India’s Snapdeal to raise $500 million from Alibaba, SoftBank, Foxconn: sources

By Paul Carsten BEIJING (Reuters) – Indian online marketplace Snapdeal is set to raise $500 million from a group of foreign investors including China's Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, three people familiar with the matter said on Monday. The latest round of support, from investors also including SoftBank Group Corp and Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, would value Snapdeal at more than $5 billion, another person said. The move is a show of faith from three of the world's biggest technology companies in fast-growing Snapdeal, which in October secured a $627 million investment from SoftBank, itself an early backer of Alibaba.

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India IT behemoths revamp culture to attract young talent, battle start-ups

By Nivedita Bhattacharjee MUMBAI (Reuters) – India’s oldest and most distinguished IT firms are doing what would have been almost sacrilegious a few years ago – holding coding marathons to develop innovative fixes and deploying “commando” units to resolve clients’ IT woes within hours. Infosys , Wipro and other Indian IT giants, which rose to prominence during the outsourcing boom in the 1990s and 2000s, have struggled to keep pace with mushrooming start-ups. Client demands are similarly changing in India’s $147 billion IT outsourcing industry.

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U.S. presidential candidate Fiorina spins web around interviewer

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina apparently has learned something about registering website domain names. Shortly after the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive announced her campaign last week, she found out that a cybersquatter had bought the rights to carlyfiorina.org and was using it to criticize her record. Chuck Todd of NBC News brought up the issue while interviewing Fiorina on “Meet the Press” and showed the website, which features row after row of frowny-face emoticons representing 30,000 people laid off during her Hewlett-Packard tenure from 1999 to 2005

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Indian jeweller pulls ‘racist’, ‘slave-child’ ad with Bollywood actress

By Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A major Indian jewellery chain has withdrawn an advert featuring Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan with a dark-skinned boy holding a parasol over her after it was slammed by activists and on social media for being racist and promoting child slavery. Kalyan Jewellers, which employs about 4,000 people across India, said the advertisement featured in a national newspaper on April 17 was intended to present “royalty, timeless beauty and elegance”

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Indian retailers hobble online as e-commerce firms race ahead

By Nivedita Bhattacharjee MUMBAI (Reuters) – The head of Future Group, one of India's largest and most established retailers, admits he can't keep up with web sites like Snapdeal and Flipkart when it comes to spending money to entice shoppers to buy online. Private investors have poured $2.

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