E-commerce Ventures in Chennai -Part 2

Posted on May 18, 2013 by hariharan

Continuing from Here

What the above two firms mentioned in part 1 GoCrazee and Krocery Can do to attract,retain and maintain customer loyalty over a period of time? First step is to identify different type of customers and their needs. Note, this is different from the budget,priorities of the customers with in each of these types.

Following are the different types of customers
1) Customers who plan,write and buy for the entire month
2) Customers who just know their needs
3) Customers who purchase on day to day basis
4) Customers who buy on instinct

Identifying the customers is required so that we could provide solutions specific to them.
Continue reading →

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When Waze and I worked on same Idea

Posted on May 11, 2013 by hariharan

I came across Waze.com, when i read This . I was pretty gloomed as i started MyCityTraffic with almost similar concept.

Though Waze provides lot of features, the core source of data for both Waze and MyCityTraffic are real time data from Drivers. Both of us crowd source the data real time, from drivers. I am pretty confident if i had continued to Work on MyCityTraffic dedicatedly, i would have landed in more broader set of features

What i had learnt from Waze
1. How to convert an Idea into a meaningful app with lot of good features.
2. User Interface design. Their user interface is simply mindblowing, simple and to-the point.
3. More than all it has improved my confidence on me and my ideas. It gives me strength to work on my other initiatives with more vigor.

I wish Waze and their team good luck.

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E-commerce ventures in Chennai- Part1

Posted on March 31, 2013 by hariharan

After launching HobbyShopIndia, i have been watching closely the other e-commerce ventures. Two of the recently launched which got my attention were

1. Go Crazee
2.Krocery

I am not surprised that both of them were in Grocery domain, because it is one of the domain which was in mind of many.
How effective are they and how matured on various parameters like content, promotion,service,technology? Were they able to make an impression.

    First Impression

Both of them have a proper strategy in terms of reaching their target customers. One of them gave a full page ad in a daily page. Other one gave a pamphlet along with newspaper on a weekend, and that too on beginning of a month. One provides free delivery beyond a certain amount for any area in chennai. Other gives a free delivery, but its coverage area is only in south Chennai.

While both of them made a good start, i could not see any more ads from them. Not sure if any one actually remembers them.

Though both of their sites are pretty much interactive and serves the purpose, that alone is not sufficient as the grocery is a complicated area and customers are very stringent on quality. Some of the following things should be kept in mind

1. Customer classification and targetting
2. Better UI
3. Innovative ideas to sell,cross sell (output based purchase)
4. Customization and localization.

Not all the solutions which worked outside India might work here. I will write in detail about each of the above mentioned points in forthcoming posts. Watch this space.

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How 2012 was (not) for me

Posted on January 5, 2013 by hariharan

2012 was a mixed bag for me, both personally and professionally. It was an year where i had not read even a single complete book and less blog post. It was an year where i had saw most number of movies. It is also an year were i realized that most of the things in the worked are over hyped and obtained a calmness within me.

However, i am happy that HobbyShopIndia.com, which was in my mind and i kick started in pongal 2012 will become operational from Pongal 2013. Getting the site up and running was a hectic task and demanded lot of efforts. Hope i can continue the momentum in future as well. A detailed post on Hobbyshopindia.com will be out soon.

The sashtiyartha poorthy of my parents happened this year and is one of the most joyous moments.
A short trip to Mooresville,NC at USA gave chance to meet A.Karthik, Sasi and a trip to Grand canyon. Hoping for such trips in future as well.

Really hoping that 2013 will give more exciting experiences.

Thank you all for supporting me in various ways in the past. Hope to be in tough with you in future as well.

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Software Projects Estimation based on Revenue Targets

Posted on October 27, 2012 by hariharan

In software maintenance project bidding,estimates are mostly given based on following methodologies

1) Complexity of the application
2) Number of incidents or problems the application encountered

Though they are mostly practical, in this agile methodology world when the time to market is very less it is very tough for software vendors to give proper estimates which can strike a balance between profitability and project feasibility. From my experience in maintenance projects, what i have observed is that generally the data to project the number of problems are either in accurate in terms of the number of incidents or tickets worked on or the time spent.

It is in this context, for e-com domain i believe that the software team or the service provider should be giving estimates based on

1) Current revenue and number of components involved.
2) Number of SKU or the products sold in the site
3) Revenue target for next x-years
4) Number of sku’s or products targetted for next x-years

As the business grows, the data or problems happened in past might not happen in future and the complexity of problem might increase.
Vendor can find the estimated cost of maintenance based on the complexities of maintaining a software platform or software product to achieve the expected sales target of customer and can decide.

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Energy Hedging: A way to Save Energy and Save earth

Posted on September 30, 2012 by hariharan

First and foremost, though the topic says as Energy, it is targetted only towards crude oil and its extracts(read as Petrol, Diesel) which are used extensively for personal use. It works in the concept of hedging and my thought that price of fuels should be based on “The effect they have on environment and a person should be rewarded for the savings he is doing to save fuel” . The main purpose of this is to make people delay their fuel purchase, giving returns for fuel they do not buy and also give captive amount for research in alternate energy area.

It works in this manner. Assume that a person deposits RS 10,000 or USD 1000 to their fuel supplier(IOC,HP, BP,Shell) etc. As and when he purchases, the amount will be deducted from the amount he has deposited. For a fixed term, he will get fuel at par market rates. After a period, he will be given fuel at a rate discounted from the market rate.

