Category: Business

The Big Fat Geek’s thoughts on Business and how business processes can be automated via workflows and technology.

Rise of Social Media in E-commerce

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Rise of Social Media in E-Commerce

If you have an e-commerce start-up and are just starting your marketing outreach program, then this is a great infographic which can be of help.

Social Media can be used by organizations for ATL activities such as branding and for BTL activities such as promotions. The visual and witty element inherent in social media helps brands to sell well. The infographic above shares some stats which are quite high and make a marketing manager relook at Social as one of their channels.

For some sites such as Pinterest where the look of the product on display really matters, e-commerce becomes a natural extension. Go to any of the boards on the site and you will find atleast a series of photos which turn the social media site into a catalog of retail products.

Add to this, people love posing for pictures on the new products they have. There’s a whole element of showing off the latest purchase through unboxing videos, through product reviews.

Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

Every technology that is embraced by the world goes through a process of adoption. Gartner instituted this as the hype cycle.

What is the Hype Cycle?

The hype cycle talks about how any technology goes through the process of being talked about, being heralded, being written off and finally being adopted in mainstream businesses.

The graph you see above you shows the x-axis as the different stages of technology adoption, starting from the trigger or the invention of that technology, to the expectations of that technology by the enthusiasts, to the stage where it is discarded by early adopters to being finally understood and put to good use by smart users.

Obviously on the y-axis you have the expectations of the world.

Gartner brings in a third dimension to this graph by indicating a time period on when the technology will be a mainstream one. In this graph for example, the Cloud Computing technology is supposed to go mainstream within the next 2 to 5 years. This was made in 2012, so to interpret it correctly we should say that Cloud Computing will be embraced by all around 2014. People who are following the news of Cloud Computing can relate to the Trough of Disillusionment!

How do you interpret the Hype Cycle?

The hype cycle represents the time when a certain technology gets adopted by businesses. So, it has different implications for different people.

Software Developer

Learn to work with this technology early on, preferably in the Slope of Enlightenment phase. It will open up doors to many career pathways. Learn technology while everyone else is learning and learn it fast!

CTO of a start-up

Basing your product on a certain technology base will help your start-up catch the eyes of an investor. Your organization needs money and making the smart move to get the market talking about your technology adoption can get you that added PR. Keep an eye out for technologies lying in that Trough of Disillusionment phase, see how they can mesh with your product/services. Try a few prototypes, it’s well worth the efforts.

CTO of a mature organization

More often than not, you would be in charge of the operations team as well. In some few cases, you would also be the visionary of the organization (this should actually be your role). Try to find technologies which are about to hit the Plateau of Productivity and see which ones suit your requirements. It will bring efficiencies in your operations.

Keep in mind, that for most of these cases the idea would be to beat the competition in adopting a certain technology, so the focus would be on adopting the technology before it becomes mainstream.

At the end of the day, it is all Hype

Hype is after all extensive publicity. It is used to get the attention of people.

Bear in mind that if you do not want undue attention and if it is not broken, then you do not need to fix it.

However, some times you do get cues on possible disruptive technologies, be on top of those, since they have the potential to change your world. For e.g the way aeroplanes changed the shipping industry.

Sometimes all talk is still action!

Free to Play != Pay to Win

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

There have been games and there have been great games. Most of these games require a huge amount of time and effort to create and maintain. Along with just the technical overheads, there is also the community management aspect of the game. In short, if a company or a publishing house is releasing a game, they have to make money. Otherwise it will not be sustainable, and the gaming community which is playing that game will have to rely on the developer to keep supporting that game. Having said that, there are still few games which are still played, are free and have a large team of developers supporting them.

Continue reading “Free to Play != Pay to Win” →

With Foodpanda Good Food is a click away!

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

I have always believed that a person can live off the internet. With virtual offices and office-less organizations being a reality now, one can operate perfectly without leaving their house. Having said that, ordering food online was not being done so well in India … yes there are many people who are trying to do this for quite some time now, however I believed no one had nailed the experience.

Until today!

FoodpandaI decided to give Foodpanda a try. The site features many restaurants in India with their menus. I went to find the nearby restaurants in Mumbai. You can choose to directly go to your favourite restaurant and start ordering, or you can provide your locality and area and find interesting joints from where you could order. All online.

I decided to discover places and found a place called Rocket Sandwiches … the prices were affordable and the menu looked great. After 10 minutes, I was done ordering and the order was confirmed!

