TechThisWeek: Personal Data Bill; bank scams; Hotstar; SOSV’s new deep-tech fund

This week finally saw the Personal Data protection bill being introduced in the Parliament on Tuesday. The bill will now be reviewed by a 30 member joint parliamentary committee and will most likely be taken up after the budget session next year. We discuss a few main clauses.

TechCircle had an interesting conversation with Jaya Vaidhyanathan, CEO of BCT digital, who spoke on the importance of regulatory technologies, the loopholes in the current banking guidelines, and how the recent Punjab and Maharashtra Bank (PMC) scam could have been avoided with the implementation of the right set of regulatory solutions.

Star India owned OTT video streaming platform Hotstar has managed to percolate down to non-metro markets this year. Small towns trumped metro cities in terms of viewership, mirroring the rising demand for regional content. Out of the overall online video consumption by the users on platform, 63% came from non-metro cities including Lucknow, Pune and Patna. 

Meanwhile, in the startup domain, New Jersey headquartered early stage venture capital firm SOSV closed its fourth successive fund at $277 million. The VC is riding on the back of five new deals in India,which is a key market for the firm’s ‘accelerator VC’ strategy.

Flipkart was also in the news recently where, In a bid to power up their omnichannel food retail operations, US retail giant Walmart Flipkart made a joint investment in Ninjacart, a B2B marketplace for agricultural produce that connects farmers and retailers. Walmart will strengthen its direct sourcing of fresh produce for its best price B2B cash-and-carry stores while Flipkart will improve its online grocery business Supermart.