Rideshare: Exhibit A For New Age Digital Business

In How Rideshare Startups Flipped A Switch To Create A Billion Dollar Business Overnight, I shared my thoughts on how rideshare startups have gone against common wisdom in many areas and used digital – aka SMAC (Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud) –  technologies to create a billion dollar business virtually overnight. But it’s more than just technology. Before I elaborate, let … Read more

PSA: Insist On Receipt When You Pay By NEFT, UPI, FPS Etc.

When you pay someone, you expect to get a receipt for the payment. Especially when that “someone” is a business. Receipt – or “proof of receipt of payment” – must be issued by the Payee / Merchant so that you can use it to independently prove that the Payee / Merchant has received your money. … Read more

The End Of Google Search Is Not Nigh

I go directly to the websites of my favorite brands whenever I shop online e.g. Amazon for products, Cleartrip for flight tickets and hotels, Housing for real estate, Play Store for mobile apps, Product Hunt for software and websites, StockImages for images, and so on. I can’t remember the last time I went to Google to … Read more

PayTM Decimates Trust With A Single #FeatureOrBug

As we saw in Feature Or Bug – Facebook & Tideplus, #FeatureOrBug refers to a feature that masquerades as a bug. To recap: As brands increasingly adopt personalization in their communications, what you see is not what I see. Then there are other types of differences like: What you see on desktop is not what you see on … Read more

Flight Delay Insurance – Why Blockchain?

I covered two Blockchain flight delay insurance products in AXA Fizzy – The New Kid On The Blockchain and Atlas Etherisc – Another New Kid On The Blockchain. In this post, I’ll address the “Why Blockchain?” question. Here’s a quick recap of the background to this question from the first of the above two posts: … Read more

Feature Or Bug – Housing, LinkedIn, Starbucks, Et Al

In Feature Or Bug – Facebook & Tideplus, we saw two cases of #FeatureOrBug, one of which was favorable to the consumer, and the other, neutral. I’ve subsequently come across many more favorable / neutral cases of #FeatureOrBug. I thought I’ll cover them before fulfilling the promise I made at the end of the last post to … Read more

Atlas Etherisc – Another New Kid On The Blockchain

At the end of my blog post entitled AXA Fizzy – The New Kid On The Blockchain, I’d promised to answer the “Why Blockchain?” question in a follow-on post. I’m not fulfilling that promise yet. Frequent readers of this blog would be aware that it’s light on research and heavy on personal experience and anecdotal evidence. … Read more