Hey Flipkart, why dont you advertise

Two aspects that caught my attention over the last two years: 

1. Local Advertising: Brands want to go local. They want to target their customers locally. Even the local stores (restaurants, utility stores etc.) in your neighborhood want to be discovered. They are looking for a way they can go to their users. While this problem is mainly solved by advertising on TVs (billboards, radios etc.) to low cost pamphlet distribution through newspapers (and the traditional annoying way - Putting pamphlets into the post boxes and the door knobs). I always thought there could be a better way to reach your customers more personally 
    
2. E-commerce (mainly consumer): Yes its true, I have heard VC’s and many founders talk about the competition in Indian e-commerce and why it will fail. If you are an Indian e-commerce startup or a company in the e-commerce space with less trade profits etc. You are always likely to be shown the door by the VC’s (at the end of the day it’s always about making money, Personally If I invest X amount of money in a company I always look for 2X in returns in the future besides a sustainable continuous income, which can be achieved in many ways ) 

[Theory] Combining Local advertising with eCommerce:                                                             

I always wondered why bigger e-commerce companies ( Flipkart, Jabong, Myntra, Amazon and Zappos for that matter ) never tried advertising on their boxes they deliver to their customers. When you deliver your brown box packed with the product the side where you tape the box is the most valuable side of a delivery box. Most people check this side (to tear the tape and open the box) when they are taking their product out.

What would be really nice is to paste a nice pamphlet may be with a QR code to measure how many people will scan the advertisement- thereby calculating the ROI for your advertisers. 

What’s an e-commerce site requires doing this? An advertising platform that continuously learns users’ interests and based on these interests it can suggest them the most relevant advertisement for that user (that could be displayed on the box). Advertisers can manually measure their ROI by an increase in people contacting them about their business or an increase in the number of visits to their stores and their websites (personally I would love to see QR code on each of these advertisements and people can scan this QR codes to get some offers or discover the brand)

Reimagining Business supplies: Introducing esupply.in

eSupply enables Indian organizations and freelancers to conveniently buy all office supplies on a single online platform at competitive prices. It’s the first of its kind in the subcontinent .

Its been an exciting 5 months since we started building esupply. We’ve been hard at work for many months now, and while we still have lots more to do, we’re excited to launch the closed beta, to show you our progress. Every feature in esupply had to fight for its place in this first version and every piece of code was written with utmost care and passion(to build a great a product).

It’s just the beginning. We have a lot of great ideas in store. But first we wanted to focus on the basics. Nailing the foundation so it’s strong and steady. One of the reasons we are having a closed beta is that it gives us a chance to get a lot of feedback so that we can smooth out some of the rough edges.

If I went into detail about every new feature we’ve put into in this post, you’d never actually get around to trying it out yourself when we Launch it at  21:00 hrs tommorow. 

Dasboard (the company around you)

Yes, what if you can have an overview of your entire company and every employee. Dasboard brings you the best of both the worlds- the statistics of the company and a perfect UI to give you the finest User Experience.
 
Most of the graph database in dasboard are moving towards runtime flexibility (but not a lot) for well defined types and performance. A client graph for e.g gives the a representation of various clients and various projects, if I just want to list all the people in the company and check out each of their performance dasboard allows u to do that too. How does dasboard get individual performances? The little secret here is that we are using a generic internal feedback system that we started developing. Based on various feedbacks our internally learning algorithms carefully does collaborative filtering and represents it in the finest UI possible.

Thats not it..!! Dasboard even brings all your projects together. Dasboard talks to various API’s and combining this information with some of the best practices we have been adopting from the agile world dasboard is fast evoloving into one of the finest inhouse products we have been working on.

Stay tuned….!!

From September 8, 2011