India Business

Here is a great way to integrate an online shopping experience into people’s offline world.  Popular online fashion and lifestyle portal Yebhi.com has followed the footsteps of Homeshop 18 and rolled out 30 virtual stores across Café Coffee Day outlets in two cities — Delhi and Bangalore. The stores boast of a virtual wall that showcases the range of products offered by the portal, along with their QR codes and Near Field Codes (NFC). Customers can view, choose and buy these Yebhi merchandise directly through scanning the product codes with their smartphone. Giving further insights about the launching these stores,  Manmohan Agarwal, Founder-CEO, Yebhi.com said, “We are adding another service level by introducing a virtual wall. The idea is to make shopping simple, quick and easy. Also, with smart-phone penetration increasing, we see more online purchases happening through the mobile phone.” The online portal aims to target students as well as office goers and has partnered the coffee stores near college campuses and corporate offices. As a promotional initiative, Yebhi has also come up with INR 200 discount to the customers who purchase from these stores . Yebhi’s new Chief Business Officer, Nikhil Rungta said that that nearly 10 per cent of Yebhi.com’s business comes through mobile devices as users spend a lot of their time on them. So, engaging with users on this platform is necessary. Hence, he believes such an initiative will take online shopping to next level by touching base with Yebhi’s customers and allowing them to shop from anywhere, anytime. The virtual store concept started in 2009 when the British grocery chain Tesco launched its HomePlus service in South Korea, which installed posters that look exactly like a grocery store aisle onto the walls of subway stations. Commuters could actually buy the groceries while waiting for their train and the items would be delivered home. There were reports recently that suggested Yebhi was in for another round of funding. The portal introduced it own Wallet service for users in January this year. I believe this is a great initiative by the company and people especially youngsters would at least out of curiosity want to try them. This might take some time until people will adapt to this form of shopping. However, as smartphone and mobile internet penetration surges, so does the mobile commerce market. Retailers that implement mobile as part of their strategy will have an early advantage in a market that’s growing faster than online commerce. What do you think of the initiative? Let us know with your comments. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? - Contact WATConsult - India's Leading Social Media Agency

Over 125 jewellers from India and abroad will showcase their exclusive diamond and gold jewellery at the sixth edition of the Hyderabad Jewellery Pearl and Gem Fair (HJF) here June 7 to June 9.

Sociomantic Labs, which provides solutions for eCommerce marketers, has extended its operation in India with a new office in Mumbai and has appointed Mahesh Narayanan as Managing Director, India. He will be responsible to build the team and manage growth in India. Narayanan joined AdMob as Country Head for India in June 2009. Following Google’s acquisition of AdMob in 2010 he worked at Google as Country Head, Mobile. Prior to AdMob, he was the founding member of Google India’s direct sales operations in 2005. He has also worked with companies such as Rediff.com, Bidorbuyindia.com, Baazee.com, Mediaturf Worldwide and Times Now. Sociomantic Labs claims that it displays campaigns for eCommerce advertisers in more than 50 countries. Sociomantic Labs has offices in Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Moscow, New York, London, Madrid, and now in Mumbai. The company has an  has employee count of 100 people and hopes to double its employees in the next 12 months. Sociomantic Labs provides an interface for streamlined real-time display of ads. It provides services such as Real time bidding of ad impressions, global RTB reach, and ability to create personalized creatives for ads.

Tata Motors, under its new management, has been trying hard to revive the sales. The management is conducting several changes in the company’s plans and one of the prime initiatives is to introduce aggressive products in the current lineup. The SUV range from Tata will be the first to get and overall change in the process. The introduction of the Tata Safari Storme was one of the biggest initiatives by the company and the next vehicles in the line are Sumo Gold, Tata Aria and even the Sumo Grande. The Aria facelift is still on the cards but it may appear soon. Facelift from the Sumo is almost ready. Tata has introduced several changes in the products and is even planning to price them aggressively. The Tata Sumo Gold will also be receiving several top of the line features and will appear in the market by June. On the other hand Aria may receive a new touchscreen infotainment system that has already been witnessed on Indica D90 and Indigo Manza. The new system will provide satellite navigation, Bluetooth connectivity and USB support. Company is also planning to price it aggressively as it is planning to dazzle the market with the product. The Aria may arrive with the 6 speed automatic ZF transmission. Company is planning to reveal additional variants for Safari Storme, one a more powerful version that will be producing about 165 bhp of power and peak torque of 400 Nm. There is also a possibility of the automatic offering on the Storme platform with the same 6 speed ZF transmission. Those who put style more, they will have a more stylish version of Storme with 10 speaker Harman Kardon music system and with touch screen infotainment system. Tata motors is also said to be working on the next generation of the vehicle with the Land Rover team. The next gen vehicle will be sharing the Land Rover technology, which can surely make things difficult for the competitors. But that is a long road to go and will take lot of time until the vehicle reaches the production stage. So, for now major focus will be on the current product line up and their expansion and revival.

