What’s happening at the Google Impact Challenge? Here’s a quick look

What’s happening at the Google Impact Challenge? Here’s a quick look

By Prathamesh Patil

Search giant google is inviting votes for its Google Impact Challenge, an initiative aimed at spotting and nurturing entrepreneurship for the betterment of human life thorough technology. As a part of the imitative it has shortlisted 10 Indian Non-Profit ideas aiming to tackle a wide array of issues ranging from sanitation, energy to education.

Of these 10 finalists, four winners will get Global Impact Awards of Rs. 3 crore each and mentoring to deliver on their project.
Jury Member consisting of Anu Aga: Ex-Chairperson Thermax & Active Social Worker, Nikesh Arora: Chief Business Officer at Google Inc, Jacquelline Fuller: director of giving at Google Inc, Ram Shriram: Founding Board Member at Google Inc. , Jayant Sinha: Managing Director at Omdiyar Network will declare three winners along with one people’s choice winner on 31st October.

Here is a quick look at the 10 shortlisted finalists:

1. Prayas Energy Group – Monitoring dashboard to improve power supply quality
Plans to improve power distribution quality in India by deploying a network of real-time sensors to monitor power supply provided by utility companies. Consumers, civil societies, researchers and regulatory commissions will have open access to this information and will use it to increase accountability of electric utilities.

2. Shelter Associates – Digital mapping to improve slum sanitation
Will conduct digital mapping of urban slums to identify service gaps & inform better infrastructure planning and sanitation development by making these findings available online for partners, governments and civil societies to improve the efficiency and transparency of sanitation resources in slums

3. Breakthrough – Digital toolkit to prevent gender-based violence
Aims to reduce gender-based violence by launching and scaling a data-driven digital toolkit to enable anyone to launch an effective anti-violence campaign.

4. Pratham Books- Open source platform to create & translate children’s books
Intends to provide kids with easy access to language-appropriate reading materials by building a collaborative, open platform that lets people share, translate and create children’s e-books.

5. Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group – Online marketplace to organize waste collection
It will setup an online marketplace and integrated mobile app to organize waste pickers and address the growing problem of trash in Delhi by connecting waste generators and waste recyclers to provide a socially and environmentally sustainable solution that improves the livelihood of waste handlers and curbs pollution.

6. Agastya – Network of motorbike science labs to educate rural kids
Aims to address the lack of science equipment and digital resources for rural children by launching a network of motorbike science labs that are staffed by trained teachers and equipped with cutting-edge technology & will also train local teachers on how to incorporate hands-on science into their classrooms.

7. Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy – Apps to connect citizens with the government
Will develop online and mobile apps that connect citizens to their government representatives in urban India. These apps will allow users to provide faster, more detailed feedback directly to their representatives, helping to close information gaps.

8. Digital Green – Video hub to scale agricultural training
By scaling a video hub and an online knowledge platform, Digital Green will help farmers gain the agricultural skills they need to lower their costs and increase their productivity & enable them to share locally-relevant agricultural skills with their peers.

9. Going to School Fund – Mobile games & books to teach kids entrepreneurial skills
Plan to devise open source mobile games that teach critical entrepreneurship skills to India’s children aiming to provide lessons in business, economics, teamwork and communications to students across the country.

10. Social Awareness, Newer Alternatives (SANA) – Integrated water & sanitation system to support healthy villages
Aims to combine solar-powered micro-ionizing water purification and biodigesting technology to improve water and sanitation infrastructure for rural villages. These systems will purify local water sources to provide clean drinking water and the waste water generated will power new community toilets.

The Countdown begins!

Battle of Online Marketplaces, Reliance Retails plans to open eCommerce gateway via its Marketplace

Battle of Online Marketplaces, Reliance Retails plans to open eCommerce gateway via its Marketplace

By Prathamesh Patil

Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries led by Mukesh Ambani is planning an ecommerce entry in next 6-8 months according to an ET report. It currently operates 1,550 offline stores in 136 cities in India. The talks come on the back of Future Retail Ltd’s launch of direct selling service called Big Bazaar Direct in September allowing customers to directly place orders with appointed Big Bazaar stores.

