the company has tied up with Bank of Ceylon (BOC) for enabling bill payments - electricity, water and phone bills - via SMS. Paymate intends to grow its merchant network in the island nation in the coming weeks.…

Cleartrip has raised a third round of funding of $18.5 million, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson which has put in $10 million. The Mahindra Group and existing investors Sherpalo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins have together put in $8.5 million, report Mint and VC Circle. In an interview, Sandeep Murthy, CEO…

A committee looking into issues of Internet and mobile banking is expected to submit its report to the Reserve Bank of India in March, following which the central bank will prepare a regulatory framework for the same. There appear to be concerns around authentication of users, reports UNI. Some of…

The Times Group (BCCL), had hived off its classifieds business into a separate entity called Times Business Solutions Ltd (TBSL), and appointed R. Sundar as CEO and Rajiv Gaur as COO. The move was officially announced a few days ago. TBSL includes e-recruitment services (Timesjobs & SmartHire), real estate portal…

Solomon Trujillo, CEO of Australia’s largest phone co Telstra has told Reuters that the company is interested in making acquisitions in online businesses in China and India, among others, to complement its SouFun business. SouFun, a real estate and home furnishing website, was acquired by Telstra in 2006 for $254…

Ixigo.com, a travel meta search company, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from BAF Spectrum, a Singapore based investment fund. The funding was reported by VCCircle yesterday, and we received a release later in the day. There are several online travel agents (OTA) in India, several of them funded…

Nasdaq listed Jupiter Media is taking a cautious approach to India: the company’s Chairman and CEO Alan Meckler was in India for a couple of days - his first trip to the country - and I met him on Saturday to talk about their plans. Jupiter Media (NSDQ: JUPM) has…

[by Cerius Shah] Husain and Raza seem to be the toast of the online art auction scene. Along with them, Tyeb Mehta, FN Souza and other artists will go under a simultaneous offline and online hammer. The event is organized by Emami Chisel Art (ECA), a collaboration between the Emami…

Erasmic Ventures funded startup Myntra, which creates personalized merchandise, has announced a tie-up with ibibo.com (MIH India), BCCL funded HolidayIQ. They claim they have 10 partners in all, but apparently haven’t updated their partner list. There’s a whole bunch of shops, though. Myntra allows users to create their own designs…

Mobile payment company Paymate has added two more banks to it’s list of partners: Standard Chartered and Cosmos Bank. Paymate already had a partnership with Citibank and Corporation Bank. Paymate also has a merchant base of over 3000 merchants. As per the release, those who register for Paymate services will…

This just in: Dice Holdings has sold its stake in Cybermedia Dice Careers to Pradeep Gupta, the founder of speciality media house Cybermedia, a BSE listed entity. Cybermedia Dice Careers, which owns the technology focused jobs portal Cybermedia Dice, was founded as a joint venture between Cybermedia and Dice’s Indian…

—redBus, an online bus ticketing company funded by Seedfund, has gone multilingual by launching Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi versions of their site. CEO Phanindra Sama says that a large segment of their users - agents, distributors and end consumers - prefer local language to English. [via release] —MakeMyTrip.com…