Foodpanda Order
The order which I placed on Foodpanda

The good part about the site is that the expectations and the wait time were given on the site for each of these restaurants. These wait times are fairly accurate and I was pleasantly surprised that the order arrived at my doorstep in the same amount of time.

The Pros

  • Simple site and to the point
  • The ordering process works and does not require you to be a rocket scientist
  • All the information you would want while ordering food is provided
  • Entire process is automated, I did not have to talk to a single person throughout the process
  • Good way to explore your neighbourhood joints or order food if you are in a new locality
  • The site keeps track of all my orders and allows me to quickly re-order the same items (I’ll just have my regular!!)

The Cons

Yes, there are a few of those!

  • There are quite a few modal pop-ups (which open-up as a separate layer of the page) in the site. Thankfully, you can close those pop-ups.
  • Ditto for the site-chat. If I do not wish to chat, then why is the functionality asking me to chat.

All in all, I am going to keep using this site!

Saving your Paper Trail

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

 

In the course of our lives, we create a large paper trail which we take with us as a means of identifying who we are, this trail involves

  • Identification proofs such as driver’s license, pan cards, UID (hope that works!), ration cards
  • Bills (telephone, electricity, credit cards) and their respective receipts
  • Mark sheets and Passing certificates (and thank god I have gone through that phase!)
  • Certifications
  • Insurance policies and other financial documents (pass books, cheque books, shares)

The list of paper documents we manage is endless … in fact as I am writing this, I know that there is one drawer-full of electricity bills in my house, all of my family members have a separate file for certificates and documents which is at least 2 inches thick. Despite of maintaining this growing trail of papers, when the time comes to fill taxes (which should have been a mundane task since I have been doing it for the past decade of my working life), I end up running around till the last-minute.

The problem?

A paper storage and retrieval system which is messy at best and chaotic at the worst. I am not alone in this war against documents, businesses suffer the same problem as well. For start-ups, the first 5 years go in peace, in the sixth year though, there is a drastic need to get all of your papers in place. That includes TDS filings, bills for incidentals, purchase documents, sales receipts … the list goes on. So what is to be done?

This is where Document Storage Solutions come into play

Document Storage involves storage and management of important documents, records management for example or simple archival of the existing documents to be fetched at a later time. These solutions are also useful for governments, for example the UK government does use strong record management facilities to support their Freedom of Information requests from the citizens. However, FOI can only be useful where the document is actually stored, what about those  documents which are destroyed? Some problems are beyond the scope of Document Storage :-)

What is important for us here is that sometimes maintaining and storing all these paper documents becomes an issue (in terms of space, in terms of finding the documents at the right time), and that’s why services which can effectively maintain these services are being founded and I find them just the solution for saving you (or your organization’s) paper trails.

Discount Sites driving Business

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment

I am a big fan of e-commerce and Indian e-commerce especially. Having worked in the web development field for more than a decade, and having seen multiple start-ups in the e-commerce and e-learning domains, I love the fact that this industry is still booming. What drives this is simple retail sales.

The sheer number of sites who have set up shop within the past two years is mind boggling. With large foreign multi-nationals also entering this market, the influx of money to the country has also strengthened the economy. Obviously with a limited number of consumers (although this is a significant number), and growing number of providers, the competition had to go up.

To battle competition, services and sites started providing deep discounts. Consumers started using these deep discounts to make spot purchases, which drew sales for different service providers.

So much was the power of these spot sales that multiple sites started aggregating these discount coupons and discount sites were born. Sites such as Cuponation.in have spawned and boosted the e-commerce market in the country.

Now why should a consumer like you and me visit a discount site like Cuponation?

The answer is simple, getting a sweet deal on a product which you otherwise would have bought at a full price!

This is like the NET50 coupon of Dominos which you keep handy whenever you want to buy a pizza … have your cake and eat it too!

So why should a service provider look at registering on such sites … hmmm … to be honest, at a business level, you have to start thinking about the cost of sales of an individual customer versus the cost of a discount. If for a 1000 INR product, my cost of sales is INR 160, then I am more than happy to provide a 10% discount on that product since that would drive up my sales.

Another way of looking at this matter is if the contribution (revenues – costs) is positive and I am looking only at the revenues (in which case most likely I am VC funded ;-) ), then I would want a sales promotion like this to drive up my sales.

So it’s a win-win deal. The end customer is getting a good deal on a product he wants to buy, the seller is getting higher sales, and the intermediary (Cuponation in our case) is getting the commissions.