Smart Connections 101 – Shopping, DealChaat and Locality

So here’s the question Tom Koulopoulos is addressing in this brilliant futuristic take on DealChaat, ‘Have I got a deal for you!‘.

(Tom has been named one of the industry’s most influential consultants by InformationWeek magazine. Geoff James of CBS Interactive Media called Tom, “one of the truly deep thinkers in the arena of technology and culture. ” Forbes.com named Tom one of its Business Visionaries with, “an incisive view of world trade…”)

Locality is important.

The bottom line is that inefficient markets tend to put control in the hands of the seller and not the consumer. An efficient market balances the scales. It gives me the best deal as a consumer and also allows sellers to appeal to me directly at the precise moment of need.

Giving control directly to consumers at the moment they’ve decided to buy and on location is not the no-brainer it seems to be. Very few seem to ‘get’ the value it could bring. Not Tom. He goes,

The greatest impact of the Internet has been the evolution of community. We are more connected than ever to the people, places, ideas and things that we want to be part of our lives.

However, this digital connectivity has been slow to find its way into our analog lives. A prime example is the huge disconnect between online shopping and the traditional store-based experience. Although we see the two as being in conflict, the realty is that what’s missing is the connection between the two.

In this age of location-aware smartphones, DealChaat is one platform for creating frictionless markets. Thanks Tom, for your insightful analysis … DealChaat sure has some catching up to do with your visionary thinking. 

As apps like DealChaat become pervasive we will be lubricating the wheels of consumerism in ways that will become as indispensable to us in the 21st Century as the Sears Catalog was at the turn of the 20th Century.

And besides, who doesn’t love a deal 

Read the brilliant post on Tom’s blog ’Have I got a deal for you!‘

Check it out. You may want to be associated … write on the blog, help with design, technology, be a critic, join the crack team … let me know.

DealChaat on the web: Facebook, Twitter, Website

Talk to us.

Also interesting in the above context are the following trends for 2013

Location, Location, Location and Smart Shopping

My company Ideafarms is not known for seeking the limelight. It is built on old-fashioned values — trust, empathy, mutual respect, empowerment, enablement — all popular business talk. And we find it so difficult to talk about ourselves because we like the walk more than the talk.

The last few months have been crazy. It has been DealChaat all the way. Chaat, for the uninitiated, is all about junk, street food. And ‘deal’, they say, is a bad word in today’s India. Why am I not surprised! Here, let me give you a clue. Nobody wants the middleman any longer.

Enter DealChaat 

India’s first location-based “last-minute-last-mile” platform on mobile. Full disintermediation.

Check it out. You may want to be associated … write on the blog, help with design, technology, be a critic, join the crack team … let me know.

DealChaat on the web: Facebook, Twitter, Website

Talk to us.

Also interesting in the above context are the following trends for 2013

Social Apps and the Mobile Frontier

There’s a huge shift in the way India’s budding entrepreneurs are looking at the business of tomorrow. The standard business-plan-must-come-first refrain is fading, at least in the minds of youngsters that are looking more and more to first creating value than simply to make money. And apps seem to be driving their models — mobile apps.

So here’s my equation …

VALUE = Mobile + Social

via Social Apps and the Mobile Frontier.

Farewell Web 2.0?

The sheen of Web 2.0 is fading. People have laid their claim on the next ‘version’ – 3.0. See how our thinking is so linear. Why are we forcing ourselves to believe, and in retrospect, that there was something called Web 1.0! Isn’t that how versioning happens?

I’d rather have called it Web-as-a-Platform (WaaP) because that’s really what it is.

My reasoning is simply that by ‘componentising’ the Web we have created -

1. a way for individuals and groups to ‘talk’ to the world and to each other in ‘open spaces’;
2. collaborative software to capture, exchange and share collective ideas and ideologies;
3. a philosophy where people can improve upon – or add value – to other people’s efforts; and
4. less dependence on technology ‘consultants’.

What I have yet not been able to see is the ‘meta’ part of the phenomenon. Call it Web-as-a-Vehicle (WaaV) – likened to a mass transportation system and not a car. I might call it Meta-more-for-less (sounds like metamorphosis). We need a hard look quickly at how to design the interfaces (if they do exist) between the existing technology components or we run the risk of building yet another set of ‘silos’ made up of existing Web 2.0 pieces. Which in simple terms means bridging the “gap in capability” between the ‘individual’ creating the content and the techie who built the component.

Google’s Chief economist, Hal Varian, says executives in wired organisations need a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation, here.

… the kinds of innovations I think will arise on top of that will be innovations in how work is done. And that’s going to be one of the most exciting aspects, in my opinion.

That’s the key here. How work is done must supersede how things work.

German Minister promises to ensure Just Resolution of Ideafarms Dispute

Given that a lot of noise was being made in Germany about the lack of enforcement of IP rights in India following the Enercon and Natco decisions, it was inevitable that Germany would raise those two matters during the bilateral talks scheduled with India between May 9 and May 11. As had been predicted before in the related post, the Indian government too found in the Ideafarms dispute sufficient diplomatic ammunition to face Germany.

As per a recent report from The Economic Times, in course of the meeting that had taken place between the Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma and the German Federal Minister of Economics & Technology Philipp Roessler, Sharma had raised concerns about the Ideafarms dispute and the manner in which it had been handled by the German court. He was assured that the German government would look into the matter and ensure a just resolution to the dispute.

via SPICY IP: Spicy IP Tidbit: German Minister promises to ensure Just Resolution of Ideafarms Dispute.