Site Navigation

iTasveer is in news as they recently announced a deal with Microsoft. If you have Vista, you can order photos right from Windows explorer, without needing to visit any website at all. Pretty neat. They also announced Doodlepad, a new feature with which you can custom design your own tshirts/mugs and order them online. Good to see some innovation in this space. Clearly, these features make them stand apart from others in this crowded space. However, digital camera + decent Internet access + Windows Vista is not a combination that is prevalent at least today in India, so it will be a little while before they start reaping real benefits from this. (esp. with all the steps Microsoft is taking to prevent piracy in Vista).

Obviously (its hard to not imagine mobile while speculating the next disruptive innovation in the Indian context), the next question is - will we see someone striking a similar partnership with Airtel, Reliance or some other mobile network? So that people can just click with their high res mobile phone cameras (or click with their standalone camera and transfer to mobile) and order prints from mobile directly. We are starting to see such services coming on mobile. For e.g. recently Reliance announced a deal with Naukri.com, stating that you can search for job listings with Naukri.com login from your Reliance mobile phone. Interestingly, the news also mentions in the end that they are looking for “other such content providers”. I do understand that ordering prints type service is more difficult than information fetch (news, email, search) type of applications because of transaction processing and large data transfers involved, but it will surely happen some time. The question is when?

Thoughts? Am I too much ahead of times to think of it at this point? Maybe our friends from iTasveer, MeraSnap, Picsquare can shed some light here. Are they thinking of any mobile angle at all?

Local search has been a very interesting challenge and alot of old and new companies are taking a stab. Lets look at this entire continuum and where each player sits. Radical idea is to find information that is geo tagged. This information can be as granular as lat-long or as coarse as a city name. So when you setup a shop to solve local search, first question is how do you collect & tag this information? How do you present this informaton so that it creates the most wholesome experience? How do you make money from this high investment business?

You can start with smart-crawling the web. I call it smart crawling because you dont crawl everything like a general purpose search engine. You need to identify and extract local information given a webpage. Dedupe listings that occurs on multiple pages. Lets says you write a kickass neural network that labels & classify this information. How does it know which one is real address? How do you verify the information you have is correct? You start thinking about this and realize that there are directory listing services that is accumulating such information forever. So you get feeds from yellow pages. There is a problem of matching different feed formats along with crawled information. This is where most of the current search engines are today. Google/Yahoo/Live/Guruji can do “crawl + feeds” using existing infrastructure.

Read the rest of this entry »

We recently spoke to tolmolbol, one of the newer players in India trying to make a mark in online local community/search space. This space is already crowded with the names like Ilaaka, Burrp, Onyomo, Sulekha. Ourcity and Guruji. Not to forget Google, Yahoo and Live search are/will be joining this game in India. This space now officially qualifies for “Indian fragmentation syndrome” similar to travel & DVD rental. Opportunity is there but not enough to attract a national play. Lot of smaller companies will trail the blaze and accumulate disjoint information about various localities in India. This should eventually get consolidated and customers are going to be benefitted with yet another addition. Here is tolmolbol (this name reminds me of tol-mol-ke-bol - the famous game show based on Monty hall problem), but that is just me.

1. What motivated you to start this venture?

The biggest motivation for starting tolmolbol stemmed from our frustration with not being able to find and locate dependable information about our localities. We couldn’t find a single online resource that provided a directory of local businesses and services across Indian cities. There was no platform at a national level for Indians to collectively voice their opinions about local businesses. And we were fed up with experiencing first-hand the indifferent attitude of service providers towards customers. Furthermore, there was no single portal for the entire neighborhood where members of the community could share tips, post classifieds, communicate events, meet interesting people in their vicinity or leverage the knowledge of their local social networks. tolmolbol is the outcome of our effort to address all of these problems.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this guest post written by Mr. Sanjay Mehta - the president of Homeindia.com, he shares his experiences and insights from doing online retail business geared towards Indian customers. He describes Homeindia’s journey over the period of last 7 years, that has seen it all - the start, the boom, the bust and today’s rising wave. The article presents excellent all-rounded points on various business aspects including but not limited to product positioning, customer focus and sailing through the highs and lows of economic conditions. Needless to say, the article has lots to take home for entrepreneurs in the Indian Internet space. Many thanks to Sanjay for sharing this with our readers. Feel free to present your thoughts and even ask questions to Sanjay, if you have any. [If you have a story to share which fits the theme of iLeher and would like to publish, please contact madhur at iLeher dot com]

