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This is a building shaped like a sphere, located in the campus of the software company, Infosys in Mysore, India (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is not every day that you are surprised and impressed to see a foreign buy-out by a completely desi origin Indian firm.
Having stated that; I can clearly list the recent of buying events when Hindalco bought Canadian Novelis; Tata acquired European Corus, and British luxury car-makerJaguar-Land Rover through their Steel and Motors’ divisions respectively.
If I deep dive further into the IT-sector to be specific; then I am reminded of the big-wig buys such as of US-based TriZetto and Zafferra by Cognizant. Wipro bought Infocrossing; and HCL bought British based consulting firm Axon Group. And just recently I had the news of Infosys buying US based Panaya from all the sources around me.
As the general understanding goes, most of the buy-outs are in the domain that the buyer is in and therefore majorly done to increase stake in the sector.
I therefore could have shrugged off the Infy shopping cart as an attempt by a newly appointed, first non-founder CEO, Mr. Vishal Sikka to garner some bling to his resume. But then, I got to notice the nature of business of the bought over firm, which made me research all over regarding this acquisition. Yes, the bought out firm is not directly in-line of business with that of its purchaser.
Infosys is an business consulting, information technology, software engineering and outsourcing services firm. Whereas, Panaya being a software as a service (SaaS) company that provides cloud-basedquality management services with solutions including Change impact analysis, automated code remediation, and test management.
So why an Automation product purchase to deliver services that were erstwhile done manually? Is Infy again up to some laying spree?
The differentiating aspect of the latest Infosys buy-out intrigued me for 2 reasons apart from the obvious lay-offs. Firstly, our Indian software hero is reputed for sitting on cash and cash reserves and shying away from inorganic spends like these. Secondly, it is an Automation product buy-out to deliver services which were until now delivered manually.
So the analytical bug in me suddenly got activated. I gathered all that I could on the subject and went into a state of ponder. All I could gather on the hard-hitting WHYs of the deal are as follows:
1.Higher revenue costs, inefficiency of client facing roles, delay in service delivery at client ends are the bottle necks of the IT Industry.
2.Attrition rate in the IT sector at an all time high of almost 21%.
3.Manpower in this sector is expensive, and further addition of on-site travels which leads to squeezed margins.
4.Existing workforce requiring constant fortification of Bonuses, perks and Appraisals; that add a major chunk to the costs. Also, the non-monetary investments like time and management further add to the impending costs.
5.Processes like Testing tend to become repetitive for the skilled engineers and also curb creative growth in them.
So, finally the jigsaw came out fine and just. In these competitive times, a company has to think out of the box to stay profitable in the game. Gone are the times when growth is directly linked with that of the linear growing work-force. In order to get into higher revenue streams, the impending need is to get into next generation technologies like the big data analytics, internet-of- things, data mining, mobility, automation and artificial intelligence. After all, emulating others from geographies (read Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley) that are known for cutting-edge technologies is the least an ambitious firm could do for themselves.
By the way, Panaya is also funded by an Israel based private equity firm - Israel Growth Partners and most of its 156 employees are based out of Israel.
Let us wait and watch what more insight comes out of this deal or from that geography or from that sector in the times to come.
Ever wondered to what other use the squeezed short urls
of some seriously long links could serve, other than obviously acting as their
zip versions?
As you probably know that the entire activity through
social sharing is traceable unlike the one that happens through emails and
instant messaging. Hence, this zone of online social sharing that is not invariably
tracked is called the Dark Social, which basically includes emails or instant
messages sent to exclusive people or groups. So, for tracking the sharing
activity that happens through not so obviously tracked medium is one of the areas
where those shortened urls could be used.
I know the popular wisdom suggests that nothing apart
from the social big-wigs like Facebook and Twitter could dominate the online
sharing scenario. But to regard that knowledge as a fallacy would be the latest
study commissioned
by RadiumOne.
The study simply summarises that a lot happens outside
the realms of what a lot of us think and understand about the online sharing
theories. As per the study, the Dark Social share surpasses the combined
activity of all the popular social media put together.
