iWorld
OneOTT Intertainment CEO Yugal Kishore Sharma moves on
Mumbai: OneOTT Intertainment (OIL) chief executive officer Yugal Kishore Sharma has chosen to move on after a successful six-year assignment. OneOTT Intertainment is the broadband subsidiary of Nxtdigital.
Sharma will pursue new ventures in the field of sports and e-sports and nurture Hindustan FC, a football club he has been associated with for several years, said the statement.
Sharma has led and built up the broadband business of the media group in India’s fourth-largest private ISP (internet service provider) with over one million subscribers. A telecom industry veteran, Sharma has been instrumental in driving OneOTT Intertainment and building up the various verticals, especially the innovative and highly successful ISP strategic partnership aggregator model.
“Yugal has played a pivotal role in the significant growth of OIL through his radical thinking, innovative strategies and evolving business models over the years,” said OneOTT Intertainment chairman AK Das. “Today, OIL is a highly respected brand across 150 cities and towns with a very high quality of service, with customer centricity at its core. Much of that credit is attributed to Yugal’s leadership from the front, propelling ONE Broadband into India’s top four private ISPs. We take this opportunity to thank him for his contribution to the growth of the company and wish him all the very best as he pursues his new ventures.”
iWorld
WhatsApp may soon let users to pick who sees their status updates
The messaging giant is borrowing a page from Instagram’s playbook as it pushes to give users finer control over their social circles.
CALIFORNIA: WhatsApp is quietly working on a feature that could make its Status function considerably smarter and considerably more private.
According to reports from beta tracking platforms, the app is testing a tool called Status lists, which would allow users to create named groups such as close friends, family and colleagues, and control precisely which group sees each update. It is a meaningful step up from the platform’s current blunt instruments, which offer only three options: share with all contacts, exclude specific people, or manually select individuals each time.
The new feature draws an obvious comparison with Instagram’s Close Friends function, and the resemblance is unlikely to be accidental. Both platforms sit within Meta’s family, and the company has been nudging them toward a common logic of audience segmentation for some time.
The move also fits neatly into WhatsApp’s broader privacy push. The platform has been rolling out enhanced chat protections and is exploring the introduction of usernames, which would allow users to connect without exchanging phone numbers. Status lists extend that philosophy from messaging into broadcasting.
Meanwhile, Status itself has been evolving well beyond its origins as a simple photo-and-text slideshow. The feature now supports music stickers, collages, longer videos and interactive elements, pushing it closer to the social-media-style story format pioneered by Snapchat and refined by Instagram. In that context, finer audience controls are not merely a privacy feature. They are a precondition for people sharing more.
The feature remains in development and has not been confirmed for release. WhatsApp routinely tests tools that are later modified or quietly shelved. But the direction of travel is clear: the app wants Status to be a destination, not an afterthought. Letting users decide exactly who is in the audience is how it gets there.