Mumbai based Reliance Retail which clocked revenues of Rs 10,800 crores in FY 2012-13 was able to break even with an EBIDTA of Rs 78 crores. It posted a turnover of Rs 6,930 crores for the first 6 months of the current FY, a growth of 41% over the corresponding period last year.

Its peer Future Group which already has an online presence in the form of Ezone, clocked a turnover of Rs 14,201 crores in FY 2012-13 and has presence through its 1,000 stores spread across the country. Retails stores like Tata’s Croma & electronic retail chain Vijay Sales have Online Sales format.

Reliance Retail is in currently working on the eCommerce platform. It is rumored to be adopting the marketplace model and will take on the heavyweights like eBay, Flipkart, Amazon & Snapdeal.

Ecommerce firms in India are adopting the marketplace model as India restricts FDI in multibrand Retail. It is probably a better suiting business model in India compared to a full-fledged inventory model. Reliance Retail can adopt a hybrid marketplace model where it can allow other seller to list on its platform by earning commission on the gross merchandise sold.

The battle will be fought at the backend with Reliance’s robust network & deep pockets while Amazon is known for pioneering operational excellence. Flipkart is changing the dynamics of Indian eCommerce while the new ecommerce ventures are playing catching up.

The opportunities are endless!

Indian E-commerce raising eye popping funding, where are we headed?

Indian E-commerce raising eye popping funding, where are we headed?

By Prathamesh Patil

Jasper Infotech owned Snapdeal is in talks of raising up to $200Mn from SoftBank, a Japanese telecom, internet and media conglomerate & eBay along with a group of private equity investors. Earlier this year eBay picked up 10% stake in Snapdeal and is keen on hiking its stake in the company reportedly eyeing a bigger share of the Indian eCommerce pie & the emerging markets’ digital commerce space. The current deal values Snapdeal at $750Mn.

In 2011, Softbank pumped in $200Mn in InMobi, world’s largest independent mobile ad network in one the largest deals in mobile internet space.

Snapdeal founded by Wharton alumnus Kunal Bahl and IIT-Delhi graduate Rohit Bansal started as an online deals website in February 2010 transitioned into full-fledged e-commerce company operating via market place model in September 2011. It claims to have 20 Mn registered users with 14-15Mn active users and an employee base of 1500.

Snapdeal has raised a total of $104mn excluding the current $150-200Mn deal talks. In July 2011, Snapdeal raised $40 Mn Series C funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners along with existing investors Nexus Venture Partners & Indo- US Venture Partners (now Kaalari Capital). Ebay, Intel Capital, Russian venture fund ru-Net, Saama Capital, Recruit Holdings Co. along with current investors invested $50Mn earlier this year.

India largest eCommerce player Flipkart has just announced the close of blockbuster $360Mn funding in two tranches, biggest in Indian eCommerce. The latest $160 Mn round included existing investors Tiger Global Management as well as new marquee investors Dragoneer Investment Group, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Sofina and Vulcan Capital Management. Flipkart’s other investors include Accel Partners and Iconiq Capital, and MIH (a part of South African media company Naspers Group), who along with Tiger Global had invested $200 million in the company in July.

Flipkart till date has attracted $540 Mn of funding. In April this year it launched its marketplace along with its exiting eCommerce platform. In July this year it launced its own payment gateway PayZippy and a month later shut down its digital music store Flyte. Flipkart claims to have 500 suppliers on its marketplace as of now.

Few questions remain, can these eCommerce firms turn profitable? Does it matter to be profitable at this point in time? It may not, that’s what these investors are betting on. The entry of Amazon has intensified the competition. eCommerce in India is at an inflection point. There are under served niches while the markets are expanding exponentially.

Money is good, pressure is immense, plans are rolled out. Wait and watch!

