Taking on Amazon's Alexa-powered smart speakers, Google on Tuesday unveiled its voice-activated the 'Home' and 'Home Mini' speakers in India that can help people with their commute, play favourite songs and videos, plan daily schedule and lots more.

Powered by Google's artificial intelligence-based Assistant, the 'Home' and 'Home Mini' are priced at Rs 9,999 and Rs 4,499, respectively. The speakers will go on sale via Flipkart and at over 750 retail stores.

New Delhi: The possible coming together of online retailers Amazon and Flipkart is likely to face close scrutiny on competition issues as the combined entity will be a dominant player in the fast growing Indian e-commerce market, according to experts.

While there is no formal announcement from any quarter on the possible multi-billion dollar deal, reports indicate that discussions involving Flipkart and Amazon are going on.

KOLKATA: India has largely been an ‘importer’ of global best practices. It is now set to ‘export’ a couple of cool business tricks that Amazon has perfected locally. Both India-first successful initiatives the Seattle behemoth is shipping overseas are in the logistics domain.

They involve roping in local entrepreneurs and tapping neighbourhood grocers, drugstores or other street-corner shops to ensure last-mile delivery of Amazon consignments to customers.

Who will win India’s promising market for internet commerce? A company with deep pockets and an almost limitless capacity to bear losses. Amazon.com Inc. fits the bill. Its investors don’t bat an eyelid when the firm announces large amounts of cash burn every other year.

It seemed like the US company had met its match when SoftBank Group Corp invested $2.5 billion in Flipkart last year. Led by maverick tycoon Masayoshi Son, SoftBank never seems to be short of funds or the appetite for taking wild risks.

Amazon, the US-based online retail giant, has expanded its global selling programme in India by enabling its local sellers to tap business clients in markets of the US, Europe and Japan. Even though Amazon had opened its global platform to Indian sellers in 2015, they were allowed to ship products only to end-consumers. The company has opened the platform for business-to-business (B2B) channels as it sees an uptick in demand in that segment.

Amazon India has reportedly laid off its 60 employees over global restructuring. According to a report published in the Economic Times, citing sources, it said that Amazon India may future might handover pink slips to more of its staff.

Sources close to the development told the publication that the second person said there might be more layoffs across teams as the company put 25 per cent more employees on performance improvement plans (PIPs) in the December quarter as compared with a year earlier.

President Donald Trump renewed his long-running assault on Amazon.com Inc. with an early morning tweet Thursday. But what measures can he actually take against the online retail giant?

He could push for probes of consumer protection, privacy and antitrust issues. He could also step up his support for allowing states to collect sales tax on third-party purchases from Amazon, or seek to have the Postal Service charge more to deliver packages.

Amazon.com Inc shares fell almost 5 percent on Wednesday, wiping more than $30 billion off its market value, after news website Axios reported that U.S. President Donald Trump is obsessed with the world’s largest online retailer and wants to rein in its growing power. Trump has talked about using antitrust law to “go after” the company because he is worried about mom-and-pop retailers being put out of business by Amazon, Axios reported, citing five sources it said had discussed the issue with him.

Bengaluru/New Delhi: Amazon India, which has doubled down on building out its digital payments business in the country, plans to continue investing heavily in the business and introducing more local innovations for Indian customers over the coming quarters, even as it grapples with new know-your-customer (KYC) regulations from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which have slowed down growth of new users.

BENGALURU: Amazon has almost closed the gap with Flipkart's standalone sales in 2017, behind in GMV marketshare by less than 1percentage point in 2017 from 5 percentage points in 2016, as per Forrester. However, Flipkart still leads as a group with Myntra and Jabong.

While Flipkart leads in fashion and smartphones, Amazon has taken lead in categories such as appliances, consumer electronics, and more importantly, groceries, which builds platform stickiness, said Satish Meena, a senior forecast analyst at Forrester.

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