Here goes the story in his own words:

When you think retail, you think walk-in, you think proximity. And yet, we are running a retail business where we are thousands of miles away from our nearest customer!

Yes, I refer to our e-retail business, running at Homeindia.com, where we have focused exclusively on customers outside of India. Even today, nearly 7 years after starting this business, it fascinates me that sitting in a small office in Lower Parel, Mumbai, we are selling ethnic Indian products to customers located in far flung areas, all over the world.

We evolved into this. Starting from a pioneering, first of its kind web-to-snail-mail service (“Online Post”) that we launched in 1998, then extending to other services for NRIs, and then to a gifting service for NRIs, and finally evolving into this present state of an e-retailer, catering to NRIs and non-Indians, outside India.

I thank Madhur for inviting me to make this guest posting, and I take the opportunity to share some stray thoughts emerging out of the learnings of our journey of the last 6-7 years:

1. While we could have opened up our store to the Indian customer, it is clear that the customer in India is very different from the customer outside India. A single brand, a single URL will be hard pressed to do justice to both of these customer types, at the same time. From merchandising, to presentation, to pricing, and to the key value proposition offered, these will be entirely different for the two customer types. Even the quality of service that one needs to give to the customer, and which one can afford to give to the customer, varies a lot, between these two markets. As an organization also, this means two different cultures or attitudes, which cannot co-exist easily. So where we see many others attempting to address both of these markets simultaneously, it is our firm belief that we need to be focused to a market, and ensure that we have the best offering for that market.

2. Back in 1998-99, the decision to go NRI or India, was a simple one. There was no serious user base or market in India, and the NRI space certainly appeared far more attractive. Today, one may actually sit back and think – where should one rather be. And of course, each one will come to their own conclusion. For us, it still remains a relatively simple question to answer. The Indian consumer still has a distance to go before he embraces online shopping, especially for products that are otherwise in easy reach of his, in the offline world. There will be some early adaptors, and there will be specific unique product niches, where traction will happen. However on a mass acceptance front, I believe, it is still a while away. On the other hand, the market outside India has got only more attractive. In addition to the NRI, we see an increasing interest in things Indian, from foreigners – Americans, Europeans, etc. With the increasing interest in India, there is an increasing interest in things Indian. And while finding the specific customer/s for Indian products in the large global population may be like finding needles in a haystack, yet, once found, these needles are made of gold and diamond tipped – essentially in terms of what they buy, the transaction size, etc. So the search is worth the while!

Read the rest of this entry »

[via Atanu]

Internet is still a niche market segment in India, a point borne out by the numbers. Anand Sridharan, in his analysis of the current state of the Internet in India, captures the reasons behind it and also takes a look ahead as to what it takes to increase the usage of Internet in India.
It is well understood that if the Internet economy is to really take off in India, it has to reach down from the upper (and upper-middle class sections) and penetrate the lower middle class. This is the population segment that the mobile phone market has been able to penetrate and consequently made India one of the fastest growing mobile markets in the world!

If cheap (”Made for India”) handsets and ever-reducing call charges have made the mobile ubiquitous in India, can the Internet (and computing) industry in India ride on the equivalent - cheap computers and affordable internet access? Novatium, a Chennai-based company co-founded by Rajesh Jain and Ashok Jhunjhunwala, seems to think so. Novatium which aims to provide “Computing for the next billion” uses thin computing to reduce costs for end-users. Thin computing, in Novatium’s own words, is “the process by which the complex computing tasks move to a central server (s) and the client desktop is relatively simple to just access what is being processed. The client desktop also becomes the interface between the human and the complex processor of the server. Some of the immediate benefits that this process delivers is a hugely manageable, secure and optimized computing setup”

MSNBC/Newsweek features Novatium.

