To help lenders deal with defaulting borrowers, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has notified new norms for banks to convert their debt into equity in distressed companies — a move that might lead to a sharp rise in restructuring of bank loans.

The decision to tweak the pricing formula for conversion of debt into equity would also pave the way for bankers to have a larger say in activities of a distressed company by acquiring a majority stake and taking over the management.

Microsoft Corp. is evaluating a bid for Salesforce.com Inc., after the cloud software provider was approached by another would-be buyer, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Salesforce, which has a market value of almost $50 billion, is working with two investment banks to determine a response to approaches, two of the people said. The San Francisco-based company’s options could include rebuffing any buyer, or working out a sale, people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg last week.

Goods and Services Tax (GST) will reduce prices in the long run and boost economic growth, said Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in the Lok Sabha today.

GST Bill is not a dancing instrument which will go jumping from Standing Committee to Standing Committee, Arun Jaitley added, indicating the government was in no mood to agree to the Opposition’s demand for the same.

Members in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday came down heavily on BSNL for “poor” services across the country as the government defended the telecom operator saying it has been suffering since the days of UPA government.

Discussing the BSNL services in various parts of the country, BJP member Sanjay Dhotre wondered whether some of the BSNL employees were working for private operators as they were “not interested” improving its own services, thus helping private companies to expand their networks.

Gurgaon based GreenHouse Ventures Accelerator (GHV) has selected the first startup for its accelerator programme. Mobile startup LazyLad that helps create a direct platform for local retailers to sell to customers has secured seed money of $100,000 along with the induction into GHV.

The team of three IIT graduates Co-founders – Saurabh Singla, Paresh Goel, and Ajay Sethi. LazyLad, which has not raised any outside funds as of date, plans to raise $1 million to fund their plans of providing their services in the metros of India.

Indian multinational corporation, Infosys is looking to evaluate six early stage startups in India for investments that focus on ares such as decision science and artificial intelligence. The company has allocated $250 million capital from its $ 500 million Innovation fund for investments in the range of $10-25 million per startup.

“The discussions are still at a very early stage,” said one of the persons directly familiar with the matter. “Most of the startups that companies like Infosys are looking to tap are incorporated in India, with their founders based out of the Silicon Valley.”

With Cloud Bigtable, Google is launching a new NoSQL database offering today that, as the name implies, is powered by the company’s Bigtable data storage system, but with the added twist that it’s compatible with the Apache HBase API — which itself is based on Google’s Bigtable project. Bigtable powers the likes of Gmail, Google Search and Google Analytics, so this is definitely a battle-tested service.

Google promises that Cloud Bigtable will offer single-digit millisecond latency and 2x the performance per dollar when compared to the likes of HBase and Cassandra. Because it supports the HBase API, Cloud Bigtable can be integrated with all the existing applications in the Hadoop ecosystem, but it also supports Google’s Cloud Dataflow.

The first year of the new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is one of the best years for India in terms of liberalisation and economic reforms, a top US expert has said.

“While we cannot claim this has been a perfect year in terms of liberalising the economy, it has been one of the best years on record. Certainly well ahead of the first year of either the Vajpayee or the Singh governments,” said Rick Rossow, senior fellow and Wadhwani Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies – a prominent think-tank.

Bollywood star Salman Khan was on Wednesday convicted by a sessions court of culpable homicide for the death of a homeless man in a hit-and-run in 2002 and faces up to 10 years in jail. Sentencing is expected later in the day.

Judge D.W. Deshpande of the Mumbai court upheld prosecution charges that Salman, 49, was driving under the influence of alcohol and did not have a licence when he lost control of his Toyota Land Cruiser on the night of September 28, 2002.

The office of the Union comptroller and auditor general (CAG) has questioned why Reliance Industries (RIL) was allowed to charge a marketing margin on natural gas in dollar terms when that allowed to state-owned GAIL was approved in rupee terms.

The auditor recommended the petroleum ministry ensure the latter methodology be adopted for supply of natural gas from domestic sources for use in sectors where the government bears the subsidy burden.

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