France fights startup drain with $5.5 bn

Mukesh Ambani has raised promoter stake in flagship Reliance Industries by 2.71 per cent to 48.87 per cent. Reliance Services and Holdings, controlled by Petroleum Trust, acquired 17.18 crore or 2.71 per cent stake in Reliance on Sept 13, it said. The acquisition was pursuant to a scheme of arrangement not directly involving Reliance, the filing said without giving details. The NCLAT directed the resolution professional of Reliance Communications to raise demand for Rs 577 crore paid to Ericsson before the NCLT-Mumbai. RCom has paid Rs 577 crore on the direction of the Supreme Court. RCom is presently going through Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process. A NCLAT bench headed Justice S J Mukhopadhaya asked the RP to file the claims before the NCLT. New Delhi, Sept. 18: Ahead of the GST Council meeting on Friday, a committee of officials has rejected demands for a cut in tax rate on items ranging from biscuits to car, citing the tight revenue position, as any reduction will dent tax collections.

The GST Council's Fitment Committee, which comprises revenue officials of Centre and States, has looked into the automobile industry’s demand for a reduction in the GST rate to 18 per cent from the present 28 per cent.

However, the committee felt that a rate cut would hurt the collection as auto sales contribute almost Rs 50,000-60,000 crore to the total GST kitty.

Although, the panel has some good news for the hotel industry, as it has recommended raising tariff ceiling to up to Rs 12,000 per night, from Rs 7,500, under 18 per cent GST slab.

The committee also rejected the telecom ministry's proposal to reduce GST rate for telecom services from 18 per cent to 12 per cent, sources said.

It was also decided not to tinker with the present GST structure for biscuits, bakery products, breakfast cereals, fruit and vegetables, mineral water, readyto-eat packaged items, and other food products. The panel rejected the proposal for a rate cut on sale of cruise tickets. It could be bad news for brands that are waiting for the consumers to loosen their purse strings during the festive season. Most consumers have been holding back their discretionary spending in AugustSeptember and even during the festive season a majority of them may not spend more than Rs 10,000 per household, finds a survey.

A survey conducted by LocalCircles, an online citizen engagement platform, among consumers in tier- I, II and III cities found that How do you stop European tech firms from moving to the US once they start eyeing the big time? Part of the solution is finding them access to funding at home.

French President Emmanuel Macron has made the continent's latest move to muster help for homegrown start-ups, promising five billion euros ($5.5 billion) of tech investments over the next three years.

The funds, pledged by banks, insurers and other big investors, include two billion euros earmarked for "late stage" projects requiring significant

43 per cent of them will be spending only up to Rs

10,000 per household on just festive basics in the next 60 days. Another 17 per cent will not spending anything and 5 per cent were indecisive.

Only 31 per cent of amounts usually reach to EU firms.

"The battle we're fighting is one of sovereignty," Macron told tech executives and venture capitalists at an Elysee Palace dinner on Tuesday.

“If we don't build our own champions in all new areas—digital, artificial intelligence—our choices... will be dictated by others,” he said.

Officials across Europe fear being left behind as American giants, and more recently Chinese firms, increasingly dominate the cutting-edge technologies crucial to future economic growth.

Young European startups generally have plenty of access to venture capital, with $23 billion (20.8 out the of consumers are willing to spend between Rs 10,000 and Rs 50,000 per household and those spending above Rs 50,000 account for just four per cent.

Brands need not expect much from these four per cent respondents who are willing to spend more than Rs 50,000 per household during festive season. Among them, 29 per cent will spend on home renovation, while 18 per cent will spend on white goods and 12 per cent each on automobiles and gadgets. Only 6 per cent will buy jewellery and even lesser 3 per cent will spend on property. billion euros) invested last year, according to the investment firm Atomico.

The problem is that after getting an idea off the ground, firms often struggle to find the larger amounts of money needed to propel a business into the big leagues.

“There aren't any large funds with the capacity for putting up 50, 100 or 200 million euros,” Olivier Novasque of Sidetrade, a business software editor, told AFP.

“But in the digital realm, you have to be thinking right away about conquering the world” and quickly scaling up operations before a rival does, said Novasque.

US laws also make it easier to give employees stock

Among the total respondents, 46 per cent were either spending less or were not spending in the last 45 days on discretionary purchases. “Onethird of the consumers have cut their discretionary spending and 14 per cent are not spending at all to hold on to the cash in case things continue to worsen. This is evident in the numbers reported by auto, FMCG and various other sectors,” finds LocalCircles. While 41 per cent respondents have been spending same as before, only 11 per cent were spending higher. options, an attractive tool for young firms that are ramping up operations.

“Policies that currently govern employee ownership across Europe are often archaic and highly ineffective. Some are so punishing that they put our startups at a major disadvantage to their peers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere,” the Notoptional collective of tech entrepreneurs wrote in an open letter in January.

As a result, European firms often jump the Atlantic to tap into the much deeper American capital markets, where pension funds and other institutional investors are more willing to make big bets on tech. Now you can generate electricity from drying clothes and that too in a natural ambience, if researchers at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT-KGP) are to be believed. That’s not all. The electricity generation can be up-scaled by systematically drying a set of regular garments under the sun-light. This, IIT KGP researchers believe, can turn into a source of lowcost power in extreme rural settings.

The whole process, or mechanism, is actually simple yet unique. The wall of any channel has some charges inbuilt in it. If saline water, or similar water-based solution, is passed through the wall, it creates voltage through capillary action. In this case the regular cellulosebased wearable textile acts as a wall to develop voltage. That voltage is then stored.

By utilising tiny channels, or the so-called nanochannels, in the cellulose-based fabric network, electrical power generation is made, through guided movement of saline water amidst continuous evaporation, very much like water transport across the parts of a living plant.

“The regular cellulosebased wearable textile, in this case, acts as a medium for the motion of salt ions through the interlace fibrous nano-scale network by capillary action, inducing an electric potential in the process”, said Prof Suman Chakraborty from the Mechanical Engineering Department, who is also a lead researcher of the group. Their device design inherently exploits a large transpiration surface for achieving a sustainable motion of salt ions, through natural evaporation phenomenon.

The researchers have also demonstrated up-scaling of this entire process by using a large number of (around 50 in number, with a surface area of 3,000 square metre) clothes being dried in tandem by washermen in a remote village. Connected to a commercial super-capacitor, in the process, the researchers were able to reliably charge up to around 10 Volt in almost 24 hours. This stored energy is enough to glow a white LED for more than 1 hour, they said. The point, Prof Chakra-borty says, is that as compared to existing methods of energy harvesting from complex resources, the electricity generation occurs in natural ambience.