Audio
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Can the Indian EV industry sustain itself without subsidies?
Electric two-wheeler sales data from the government's Vahan portal showed that June has been the worst month this year. Does this reflect the cut back in subsidies that the government announced recently, and what does it say about the sector's prospects? Amitabh Saran, co-founder and CEO of Altigreen Propulsion Labs in Bengaluru, joins us on ToThePoint today to explain what's happening in the industry. While the timing can be debated, the industry will have to prepare itself for the day when there will be no subsidies, he says
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Maruti Suzuki's Invicto versus Toyata's Innova Hycross — which one would you pick?
Maruti Suzuki's Invicto, which many are saying is a rebadged Toyota Innova, is out. So, is it? Forbes India's Manu Balachandran joins us on ToThePoint today to talk about this latest offering from Maruti, its first in this segment, which is priced a tad lower than the Innova Hycross, its Toyota twin. After the success of the Grand Vitara, will the Invicto help Maruti chalk up another win or is the Innova too well entrenched in Indian psyche as the top people carrier? Manu points out that both vehicles have already garnered thousands of bookings
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IT services outlook: How TCS, Infosys and others are evolving differently from each other
Tata Consultancy Services will kick off earnings results for India's top IT companies next week for their fiscal first quarter that ended on June 30. We asked Yugal Joshi, a partner at Everest Group, to join us today to talk about the outlook for the sector. "Deceleration does not equate with decline," says Yugal. Companies like TCS and Infosys are so core to the operations of the world's biggest corporations that, barring black swans, the future can only hold growth. In the near term, an important phenomenon to pay more attention to is the number of senior exits, he says
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Praval Singh on how Zoho's entrepreneurial culture has expanded its upmarket reach
Praval Singh, vice president of marketing and customer experience at Zoho, talks about how the company has achieved strong traction with larger enterprise customers. Over the last three years, Zoho grew its mid-market and enterprise segment at 65 percent CAGR. The segment accounts for 50 percent of its annual recurring revenue in India and a third of its entire business, which has more than 90 million users from over 600,000 businesses. Singh, who started as an entrepreneur and a customer of Zoho himself, talks about how Zoho plans to build on its achievements
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India's SAFF victory: What it means for the future of Indian football
India won its 9th SAFF Championship final yesterday and Sunil Chhetri took home his third Golden Boot award. But how bright is the future of Indian football? In this extended edition of ToThePoint, Kathakali Chanda is in conversation with the well-known sports presenter Joe Morrison. They speak about how far the game has come in India from its darkest day of recent memory when Chhetri had to appeal to fans to come watch the match to the current growing interest in the game. And, did the latest championship reveal glimpses of who might inherit Chhetri's mantle?
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Meta's Threads vs Twitter: Is this the real Mark vs Musk cage fight?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may have had to contend with less than spectacular success with the metaverse, but will Instagram's Threads become an instant hit, as a "Twitter rival" or something better? Hitesh Rajwani, CEO of Social Samosa, joins us on ToThePoint today to talk about how Meta's ecosystem might finally have us in its full embrace. Hitesh also offers his views on why Threads might be the first real threat to Twitter, at a time when the microblogging platform continues to reel under the impact of Elon Musk's experiments
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India's generative AI opportunity: Founder-investor views from Pratyush Rai and Vaibhav Domkundwar
In this episode, Pratyush Rai, co-founder of Foyer and Vaibhav Domkundwar, CEO at Better Capital, discuss the generative AI opportunity in India. Pratyush and his two co-founders, Sirsendu Sarkar and Siddhartha Saxena, are developing a Chrome browser extension that they've named Merlin, which allows users to tap the power for ChatGPT from whichever website they're on. The product has found strong traction within months of its release and is backed by investors, including Better. The founders expect to build deeper features around personalisation and the mobile phone
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HDFC Bank becomes a global giant — what should we expect from it now?
The merger of HDFC Bank with the company widely seen as its parent, HDFC Limited, in India's biggest corporate deal, a $40 billion all-shares transaction, created the fourth-largest bank in the world by market capital. Forbes India's banking expert Salil Panchal joins us on ToThePoint today to discuss the significance of this development, which has been more than a year in the making, since it was first announced. And an important chapter concludes in the bank's history, Deepak Parekh, one of India's most respected corporate leaders, retires from the organisation
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Inside our artificial intelligence special issue
The world is watching the revolution of artificial intelligence (AI) that has been in the works for decades. OpenAI and its chatGPT are part of every other conversation. Now is the time to build on that revolution, and a few Indian startups—in healthcare to consumer research—have already started to harness the tech to their advantage. In this issue, we look at their stories, and in this podcast, Naini Thaker takes us through the ones you cannot miss
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India's National Research Foundation gets green light and Rs 50,000 crore — big step?
The union cabinet yesterday approved the introduction of the National Research Foundation (NRF) Bill, 2023 in parliament, the ministry of science and technology said in a statement. The NRF is to provide high-level strategic direction to scientific research in the country as recommended in the national education policy. The first outlay for it is Rs. 50,000 crore over the next five years. We asked Kamlesh Vyas, a partner at Deloitte and a specialist in education and skill development, to join us on ToThePoint today to explain the significance of this historic move
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What Milind Manoj, AR expert, loves about Apple's Vision Pro and some things he doesn't
Milind Manoj, co-founder and CEO of Pupilmesh, an augmented reality and deep tech startup in Bengaluru, talks about what he loved about Apple's new headset, the Vision Pro. Milind talks about how Vision Pro differs from Apple's other products in that it will probably be very different from what we might find in, say, 2030. In contrast, if you look back at even the first iPhone, it's not all that different from today's handsets. Milind also explains some of the hardware challenges to be overcome before an AR headset will look no different from a pair of Ray-Bans