Dear All ,

I have moved to a new domain www.DigitalMusings.in . Hope you like that as well.

Cheers,

Puneet

Just some googling & some news report analyzing & soon this table swelled up to a distinguished number of 34 sites (table below). The first thing that came to my mind was ..Phew!! That’s a lot of competition in this business space.

In Rank Order based on Traffic, compiled  by Puneet Garg | Using Source : Alexa

Just a glance at the table above & you can see that Snapdeal.com is rated as the first among the entire group discount scheme website in India (based on traffic rankings in India –Alexa). With an India rank of 19^th in terms of the traffic generated (Google is number one), it surely is far ahead of its competition.

Most of the 70% of Snapdeal’s traffic doesn’t visit any other page than the home page which projects that the conversion rate is definitely less than 30%. Thus 30 people of 100 visiting the site have either clicked the deal, or have shown some kind of interest in the deal. The traffic trend consists of majority men under the age of 25 who are all educated.

The next best site in traffic terms will be fashionandyou.com. Again this is visited more frequently by users who are in the age range 18-24 & mostly men. Another interesting fact being that these men are often accessing these sites from their work place..(so much for office productivity !!)

With the competition space already getting chock-a-block and new sites being launched every other day, the business of group deal or online discount store is really a hit among the growing Indian ecommerce space.All of the above sites are serving same purpose but treatment is different.

Concept of group bargain sites is very new in India (Snapdeal.com was launched in Feb 2010 only & madala.com in Nov 2010) thoughit’s been around in the west started by sites like groupon. Incidentally Groupon has also entered the Indian market by acquiring Kolkata based www.sosasta.com. Internet giant Google also has plans to bring its answer to Groupon – Google Offers – to India. (Yeah this is going to be great fun in future…just wait for it)

Considering this spree of new companies entering this crowded market space it is but obvious that only the fittest will survive this competition. The weaker will either shutdown (mobstreet being latest victim) or will be acquired by others. The best way out is to join hands with others players in the space &consolidate their businesses – a strategy which still has high chances of survival for these new entrants.

Still whatever may be business tactic, In any case I feel the ultimate beneficiary of these sites is the consumer aka you & me, who have gainedfromthe great deals via this e-commerce revolution. I am sure you must have stumbled to at least one of these sites.  Isn’t it?

Now this is something for the small businesses. How about a device which can be attached to the mobile phone & enables the small business owner to accept credit / debit cards?

Well a company called square has already developed such a device which could be a big boon for small business owners to conduct financial transactions. They have developed a card reader, that is small enough to carry in your pocket & advanced enough to do those credit / debit card transactions.

Square’s pricing structure seems simple at a per transaction charge of 2.75 % & what’s more ..they are giving the device for FREE !!  Incredible technology which can do wonders in the coming years ..Isn’t it ?

Visa has developed a single click point of sale payments mechanism for online payments.  The interesting fact is that it will handle both Visa & Non-Visa payments. The visa press release though doesn’t mention in detail on how will the system work, but states that the users can shop “by simply entering an email address, alias or online ID and password, instead of a billing address, account number and expiration date”. Such a system is bound be hit by ever skeptic customers (specially Indians ) who are varied of going for any new mechanism for online transactions involving their hard earned rokda i.e. money.

In term of competition I feel there are already so many players in this field  e.g. Amazon’s 1-click and PayPal services, where Paypal already has  more than 98 million active users (though it charges a premium rate of 30 cents + a percentage rate per transaction) . I guess adoption by both merchants & customers is the biggest success attribute here.

From an Indian market perspective the credit/debit card subscriptions are high but card usage is relatively low. However the exploding mobile revolution with burgeoning mobile users touching 770 Million, the perfect channel of growth for payment industry is the cellular medium. The interesting fact is that the most important payments mechanism i.e. mobile payments will be catered later by VISA. It will however be using the NFC (near field communication) technology.

Airtel being another stakeholder in this industry has already launched Airtel Money – a scheme where mobile payments services are provided by the service provider. Considering NFC being the upcoming technology in this arena & widely talk about the next in thing when most of the latest mobile phones will have NFC enabled chips, the player who captures the opportunity first & throws it open to the Indian market will have a chance to catapult great growth figures in the payment industry.

Imagine a protracted road which is fathom less & loud. Motionless dark tinge of the sky. Making a rugged loud soothing sound. While rubbing your tender skin and gulping down with a gentle spot, adding a consoling perfume to the ever distant music of the stark landscape. Wind rubbing the dust while assimilating the fragrance of soaked wet sand and the parched bright scattered sunlight. The reverence of the white noise emerging from a far distant succulent fairy land. The skyline breathing with aromatic & tender vibrant potion which will just melt with your first bite. The oozing sound of water dripping past your ears. The colorful sparkling nectar ready to be slide down your throat.

P.S:  People please share what you feel after reading this piece. What comes to your mind? What did you imagine?

Now keeping these thoughts with yourself, read the scientific explanation from the master Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) who inspired me to write this. He had written one complex paragraph himself & then gave the below explanation.

“The wording of the paragraph is engineered for a specific purpose. It’s designed to activate different areas of your brain all at once.

The paragraph starts by activating the language part of your brain, obviously. Then it made you curious. Then your analytical side kicked in, trying to discern its meaning. Your left and right hemispheres were engaged, and they stayed that way throughout. So far, that’s like any good mystery story, and not yet special.  The words are meant to activate the areas in your brain responsible for your five senses, which means five different physical parts of the brain, pretty much all at once. Notice that all five senses are mentioned:

touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing.

The nonsense part of the construction is intended to keep the writing complex, so you can’t instinctively simplify anything in your mind. By activating multiple parts of your brain at once you would feel energized. This sort of thing would make some of you feel annoyed and some of you feel delighted.

At a writer’s level, the words are carefully chosen to work together independent of meaning. They simply “sound” good together, and they have a similar vibe. Call it Word Art.

All good fiction writers create in book form what we did in this experimental paragraph. It’s no accident when a Harry Potter book goes off on a tangent about food, which has nothing to do with moving the story forward. Descriptions of taste and texture and smell engage new parts of your brain. And it’s no accident that most Harry Potter chapters end with a point of curiosity. The author is making sure to stimulate as much of your brain’s real estate as possible. That’s why you can sometimes enjoy a movie or a book while knowing that the story itself is lame and predictable. What matters to entertainment is how many parts of your brain get pleasantly stimulated at once.”

I was just blown away by this experiment. You can read his paragraph at this link & the complete explanation here.

To create the above para I created a table map of the all the senses & possible words to describe that :

Then simply crafted that piece using a little help from the dictionary & whoa there you go !! !!!

Hope u find this interesting.

Puneet

Filed under: Just Words Tagged: Art of writing, Dilbert, emblematic, Experiment with words, harry potter, science of writing, Scott Adams, word art ]]> http://puneetg.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/the-emblematic-the-art/feed/ 7 Puneet dilbert