CategoryProductNation

Insights on Building Sustainable, High-Growth Product Company

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Manav Garg’s career exemplifies the statement “where there is big risk, there is big reward”. Throwing up a lucrative, six-figure plus salary and bonus as a commodities trader to start a software company that would build a commodities trading product required guts. Manav took it in his stride and today has built a world-class company that competes globally with its commodities trading software...

Indian Product Industry: How Far We’ve Come And How Much More To Go

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These are exciting times for us in the Indian software products industry. The air is pregnant with cautious, yet very strong optimism that some truly great product companies will emerge out of India in the coming years. There is a significant shift in the mindset of Indian entrepreneurs, with a focus now on building great products and not just good enough products. A talent pool of  highly...

Promoting Design Thinking in the NCR

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In the last 2-3 years there have been well designed products coming out of the NCR startup ecosystem. Mettl, Visual Website Optimizer, Paytm, and Oogwave, especially come to mind where Design Thinking has been an integral part of the product development process, and not an after thought by giving it just a cosmetic veneer. There is a noticeable increase in design sensibility while attending...

Redbox – A Fine Example of Integrated Physical and Virtual User Experience Design!

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Redbox rents DVDs, Blu-Ray Discs and family video games in US and Canada. Redbox kiosks are found in 34,600 locations and are fully automated video rental kiosks! More than anything else I love using them because they carry the latest titles, are affordable and make me happy every time I do business with them! In my experience I have not seen a better example of INTEGRATED user experience design...

Catching small fish can pay big.

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For sure big fish can get you more meat but there also less number of those in that deep blue sea. Pound for pound, the fisherman still prefers to cast the net with small holes – getting easy food in copious amount.  Unfortunately the fisherman logic is somewhat lost to a vast majority of the enterprise companies in the world. India is home of a vast and complex array of small business. If you...

Transforming a nation with products

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India is at a crossroads today. Gloom has replaced what seemed to be an unending boom just a few years ago. After a decade of rapid growth led by the services sector, the Indian economy has hit a plateau. While services exports continue to grow and create a surplus in services trade, they only constitute 35% of the country’s total exports and are unlikely to compensate for the deep deficit in...

Showcase of 8 Innovative companies for #IndiaInternetDay – A TiE event

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It’s here! The India Internet Day(a TiE event) celebration is beginning, and you’re all a part of it. You may be an outelier, an insider, a veteran, an investor, a trend spotter, an experimentor or an industry driver, but this is your go-to event this year. Why? We’re looking at the long-term horizon and paradigm shifts in the internet industry globally and translating that in the Indian context...

To open source or not….

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Ashok was perturbed. In Jan 2006, an eastern European company had taken his source code, made minor changes and started selling it under an alternate brand name at a reduced price. Ashok’s company Chartengo was a pioneer in Adobe Flash based charting software that helped users create charts for data visualization. Its charts were perceptibly superior to any available on the market. The company...

Hike Messaging App – 5M users since 12/12/12, and counting!

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BSB is a start-up funded by Bharti & SoftBank building mobile products for the Indian market. Hike is a messaging app which allows instant messaging and group chat on your phone with friends who have Hike, as well as those who don’t have Hike. We caught up with BSB’s head of products and strategy, Kavin Bharti Mittal (KBM), to talk about Hike, right before he was getting ready to launch Hike...

Drinking from the firehose at iSPIRT PlayBook Roundtable (on Effective Product Management) at Delhi

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When nearly two dozen product enthusiasts sit around a table passionately talking for 4-½ hours, expertly addressed by two product veterans – Amit Somani and Amit Ranjan, you can expect an information overload. And, it did seem like drinking from the firehose, trying to capture all the takeaways in the intense back and forth, where even a tea-break seemed imposed. A blast it was – this...