Dark Social: Revealing the Dark unseen side of Social Sharing
If the figures are to be believed, about 84% of people share content online, out
of which 93% use Dark Social media.
Also, 32% of those online sharing
ones share only through the Dark Social. Though, one of the most defining
findings of the study is that 69% of
the entire sharing activity happens through the Dark Social, whereas the big
brother of social media - the Facebook only accounts for 23% globally.
It would not be incorrect to deduce that what viva voce is in the offline world, Dark
Social is its reliable counterpart in the online one. Coming to think of it,
Dark Social activity is bound to happen between two strong contacts and hence,
the probability of an actionable recommendation is more likely.
Hence, the time is right for the content marketers to
get into some serious deep dive into the emails of their recipients.
This is 2015 and the phrase Social Media
Management has evolved a whole lot. It is simply much more than acquiring a chosen user name
with the top Social Media accounts and using them to stay in touch with the
people you know in the real World.
Here I am referring to the Social Media
Management for a professional use, which would help in the streamlining process
for the branding and content management for personal as well business
identities.
Although there are numerous tools available
which are notably popular amongst Social Media enthusiasts; but for the sole
purpose of keeping things simple, I am only mentioning the ones which are by
far simplest in terms of usage and are absolutely frugal.
Have a look and feel free to discuss your
experience(s) using them.
Being a writer I have always struggled when
it comes to associating an appropriate picture or a graphic art with my
write-ups. I know that our very own Google has been a darling in providing an
option for using ‘labeled for reuse’ images. But sadly, that particular option
only takes care of the licensing problems, the dire need for an appropriate
graphic content to complement the written content is not addressed properly
with it. That is when I researched and got to know about CANVA.
Canva is simply a graphic art designing
website that gives you numerous images based on the key-word that you provide.
They do ask for a dollar for buying them, but the free pictures are available
with their water-mark. Let the last part of the last statement not let you lose
your curiosity in Canva. It is because the water-mark is almost non-existent
with the careful camouflaging done by the minds at Canva.
By the way, the graphic art on this article
also uses water-marked images from Canva. I bet you checked twice to confirm that.
It goes without saying that Google
Analytics is the tool to administer all your campaigns on the World Wide Web.
It is pretty easy to configure with a basic Gmail account to access all the associated
statistics related to a website. For anyone not much obsessed with data (unlike
me) can do simply well with the basic information provided in the dashboard
report that comes up on the front page with statistics like – number of users,
page views per session, bounce rate et all with respect to different time
frames. As long these figures are in good health, everything would seem to be
working fine in general; but for specific campaign related stuff, the
CONVERSIONS feature of Google Analytics comes in handy. It can be used for
tasks which require to know activities on a campaign like “how much downloading
activity happened” to “how many registrations” and of course everything related
to the E-commerce arena. With power-packed features available for E-Commerce
tracking, everything related to a particular sale gets a deep-dive into a pool
of information. Sofrom the referral landings, time-lag in-between the purchases
to sales figures pinned down to locations,all will be at your disposal with few
clicks.
Even if anyone has been remotely associated
with any Social Media activity, they would surely agree on creating killer
content as a means to survive in the game. Time and again the particular task
of creating an engaging content has to be repeated in order to achieve time
stamp in the minds of the audience. Since the content cannot be created
magically all the time, in such a scenario application like Buffer comes to
rescue. One can simply create a lot of content and then schedule it to be
posted on specified time frames with the Buffer. Buffer then automatically
shares the content on those optimal time-frames (user-specified) in order to
receive maximum visibility. Also, the application allows sharing third-party
content that is doing the rounds on the internet via the user’s social handles.
This particular feature is very useful for interim periods of lag in-between sharing
of self-created content. It keeps the user base engaged with the relevant
content from other users while getting to see it shared by your own social
identities.
Services offered by Bitly became popular
through Twitter’s stringent 140 characters service. Bitly simply shortens any
url so that it gets condensed to fit into the default character settings of
Twitter or any other social media. This one is my favourite of all and I simply
cannot do without it. Although Twitter also offers a url shoterning service,
but since it is only limited to Twitter, so I end up using Bitly a lot. One
particular shortened url works for all my social media handles and I also get
an accurate statistics on it with the insights that it’s advanced analytics
features provide. It is a great tool for spreading mass coupons and discounts.
