Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Blog

From a post a year ago: There are three elements which I have found are particularly useful in the ideation process: Talking to people and listening carefully to the questions they ask Writing or doing a presentation – helps in structuring it Deep thinking for an extended period of time Of these, the third is [...]

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This week’s links: The incredible growth of the Internet since 2000: from Royal Pingdom.”There were only 361 million Internet users in 2000, in the entire world. For perspective, that’s barely two-thirds of the size of Facebook today.” Dawn of a new day: by Ray Ozzie. “The next five years will bring about yet another inflection [...]

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I was speaking to a friend who got into building a hotel. This was his first construction-linked project. When he started, he had estimated the cost project to take about 2.5 years and cost Rs X. It took him 4 years and cost him 2X. At every stage, he had to pay off people. Every [...]

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We all groan about the high prices of real estate in India’s cities. Rates in South Mumbai have reached Rs 75-80,000 per sq ft ($1,800 per sq ft). Have we ever thought about why that is the case? In urban areas, real estate is one of the biggest money generators for politicians. About 25-30% of [...]

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This story is about how innovative our political parties are becoming when it comes to buying votes. In the early days, voters would be paid an amount (say, Rs 500) to vote for a candidate./ The payment was made prior to voting. Then, the payment was linked to outcome. 50% was paid prior to the [...]

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A large company won a contract for a waste management project in a global tender. Everything clean so far. Then, it started. Party 1 called up for Rs 8 crore. Had to be paid. Party 2 called up for Rs 10 crore. Paid. Party 3 called up for Rs 7 crore. Paid. Then, a senior [...]

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I was having a conversation late one night with a few friends and relatives, whom I was meeting after a long time. Inevitably, the topic shifted to politics. One topic that kept coming up was that of corruption – at the high levels and at the low levels. Its pervasiveness has now become so deep [...]

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From a post I wrote a year ago: Every company, however small, must develop a “numbers discipline” when it comes to revenues and costs. For much of my business life, this is not something I bothered to do – and so am assuming that there are plenty others like me! Hence there is a need [...]

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This week’s links: Twitter and Facebook: Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin argue why Twitter is undervalued. “Twitter is in theory even better positioned than Facebook to capitalize on the social interest graph.” Gartner 2010 Hype Cycle: “Media tablets, private cloud computing, and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays are some of the technologies that have moved [...]

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How can the Uns of India become United? And what can this unity do? For this, I recommend reading these two posts by Atanu Dey: Part 1 Part 2 As Atanu puts it: “It is possible that the 150 urban parliamentary constituencies of India have an aggregate of 20 million or so people who are [...]

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We are the People of Middle India. We are the Uns. Unregistered voters, Unconcerned citizens. Undecideds. On election day, we take a day off. So, why should our elected leaders care about us? Imagine if it could be different. Imagine the Uns coming together to create a Votebank. Just like some of the communities do [...]

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Now that we have finally executed well during the Commonwealth Games, it is time to hold those responsible for the mess and loot prior to the games accountable. And on paper, we have various inquiries that have been instituted. The Organising Committee has already been indicted. The reports will be submitted, a few will be [...]

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As I was reading one of the books written in the 1960s about India, I couldn’t help thinking about the challenges and the opportunities that people must have felt at India’s Independence. True, we started off Freedom with plenty of challenges — Partition, Gandhi’s assassination, Kashmir and the Princely States integration into India. It took [...]

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It happened quite literally to me. I had gone to Metro and was walking down one of the side roads near St. Xavier’s High School and College. And I saw Raj Mahal, the restaurant. Long forgotten, it was a place I used to frequent while at school every once in a while.  And so for [...]

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From a post a couple years ago: The 5 Phases in the life of a Customer Relationship: Non-Customer and Competitor’s Customer: This is the universe of customers that need to be targeted. They can either be first-time customers in a category, or they could be competition’s existing customers. Need: Branding and Lead Generation Future Customer: [...]

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This week’s links: Where ideas come from: from Wired and Economist. Riding Asia’s digital tiger:from McKinsey Quarterly. “Asia is the world’s hottest area of Internet growth, but the dynamics on the ground vary widely by nation.” India Digital Media Outlook 2010: from WebChutney. Android and Mobile Computing: from Newsweek. “Android is the kind of runaway [...]

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What is needed is the equivalent of an i-mode for India. While i-mode’s 91% payouts made Japan the pioneer in mobile data, my belief is that a model wherein content and service providers could get 70% of the end-user payment can help drive data services in India. While AppStores do offer that, the “app market” [...]

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One clear opportunity in India is in the eCommerce space. As the Internet user base grows, the convenience of shopping from one’s home (or office) combined with attractive deals will grow the market. The key determinant for success for hard goods will be the efficiency of the value chain (logistics of speedy delivery). Winners are [...]

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To make money via advertising, the Internet opportunity is about 10X the mobile opportunity today in India. But the challenge is that the bulk of the money in this space goes to Google and Yahoo (with Facebook likely to be a strong contender in the future). That leaves a much smaller quantum for the local [...]

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There is a market that is a magnitude larger than Internet advertising in India – and even that barely existed a decade ago. Mobile VAS (value-added services) accounts for consumer spend of about $2 billion (Rs 9,000 cr) in India.  With a user base that is also about 10X the Internet base in India,  India [...]

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