Infinite thoughts

Last few days I have been hearing the radio ads by Jay-Vijay motors on various radio channels in Pune.  First one is for persuading the Volkswagen owners to get their vehicles to Jay-Vijay motors for servicing. The punch line is that "you" get your vehicle to their service center in the heart of the city and do not rely on some unknown person to do pickup and delivery. Unknown driver may cause damage to your Volkswagen car.  The second one is for availing attractive discount on the Volkswagen cars between 21-Jun and 23-Jun (yeah, for three days and it looks like the ad started running today morning itself).  Jay-Vijay motors is located near Managla Theater and the service station is very much at the same place.  AFAIK, Jay-Vijay motors has only one competitor in Pune area and that is B.U.Bhandari, whose showroom is located on Pashan road near Abhimanshri Society and the service station is near Wakad on Pune-Bangalore Highway. So every Volk...

A year back, I blogged about the " Mobile Number Portability " and its possible usage in India.  While I was predicting that the customer would still be cribbing, albeit for the new provider, since every provider appears to be providing same quality of service. However, today's news made me aware that I had forgotten about a particular aspect completely. Willingness of the operators to let go of the existing customer - it seems to be playing a key role in making MNP not so widely used in India even after a year. As per the current statistics only about 2 percent subscribers have opted for MNP, whereas in other countries the percentage has been in the range of 4 to 16 percent. Even TRAI was expecting the usage of this facility by about 10% of the subscribers. A quick search on MNP issues, landed me with this page, which is talking of the same issues which TRAI has pointed out in today's report .  I wonder if this is cartel. All providers deciding to keep their...

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...

I have been watching the current happenings in the Indian mobile market and have made some interesting observations. Idea Cellular has launched a big campaign about Mobile Number Potability. I blogged about my view on MNP here . Interestingly, MNP can not work without collaboration and n/w-s/w readiness from all the mobile operators in a circle. And even then only one of the operators is investing so much money in the advertisement and others are completely ignoring it. Similarly only Airtel seems to be behind projecting 3G as their USP . While this is a true that almost all the players have the 3G Bandwidth available and would be launching it more or less this quarter (Vodafone and Airtel are definitely launching it this quarter, no clue about Idea 3G yet) Vodafone is just continuing with it's sluggish advertisements of "happy to help" and "wherever you go". No signs of MNP and 3G being advertised. [Interesting Update: While searching for Airtel website, Googl...

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...

Long wait is getting over. Soon all the Indians will be blessed with this fantastic service, mobile number portability , which will enable a subscriber to retain the number while changing the service provider. Being a technical person working in the Telecom domain, I had been part of the system/software upgrade that the western Telecom operators were making to comply with the WNP (wireless number portability) few years back. I was so much in want of this facility in India since then. Now that it is here, I am actually a bit skeptical about it's use to the customers. While I talk to my friends, colleagues or even when I read on twitter, everyone is complaining about their own service provider for mobile service. A vodafone customer, which I am, complains about network coverage and expensive data plans and wishes if I could go to Airtel or Idea, whereas I have seen similar complaints from Airtel or Idea customers too. I am more or less reaching to a conclusion that every provider has...

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...