What do you think? Is this the way computing will reach the next billion? Does Novatium have what it takes?

Rediff has this detailed interview with the CEO of Info Edge Sajeev Bikhchandani, where he talks about about the eventful journey of Naukri.com. Its a typical story how legends are made - clear vision, immaculate execution, unperturbed perseverance and a bit of luck - leading his way from rags to riches, garage to IPO (the first for an Indian Internet company in Indian markets)

Key takeaways from the interview:

1. Idea: Saw a real opportunity from his own experience. Notice at first his idea was just to aggregate all the job listings - computer and later the Internet just happened to be the medium to realize the idea.
2. Funding at the right time: Like he says, this may be just his luck, but he raised money right before the bust happened, as a result of which, he used the money much more frugally compared to what a lot of other companies were doing at the time.
3. Early mover: Was one of the first Internet companies that targeted Indians in India, more importantly for something that people cared about, not just to copy one of the ideas straight from the West and hope to get lucky.
4. Persistence: Waited for 10+ years before he drew any salary from the company. That requires quite a bit of determination. But like he says, doing what you really want to (with some alternate source of money to make ends meet) really keeps you going.
5. Risk: It’s interesting - he makes conflicting statements at two different places (unless I am misunderstanding something) in the interview. At one place he says real risk is often times less than that perceived risk and then the converse of it at another place. But the bottom line is that you have to evaluate your risks before making the jump and over time you will manage to find your cushions and buffers.

I will say though that Naukri.com being the poster child of Indian Internet success, could do with some makeover in the UI. The overall impression the sites gives on the first look is as if its 5 years behind the times. If nothing else, stop those annoying popups and remove those flashing gifs from bulletin board on either side of the page.

One of the most prevalent business models in Internet companies is advertising. Here is a look at different types of business models that exist on the Internet around advertisements. The basic aim of advertisements is to generate leads for the advertiser. The beauty of CPC (cost per click) advertising on the Internet is that the vendors (advertisers) need to pay only when they actually get the traffic, which makes their marketing costs much more accountable compared to traditional banner advertising. Realizing the ROI that this promises to the advertisers, in the US, people have set up companies that solely do this - generate leads for online vendors. Of course any website that has google ads already does that. But let’s talk about sites that are dedicated to generating leads without focusing on any other content at all. One of the categories of sites that is quite popular in the US markets is the “deals” sites. These sites publish the latest and the greatest deals and discounts regularly, some updated throughout the day. People hungry for deals keep coming back to the site to check out the latest deals. Because of the timely nature of these deals, the daily traffic volume is high and since these sites publish hot deals that tend to expire soon, the clickthrough ratio is also very high. FatWallet is the big daddy of all such deal sites. There are dime a dozen other deals sites like edealinfo.com, deals2buy.com and more.

Naturally the trend is already beginning to catch on in the Indian markets. If you look at the google trends data for “online deals” India is not too low down on the list. So we had a chat with a couple of players - allindiadeals.com (publishes deals in online shopping space), tripmela.com (publishes deals in online travel space) - to get insights into what they are doing to get the latest deals on their sites and to drive the hungry for deals traffic on their sites:

Sources of data: Both of these sites use a combination of feeds from vendors and handpicked deals from variety of websites.

Freshness of data: allindiadeals updates the site once a day while tripmela does that 2-3 times a week.

Business model: The source of revenue for both of these sites comes from a mix of CPC based listings plus google ads on the site.