Following the recent launch of the 7 series, BMW has now revealed the facelifted version of its smaller brother 5 Series. The facelift version of 5 series has received few major styling updates in shape of extra contour lines that surrounds the kidney grille, the air intake at the front has also received redesigning, front fog lamp is now surrounded by the chrome finish, rear apron also receives extra chrome strip, the tail lights have also received updates and the new alloy wheels are now adorning the vehicle. The interior has also received some updates, the iDrive screen has been broaden with the chrome strip and company claims to have increased the storage area. If we look at the features, xenon headlights now come as a standard on all versions while the adaptive LED lights are being provided as an option. The new LED fog lights have been added and the wing mirror now comes with the indicators. An optional control system is also available that allows you to open or close the boot lid by just putting your foot under the rear bumper. The cabin ambient light are now available in two options i.e. in orange and white. Another coasting mode has been provided that disengages the powertrain while coasting, thus helps in saving the fuel and increasing the efficiency. The new entry in the line-up is the 518d diesel variant. The car comes with a four cylinder trim that offers decent 143 bhp of power. But there is now news if BMW is planning to bring that to the Indian market. The facelifted BMW 5 Series is expected to hit the Indian shores somewhere around end of this year.

The new version of the Opera Mobile browser for Android has shed its beta tag and is now available for free download on Google Play. This version of the browser marks an important development. Opera has now switched its rendering engine from its proprietary Presto to the open source Webkit, which also powers Chrome and Safari.   The new browser has a lot of improvements. The entire user interface has been streamlined to display more web content. The various functions of the browser can be accessed from a single button on the right hand top corner. Also the new off-road mode lets you have Opera Mini like compression technology at your service. It also shows you the amount of data that it compresses so you can instantly gauge whether the browsing is affecting your data charges. Besides that the browser implements a slick tab selection page if you are viewing multiple tabs. You can also get a quick look at news and other content which is personalized to your browsing habits by swiping right to the Discover section of the browser. The switch from Presto to Webkit seems to have given the Opera browser more speed in terms of page load. I am basing this on the comparative way in which Opera functions on my Android phone compared to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Both Chrome and Firefox on the mobile seem to be incomplete products because there is a significant lag in scrolling (in chrome) and page blur on scrolling ( in Firefox). By comparison, Opera works much better in this case. Opera seems much more stable and I am going to test it as my default mobile browser for a week and see how it turns out. If you have been facing similar issues with Chrome and Firefox on Android, you should check the latest Opera out. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? - Contact WATConsult - India's Leading Social Media Agency

