Brave For Free

Two weeks ago, in a journey that brought back memories of hunting down Casio organizers, I trudged the corridoors of Funan Digital Mall in Singapore till I got my hands on an iPhone 6. Here's my impression of it two weeks later. Right off the bat, I must say I love it. Yes, I'm an Apple fanboy who has had an iPhone for many years, (though I've used an Android on and off and before that lived on a Blackberry). I also have a couple of iPads and iPods, though never a Mac. That bias aside, however, the iPhone 6 is a seriously nice phone - lovely build quality, beautiful screen, wonderful to hold in your hand, blazngly fast and as loaded as you can want. Mine is a 128GB, though I'm still wondering what I to do with the 80GB still left after I put in every song and photo I had. As phone goes there is little to quibble about with what it has. First, the size. Yes, Jobs was right in that it is a bit of a stretch - a few things require finger gymnastics. However, he was wrong t...

Social is the new buzzword, and what a loud buzz that is nowadays. In the last post I described my theory of levels of social media - Presence , Participation , Penetration and Platform . Presence was passive, Participation was active entry into the world of social media. Penetration and Platform are quite a bit more complex. This part two of the series gets into the next P – Penetration . I’ll need another post for Platform . To understand where I’m going with this, lets see what a social network really is. The web started off as a way to connect content together. Any piece of content could easily and simply refer to another piece of content, even if it was on a different server in a different country. A browser allowed people to move from content item to content item, thus making the universe of the world wide web a wonderful store of content. People soon realized that this could be extended to all kinds of transactions – one could pass not just content but messages and info...

Social is the new buzzword, and what a loud buzz that is nowadays. Everyone from sedate bank to hippy dippy start-up wants to be "social". Being unsocial nowadays is like admitting to a fondness for bellbottoms - hopelessly anachronistic and just a little worrying. Its not unlike the early days of the Internet where everybody wanted to "be on the web" and "have a domain". What does social mean, though – does it mean putting up a Facebook page? Does it mean obtaining a twitter handle? Does it mean encouraging a bunch of people to like you on foursquare? And what does good this do my business anyway? This rush to keep up with the social Joneses lead to some absurd decisions. Companies put up, sometimes at considerable expense, a "Facebook presence" and then proceed to be puzzled when no benefit accrues from all this. As with many technologies in their early days, people glimpse vast potential but simply cannot figure out how to convert this potenti...

E-Commerce is close to my heart, and I have been asked many times in the recent past what I think of Flipkart buying Myntra. And really, the one thing I feel is dread. I really do like both Flipkart and Myntra. Both have good products, reliable service, convenient sites and great customer support. I have been frequent purchasers from both; everything from shoes to mobile phones. Both are businesses I hope will survive, as I hope e-commerce in general will. Why the dread, then? Its because I don't understand the deal, the reason FlipKart was willing to shell out a generous chunk of change to buy a good but not great brand. And what it seems to portend for the etailing category as a whole. People have pointed me to Facebook's purchase of Instagram or WhatsApp as the template, but I see more Compaq than WhatsApp in this deal. Instagram and WhatsApp were both global leaders, dominant in markets that Facebook was lagging in but hoping to penetrate. Myntra offers FlipKart neither - n...

When passing through a full body scan, a pat-down search and a baggage x-ray on your way to buying a coffee in your local mall, you know you live in the era of Security. It seems to me, however, that enterprise security operates under the sole premise that mal-intention can be prevented. Password policies, network restrictions, biometric sensors, intrusion detection, firewalls, access tokens, truckloads of technology all geared to one single goal - keep the bad guys out. Driven by fear of doomsday scenarios fed into you at numerous conferences, we treat every potential breach as a nuclear explosion and try to prevent it. I doubt anyone other than Jet Li can bring a jet down with a pocket knife (and by definition he's a rare talent), yet we – at great cost and inconvenience - make sure every pocket on a plane is empty of a knife. Even China does not have that many Jet Li's so for that kind of success ratio this is kinda expensive. Ignored here is the strategy of deterrence - mak...

Multi-channel – store, phone, online, mail-order - is finally maturing . For the longest time, retailers promised and customers expected this muti-headed hydra of a retailer present seamlessly across every channel, moving between channels with similar lack of seam, permitting mix & match of all kinds. For the longest time, reality was disappointingly different. Retailers spent the last decade launching anaemic web stores; proudly announcing that they were multi-channel and hence so much better than pure-play e-retailers. Unfortunately those feeble attempts remained the stuff of boardroom backslapping and upbeat press conferences - neither actual shoppers nor pure play e-tailers took much notice. Staples , John Lewis and a few others remained rare exceptions. What took so much time? Retailers aren't exactly clueless idiots, why didn't this get figured out a long time ago? Futurebazaar was exactly such an attempt; indeed many customers assumed automatically that we were mult...

In my last post , I talked about how giving up some of the trappings of physical retail is not without its costs. This post is about the flip side of that coin – in a way. What caught my eye was Wal-Mart's new facility allowing customers to pay cash for online purchases. The announcement (made a little over two months ago) comes with a twist unfamiliar to those Indians happy with cash on delivery – this one requires you to visit a Wal-Mart store to pay cash for what you bought on the Internet. After same-day pickups, this seems Wal-Marts latest attempt at that famous silver bullet that was supposed to defeat Amazon – multi-channel. Online shopping is still a small percentage of worldwide retail, but it is expanding far faster than the boring brick kinds. Profits may not be stellar, but growth certainly is - Amazon is climbing the ladder faster than an MBA on steroids. And physical retailers are feeling – if not the heat, then at least the smell of smoke from the flames. After ye...