Infinite thoughts

As the internet penetration increased over the last 2 decades, it also gave rise to digital subscriptions. The internet users slowly started developing trust in internet-based payments and that too on recurring payments. It probably started with the tech community using the recurring payment systems and slowly spreading that faith to non-tech-savvy users. There was also a phase when I started using the credit card for online transactions but wasn't comfortable storing the card details with the merchant. I used to enter the details every single time. (That is how I still remember the CC number that was in use at that time) In the late 2000's I was introduced to Ecom website development and since then it has been part of my professional as well as personal life. Over the years, I learned about the  PCI-DSS standard , and the extent to which the Ecom companies make an effort to protect consumer data. There have been instances of a data breach across the globe, but alon...

  It has been a while now since digital payments in India have become more mainstream. Although digital payment options were available to Indian consumers for a long time, the real growth happened after the demonetization in late 2016. PayTM jumped on the opportunity and benefited to a large extent as they already had the network, the infrastructure and marketing muscle to materialize the digital push. However, there were other players as well - MobiQuick wallet, PhonePe, GPay etc.  Another great enabler was the Indian invention called UPI by NPCI - Unified Payments Interface. Although the UPI was launched before the demonetization (Apr 2016), it wasn't understood enough by the masses. I remember an incident when I had tried convincing my vegetable vendor to accept UPI payment instead of insisting on cash. He was absolutely unsure and reluctant.  Fast Forward to 2022. The UPI payments are ubiquitous. Every nook and corner accepts the UPI payments. In fact, a person like ...

Government of India launched a very ambitious initiative on 25 Sept 2014 - Make In India . As anyone can guess this was to increase the investments in India in the core sectors such as manufacturing, biotechnology, aviation, construction and thus increasing the employment and  entrepreneurship.  Until now, we were getting only the news about who has promised investment in India and how much. But announcements usually outnumber actual actions. Now that it is little over a year from the start of the initiative, we are seeing some progress happening through this initiative. Xiaomi and Huawei have already started their manufacturing plants in India. Lenovo joined in recently with their Motorola smartphone plant near Chennai. Total proposals for investment received so far are said to be Rs. 1.10 lakh crore. While the three entities mentioned above would form only a tiny fraction, another news came in which was more heartening and encouraging. IITs - our elite institutes ...

Happened to read this news item in yesterday's Times. One of the NGO's had filed an RTI query which revealed that LIC has invested some 3.5k crores in Tobacco companies. NGO is questioning is it right thing to do when government is spending 10,000 crores on treatment of tobacco related illnesses. On the first look, the question looks very good and I got into answering it negative. But is it really bad? Is it unethical? Is it something morally incorrect? Is it wrong from business perspective? Here are my thoughts.. LIC is out there to make money. The consumers would want LIC to succeed so that they get their payouts, so that LIC keeps on giving them the insurance cover. Actually the NGO should be pushing to ban the tobacco industry completely, instead of asking government owned companies not to invest in tobacco related companies.    Now-a-days, investment patterns are so complex, it would be very difficult to predict, if my invested money is actually invested in ...

Some recent experiences. Except for one, rest are pretty good. Domino's Pizza : Few days back, I came to know that Domino's has started with online ordering system. With my recent adventures of online shopping, there was nothing to stop me and I ended up in ordering online. The experience was pretty smooth and hassle free. Given that it was first time, Meghana confirmed the order by calling up the concerned outlet. Incidentally, we checked the watch exactly at 30th minute and realized that the pizza hadn't reached us yet. And then it was hard to stop Meghana to call up the outlet to check what's happening with our pizza. To our surprise, when she mentioned that it is already past 30 mins, the outlet manager was kind/professional enough to agree to keep the "Domino's promise" and promptly asked us to call him back when the delivery boy reaches. The Delivery boy also gracefully returned some 300 bucks, no questions asked. The wonderful thing happened af...

Amongst many of the online shopping sites, Indiaplaza is becoming my favorite shopping site. User friendliness and multiple payment options being the two most important reasons. Some of the purchases include a personalized Parker Pen and quite a few books. The biggest shopping that I did was just two weeks back - Samsung Galaxy S2 - a gem!! Meghana was eying this piece since February this year. The mobile launched only recently, however, with a huge disappointment on the price front. Our expectation was somewhere around 24-25K given the feature set. The launch price was 33K!! Meghana had almost given up the hopes of owning it in near future and had started looking for other options. With none is site, I was seeing her desperation. And Indiaplaza came in to rescue :) It offered flat 3K discount on the listed price i.e. 30K, still a bit more than what we wanted it to be priced at. And one fine day, I received a discount coupon in my mail box, worth 1K. Net price - 29K. We tried the Sam...

Yipit is a daily deal aggregator which is providing value added service on top of the daily deals provided by various sites. As per this report on TechCrunch , the service currently caters to 335 deals in 32 cities and is having 250,000 subscriptions already. The value that Yipit adds is the interest based deals sent to you in an aggregated email. You can store your preferences (e.g. Restaurants and Yoga, but nothing on hair loss treatment) and based on that the deals will be sent to you. Of course, you would get the deals in your city or the city that you subscribe for. Another interesting value add is "deals near you". Apparently each deal is accompanied with location information, which is mapped with the address that you provide (optional) and then you can get the deals which are closer to your address. I feel this is a very cool aggregation and has very good potential, especially in the domain of location aware mobile app. I should be able to find ou...