Online fashion and lifestyle portal Yebhi.com has launched virtual stores across 30 Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) outlets in Delhi and Bangalore. These virtual store will feature pictures of merchandise from Yebhi.com website with a QR or NFC code. It’s not clear whether Yebhi plans to extend this initiative to other CCD outlets across the country How to use: One can just select any item by scanning the QR code or by tapping on the NFC sticker through their smartphone. They will be taken to the product page on Yebhi.com where they can make a purchase. Yebhi claims that if one buys a product through virtual stores they will get an additional discount of Rs 200. Note that since there are considerably lesser number of NFC devices available across various mobile platforms in India, it’s smart of Yebhi to also include a QR code. However, this also restricts possibilities that Yebhi could have achieved here. Yebhi could have integrated their wallet for payment through NFC, however in the current implementation, a tap on the NFC code leads the user only to the product page. This looks like more of a marketing initiative than aiding business leads. The idea behind such moves is to encourage potential customers to use the service, and usually, mass media like TV or print newspapers are used. Yebhi recently raised $12 million as bridge round of funding from its existing investors, Fidelity Growth Partners India, Qualcomm Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Catamaran Ventures. Similar initiatives Recently, we have seen companies adopting more technology oriented methods to promote their product, of which, QR and Augmented Reality remains the top favorite with NFC implementation catching up. In January 2013, Homeshop18 had launched a similar initiative by installing a virtual wall named ‘Scan N Shop’ at the  Terminal 3 (T3) domestic side of New Delhi’s-IGI Airport (IGIA). Homeshop18′s implementation only offered payment via cash on delivery, which we believe was much more swift than Yebhi’s implementation. Mobile advertising solutions company TELiBrahma launched its Augmented Reality (AR) app PointART. Times of India also launched its AR app - Times Alive, while HT Media too has its own AR app - ARPLus. Recently, PVR Cinemas had launched an NFC-based PVR Wallet app for the recently launched BlackBerry 10 platform. In October 2012, Bangalore-based mobile payments solution provider iKaaz had launched two new mobile payment platforms for enterprises and consumers called iKaaz Consumer Wallet for Enterprise and iKaaz mPOS. For the same, the company had launched an NFC based solution for merchants called Tap & Pay where merchants can receive payments from customers with a single tap from an NFC-based device. In August 2012, Nokia India was looking to introduce a NFC-based ticketing system for its consumers and was apparently in talks with a majority of the metro rail projects in the country for this initiative. The company had reportedly partnered with the mobile payment company Paymate for NFC solutions and had tied up with banks for this service. Nokia had previously partnered with Paymate and the makers of the Bollywood movie Ra.One to offer content including ringtones and wallpapers, through the use of NFC tags. For this initiative, PayMate had installed around 20,000 tags across Nokia outlets, shopping malls and movie theatres in the country. State Bank of India had also announced NFC enabled debit cards for Bangalore Metro project in July 2011, which allowed commuters to pay for their journeys with a simple tap while Tata Docomo had partnered with Xius to trial Near Field Communications based mobile payments in Hyderabad in February 2011

A lot can happen over a coffee. And if the new age marketing trends from the smartphone industry are any indicators, a lot is already brewing. In a world clogged with the dominance of Google’s Android mobile and massive eminence of Apple, Blackberry has put its invasion mode in the top gear by deciding to demonstrate its latest handset, Blackberry Z10, at hundreds of cafes across India. According to the company sources, the move has paid off as 70% of the cafegoers consented to demonstration and one in ten asked Blackberry to contact them about the purchasing. Out of this group, 82% proceeded to buy a Z10. A pretty impressive feat considering company’s projection rate of 50% conversion. Although Company’s Marketing Director, Anish Gupta, did not unveil the final number from overall generated sales, he confessed that the campaign has managed to facilitate 22,000 demonstrations successfully with many consumers even inviting the blackberry staff for a cup of coffee. The present eagerness of Blackberry to cover the lost ground after being elbowed from the third spot by Windows recently at Global scale is understandable.* But, whether the shaky smartphone giant would be able to transform the generated goodwill to any real number remains to be seen…. *The IDC Survey Story Source: ZDNet Looking For A Social Media Agency?? - Contact WATConsult - India's Leading Social Media Agency

Directi, an Indian corporation which offers a variety of internet products in the domains, hosting and media space has announced a new web suffix which they will be launching next month. The new suffix ‘.in.net’ is being targeted towards Indian businesses who would like to have an online presence. This domain extension will be operated by Directi as generic, unrestricted domain. The company previously launched .pw (the professional web) which has seen 150,000 registrations. Directi is now a registry operator and has been pushing towards introducing new domain extensions in India. This is so because according to the company’s internal data, 65% of the people who use their website are unable to get the domain name of their choice. Bhavin Turakhia, Founder & CEO of Directi spoke about the development, “Directi has played a pioneering role in defining products and platforms that have revolutionized the way people host their businesses online. With the launch of .IN.NET, we are confident of providing Indian businesses an opportunity to leverage the domain as a new platform to enhance their online experience and opt for memorable names within .IN.NET that will give them a competitive edge.” The company says that the new suffix will be publicly available after a 42 day landrush period. A landrush period is one where customers who do not own a trademark will be able to pre-register for generic, premium and brand domains. After this period, the domains with this extension will be available to everyone on a first come, first serve basis. Landrush and Trademark claims phase: June 17, 2013- July 30, 2013 More information can be found here. Looking For A Social Media Agency?? - Contact WATConsult - India's Leading Social Media Agency

India Cements has reported a 59.5 per cent slump in net profit to Rs 26.28 crore for the fourth quarter ended March 31, 2013, mainly due to poor demand and increase in freight charges.