10 of India’s biggest tech stories in 2015

2015 was a year of massive headlines in India, the land of a billion people that everyone from Facebook to Xiaomi to teeny local startups is busy wooing. That shouldn’t surprise us at all given the country’s cementing status of Asia’s Silicon Valley.

Here’s a rundown of India’s tech movers and shakers in the headlines this year.

1. Prime Minister woos Silicon Valley

Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Valley earlier this year for a series of meetings with tech giants to boost the local technology and manufacturing industries. That ended up with chipmaker Qualcomm announcing an India-specific US$150 million venture capital fund for startups in the mobile and “internet of everything” sectors.

Read the full story.

2. The Housing.com saga

He’s in, he’s out, he’s in, no he’s out.

India’s startup industry and its fans followed the Housing.com twists and turns for weeks, as Rahul Yadav called investors names, resigned from the board of the company he helped found, joined back, and then finally got the sack to end the most explosive drama India’s budding startup industry has seen to date.

Softbank, a major investor, had to do some damage control. The spat between Rahul and Housing’s investors brought to the fore a festering relationship between startups and moneybags, and also made the industry wake up to the problem of too much growth with too few basics in place.

Housing, which was splurging on full page ads in national dailies as well as massive hoardings, decided to fire 600 employees weeks after firing the CEO.

Read the full story.

3. The fight of the taxi apps

2015 was the year everybody teamed up to kill Uber. Ola in India, Didi Kuaidi in China, GrabTaxi in Southeast Asia, and Lyft in the US announced a rideshare partnership in December. So if you’re travelling abroad from India, for example, you can use the same app in Singapore to hail a GrabTaxi – and vice versa. This mother of all alliances was announced, of course, to put Uber in a corner, but the results are still blowin’ in the wind.

How did this happen? Easy. SoftBank invested in Didi Kuaidi, Ola, and GrabTaxi. Alibaba, whose early investor was SoftBank, backed Lyft. Tech In Asia saw this coming from miles away.

4. Alibaba made inroads in India

5. Jeff Bezos writes to Indian customers, slams Flipkart

6. Myntra goes app-only, leads the shift to smartphones

7. Xiaomi goes Indian

8. Snapdeal bought FreeCharge to take on Flipkart

9. Food tech goes cold

10. Facebook bats for Free Basics in India