Marketing: Both the sites realize the power of SEO and are doing things to promote their site high up in the organic search results. allindiadeals uses the power of social networks like orkut and other online communities to spread the word. tripmela has used techniques like press releases and Search Engine Marketing to buy sponsored listings in search engines. tripmela also delivers weekly newsletters to the inboxes of the registered users and a lot of customers seem to like this feature. (Tip: Doing RSS based subscription could also be quite useful)

Problems they are facing: This is probably the most interesting data that we got:
1. allindiadeals says initially people were not really familiar with the concept of online deals, although with the competition increasing among the online merchants, people are starting to get it now.
2. Both players mentioned that a lot of the online vendors do not understand the power of CPC based advertisement, as a result of which they are not willing to give data feeds. This is starting to change as well, with the increasing competition and increasing advertising budgets for online companies.

Bottomline
It’s clear from our conversation that a lot of merchants still do not understand the concept of lead generation and CPC advertising. We think as the market evolves, lead generation phenomenon will pick up steam - online vendors will realize the importance of CPC based advertising and they will start providing feeds of their data. As a result, we will start seeing more players who will get into lead generating business in the form of comparison shopping, vertical searches, affiliates and deals publishing sites.

Ecommerce is very important to sustain the growth of Internet. The ecosystem just doesn’t complete without ecommerce. After all that’s where the real money exchange happens between users and businesses. All other revenue models and businesses are just supporting, they cannot stand on their own. For example, there cannot be much expansion in ad revenues, or revenues from affiliates unless customers are ready to buy stuff that businesses are trying to advertise in the first place. We know that it is going to happen. Today or tomorrow, ecommerce will take off. It has happened in travel, it has happened in matrimony, jobs. Online retail is the next important and the biggest sector. There’s already a good number of sites that have decent offerings, but something feels lacking in them. Some of them are better than others in some respects, but none of them seem to be really tailor-made for Indian infrastructure and audience. Here is a list of points that we have come up to make a site better suited for users in the Indian context.

Payment system
People are not used to online payments. Forget online payments, people living outside of metros don’t even do a lot of credit card transactions. Customers need to be educated about this. They need to be given extra assurance that these transactions are safe. They should be given multiple payment options. Credit Card, Cash on Delivery, Cheque, Net Banking are just few of the days. Just today came across these two pieces of news, which talk about how BharatMatrimony (payment at local post office) and Yatra (payment at Web World) are using interesting ways of making payments easy for the users - quite neat.

Customer Service
Customer service is not a concept that a lot of Indian companies are associated with. (Isn’t it ironic that India considering that world’s leading companies have their call centers in India?) In any case, customers need to be assured that they will get top notch service. Phone numbers, live chat are some of the ways. Providing them assurance of smooth returns/exchanges will help quite a bit as well.

Shipping (delivery) assurance
Postal service is not exactly something that people in India count on. Of course most ecommerce companies use private courier companies for delivery, which are much more reliable. This needs to be spelled out explicitly on the site. Users need to be given guarantees about this.

Offline presence
We have written about this in details here. Having offline presence just gives a feeling that its all “real”. This can be a very important psychological factor for many users.

Mobile angle
We have seen a lot of companies using interesting ways to promote their service using mobile as a medium. This needs to be continued. Shipping info, tracking, price alerts, there are so many things that can be done using mobile. One of the biggest things that will help is mobile payments, when that hits the mainstream.

Price break
All things said and done, there is no real compelling reason for people to buy online unless they get a real break in the price. And this should happen. Businesses avoid the cost of building and maintaining physical stores and hiring employees by selling stuff online. At least a part of these savings should be passed on to the customers. And again customers need to be given proofs that they are getting non-trivial savings because they are buying online. Schemes like price matching will also definitely help.

Local language
The largest circulated daily in India is not English. To reach the critical mass, Internet has to go local language in India. Ecommerce sites typically have very little content. Having options to see them in local languages can be a very useful value add.

User interface
Keep it simple. Lot of Internet users are new and will be new in this growth phase. Lot of them would be doing their shopping first time. There is no point having complicated Ajax site or having a site full of flashy ads or million options for customizing what users are buying. Remember that most of Internet users still use dial-up, so the simpler the site, the faster it will be and more reach it will have.

What do you think? Why would you buy online, or why do you NOT buy online today?