Pune Metro Card – Third Time’s The Charm

At its inception two years ago, Pune Metro supported the following ticketing options: Human-operated ticket counter Self-service kiosk WhatsApp e-ticket Contactless prepaid card. Since I’ve a great experience with contactless prepaid cards on rapid transport networks in several cities in the world (e.g. London Oyster Card), I jumped at the last option. My first attempt … Read more

Trump Tariffs: 7 Reasons Consumers Won’t Pay The Price

Economists claim that American consumers will bear the cost of Trump Tariffs. Dealmakers insist that overseas exporters and / or American importers will find ways to avoid passing on the burden of Trump Tariffs to American consumers. According to me, the question of who pays tariffs is extremely nuanced. As a career sales professional in … Read more

Why Does It Take So Long To Be Unsubscribed From Mailing Lists?

(This post is a slightly edited version of my answer to the above Quora question.) In my company, we run many email newsletter campaigns for customers and ourselves. We rarely get unsubscribe requests, as you can see from the following exhibit. On the rare occasion that somebody wants us to stop sending them our future email … Read more

Dealmakers Trump Economists In Predicting The Impact Of Tariffs

To: editet@timesgroup.com Subject: Alternative to Dollar Trump | Letter to the Editor Dear Editor of Economic Times: This has reference to op-ed entitled Alternative to Dollar Trump by T. K. Arun in Economic Times. Most economists says tariff is paid by the consumer. Some economists say it’s paid by the supplier. As a career sales … Read more

10 Things They Didn’t Tell You About Trump Tariffs

This blog does not get into politics but tariffs have significant impact on business in general and sales and marketing in particular, hence this exception. Tariffs on imports has been a major plank on which Donald Trump ran for President of the United States. Unlike many political candidates who forget about campaign promises after assuming … Read more

Output Versus Outcome Based Pricing Model

During the recently concluded NASSCOM Technology & Leadership Forum 2025 conclave held in Mumbai, the OGs of Indian IT industry noted that the time is ripe for the industry to pivot to Output-based Model. I shared this article on LinkedIn (and X fka Twitter) with the following comment: “Output-based Model” is correct. Kudos to Indian … Read more

Success Story: Using ChatGPT To Migrate From Scraping To API

In my blog post entitled Using ChatGPT As A Data Analysis Assistant, I described a Stock Portfolio Prediction Tracker in which I’d used the Data > From Web feature in Excel to scrape the Current Market Price of various stocks from Yahoo! Finance website. While I was quite satisfied with scraping in the short term, I … Read more

Three Innovative Features From Hyperlocal Apps To Kill Location Friction

In Why Do Hyperlocal Apps Have So Much Location Friction?, I described many friction hotspots while entering and editing locations in hyperlocal apps like Ola, Rapido, Uber (Rideshare) Pizza Hut, Swiggy (Food delivery) Dunzo, Swiggy Genie (Runner) Many of these apps have excellent UX. I found it hard to believe that they’d have bungled just … Read more

Globalization – Good or Bad?

Any discussion of globalization and its impact on a country needs to recognize that a nation comprises both producers and consumers. Producers are businesses. Consumers are J6P (Joe Six Pack or Jane Six Pack aka common man / woman). While import of cheap goods from China might cripple American manufacturers, it is a positive for … Read more