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

Bugs Are Everywhere – Don’t Single Out Excel & Access

It’s fashionable to dunk on Excel and Access in many quarters. Take The Register for example. It blames Excel for under-reporting 16,000 Covid-19 cases in What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases, and Access for inventory discrepancies in Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same … Read more

Traditional Media Has Itself To Blame For Its Downfall

Millennials don’t read newspapers and magazines. That bodes ill for the future of traditional media. As though such threats caused by generational shifts are not lethal enough, traditional media is hurting itself even further with its lax attitude and casual behavior. Here are some ways by which traditional media is hurtling towards its downfall. Can’t … 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 Brands Can Leverage The Eternal Disconnect Between Want & Like

In Want v. Like: Decoding The Eternal Disconnect In Consumer Behavior, we saw a couple of examples of  the eternal disconnect between what consumers say they want and what they actually like. We also speculated on the root cause of this conflict.  In this follow on post, we’ll examine the implications of the want-versus-like disconnect … 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

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

Is Scalability A Bogey Created By Hardware Industry?

A friend recently asked me the following question via Twitter: @s_ketharaman Thoughts? I am not so sure since infra is still not scaling. https://t.co/vDi1zHZynB — Gopinath Pandalai (@gopibella) April 28, 2020 I read the linked HBR article on Blockchain technologies and replied as follows: Many mobile payments use cases I never thought could go digital … 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