Zemanta is something I have on all my
blogging platforms as a default add-on. It is easily compatible with all the
major browsers and the moment content comes to the scene, it promptly starts
featuring relevant pictures and related content alongside the blogging window.
It also helps in suggesting context driven labels/tags and in-text links as
well. My favourite feature of Zemanta is the ‘Related Articles’; it gives the
user an option of including related content of fellow bloggers and in-return
allows the user’s post to be available for sharing by other Zemanta users. This
feature simply works as a Share-some-link-love and get it back thingy. You
never know when a little social sharing ends up serving as a good karma for
you.
Disclaimer: The content for this article is
entirely based on my experience of working things around in the Social Media
Sphere. I would love to know your experience with these tools and specifically
others that you are hooked on to for your campaigns.
I recall it was about 2-3 years back when I once got stuck at Andheri-Jogeshwari flyover for about half an hour during one of the hot afternoons of summer. During those 30 minutes of no-movement inside the cab, I had nothing much to do except for looking around at others who were also stuck like me there. People in all sorts of vehicles - Mercedes, Jaguars, Honda City and good old Fiat Padmini, were all travelling at same pace and were stuck together irrespective of where they came from and where they were headed to. By observing that scenario I struck with the moment of truth that no matter how and where a person lands up on this Earth, but ultimately he/she has to get stuck somewhere with a lot many others of different economic backgrounds. To be honest, I really felt that I learned a lot during that half an hour of congestion.
In between this period of understanding social anthropology, I had no idea that I would also learn a lot about changing trends in Indian shopping scenario. So my second learning of the day was that a lot of people shop online through Jabong.com. Like the first learning, this one also came from the same old traffic only. In-between those plethora of vehicles, there were frequent motor-bikes travelling with pillion guys carrying parcels of JABONG. Initially after observing 2-3 of those motor-biked courier delivery men I assumed that they must have been part of a single shipment travelling together. But sooner I got to know that my assumption was simply based out of plain ignorance. Obviously, I then kept on noticing a lot of JABONG men travelling to and fro delivering the parcels to their respective recipients.
Escaping the traffic, and after escaping the busy life of Mumbai I reached back to my city of Vadodara. Yes, my same old #damndrystate. Once home, I started my research on this JABONG. Once there online on it, I was amazed with the chunk of products available on it. I do agree that there are few other competitive brands offering similar service, but if I have to get into a thread-bare analysis with the perks and services I look for,then definitely JABONG will stand out from the crowd.
As any one close to me can vouch that I am a complete non-shopaholic. So, I did not shop as in shop with them much, though I did buy 2 silver rings from them. That was then, but recently they contacted me to review their site and gifted a voucher to do so. Again me being me, I just could not bring myself to shop and I hence did not realize when the voucher actually reached its date of expiry. Again me being me, I forgot about the whole thingy till the sweet people at JABONG again got in touch to know if I did use that voucher. I told them the truth and they were really sweet to extend the life of the voucher. I then did shop from them and surprisingly I did buy a dress for myself.
To let out a fact, I am a dress person. I have a huge collection of dresses, but all have been from stores in the U.S. I have always believed that good dresses are only from phoren stores. May be that is the reason I never ventured into searching them on any stores in India, be it online or offline. But this recent gift from JABONG made me venture into that territory as well.
I checked out their collection and to begin enlisting my observations - they do have a huge collection of dresses. With prices ranging from less than 300 INR to well above 30,000 INR, they have more than 6000 SKUs in dresses at any point of time. I have listed few of the features of the site which helped me with my purchasing decision, which are apparently absent in the competitor websites.
1. More inventory. For dresses - 6679, the nearest competitor offers 5123.
2. Classification on Dress type - For me a Peplum dress is a sub-set of DRESS. I cannot wear a
similar dress style for all occasions. Thankfully JABONG caters to the dress-informed people like
me. So, it was easy for me to use their site to find a Maxi-dress for myself. By the way, such an
advanced feature is rarely found in other online stores.
