Business Standard has an interview with Dheeraj Sinha, regional planning director, Bates 141 and author of Consumer India: Inside the Indian Mind and Wallet. In his book, Sinha puts Indian consumers into three segments: partition generation, transition generation and no-strings generation, and gives an account of what marketers and advertisers need to keep in mind to draw the attention of each of

In its second acquisition in two weeks, eBay’s PayPal unit has bought mobile payments startup FigCard. Terms of the acquisition, which was announced on the PayPal blog, were not disclosed.

Boston-based Fig Card allows merchants to accept mobile payments in stores by using a simple USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal. All the consumer needs is the Fig app on his or her smart phone. The connection with PayPal is that when consumers setup their payment information, they could add PayPal as a payments option. You can see the video below for a demo of Fig Card’s technology

This is also as much of a talent acquisition as it is a technology buy. The founders, Max Metral and Hasty Granbery (who will both join the PayPal Mobile team) are both seasoned technology execs. Prior to founding Fig, Metral was co-founder and CTO of Firefly, which was sold to Microsoft. He also went on to architect sign-on system Microsoft Passport. Metral and Granbery met at PeoplePC, which was sold to Earthlink. And so and so forth.

Clearly mobile and online to offline is a big part of eBay’s strategy both for its marketplace and PayPal business. The company just bought location and advertising company Where, which will be housed within PayPal. In fact, PayPal will be integrated into Where’s mobile app as a payments mechanism for its local deals.

It should be interesting to see how (and if) PayPal integrates Fig Card into its products. We know that the payments service is looking to connect with local merchants and bringing them a PayPal-focused point of sale system could help them compete with emerging technologies like NFC, Square and others.

SEOUL, April 25 (Reuters) – Vale , theworld's largest iron ore producer, is in talks to reduce itsstake in a joint venture with two South Korean firms to build anintegrated steel mill in Brazil, a …

From the Times of India profile of the company which recently raised capital from StanChart Private Equity:Two years into the business and Privi had not yet created a sufficient client base, pushing it to the verge of shutting down. In 1994, its losses eroded its equity and the company's prime creditor, State Industrial & Investment Corporation Of Maharashtra (SICOM), served a notice to take over

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In the context of the recent acquisition of Capital Markets focused IT Services firm Headstrong by BPO giant Genpact, former Infy sales head Basab Pradhan, has an interesting post suggesting that the answer is yes.Genpact had to bulk up its IT Services business. IT Services offers both higher margin and higher growth. Both of which Genpact has not been able to deliver, at least to the

Interactive lecture to feature as part of research firm Venture Intelligence’s “Entrevista” seriesVenture Intelligence, India’s leading research service focused on Private Equity/Venture Capital and M&A deal activity, has partnered with IIT Madras’ C-TIDES, to produce multimedia recordings of interactions with successful Indian entrepreneurs from across sectors. Branded as ‘Entrevisa’, the

Amount invested more than doubles over previous quarter; Median Deal Size jumps to $14.5-MPrivate Equity firms invested about $3,296 million across 83 deals in India during the quarter ended March 2011, according to a study by Venture Intelligence (http://www.ventureintelligence.in), a research service focused on Private Equity and M&A transaction activity in the country. The amount invested