Archive for 'startups' Category
e-Commerce Poised for Big Growth – The Challenges & Have Valuations Peaked ?
Most e-commerce companies in India are currently focused on driving up valuations by increasing market share at the cost of profitability. Can the Indian e-commerce bubble burst? It can be looked at two ways where one argument says – The bubble has already burst at the valuations level. In 2012, the total e-commerce revenue in India is at about $1.6 bn. In India, online retailing accounts for only 0.3 percent of all retail volume, compared with 5 percent in the US and 1.8 percent in China. The online retailing in India is set to explode. The market will expand at a CAGR of 25 percent over the next five years to reach $8.8 bn by 2016. While the other section of players argued – Currently, the number of e-commerce companies in India with a substantial turnover is only a handful. In Indian e-commerce, we don’t see the bubble really. The bubble of late 1990s was due to the business model of the anticipation of a transaction” or “eye-balls,” but it doesn’t apply to the current scenario where the customers are increasingly transacting on the net. Indian e-commerce is showing lot of promise.
The Flourishing Product & Services in Indian e-commerce In most economies. e-commerce growth has typically been led first by content (i.e.. books and movies), consumer electronics (i.e., laptops and accessories) and services (i.e., travel, job site). As consumers get comfortable with transacting online, growth in other categories such as food, clothing, cosmetics and other general merchandise categories follows. This model of growth has played out in the US and is now unfolding in China.
In the Indian Context, the story is a bit different – E-commerce can be Read the rest of this entry »
How to Build Your Own Tablet ? Key Components’ Suppliers Data as Per Units Shipped in 2012
Tablets have increasingly gained acceptance over NetBooks and Laptops in the Last 12 Months and new consumers especially in China and India are not even having a second thought about Laptops and are directly logging on to Tablets. In the context of this development, we undertook a field research on who are the major component suppliers for building your own Tablet Brand and disrupt the market like Micromax did with Mobile Phone Handsets in India.
In this Article we’ll dissect and open the Tablet and see what the Major Components are and who are the Top 5 Suppliers for that component along with cost in US Dollar
Display Costs around $50. Samsung, LG Display, Chimei, Sharp and AUO are the Major Suppliers
NAND FlashCosts $32 for 32GB. Samsung, Toshiba, Hynix, Sandisk and Micron
Battery Cost upto $25. Simplo, Dynapack and Samsung
Applications ProcessorCosts around $18 per unit. Apple, Samsung, NVIDIA, Texas Instrument (TI) and Qualcomm have the major pie of the market
Baseband and TranceiversCosts around $18. Qualcomm has the bulk of market at 70% followed by Intel at 15% and others.
DRAMCosts $14. Samsung, Hynix, Elpida and Micron Read the rest of this entry »
An Insight into Palo Alto Single Pass Architecture for NGFW for Controlled Corporate Network Access
Palo Alto Networks is focused on the $7.4bn network security market. Specifically, Palo Alto is a vendor of NGFWs – Next Generation Firewalls a part of Unified Threat Management (UTM) devices, the fastest growth segment of the network security market. Palo Alto is a startup in the Enterprise Security space with revenue of just $166mn in 2011.
Check Point and Fortinet are two big names in the UTM segment. The addition of yet another function to their UTM appliances has hurt the performance of these solutions. Indeed, these appliances began with a stateful inspection firewall and continued to add performance-degrading functions in series behind the key firewall function. This is where Palo Alto’s unique single-pass architecture performs all security functions in parallel, rather than in series. This reduces degradation, providing improved performance and has gained acceptance in the market place.
Palo Alto is the key beneficiary of the presence of Web 2.0 technologies [Facebook, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn, etc] seeing increasing adoption in the enterprise. With increasing pressure from employees, corporate managements want to let employees use Social Network and other Web 2.0 technologies, responsibly; for instance allow employees to send and read Facebook messages but block Games and Apps such as farmville. The company has the advantage of having one of the newest products on the market and Read the rest of this entry »
What is the State of Facebook Advertising on Mobile Vs Desktop; Tools & Analytics for Advertisers
Social Networking Giant Facebook has emerged as the largest threat to Online Advertising monster, Google. Interacting with Ad Agencies we’d like to present the current state of Facebook Advertisement Platform which offers inventory for Mobile, Tablet, Desktop users and also the state of Tools and Analytics Facebook offers to Advertisers.
Facebook ads are 2 to 3 clicks removed from the point of conversion, versus pay-per-click advertising or other forms of advertising where it’s one click removed. So they’re harder to track. Someone will “Like” an ad or click on an ad and maybe “Like” your landing page on Facebook. Maybe, in the future, they will go to your site and convert in some way.
Some mobile ads require consumers to click or somehow respond. The best performing Ads aren’t necessarily defined by ad unit or ad form factors. What they’re seeing is that certain types of ads, as far as context, outperform others.