3. Classification on Occasion type - I was thrilled to see a classification on Occasion for dresses.
That is one feature that can be of use to people who are not much acquainted with the process of
buying dresses irrespective of an online or offline mode. I simply checked the WORK option under
Occasion and voila I had all the dresses as per my search criteria specified.
4. C.O.D. - It sounds like nothing if one is paying by digital money, but it matters a lot if one is not
so sure on their shopping skills. Considering women and their shopping, it is much of a possibility
that bought products could be returned. Yes, JABONG provides that option which is majorly
absent for many of the small towns in our country.
5. FreeShipping - Now who does not want a free shipping. But if a site tells you that the minimum
you need to order is 499 INR, you are bound to get irritated. I mean what is the point buying a
dress for 399 INR and then look for something else for another 100 INR to get qualified for free
shipping. Luckily JABONG does not tie to buy with such tricks. On the other hand, they
simply ask for 2 products site-wide, irrespective of their price. So, one can enjoy free shipping
even if their order is less than 499 INR.
So, I went ahead after my thorough research on the site and ended up buying a nice little dress which eventually turned out free for me as I was gifted a 500 INR voucher by them. I wanted some work wear sturdy garment in a dress that would cover up much and still be defined a DRESS. I am happy with my purchase and here I post a few pictures of me in it.
Overall, I had a fun time shopping and using the product that I bought from Jabong. The product was of good quality and definitely worth its cost. The inner lining of the dress was perfect along with the seam stitches and the back zipper.
Yes, I do look forward for another purchase with them any time soon.
If you wish to purchase anything similar like what I did, you can try this link.
P.S.: I am not paid a penny by anybody to write this article, all the content is my own. Though Jabong gifted me a no frill voucher which I used to purchase this dress. For the pictures, I give the credit to my friend Bhavina. Thanks Bhavina!
These days it is not at all uncommon to find brands being endorsed by celebrities. Gone are the days when you find a well known personality acting as a mere user to a particular brand; rather today is the time when a celebrity is synonymous with a brand in all respects and time zones. Be it giving endorsement speeches, showing up at allied events organised or co-organised with the brand or speaking about them at all media events in front of the cameras as well as behind them and; all the time talking about using them and hopefully using the endorsed brands for real as well.
Also it is a general fad that adding a well known celebrity to endorse a brand increases its brand value. Statistics has shown that it does happen all the time. But there also exists data to prove that that has not happened all the time.
I am not aware of all, but there are few, namely 5 that caught my fancy, hence enlisting them here.
I am not talking of the current scenario where Shah Rukh Khan is the brand ambassador for the Sunfeast range of foods, but to the times when the actor was roped in as an attempt to shake the 90% market share enjoyed by NESTLE's brand of instant noodles - THE MAGGI.
Surprisingly, the actor's charm and keen marketing sense (so popularly called) did not do a thing to bring the meagre share of TOP RAMEN brand of noodles by the Indo Nissin Foods anywhere close to the former brand's.
Some would call it bad luck, others would call it failure of the brand and the brand ambassador, but I would like to keep it as "failing to make the first mover impact" by the Indo Nissin Foods that ultimately made their attempts in bringing up celebrities as plain futile.
Also, more recently they had Sania Nehwal as the brand ambassador, which also did not work. Sigh!
By the way Shah Rukh Khan today endorses the instant noodles brand by SunFeast. So I would not be surprised to see him any day slurping up some variant of Yippie noodles, if he has not done it already.
I laughed the first time I saw Ranbir Kapoor starting the tag line - I am a Virgin, are you? May be the playboy image of the then poster boy of Bollywood worked in the process of enticing their targeted audience as mentioned by the company - the YOUTH. But really that did not seem to happen anytime.
Further more, the brand was also unique in terms of offering the "get paid for incoming calls" strategy. Unfortunately, that also did not work. I got some data which is exhibited below, it clearly shows that the parent company for the brand Tata Teleservices itself does not have much worthwhile share in the market, so speaking of Virgin's share is not of much significance.