E-commerce in India – Version 3.0? | Business Standard

Flipkart’s s successful raising of $200 million (about Rs 1,200 crore) in its fifth round of funding could well mark the launch of version 3.0 for India’s still fledgling but rapidly maturing e-commerce activity. The timing of this announcement could not have been more propitious since till just before this event, there were growing legions of sceptics questioning the viability of merchandise-oriented e-commerce business models in India and others who felt that e-commerce may have a future in India but only many years down the line. Perhaps some of these sceptics would now give a fresh look at the potential of e-commerce and begin to accept that it is a phenomenon whose time has already come, even in India.

The first wave of e-businesses, better known as “dot.com”, came with a big bang in the late nineties but fizzled out with a big whimper by 2001. In hindsight, the reasons for the collapse of the dot.com phenomenon were quite obvious with the most glaring being the near-absence of a tangible revenue model. The second version of e-commerce took off after a brief hiatus of four or five years. In this version, there was much sharper focus on generating of revenue both through sale of a wide assortment of merchandise and services. Most of these second-generation e-commerce start-ups had a much more tangible business proposition, and a much better configured business model. The biggest challenge for most of those start-ups was to deliver profitability even though many were able to generate revenues and create repeat customers. The biggest challenge in achieving profitability was high cost of acquisition of new customers, and excessive discounting that negated the fundamental cost-advantage that an e-commerce venture could potentially offer, compared to a brick-and-mortar retail business, after achieving a certain scale.

Flipkart’s incubation in 2007 (and several others that followed soon thereafter) took place in an era in which most global e-tailers were trying hard to figure out how to grow profitably. So, although Indian emulators could see what the likes of Amazon, eBay, Taobao, 360buy, and hundreds of others were successfully doing in the US, China, UK, and elsewhere to generate revenues, they had to figure out the path to profitability entirely on their own. That’s because India had its own unique set of challenges that included poor penetration (and poorer quality) of internet, poor penetration of credit or debit cards and at the same time, the wide prevalence of a “cash” economy, and under-developed supply chains and logistics infrastructure on the ground. It also did not help that almost all of these start-ups were by bright, young and enthusiastic entrepreneurs who did not have much else by way of business experience or capital.

It is no surprise that India’s political and bureaucratic leadership has consistently missed (or dismissed with disdain) some of the most transformational trends since independence – whether on physical infrastructure (roads, energy, affordable housing, and public transport) or social infrastructure (education, health care, clean water, and sanitation). But what is surprising is the near lack of enthusiasm from large businesses. Historically, Indian conglomerates and big businessmen have been the first to spot emerging business opportunities and commit a huge amount of resources, even if such investments are likely to be loss making for years to come. Several examples of such exuberance abound in diverse sectors that include power generation and distribution, roads and airports and other such infrastructure, telecom, oil and gas exploration and production, brick & mortar retail, and many others. Inexplicably, there is no major mega-investment push from groups such as Tata, Birla, Ambani and so on in a pure-play e-commerce-oriented business, whether it is consumer-oriented or business-to-business focused, or even in providing logistics and the back-end support to consumer-facing e-commerce businesses where the last-mile connectivity requires logistics providers who can cover the length and breadth of India.

So, although the government continues to ignore the irreversible trend towards non-store retailing and prohibit international investment in such ventures (even brick and mortar retailers with foreign investment cannot have e-commerce activities) and Indian big business regards e-commerce as a fad, the current Indian players in the space can rejoice in Flipkart’s success in raising this impressive amount of additional funding. It is quite certain that this vote of confidence from Flipkart’s investors will enthuse many other investors too and more funds will flow into the e-commerce space. Further, almost all of these investors have been providing a much-needed mentoring support to these typically very young promoters, and also providing them support to get some top-quality managerial talent on board.

Hence, India’s e-commerce version 3.0 launch year could well be 2013-14. This is the year that could see the beginning of a much more rapid convergence of many enabling conditions – a rapidly increasing pan-India base of internet users, imminent launch of better quality fourth-generation platform data services, enhanced access to financial capital, experienced managerial talent and a better understanding of revenue and profitability drivers for e-commerce formats. Above all, it could be the beginning of steadily increasing acceptance of e-shopping as the retail channel of choice by the middle and upper middle class Indian consumers.

