Beyond Google Search – The Platforms For The Internet of Actions

The below post is edited from an answer given to ET for this story. This article is 2 yr old. Republished today. The rise of Mobile is a big shift in the way Internet is used, thereby influencing commerce over the Internet. In developed economies it is the desktop based users who have started spending …

What the U.S. can learn from India’s move toward a cashless society

Looking from Silicon Valley upon the progress that India has made in building a digital infrastructure, I am in awe.  The U.S. tech industry fancies itself as the global leader in innovation, yet India has leapt far ahead of it.  Silicon Valley’s tech investors hype complex technologies such as Bitcoin and blockchain.  But India, with simple …

85 Things I learned being a CEO

It is going to be an extremely hard job. No amount of preparation or education is going to prepare you for what it demands. You will feel like quitting at so many instances. Don’t, just persist. It’s a lonely job. There will be no one who you can tell everything about your work. Uncertainty is …

eKYC – Know Your Customer unassisted using Aadhaar, OTP and Face Biometrics

Context Know Your Customer (KYC) is essential for obtaining Financial, Healthcare, Insurance, and Telecom services around the world. In the Indian context, until Aadhaar opened up its APIs, KYC was a laborious process costing billions to services providers and inconveniencing customers with a mountain of paper identity documents. The thoughts here are confined to the …

Freemium Model for SaaS – The Good, The Bad, and The In-between

In 1999, Vistaprint, a four-year-old French startup, launched its internet-based printing services in the highly competitive US market. Going against the popular advice to target the bigger companies (who would spend more money on printing), the Vistaprint team went for the micro businesses (who were then considered as a terrible market, as they were close …

The Need for Product Thinking and Successes

“The role of a product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible.” – Marty Cagan, Partner, Silicon Valley Product Group In a few simple words, this quote capture the essence of what this article is all about. At a recent conference with several venture capitalists, product managers and executives from …

On-Premise or On-Demand Product Modeling: cloud is in your court

Do you sound familiar with the situation explained below? You started out with a Custom Off-the-Shelf (COTS) CRM product suite, but your user adoption changed dramatically, owing to Scale and Technology Transformation, thus leaving you to think over to a new deployment model. Or perhaps, you purchased your Point of Sale (POS) system many years …

Disruption of Chit Funds and the Role of the India Stack.

Chit Funds are indigenous financial institutions in India. It is a mechanism that combines credit and savings in a single scheme. In a chit fund scheme, a group of individuals come together for a predetermined time period and contribute to a common pool at regular intervals. Every month, up until the end of the tenure …

Strategies for MNCs Engaging with Start-ups in Emerging Markets

For large global companies, forging effective partnerships with high-potential start-ups is easier said than done. The very traits that make such start-ups potentially complementary as partners also make it difficult for large companies to engage with them in the first place. Multinational corporations often struggle event to identify promising potential start-up partners, while start-ups find …

Action For India’s 6th Annual Forum invites FinTech startups

Just about two months ago, the nation attempted the massive ‘demonetization’ initiative at an unprecedented scale to clean-up illicit money and move towards greater economic equity and justice. As a consequence, the realm of digital money management and transactions saw a burgeoning growth and needless to say, this accelerated the vision of ‘Digital India’, the …

Mr. Sikka, you are right.

For any of you who may have missed Vishal Sikka communication to Infosys employees on the new year, read here. The problem that Vishal Sikka is alluding to is largely connected to the identity of our IT Industry today. We’re the ‘outsourcing’ destination for the world – and companies like Infosys actually helped create the …

PAY-IT-FORWARD PARADOX… The More You Give, The More You Receive

Ever noticed how the busiest of people are often the ones that find time more easily than others? It is about making the time versus having the time! When you make time despite busy schedules and packed days to share your experience and perspectives it helps so many people, definitely more than you could individually …

Product Manager as the Wicket Keeper

Wishing you all a very happy 2017, may you get the guts and courage to make the change this year. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, one of the most successful cricketers is certainly an inspiration for all of us – cricket fans and Indians. While he is a famous and winning captain, probably being a wicket keeper …

Simplified Incorporation And Documentation Procedure

Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) has further simplified the ease of doing business in India by introducing SPICe forms to further digitize the company registration process. The form INC 29 was originally used to incorporate companies within a couple of days. Though this form simplified the process of incorporation, key stakeholders and professionals felt that …

BHIM (Android/*99#) & AadhaarPay

This afternoon the Prime Minister unveiled BHIM – an Android app from NPCI with an equivalent USSD-based *99# service. Additionally, recently one of the banks launched AadhaarPay – a capability that allows merchants to collect payments from consumers with their Aadhaar# and fingerprint. There has been a bit of confusion about the role of Aadhaar …