And a bit of trivia here - back then in 1999, they roped in Genelia D'Souza and Diana Penty (who obviously was not much of a hot property then) for their adverts. Later on the Kapoor scion moved on to the parent company Tata Teleservices, coincidentally with which Virgin mobiles penetrated the Indian shores with a joint venture.
I mean, will any one will ever believe what I wrote as a heading for this one? Yes, it is true. I recall traveling by Mumbai locals in the year 2007 and finding the trains hoarded with big banner adverts of Ms. Kaif endorsing the brand with her full on grace.
Till date the travels and trains for me have been the same year after years, but I notice that the brand endorsed by the lady has changed. She moved on to the unbeatable leader in the consumer goods market HUL with their flagship brand LUX.
It is interesting to note that although today she is not associated with the brand, but her presence did help the FMCG arm of the Anchor Group, the Anchor Health and Beauty Care to claim that Dyna became the first new beauty soap in over a decade to enter the league of
top 10 national soap brands in our country. The point to note here is that although the soap was launched in 2006, it achieved this feat within an year's time.
This makes me wonder what would have happened to the brand in current scenario if the rumored soon to be Mrs. Kapoor in question was still endorsing it!!!
Considering the overall flops that junior Bachchan has churned in Bollywood, it is not so surprising for anyone to conclude his omen carrying forward to his commercial brand endorsements as well.
Abhishek was either roped in with his dad or with the Maruti people only to endorse their family sized car Versa in the the year 2001 in an attempt to market their product as a family one. But as we all know, the brand failed miserably in the market and years later it was probably made into Maruti Eeco with a much lower price point than Versa, which seemed like an attempt to dispose the vehicle off the shelf.
Obviously, the company Maruti Udyog Limited had burnt their fingers in their bargain to get BOGO free celebrity offer.
Sadly enough, with time things did not change much; just the car manufacturer changed from Maruti to Ford. In the year 2005, Ford had Mr. Abhishek Bachchan roped in for their Ford Fiesta brand. Considering the fact that in those days his mainstream Bollywood career was going gun-ho with movies like Bluffmaster and Guru, it was obviously not insane for the guys at Ford to assume same accolades for their brand as well. But sadly, the American vehicle manufacturer did not even reconsider their endorsement contract with the actor after an year.
At this point I got nothing to comment; though I would love to share some trivia.
Moving further, the Maruti guys then got Kavita Kaushik of Chandramukhi Chautala fame from the hugely popular series F.I.R. to enact in their Eeco adverts; while brains at Ford were probably too scared to get any celebrity on board. So Ford remained brand ambassador-less till 2009, after which they had Suneil Shetty endorsing their SUV, Endeavour for a year long contract, which was obviously not renewed. (I knew you guessed it right by now)
By the way, it is indeed contrary to find Abhishek Bachchan's septuagenarian dad still having a long
list of active endorsements in his kitty, although those endorsements are successful or not is a matter of much debate worth many blog posts.(some day later I shall....)
when brands are not saved by their Ambassadors
5. Amitabh Bachchan for Uttar Pradesh Tourism
Continuing with the Bachchan family, brand endorsements are a synonym with the surname. Therefore, I could not help not include the biggest celebrity endorser of India in this list. I know this list is complied of the flop brand ambassadors; but when you have 20+ brand endorsements in your separate brand ambassador career profile No. #3 (politics was No. #2), you are bound to have made few wrong decisions in your career by the sheer rule of probability.
So, here I include senior Bachchan's Uttar Pradesh Tourism brand endorsement as a failure. If the various statistics have to be taken into consideration, the state did not see any significant change in the tourism footfall in the years 2004-2007 when he was the reigning brand ambassador of his home state. On the other hand, since the time he shifted his endorsement base to the state of Gujarat (last 5 years), the state witnessed a 14% pick-up in the tourism foot fall, which even surpasses the national growth rate by more than double the rate, which is 5.82% for the current fiscal.
Again a trivia on the facts and figures, the state of Uttar Pradesh enjoys the highest footfall in domestic influx of tourism averaging to 71 million (forget the international), whereas Gujarat has a mere figure averaging to 20 million for both. (don't look for currency symbol, I am talking of human beings here)
So, it is clear as to why the hugely popular brand ambassador failed here; what more greed can we expect from the state tourism board here.
