My Two Cents On PayTM Kerfuffle

PayTM is the first digital payment product I’ve used at scale in India. When RBI enforced the two factor authentication mandate for online payments, bill payments became a major PITA. By requiring users to fill credit card number, expiration date, and half a dozen fields, Reg 2FA caused tremendous friction. After they received the OTP, … Read more

Economic Times Publishes My Take On Play Store v. App Developers Controversy

Google Play Store provides the following services to Android app developers: Listing Discovery Distribution Commerce platform Training Google does not charge any fixed fees for these services. Like most companies in their early days, app developers are short of funds when they start out. While they have aspirations to build for the world, do marketing, … Read more

28 Versus 30 Days Plans Of TELCOs

This post is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following Quora question: In coming up with plans with 28 days’ validity, I’m guessing TELCOs have been inspired by one of the 29 Psychological Tricks To Make You Buy More that leverage inherent biases exhibited by consumers. According to this Visual Capitalist article, … Read more

Why Doesn’t UPI / A2A RTP Provide Scam / Fraud Protection?

There’s a lot of buzz around cybercrime. Not a week goes by when we don’t hear of someone or the other losing money to scammers and fraudsters via UPI and other A2A RTPs. Let’s consider the following ubiquituous cybercrime described in Why Is It So Hard To Catch Cybercriminals?. Joe uses UPI to buy something … Read more

How To Revive Interoperability In UPI

In Interoperability – The Sole Loser In UPI, we saw why interoperability has been compromised in UPI. In this post, we’ll explore ways to revive this noble goal. Some people advocate education campaigns to increase awareness of VPA and thereby revive interoperability. Once people know what a VPA is, first they would ensure better VPAs and … Read more

Interoperability – The Sole Loser In UPI

We ended Banks Have Not Lost The UPI Plot on a sobering note: Sadly, interoperability has been given the short shrift in the way UPI has evolved. In this post, we’ll see how interoperability has lost the UPI plot. One of the founding principles of UPI is “interoperability”, which stipulates that anyone with any UPI app … Read more

Banks Have Not Lost The UPI Plot

The common man hears about Google Pay, PhonePe and PayTM while making UPI payments – rather than State Bank of India, HDFC Bank or ICICI Bank. Ergo there’s a widespread belief that banks have lost the UPI plot. Take this tweet for example: The statement on NEFT with stanchart applies to the HDFC as well. … Read more

Don’t Go Global Without Cracking The Value Proposition For Foreign Markets

We regularly come across founders of software companies who have achieved a certain degree of success in India and now wish to take their product global. This is a perfectly sensible strategy because overseas markets are extremely lucrative. But many of these “export initiatives” flounder. Because what works here does not work there. UPI is … Read more

How Does Turn By Turn Navigation Work?

A turn-by-turn navigation system is a combination of hardware and software that provides an automobile driver with one or more motorable routes between Point A and Point B on the surface of the earth. Sold as a dedicated satnav system or as an integral part of a smartphone, it comprises the following building blocks: GPS. … Read more

How Does Google Maps Know Traffic Conditions In Realtime?

When I was in Germany in the early 2000s, all my questions about distance would receive answers in terms of time. That too, under two conditions, namely, without traffic and with traffic. For example, if I asked a customer, “how far is your office from Munich airport”, the typical answer would be, “one and a … Read more