Will The Sad State Of Logistics Hurt Indian eCommerce?
An old friend of mine from my alma mater, IIT Bombay, who is now a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, was recently carrying out a sponsored study on…
How Long Can Malls Remain Open If Stores Inside Them Keep Closing Down?
How Long Can Malls Remain Open If Stores Inside Them Keep Closing Down? Short Answer: Forever. Now for the long version. As I highlighted in Retail Winners & Losers Amidst…
Good Riddance To Cheque Deposit Systems
Over five years ago, I'd written a post titled Cheque Deposit Systems — Are They Really Worth It? During the next couple of years, I found this contraption to be…
Tirumala-Tirupati Updates
Here are some updates from my recent visit to the famous Lord Balaji Temple in Tirumala-Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, India. "Sheegra Darshan" is anything but the "quick darshan" that it…
Small Conversion Can Create A Large Business
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. This famous quote is attributed to John Wanamaker (1838-1922), the US businessman who…
Banks Have Nothing To Fear From TELCOs
In my op-ed article titled "Impact of Regulation on Financial Services Providers" published in the August 2012 issue of The Journal of Internet Banking & Commerce, I'd argued that banks…
Ten Ways – Er, Only One Way – To Slash SMS Costs
In Whither Cross-Selling And Upselling With eBills And eStatements?, I'd written about how I got hit by exorbitant SMS costs and how I solved this problem by ordering an SMS Pack…
Web – The Forgotten Channel?
According to the World Retail Banking Report 2012 co-authored by Cap Gemini and EFMA and a few other research reports published recently, customers are viewing the Internet as one of the…
CTS2010 Compliant Or Not?
Soon after I wrote Cheque Truncation System or Contract Termination System, a senior banker averred to me in private that India's cheque truncation program had a lot of loose ends.…
Has The Indian IT Industry Missed The FORTUNE 500 Bus?
ROYAL DUTCH SHELL (Netherlands) and MANPOWER (USA) respectively bring up the front and rear of the latest Fortune GLOBAL 500 list published in July 2012. RANK* COMPANY REVENUES (US$ Billion)…