Mahindra moots funding FB rival
Anand Mahindra who promised to help fund a rival to Facebook said yesterday he had been “overwhelmed” with the response.
Mahindra, whose Mahindra Group business empire spans everything from cars to real estate, sparked a flurry of brainstorming.
Mahindra earlier this week urged India’s tech entrepreneurs to devise “our own social networking company” and offered seed funding to start-ups to get the better ideas rolling. The invitation provoked a flood of proposals, even from his own chief digital officer Jaspreet Bindra who was tempted by his boss’s offer.
“To say I’m overwhelmed by the responses to my call for social network start-up proposals would be an understatement!” Mahindra posted on Twitter yesterday. India has the world’s highest number of Facebook users with 241 million active members, according to a report published last June by Amsterdam-based firm The Next Web.
Cambridge employee poisoned?
A Romanian employee of Cambridge Analytica (CA), who worked on its project in India, may have been “poisoned” in Kenya, an ex-employee has told a British parliamentary select committee. Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee on Tuesday that Dan Muresan, who had worked on the Indian project, was suspected to have been poisoned in his Kenyan hotel room in 2012 after a deal went sour.