Mobile commerce rings into new era: Bipin Preet Singh, Mobikwik

In the last decade or so, the mobile device has essayed ajourney of massive transformation due to an increase in their processing power and computational speed. They have moved far beyond voice communication and text messaging. Even entry-level mobile devices today enable internet browsing, emailing, multimedia messaging, multimedia playback, video communication, as well as downloading and running third party applications.

This technological advancement on the hardware side has been complemented by strides in mobile broadband networks, with end-user bandwidth throughput going up by several factors from the early GPRS/EDGE networks to present day HSPA and LTE networks.

That there already existed several channels of communication such as SMS and USSD on mobile networks has only added to the now available access through mobile broadband networks, heralding the soon-to-be-globally-ubiquitous era of mobile computing.

The mobile subscription is extremely personal and individual in nature. This, and the easily verifiable fact that no one leaves their mobile device behind, whether on personal or professional pursuits, makes the device the best placed to enable a variety of economic activities.

Several types of economic transactions such as paying for goods, services and utilities either remotely or at point-of-sale, operating bank accounts, making online purchases, sending or receiving funds – can be enabled using the mobile device and subscription.

The world is now on the threshold of Mobile Commerce being the end-game in mass market mobile services. Mobile Commerce, more than any other emerging mobile services such as mobile education, mobile healthcare and location-based services, promises to deliver the highest impact for all of mankind.

Till now mobile payments, in a sense, meant operating a point-of-sale card swiping machine using a mobile data enabled SIM. This works only for proximity payments and still requires the use of a financial instrument (credit/debit cards) other than the mobile phone for payments.

To truly enable proximity as well as remote payments, and to obviate the need to carry physical wallets that hold cash and other financial instruments, a mobile wallet is required. This is a functionality or service that enables a user’s mobile device to be employed as a wallet by aggregating several payment instruments and their details.

The user needs to add cash to the mobile wallet by a process called pre-loading – such funds can be transferred into the mobile wallet by visiting an authorized agent of the wallet provider, or by other channels such as from a traditional bank account, or through credit cards. It resides on the mobile device as a SIM utility, or as an app.

Several mobile wallets store no personally identifiable information on the phone, and can be operated for payment transactions using SMS or USSD access channels. Mobile wallets primarily offer utility bill payments and merchant POS payments. Certain mobile wallet offerings enable online payments (e-commerce) as well as remittance services (sending money to another person, who may or may not have a mobile wallet).

Mobile payments are governed by regulatory oversight, and doubly so since they are an intersection of the financial industry and the telecom industry, both of which are regulated activities. As such, while the technology exists to offer the full spectrum of mobile commerce activities, it is up to the country’s regulators to specify what is permissible and what is prohibited.

This is especially of import in the case of remittance, which is prone to misuse, such as to circulate funds derived from or for the purpose of carrying out illicit activities. Therefore, taking baby steps is the adopted approach by regulators, ensuring at each step that a framework with the necessary safeguards and sufficient infrastructure exists to maximise utility and minimise nuisance for the most number of users.

India is witnessing a massive explosion in mobile payments. This August 2013, 8,46,000 transactions have taken place via immediate payment system (IMPS) as compared to 93,715 in September 2012, an eight times increase according to National Payment Corp of India (NPCI). Backing this growth is the RBI, which said mobile payments will be the “game changer both in the financial sector as well as to mobile companies”. It announced that it will get “banks and mobile companies to co-operate in rolling out mobile payments”.

The true utility of mobile payments will be realised through a network effect, meaning a large number of users and a large number of merchants and utilities accepting mobile payments.

This will enable people to feel confident that their physical wallets are no longer required for the supported class of payments. This is further supplemented by person-to-person payments, whereby mobile commerce can play the role that traditional currency plays in today’s world.