Context Ads Better than the Rest – For example, ads on tablets that are orientation-sensitive, and let you drill deeper, perform far better than ads that are not orientation-sensitive. So if you turn your tablet on its side, does the ad actually reorganize itself, and does it get clicked? They’re also seeing that just straight-up context sensitivity is a major factor. If you can put ads in front of people at the point-of-need or the point-of-interest, that sparks response rates and monetization by orders of magnitude.
You can deliver mobile ads using Facebook under circumstances where people are more likely to be using their device in a way that is more inviting to a deeper engagement, what I call “stand-up”, or “stand-up downtime”, where people are waiting in line, for example, at the airport. Those ads are going to perform better because you have a captive audience.
Facebook Mobile has 20% to 60% click-through rates on mobile, depending on Read the rest of this entry »
How Paypal’s BillMeLater Service Works for Consumers, Merchants and eBay ?
In order to sail the tide of Tough Economy and offer incentives to consumers, Paypal started the BillMeLater Service. So what exactly is BillMeLater – BML? It is PayPal’s instant online credit offering. It allows qualifying U.S buyers to obtain a revolving line of online credit from a third-party chartered financial institution – currently WebBank. Since BML is neither a chartered financial institution nor is it licensed to make loans in any state, it relies on WebBank (a licensed lender) to issue BML credit products and extend credit to customers.
Acceptance of BillMeLater
BML is accepted at over 1,000 online merchants and travel partners, including Walmart.com, Zappos.com, American Airlines, and Toysrus.com
As a Customer How do I use it ?
If an online merchant accepts BML, customers have the option to select BML as a form of payment at checkout. The customer will then be prompted to provide their birthday and last four digits of their SSN, after-which BML (through WebBank) will extend credit at the point of sale. The customer will then receive an email from BML confirming the purchase, and in 10-14 days, a bill confirming the balance and payment due date.
The current APR charged Read the rest of this entry »
What Job Search / Resume Banks must Learn from LinkedIn Professional Network ?
LinkedIn has some key business drivers which makes us positive on the fundamentals of the business. Apart from being a network of professionals we’ll see how LinkedIn has been able to stay ahead of competition.
Focus on Member Engagement
The majority of LinkedIn’s product and engineering resources are being dedicated to product enhancements aimed at expanding member engagement and, as a result, the pace of new releases YTD, and we suspect going forward, has already accelerated. Some of the noticeable ones are – the new homepage / landing page redesigns, LinkedIn Today, mobile apps and aggressive SEO techniques when searched for an individual. As a result of this, engagement has shown modest increase but we believe these initiatives – including on mobile – are resulting in continued usage / engagement growth. This will also help drive Marketing Solutions growth which is 28% of total revenues for the company.
Self Service
While the introduction of a self-service advertising Read the rest of this entry »
Unstructured Data – Big Opportunities Galore in India
Many Global tech companies (EMC, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) were circling the big data Hadoop elephant of a solution for the onslaught of unstructured data facing them. One has to ask the fundamental question, what sort of companies would face these sorts of problems and whether Hadoop was a solution ? There is a clear and definitive need for managing and analyzing unstructured data beyond searching for alien life or analyzing the human genome, and we can see the significance of that need increasing from an investment perspective.
After six years of development, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the official release of the first Hadoop platform (1.0) to address the unstructured data challenge facing network companies which extends beyond traditional telecom operators and includes any operator that has a network with large numbers or users (subscribers or not) and large volumes of traffic. This would include cable and satellite operators, but also social networking companies such as Facebook, Twitter, as well as Sina and Tencent, Microsoft and Yahoo! for messenger as well as companies with transactions such as Alibaba, eBay, PayPal, Flipkart and, of course, the web portals and search engines.
Another area of application is the utilities, Read the rest of this entry »
99Acres – Realty Classifieds on Steady Growth Trajectory
99acres the online real estate classifieds reported 47% Y/Y growth in 1QFY13 quarter. 99acres is more exposed to new project / housing market (compared to secondary market) increasing dependence on new launches. However, management pointed out that the company is making an effort to penetrate the secondary market (property dealers). Management suggested that real estate market continues to be difficult as transactions are down 25-30% Y/Y. New launches in Mumbai, Noida and Chennai remained subdued due to weak market conditions.
The revenue growth in this business is very much dependent on macro factors such as interest rates, inflation and the regulatory environment, but over a period of time, revenue growth tends to normalize as witnessed by similar businesses in other geographies. For example, SouFun.com, a Chinese online real estate classified company, registered 66% revenue CAGR over the last five years, though FY09′s growth rate was only 22% due to a challenging macro environment. 99Acres is consciously making an effort to increase the proportion of business from the resale market, where the interest rate and inflation impact is lower.
The following chart shows the steady growth of Paid Transactions on 99Acres.Com Read the rest of this entry »
