e Magus

Experts have been talking about how technology is innovated based on human behaviour, and the cultural behaviour of the people…. But this is no one way street. The use of technology is changing the human behaviour too. Remember the days of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Systems)…where in you had to actually rotate and dial a number…(I can still remember the kit-kit.kit…tone you get to hear when you release the wheel).. I’m sure like everyone else you would have been using the index finger to dial the number. In case you don’t belong to the POTS generation, ask your parents about the big black telephone covered with the white cloth placed in the corner of a living room…with the bulky telephone directory under it. It was an era when the index finger ruled. Then came the push-button dial pad telephones….It was usually gifted to you by your rich uncle or cousin coming from ‘Gulf’ on their annual holidays. The late 80’s saw the govt. owned company Bharat Electronics producing the same for mass m...

A few weeks back, I was working on a proposal for marketing of an e-commerce portal. One look at the stats showed that the e-tailing in India never took off. While categories like travel (led by IRCTC, and the OTAs) and Hotel bookings has taken of in a big way…it has been a dismal performance, when it comes to e-tailing. e-tailing can be defined as a business to consumer transaction through direct sale of limited quantity of goods or services.. The industry experts have been talking about the rise of e-commerce in India, but what is being missed out is that most of these e-com transactions are done on the B2B space. The data shows that the B2C industry size of ecommerce in India is around INR 11,000 crores*. About 80%* of the B2C e-com transaction is from the Online Travel Industry, followed by online classifieds The e-tailing pie is only about 9%*. While the numbers and growth might be encouraging, it is nothing great to make a big noise about (* Guesstimates by classical extrapolati...

An interesting news article that came out a few weeks back has got me thinking…. Facebook has overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the United States for the first time, according to new data from Hitwise, which measures Internet traffic. For the week ending March 13, the social networking juggernaut registered 7.07% market share, beating the search giant's 7.03% market share. See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/8XVAKZ What got me thinking was how could Facebook in such a short span of time overtake Google -the default destination for millions of internet users globally? The data shows dramatic rise of Facebook- this can be attributed to the fact that people are spending more time on the net socializing, and an average user visits more pages on Facebook (not sure though if the Facebook Chat window refreshes are counted as part of the Hitwise data as the chart shows a phenomenal increase since April 2009). On a different note, a person usually visits ...

I saw this new stuff that Google Labs is working on… FollowFinder it made me curious to know what exactly does this feature do, and how will it help the users and also how will it help Google as a company. Followfinder is basically a search engine that will help you find people (nay, tweeps) and expand your twitter network. While I’m not sure why would people go to a Google feature to search for Tweeps, while I have this function on Twitter page… in terms of finding people. In fact looking at the growth of twitter access through mobile apps (I guess in the last count it was close to 45%) Google is looking at only half the twitter user universe through this feature… Another reason and I find this most stupid is the fact that if I am following say 2 publication tweets…what inference makes Google believe that I might be interested in other publication tweets too.. I mean, I do not subscribe to all the newspapers or magazines.. I stick to 1 or 2… and I’m sure most people also would be hap...