TelecomLive April-2020

[ News Bytes ] 54 Ola-backed bike and scooter sharing startup Vogo raises $19 mn Vogo, a bike- and scooter-sharing start-up, has raised $19 mn in a funding round led by LGT Lightstone, an investment fund managed by the Princely House of Liechtenstein. Other existing inves- tors such as Matrix Partners and Kalaari Capital have also participated in the round. Vogo had previously raisedmoney fromride-hailing firm Ola (Ani Technologies) and Stellaris Venture Partners. In December 2018, Vogo formed a strategic partnership with Ola, under which the ride-hailing giant will boost Vogo's supply by investing in 100,000 scooters on the Vogo platform, worth $100 mn. The cab-hailing firmhad said Vogo's offerings will be avail- able for Ola's customer base of over 150 mn, directly fromtheOla app. Vogo's main rival Bounce has now touched a valua- tion of $520 mn, with the backing of Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and B Capital. Bounce, which recently raised $105 mn, is planning expansion in India and also get intomarkets abroad. Vogo, which is the short form for 'vehicle on the go', was co-founded in 2016 by Anand Ayyadurai, an alum- nus of Vishwakarma Institute of Technology in Pune www.telecomlive.com and IIM-Ahmedabad, along with Padmanabhan Balakrishnan and Sanchit Mittal. Walmart to turn some stores into Flipkart warehouses Walmart has set in motion plans to convert some of its two dozen wholesale stores into fulfilment centres for homegrown Flipkart, which it owns, as part of a restructuring process of its cash-and-carry busi- ness. Out of the 28 stores, six will be converted into f u l f i l me n t c e n t r e s . Walmart's plan is to turn many more of its 'Best Price' brand cash-and- carry stores into ware- housing in the coming months. Themove comes barely a month after Walmart said it had sacked more than 50 employees in India as part of a restruc- turing of its loss-making Walmart India business which runs the 28 Best Price stores nationwide. 79 held in RPF's crackdown on illegal e-ticket rackets The Railway Protec- tion Force (RPF) has busted countrywide ille- gal e-ticket booking rack- ets and arrested 79 per- sons. It has also identified 16,735 user IDs for black- listing through which tickets were booked ille- gally, besides blocking 27,948 tickets worth Rs 7.96 cr for upcoming journeys. ANMS and MAC, the illegal software which the racketeers used for book- ing e-tickets fraudulently by getting around One Time Password (OTP) Telecom LIVE April 2020 and CAPTCHA systems, were completely "neu- tralized" by RPF sleuths. RPF deactivated ANMS software on January 23 and MAC on February 8. The arrests were made in various parts of the coun- t r y and t he a c cus ed included owners of the illegal software. Facebook sues data analytics firm OneAudience for har- vesting users' data Stung by the Cam- bridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has filed a fed- eral lawsuit in California court against New Jersey- based data analytics firm OneAudience for secretly harvesting its users' data. According to the law- s u i t , O n e A u d i e n c e improperly accessed and collected user data from Facebook and other social med i a compani es by paying App developers to install a malicious Soft- ware Development Kit (SDK) in their apps. Security researchers