In Brief: Oyo culls 200 jobs in Delhi; Housing ministry launches online portal for real estate

SoftBank-backed hospitality major Oyo has fired 200 employees from its Delhi office, The Economic Times reported. The Gurugram headquartered company notified its employees about their job status through an email. It has also asked some of its employees to explore careers outside the company. 

Oyo is reportedly cutting some 2,400 jobs from its total workforce in India over the course of the third week of January. A company executive said that Oyo wants to bring the headcount down by another 20% at least and launch another resizing exercise by the end of March 2020.

Also read: Oyo elevates CEO Aditya Ghosh to board, raises debt finance from Avendus

Housing ministry launches e-commerce platform for real estate sector

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has launched an e-commerce platform to help home buyers identify genuine properties, The Economic Times reported. The online platform will list projects that have received occupancy certificates. Post-launch, the portal will be open for a month for the real estate developers to register their projects following which the portal will be opened for home buyers, with a 45-day sale period starting February 14, 2020.

UC Browser launches UC Drive in India

UC Browser, a web browser developed by China-based mobile internet company UCWeb, has rolled out its in-app cloud storage service UC Drive in India, according to a statement. The company is offering 20 GB cloud storage for free to its users. UC Drive, which is integrated into the browsing platform, will let customers save any downloadable content using the ‘save to drive’ function. This will enable users to directly save a wide variety of downloadable content while browsing without taking up storage or memory on their mobile devices.  The company, as part of the launch from 13-19 January, is giving prizes and hampers,  including 20-gm gold, smartphones and coupons from Amazon.in, GrabOn and OYO worth up to Rs 50 million.

Athenta Technologies introduces monitoring and control system for Metro 

Gurugram-based information technology and services firm Athenta Technologies has unveiled its TRANSDAQ monitoring and control system that can do deep dive integration into the urban transport systems and subsystems from a unified console. TRANSDAQ, also called as the manager of managers (MOM) system, can control all the subsystems from a single console in a metro T-SCADA project. It maximises the efficiency in operations and maintenance for metro systems and customer service, it said in a statement.  “TRANSDAQ is an application-based product that performs the infrastructure management for the metro rail and it has now become the preferred telecom-SCADA Platform for metro rails in India,” said Gopal Joshi, director sales, Athenta Technologies. SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition) is a system of hardware and software elements used by industries to streamline processes.

Hindustan Zinc, FarEye join hands to build industry’s first digital control tower

India’s largest zinc-lead miner, Hindustan Zinc (HZL) has entered into a partnership with FarEye, a software-as-a-service-based predictive logistics platform, to reduce dependency on manual processes, enhance logistics efficiency and mitigate risks.HZL will leverage FarEye’s ML (machine learning), IoT (internet of things)-powered platform to drive analytics around stakeholder and vehicle performance to better identify bottlenecks, the companies said in a joint statement. The state-of-the-art logistics control tower will enable HZL to monitor and control more than 30,000 trips per month. “FarEye is enabling Hindustan Zinc to have control over more than 30,000 trips every month with zero manual intervention thus, enhancing the efficiency of our supply chain and operations. Its machine learning capabilities have been generating accurate ETAs for Hindustan Zinc’s customers. It also makes planning efficient routes easier,” said Sharad Gargiya, chief commercial officer, Hindustan Zinc.

TravelDilSe joins IAMAI - Mobile 10X incubator programme

New Delhi headquartered TravelDilSe, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual travel firm, has been selected in the next set of incubated startups by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) Mobile 10X, a forum to nurture and grow the apps ecosystem in India. Four other startups along with TravelDilSe have also been selected for the programme, according to a press statement. The incubator will provide guidance and mentorship by industry experts, networking and collaborating opportunities, training to enhance the skill and talent of the startup team and challenging tasks to nurture the skillset, the statement added.