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

Deals on your smartphone on-location | the DealChaat blog

“DEAL” has come to be a bad word. So we are told.

The culprit is aggregation. Why have a middle-man that provides no or negative value. The other culprit is designing the mobile experience using the web toolkit. Mobile phones are not just computers with smaller screens; they are personal belongings that can be personalized. And yet another culprit is that advertising, promotion and marketing, meant to be instant and real-time on location-based apps, are still produced the way agencies produced print ads in the eighties.

via Deals on your smartphone on-location | the DealChaat blog.

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