The International Monetary on Wednesday said that Indian economy would be the fastest growing major economy in 2018. The IMF said that with a growth rate of 7.4 per cent that rises to 7.8 per cent in 2019, the prospects for Indian economy are bright.

In its Asia and Pacific Regional Economic Outlook report, IMF said that India was recovering from the impact of demonetization and GST roll out and "the recovery is expected to be underpinned by a rebound from transitory shocks as well as robust private consumption."

The theme of the two-day Summit is  'Telling Our Stories – Asia and More.' Represenatives from 29 countries are participating in the Summit. An array of issues including media business models in new era and emerging technologies in broadcasting will be discussed during the two-day long summit. At the occasion, the union minister underlined the need to dehyphenate the need to generate revenue and the importance of retaining talent in the media industry. 

Smriti Irani also said that soon India will have over 90 crore internet users and the statistics warrant the importance of having proper rules, ethics and laws in place to ensure there is no monopoly of one dominant player in the industry. 

Bangladesh delegate Hasanul Haq Inu said that South Asian region needs to fight cyber crime. He stressed the importance to formulate a digital security act.

NEW YORK: Prime Minister Narendra Modi figures among the 10 most powerful people in the world in US magazine Forbes' 2018 list that is topped by Chinese President Xi Jinping, while Reliance Industries (RIL) Chairman Mukesh Ambani is the only Indian businessman

"There are nearly 7.5 billion humans on planet Earth, but these 75 men and women make the world turn. Forbes' annual ranking of The World's Most Powerful People identifies one person out of every 100 million whose actions mean the most," Forbes said.

Just one week after WhatsApp CEO and co-founder Jan Koum said he was leaving the company, Facebook announced his replacement: Chris Daniels will take over as the new VP of WhatsApp. He’s the Facebook product executive who has been running Internet.org, the company’s effort to bring free internet services to the masses.

Daniels has been with Facebook for more than seven years, and while he hasn’t worked on WhatsApp previously, the kind of stuff he has worked on has a lot of relevance.

NASA has signed a second space act agreement with Uber Technologies, Inc., to further explore concepts and technologies related to urban air mobility (UAM) to ensure a safe and efficient system for future air transportation in populated areas.  

Under this agreement, Uber will share its plans for implementing an urban aviation rideshare network. NASA will use the latest in airspace management computer modeling and simulation to assess the impacts of small aircraft – from delivery drones to passenger aircraft with vertical take-off and landing capability – in crowded environments. 

This is NASA’s first such agreement specifically focused on modeling and simulation for UAM operations. 

Bengaluru: Walmart’s investors reacted negatively to news of the retail giant’s Flipkart buyout on Wednesday, wiping away $10 billion worth of Walmart’s market capitalization, as investors punished the stock in early morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

In pre-market trading at around 6.30 pm IST, Walmart’s shares on the NYSE were down a little over 5%. Walmart’s market cap currently stands at $252 billion, according to stock data from NYSE. However, the stock of Walmart’s biggest rival in the US, Amazon, rose marginally in early market trade. Amazon’s market cap currently stands at $776 billion.

Earlier on Wednesday, Walmart said it had agreed to buy 77% of Flipkart for $16 billion, valuing India’s largest e-commerce firm at roughly $21 billion. Walmart, however, added that it expected operating losses as a result of the deal, along with a negative impact to its earnings per share.

BENGALURU: Google said it had appointed Nitin Bawankule as the country head for its cloud business in India, as the search giant looks at taking a larger share of the booming demand for those services in the country.

Bawankule has been with Google for six years and was previously head of sales for its ecommerce, retail and classifieds and education business. Bawankule will report to Rick Harshman, managing director of Asia Pacific for Google Cloud.

The Indian telecom regulator on Tuesday released the draft amendment of telecommunication interconnection where it has set time-frame for provisioning of ports for initial interconnection and augmentation to be increased to a maximum 42 working days.

The draft said a service provider may request the other service provider for additional ports at a Point of Interconnection (POI), if the projected utilisation of the capacity of such POI at the end of 60 days from the date of placing the request, is likely to be more than 85 percent and such projected utilisation of the capacity of POI shall be determined on the basis of the daily traffic for the preceding 60 days at the POI during busy hour.