With its back against the wall financially, auto maker Ford is taking a radical and risky approach to the marketing of its new Fiesta: Later this month, it will hand over the branding and promotion duties for the car to 100 twenty-somethings who have no advertising experience. Ford is giving…

Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail, has now given up on another internet business. French business networking site Viadeo has acquired Bhatia-funded social networking website ApnaCircle.com. The financial terms are not disclosed, but the deal is in stock only, according to Yogesh Bansal, co-founder of the Indian networking site. The…

Nautanki.tv Networks Pvt. Ltd, the video distribution start up in which Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt Ltd (formerly Virtual Marketing) acquired a majority stake last year, is rapidly scaling up in terms of content offerings. It has struck a deal with Star India Pvt. Ltd, the News Corp (NYSE: NWS).…

Picsquare CEO Manish Agrawal has confirmed the deal with Ahmedabad-based Infibeam to VCCircle. Bangalore based photo printing portal Picsqure has been sold to Indian online retail firm Infibeam. Picsquare CEO Manish Agrawal has confirmed the deal to VCCircle. He, however, refused to divulge the financial details nor commented whether it…

  Korean handset maker LG (SEO: 066570) has struck a deal with RockeTalk to preload the Indian start-up’s mobile social networking application on several handsets, including the LG KT610 and KF750 (Secret) handsets sold in India. The two handsets go on sale in November. RockeTalk’s application includes an instant messenger…

In one of those local experiments that Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) keeps doing from time to time, it has launched a new social networking service called SpotM in India. This is Yahoo’s third or fourth attempt at entering social networking space, which has been a weak spot for it for it…

Mobile social network myGamma‘s parent BuzzCity is getting a $10 million funding from South African media group Naspers, with the aim of investing in applications that can leverage partnership opportunities. The Singapore-based network offers blogging, messaging, games etc and claims 2.7 million users across 70 countries and 1.7 billion ad…

BigAdda, Reliance Entertainment’s social networking play, has gone mobile with a mobile app, wap site and SMS features. The Big B(eta) seems to have gone well, considering they first launched the mobile app to ease Amitabh Bachchan’s blogging pains. The app, titled MobileAdda, supports Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Sony (NYSE: SNE),…

For now, Facebook users in India are the only ones with access to popular word game Scrabulous through the social network. A few weeks ago, developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla pulled the Scrabble knockoff from Facebook in the U.S. and Canada following a complaint by toy company Hasbro but all…

LiveJournal has launched it’s first dedicated project for India. They have partnered with Caferati, a literary community, for a Flash-Fiction contest (users have to submit stories of 500 words or less). Caferati has previous experience doing events for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival as well as a community base of…

Friendster has closed its new round of funding, in progress for most of this year, and it is a big one: it has raised $20 million in a new round, and the pioneer is now shifting its focus, wisely, to where it is strongest: in Asia. The round was led…

So says this ET story, citing talks that Airtel is having with handset players such as Nokia…Airtel Live, the mobile VAs app, may be embedded in Nokia (NYSE: NOK), and irrespective of whether users are on Airtel network or not. “The icon will be available in all handsets and hence…

LiveJournal’s new owner plans to launch the blog community in India in the next few months. Moscow-based Sup bought the host from MovableType maker SixApart in December and now plans an internationalisation drive; Sup CEO Andrew Paulson told me first stop is “moving aggressively in to India”. “We were in…

This story was provided to us by our content partner VCCircle. Recently, Tencent Holdings, an affiliate of MIH China, announced that it would pick up a 50 per cent stake in MIH India, the owners of ibibo.com, a social media website. It also said it will invest $7.5 million in…

Its hard to resist a headline like that. Reliance ADAG’s love affair with the Bachchan’s continues, this time in the form a mobile blogging application called MoBlog developed especially for Amitabh Bachchan. The re-designed blog features a mobile shaped left navigation featuring twitter-esque updates from Big B (or possibly his…

Jivox, the developer of a self-serve video ad system, has raised a $10.7 million first round led by Opus Capital, along with Helion Venture Partners and other past backers. In March, the company did a $2.7 million seed round. The San Mateo, CA and India based company claims it simplifies…

Regular Indian internet urban users grew 19% in 2008 to reach 30 million ‘regular’ users and a total of 35 million. Regular is defined as users who access the internet atleast once a month. Out of the total., 30 million are urban and 5 million are reported as rural. This…

While there is no official announcement yet, this is big news for the video market. We had earlier reported Tata Comm and BitGravity, a CDN solutions provider based out of California, partnering to resell the technology platform in Europe and Asia. The service is now live with Tata entering the…

User review portal MouthShut has gone in for a re-design, adding local listings and reviews to the mix. Currently it lists entries from 20 cities and small towns covering restaurants, malls, pubs and clubs. According to the release, it seems more like a navigation tweak with citywise categorization of content…