While everyone is waiting for prices to come down in the real estate market, which won't happen anyways, even the virtual land is up for sell. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is all set to allow domain names including any suffixes. So far there was a standard list of domain suffixes available, but with this new scheme, anyone can claim domain name ending with any string. Read more at the times article or directly from ICANN website . Businesses would need to ensure they pick up right domain names, and now probably multiple such names to retain their internet identity and safeguard the customers. This could mean a lot of cash, which is really unnecessary, if all that I need to do is to redirect all such domains to my primary website. What it means for end users? Nothing much if you are a simple web surfer. You would still be able to reach the required website as you would usually rely on the search engine to give you the right URL. Ho...

Recently every newpaper and channel was flashing the stories of how airlines are looting customers when there was more demand. When there was political storm in Maharashtra and Karnataka, all the local political leaders were running to Delhi to make their own position strong and in this fight, the airlines decided to cash out the high demand vs low availability. Mumbai Delhi economy ticket was sold at Rs. 30000 to Rs 40000 during that period. The air prices may not be pinching you, me and many of us. However, what pinches is the mentality of cashing out to unreasonable levels during the peak demand period. The same mentality is observed even in the private travels business where they have point-to-point service (intercity buses). During Diwali, the fares are almost triple. Actually speaking the fares during normal demand period are set considering lower occupancy (may be 60 to 70%?) and if the bus is fully occupied, the travel is set to make good profit (to the tune of 30-40%?). Consi...

I happened to visit Big Bazaar today after a long time and was happily surprised not to have so much rush in the mall. I had always discouraged myself from visiting Big Bazaar for two reasons. One - the huge rush and second the congested arrangement inside the mall. I found More comparatively better than any other super market including Reliance Fresh and Spencer's . Last time when I visited Big Bazaar it had impressed me with the variety of grocery items available under one roof. This time I was amazed by the speed with which the billing was completed at the cash/credit counter. While the counters were still having a big queue and each customer having tens of items, I could not ignore that each item was getting correctly read by the bar code reader in the first attempt itself. It was a good to see this seamless operation as I have kind of got used to bad bar codes/readers in the More super market. It has been a constant observation that almost 15-20% items will be required to b...

Don't think so. At least in the context of Indian market. As per the established belief, market becomes a better place for consumers if there is fair competition. However, contrary to this, Indian market is establishing a fact that we don't care about the consumer, we all are competing against each other for the sloppiest service award. You might very well be aware about my opinion about the retail outlets like Reliance Fresh, More, Spencer's. They have one thing in common - not having stock when the consumer needs it most (weekends, holidays, month-ends etc) . On top of that all of them have started putting air-conditioning off or to the minimal level. In my opinion, most of these places have been built assuming that there will be artificial ventilation provided in terms of A/C. So when you turn off the A/C, people inside the store have no choice but to get drenched in sweat. When asked, the rep would embarrassingly tell you that A/C is not working. Recently, Pune has bee...

A powerful thought - make your customer to stay with you by choice and not out of compulsion!! One of my fellow colleagues spelt it out so well, it covers the basic principle of maintaining/increasing your customer base. The other day I needed to buy some sweets from the franchisee of a well known sweet mart. When I placed my order, I saw that the sweets, the pedhas, were all broken. I brought this to the notice of the salesperson, who outrightly rejected to change the broken pieces. To my surprise, same was the reaction from the shop owner. I decided to leave the shop without taking anything and proceeded to another franchisee few kilometers down the road. Thankfully, the salesperson was good and gave me good pedhas and some othe stuff. Looking at this whole episode now, I realized that I was visiting the first shop out of the need of a shop closer by and not as my choice. That fellow definitely has lost one customer now. If he'd have provided me with good sweets, I would have vis...

Had heard about this network for quite some time, finally today got registered with them. I am yet to explore the full strength of this networking site, but, nonetheless I am looking forward to a better experience. While talking about the social networking sites in Indian context, you can't miss Orkut . But unfortunately, it has failed to keep my interest over a period of time. I still login to Orkut check my friends' profiles, do some profile hopping but that's it. It's not keeping me hooked on to that service any more. Hoping to get some good things from this linked in service. Here is my profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mandarbehere Related links: Hatred

Doesn't seem so. Have a look at the latest report in Outlook India - Was It All Track-II ? (Registration required, else pick up Sept 20, 2007 issue of Outlook). Last year I had quoted a story from Outlook India, on Lalu, how has he turned around the future of railways, in an article - Revisiting past belief . I was very curious to know the details of how was this achieved. All of the media was zapped by the numbers thrown by Lalu's ministry. But as this report reveals, most of it is just a play with numbers than actual profit. In addition, he has succeeded in extracting more money from "Aam Aadami" in various ways. Unfortunately, no one from media seemed to have followed up on this huge success and revealed the truth, except for Outlook. This latest report details out how all these figures were tossed up to show a huge profit. Some examples: Declaring trains superfast without any reduction in the time taken Mangling with the "TatkaL scheme"...

For past few weeks we (me and my better half ) are continuously observing a steep downfall in the service provided by the retail chains such as Pyramid, TruMart, Spencer's Daily (formerly Food World) and the likes. Being in software industry and not yet reached to a level where one can slip out of office at 6 PM, we invariably end up visiting these supermarkets on the weekends. Typically, most of them are out of stock for half the things that we have on our list to purchase. Be it a common thing like atta or something not so common. If you are lucky enough to find the stock, it would be way old, close to the expiry date. More to your unfortune, you would spot some life, which we don't dare to it, inside the packed food item. We initially thought it's just us who are not that fortunate to find the required stuff. But after repeated instances at TruMart, Bhandarkar Road, we approached the customer helpdesk only to find that they don't keep the complaint book. To our surpr...