Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Blog

The third business in Netcore is mobility. In this, the primary focus has been around SMS, but in recent times, we have been working to widen the portfolio of services on offer to businesses. We had started with a consumer-centric SMS content service (MyToday SMS) about five years ago. We hoped to monetise the free [...]

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Netcore’s second business which is also linked with email is Email Marketing. We have two offerings: Emergic Mass Mail (EMM) and Affiliate Email Marketing. EMM is about providing a hosted platform for companies to send out and track emails at scale. The email lists are owned by the company – what Netcore offers is a [...]

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Once every couple years or so, I provide an overview of what Netcore, the company which I founded more than a decade ago and I run as Managing Director, does. With changing times, some elements of our business mix have changed. Much of what Netcore does has stayed as B2B (business-to-business). We have experimented with [...]

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From a series written a year ago: Corruption is a cancer that eats away at the fabric of a society. That has what has happened in India through the years since Independence. We let our standards drop. It must have started slowly – like a frog being boiled.  Those in power condoned the first actions [...]

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This week’s links: Top 10 emerging enterprise technologies for 2012: from InfoWorld. Best Business Books of 2011: from strategy+business. Also: some recos from Knowledge@Wharton. India’s imperfect liberalisation: by Swapan Dasgupta. “Even two decades after liberalization transformed India and heralded far wider levels of prosperity, India has not yet turned its back on the belief structures [...]

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The Debrief On the flight back, Mr. Narendra Modi called all of us to the front of the aircraft and asked us our views on the visit, and what could have been done better. We were told that this was something he does on every trip. The novelty of this exercise was as surprising as [...]

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Chengdu We arrived in Chendgu in the late afternoon on Friday. Chengdu is in Sichuan province in central China. By now, I knew almost everyone on the entourage, so the conversations became varied and lively. While half of the group accompanied Mr. Modi to the political-business meeting, I was in the other half that had [...]

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Side talks One of the advantages of international trips is the conversations with fellow travellers. After dinner at the Indian ambassador’s residence, when we returned to the hotel, a couple of colleagues invited me for a stroll in the nearby Wangfujing Street. I readily agreed. That walk brought back memories of my first visit to [...]

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Showcasing Gujarat The first business event kicked off with almost 200 Chinese companies in attendance. They were in-depth presentations on Gujarat and the industry and investment opportunities. Special focus was on the Dholera special investment region that was coming up as part of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor. Mr. Modi, on his fourth visit to China, [...]

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The Invitation I was invited to be part of the business delegation to China of the Government of Gujarat, led by the state Chief Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, from November 8-12. What follows is a first-person account of some of the sights, sounds and learnings from what was for me personally an extraordinary experience. My [...]

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From a post I wrote a year ago: 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 [...]

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This week’s links: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos interview: from Wired. “Jeff Bezos owns the Web in more ways than you think.” Steve Jobs’ real genius: by Malcom Gladwell. “Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it.” Who’s the decider? by Thomas [...]

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Let us look at an area where decisive action is urgently needed, where , an alternate agenda and firm leadership is needed. Some prescient economists and journalists have been warning us that the NREGA scheme has put India on an inflation treadmill. Even as the government tries to blame inflation on  international factors, the reality [...]

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Much of what I have outlined is  obvious with just a little bit of thinking. But many of us have stopped doing so. In our daily struggles and desires, those among us who have the capability to bring about this transformation by changing people’s minds have cocooned ourselves in our own private gardens behind high [...]

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It could be argued that the Prime Minister was not the real leader but that power was concentrated with the Congress President and the Family. But the PM should have known better. If he saw the 2009 victory as a vindication of himself over the past years, he could have laid out the operating rules [...]

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As we look at the present morass, what is clear is that there is a lack of both vision and will in UPA 2. It is almost as if it is a cricket team batting on the third day of a Test Match to play for a draw or avoid a loss. How did we [...]

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Along with changing the economic model of India and driving a reforms-led agenda,  UPA 2 also need to think big. Two-and-a-half years is  a long time for many such bold ideas to start having an impact. India needs a hundred new cities. India needs to rethink agriculture productivity. India needs massive investments in alternate sources [...]

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From a series I had written a year ago: 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 [...]

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This week’s links: Facebook vs. Google: The battle for the future of the Web: from Fortune. “These companies are fighting to see which of them will determine the future of the web — and the outcome will affect the way we get information, communicate, and buy and sell.” Business Week’s special Steve Jobs issue: Try [...]

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The third issue, and this is linked to the governance issue, is that of the economic model for India. Central to this transformation are reforms. The Congress, under an external shock, started the real process of reforms in 1991 under Narasimha Rao. The BJP governments from 1998-2004, under Vajpayee, took this process forward. Since 2004, [...]

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