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

All Payments Are Not Equal – Retail Payments Primer

This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: I had a similar experience recently. I scanned the Merchant’s QR code at a restaurant with my PayTM app. PayTM asked me to link my bank account to complete the payment via UPI. I refused to do so because I wanted … Read more

Dr. Batra’s – A Sanitizer That Will Outlive The Virus

The Co-Founder of Druva, the Pune-based cloud data protection software provider, once narrated the story of how his company broke into NASA. Its sales team was pursuing the prestigious American space administration agency for months with the usual sales approach spanning demo, proof-of-concepts, requirement study, and so on, but didn’t get much joy. Apparently, the … 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

Why Does Cross Selling Fail?

In my last post on cross-selling entitled Cross Selling Is Hard, we had seen several cross-selling flops by majors. In each case, a company that is wildly successful in one product category attempts to cross-sell a new product to its existing customers and achieves very little success. In some cases, the lack of success is … Read more

Why Two Factor Authentication Is A “Conversion Killer” & “Blood Pressure Booster”

Any digital payment goes through a long and tortuous value chain comprising multiple entities. If we take credit card as an example, the entities include Consumer (e.g. You), Merchant (e.g. Amazon, DMART), Issuer (the bank that issues the card and enables the Consumer to make card payments e.g. Citi), Acquirer (the bank that supplies the … Read more

Why Banks Will Never Catch Up With Fintechs On UX

Top 6 US banks posted a trillion dollars in profits in the last 10 years. "Top 6 Banks In USA Earn $1 Trillion In Profits In Last 10 Years" ~ https://t.co/coy2mSvu3C via @maxabelson @business .That's the same period when fintech was supposed to disrupt dinosaur banks. #Disruption #Shisruption #Banking #FinServ pic.twitter.com/kjZfCkqSbC — Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) … Read more

Better A Digital Colonizer Than Digital Colony Be!

Of late, there’s a lot of concern in the public discourse that India is becoming a digital colony of the West. If this concern is valid, we have ourselves to blame for letting India become a digital colony. What’s worse, we’ve been doing this for ages and never seem to learn from past mistakes. I … Read more

Credit Card Versus Debit Card / UPI / A2A

Credit Card and Debit Card are both “cards”. Both are digital payment methods. Both are issued by banks. Both of them work on card rails owned by Visa, MasterCard, China Union Pay, RuPay and other card networks. Because of these similarities, many people tend to believe that there’s no difference between credit and debit cards. … Read more