Furthermore, I have a piece of personal advice for the decision makers for the UP tourism board here; instead of spending money on a new brand ambassador, why not work on improving the security scenario in your state, especially for solo female travelers like me. I am sure it will enhance the image and brand for your state, since the numbers you already have.
A big bit of Trivia: Not to forget the open white lie endorsement tag line from the dashing old man for their adverts: UP me dum hai, kyunki Jurm yaha kam hai (what rubbish, I am a born and luckily not brought up from the states of UP )
when brands are not saved by their Ambassadors
Hope it all was entertaining and factual to read , if not accept my sincere apologies. I shall try to be better with time.
La vista da uno dei ristoranti all'interno del Grand Hyatt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Hi,
This morning I woke up to realize that my blog is accepted by Indiblogger to be up and running for monetizing their brand of content.
This typically means that I can post adverts that specifically come from them.
So, after spending a little time with the system, I got my ads integrated to my blogs.
Though currently, they are only offering a travel affiliate for monetization, which seems will improve in the times to come.
So here I am posting a search bar for this travel website. It is called Wego.
Wego.com is the leading travel search
site in the Asia Pacific and Middle East, headquartered in Singapore,
with regional offices in Jakarta, Bangalore and Dubai. Available in
more than 50 localised country sites and 30 languages, Wego searches
hundreds of global travel websites including airlines, hotel chains and
online travel agents, using powerful yet simple to use technology.
Wego presents an unbiased and channel neutral view of travel prices,
providing users with the choice of booking direct with a hotel or
airline, or via an OTA or aggregator site.
I have tried and tested it. It works in the lines of IXIGO that we know of more popularly in India.
I as able to locate good hotels in my vicinity at more or less the same price that I find at other leading websites.
Though I have not used the site personally, but the ease with which it navigates, seems user-friendly.
I believe the real test of a travel booking website comes when you actually get to find a good deal at the last hours of travel.
That reminds me that I will have such moments in just about 15 days from now. Will then use it again and post the outcome. Till then one can experience it here - Wego.com
P.S: The java scripts provided by Indiblogger are broken, so I could not paste them here. Will do so if I get hold of the correct error free scripts at any time.
Also, please feel free to share your reviews here.
So this post is to share some good news. No, do not get any hanky panky ideas. I want to share that one of my tweets made me win a personally autographed Lakme goodies hamper from the Kareena Kapoor Khan.
Yes, it happened, and it happened yesterday. I know I should have been posting this yesterday itself, but you know I am too lazy for myself.
So, anyway, yesterday it was a Sunday and I was in my lazy lamhe mode at around 12ish during the day time. So, I logged into my tweetcaster account from my phone and so some #GoesGlossy contest going on by Lakme India.
I scrolled some tweets on it and realized that basically it was just a part of promotion activity for the Lakme Fashion Week that also had its finale yesterday.
The contest basically required people to tweet with the #GoesGlossy hashtag on a picture of Kareena Kapoor which had her in 3 different make-up looks. One was supposed to voice out his/her favourite look for her amongst those 3 with a reasoning. Ultimately the best 5 of all entries would win a hamper from the organizers, which would be personally autographed by Ms. Khan.
Generally I am not the one who goes for such quick trending one-day contests; but seeing the visuals of Kareena Kapoor Khan I immediately had some thought crossing my mind. Obviously then I blurted out in a tweet.
@ILoveLakme I go with the Orange candy look as it signifies Kareena Kapoor Khan's royal dignified demeanor to a complete T. #GoesGlossy
— aditi mishra (@surprizezunltd) August 24, 2014
And then in few hours I was awoken to realize that I had about 50 notifications on twitter and one could guess why that number in just a matter of 4 hours.
Yes, I won that one.
I felt good and immediately I shared my joy with the person because of whom my creativity these days is blooming to a new flavor and color, and yes a glossy color.
Attached are both the contest tweet and the one that made me win. Cheers!!
P.S: The aftermath of the contest was a lot of young girls sending me tweets and following me, and then asking me to follow them back. And I hope that is it.