For e.g if a person deposits Rs 10000. For next 6 months, he will purchasing fuel at market rate. From the 7th month, he will be getting discount of Rs 3 per litre. After an year, he will get fuel at discount of Rs 6 per litre and after 18 months it will be discount of Rs 10 per litre. Assume that the lock in period is 3 years, at the end of 3rd year, he will be getting returns based on the current rate of fuel. While making deposit of 10,000 if a litre of fuel is 50, he will be allotted 200 litres. If the amount is unused, at the end of 3 years he will be getting market rate of 20 litres of fuel.

How this will help companies
1. They get money to invest in research.
2.They get money which can be deposited in banks and can gain interest.
3. At returning the money later at market rate, they dont lose any thing.

How this will help People
1. Help them to postpone fuel purchase, as they get savings when they purchase fuel later.
2. In the period of saving, they will use public transport etc.
3. Oil will become a mode of investment.

The success of it depends on how effectively we can track purchases by a user. How will we track when user deposits in 2 suppliers and purchases from another supplier?

Also i beleive oil companies will not become crude capitalists and act against favour of consumers by manipulating the rates to their will.

Though it needs lot of drill down to details, work on the numbers to make it a proper fool proof plan, at an idea level i think it provides a potential. Let me know your thoughts.

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what will make MS word Great in future

Posted on June 25, 2012 by hariharan

I have used both open office and MS word(till MS 2007.Not MS2010). THough Open office is good, there are lot of things which are very easy in MS word, which i feel is worth the money. But i want MS word to have following things in its feature to make this a very compelling product and relevant to times. My needs are based on my working in IT consulting profession and i am sure it will be useful for others (any business,students ) as well.

1. Expanding Sections

There should be a way where a heading or a section can be collapsed or expanded. This will be useful when reading a large document and we would to focus on specific section. Link from table of contents to the area and we can qucikly expand the required sub sections or read text

2.Better Image handling
Many times the images we embed need to be cropped up to fit into the page dimension. Though i agree that they like to give how the printed copy will look like, there should be an option to enlarge the images like the way any standard web 2.0 site gives

3.Better reference handling
Sometimes we might refer to lot of documents in same location. It would be better if we can define a template or section where we can define the parent folder and reference section can refer to the actual content from there. In future if site structure needs to be modified, we can modify in the header rather than find and replace.

4. Easier formatting
I need to agree that creating nested heading strcutures within a document is a big pain. Also updating the table of contents to include specific section or depth is not straught forward( or tough). Perhaps the MS team can look into it and create a more intuitive product.

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Virtual Group shopping experience

Posted on May 28, 2012 by hariharan

Wont it be good if your e-commerce site allows you to colloborate with your loved ones and enables you to choose a product
based on your interaction.

Say you and your brother in a different city want to buy a gift for your parents. Wont it be good if both of you can open a dedicated collaboration and communication session “in the site” and you both can add items to your virtual area(similar to cart), drag and drop products, tag on products, comment on it and then choose to buy the product.

By this way, you can avoid users from going to different application for communication(e.g a messenger or gTalk window) and there by preventing potential navigation to other competitive sites. May be you can as well see your faces(if enabled with webcam) and can both see as well as play in the virtual area.

What do you folks think?

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Personalized Doddles

Posted on May 11, 2012 by hariharan

I guess almost everybody likes Google Doddles.

Wont it be good, if users can create doddles for important dates in their life. For e,g,if a teenager has got his first kiss on a day, he can create a doddle of that. Whenever that date comes in future, that will be displayed. You can also doddle the day you got your first pay, took your girl friend for dinner, or day you gave a memorable gift for your parents, day you trekked to a wonderful spot with friends, day when your daddy gave you a bike etc..

Why i feel it will be good? Reason being that there are many small wonderful moments which makes life wonderful. Due course of time we forget that. Having something like this will make people happy. When somebody is in a depressed mood, seeing such things will give them confidence, and cheer up them.

I am thinking of writing a service that could do this. Any thoughts, leave your comments?

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Relational DB for apps

Posted on February 20, 2012 by hariharan

While developping MyCity Traffic app as mentioned here, i needed a database to store the data. I ruled out GAE because its No-SQL structure doesnot support me and Google Cloud SQL was not released then. I chose Amazon RDS then. DB i selected was oracle. The pricing for both Oracle and MySQL were almost same.

Agree that Amazon RDS gave lot of features and you can play around a lot. It would have suited my needs well if the app was widely used. It turns out that number of users for this app was very limitied and i did not find justification for the high price (around 100USD a month)i was paying for DB. At the same time i did not want to shut down my app completely as i want to keep using the app and improving it.

One day i realized that one of the domain i was using had some extra capacity and it had a MySQL db as well. So i tired experiementing with it. I created seperate schema in the MySQL environment and open up the DB for connection from remote IP’s.

So now my java webservices hosted on Amazon EC2 is talking to MySQL db hosted in another domain. Webservices are invoked by my android app. I just need to add couple of security aspects over it and you are safe. So my alternative for Amazon RDS is much less expensive (just the hosting charge per year). ofcourse i wont get the benefits RDS gives like scalability, replication,backup etc, but for my app in
life support, this is just enough. May be that this is the default option for many folks and i had a oversite and chose a wrong
sfotware. Life is about making mistakes and learning.

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