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The 'hot' business till a year ago is seemingly ' hot to handle' now. There is a pervading sense of fear exacerbated by the closure some famous start ups in food delivery business. However, the naysayers will not question the potential in food delivery- The organised food business in India is worth $48 billion, or Rs 3 lakh crore, of which food delivery is valued at $15 billion (Rs 94,755 crore). In developed nations, takeaway and home delivery contributes to about 35% of the food business. In India only about 10% of the orders are for takeaway and home delivery. Furthermore, 80% of the orders are made through phone calls.  Eateries like Dominos, Pizza Hut etc. alone get 50-60% of their sales through eCommerce.  At last count there were around 120 start ups in this space, all jostling for the same customer in the same areas.  Given the low entry barriers and healthy wallets of investors start ups have mushroomed. That is reason enough to ...

There has been a lot off buzz when India Post collected Rs 280 crores through Cash On Delivery (COD) for e-commerce firms in the last year. While this surely something to crow about, this is just a small drop in the ocean. However this perhaps assumes much more significance on the way forward for the organization. To give an introduction - India Post has about 1.55+ lakh post offices of which 90% are in the rural areas, making it the world's largest postal network. On an average, a post office serves 21.21 sq. km area and about 7,175 people. It also has cash handling services like core banking solutions, money transfer and a robust account system. Apart from this it has insurance and other services. India is at the cusp of the ecommerce wave.  The e-commerce business in India was about $ 6 billion (approx. Rs. 37,344 crores) in 2012 and is expected to touch $76 billion (roughly Rs. 4,73,024 crores) by 2021 of which distribution, delivery and logistics constitutes around 12 per...

This note was a very personal one when we completed a milestone of completing 20 years of our married life together. 7300 days ago, we had a traditional Malayali wedding in Trichur, Kerala. My grandmother (bless her), till her death insisted till that it was only because of her that we got married – (she got her thrills from it) – after all I was a favourite grandson (did I say only too?) and Latha was her only grand-daughter in law. Latha is the scheming sort. Pretty soon she warmed her way into the h earts of my relatives. Infact she knew more of them than I did. They would rather talk to her than me. Forget relatives, she managed to swing my father her way. He actually thought that he had a great daughter in law much better than his own son! Poor me! We are very different persons. I am the impatient one and Latha is just the opposite. My idea of a great time is to relax and chill, her idea of a great time is some action. She loves to party and I love to be at home and...

An $8.8 billion write-down of its latest acquisition - Autonomy seems to be the latest mishap in the HP saga. And with it comes proof that HP has been following a path which is heading south. From the exciting times of Lewis Platt and John Young to the bleaker times started by Carly Fiorina, HP has lurched from disaster to disaster. And the list looks endless. Fiorina decided to move to reorient the company to a marketer of computer equipment and enterprise systems. Her acquisition of Compaq Computer so that HP- Compaq would be the leader in low-cost personal computers was a disaster.  She tried to focus simultaneously on high-end enterprise systems. Luckily or unluckily she had bid for the business consulting practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers, but lost to IBM.  NCR's Mark Hurd followed her and appeared to appeal to the stock market. The efficiency expert, he focused on short term sales growth and cost reduction, doubling the company’s ear...

"18 Again" launched with much consternation and hype a vaginal tightening cream. I am not going to talk about the efficacy of the product and neither is it to ridicule the product per se. Frankly, I don't care.   This is more to do with the hypocrisies associated with a product like this.  The positioning of the product along with the commercial  And more importantly sexual intercourse / sex is still looked as a matter which I dare say, most people enjoy but something which cannot be talked about in the open. What the f#@* (well ...fuck!)?    Positioning of the Product 'Like a virgin' - the heroine croons in the commercial. But unfortunately this advertising reinforces the sexist view in India that pre-marital sex is something to be frowned upon, a taboo which is even seen as sinful by some.  According to the company the cream empowers women but rather than empowering women it will reinforce the pat...

The airline industry in India has been going through an enormous amount of pain. It has seen more downs than ups. At a time when the economic outlook is far better than the US or European geographies, the whole business is going through a crisis of sorts; some due to its own doing and some due to extraneous factors. Market In recently announced statistics, the domestic market has increased 1.1% year-on-year in Mar-2012 to 4.87 million passengers. This is the slowest month of domestic passenger growth since May-2009 when passenger levels declined 4.4%. Passenger traffic increased 6.55% in 1Q2012 to 15.3 million. For 34 consecutive months the market has seen growth however it is the third month in the same period which has seen a single digit growth. There has been 16 months of double digit growth prior to that. The drop in traffic can be directly attributed to the reduction in coverage by Kingfisher Airlines. Till such time, India's growth rate was among the highest ...

Most of you do not know my uncle. T.C. Krishnankutty Menon (TCK), or to me Aniyanmaman, passed away recently.  He resided in Trichur, in God's Own Country,  a town more famous for its literary figures, jewellers, temples and Pooram. I was born there and he stayed in a house next to ours - we were all from the same family. TCK was, in a sense, a true blue Keralite. He did his schooling in Trichur followed by his graduation in Chemistry at Maharaja's College, Ernakulam, quickly followed by a post-graduation through research. He joined Sri Kerala Varma College, Trichur after that, in two spells and taught there till his retirement. In-between he did drop into the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Delhi for his Ph.D but for reasons which lie buried with him, he returned to Trichur and that's where he stayed for the rest of his life. His visits out of Kerala were few and far. A Keralite he was but parochial he was a not. In a s...