In a slowing economy with rising inflation, retail therapy can be healing, especially if you get some cash back on every purchase. Launched in India in November 2011, Pennyful.in helps both the customers and the e-commerce portals by directing the customers to the retailers' sites and helping them avail a cashback offer, over and above the ongoing discounts and coupon deals. Ravitej Yadalam, a 25-year old graduate from the R.V. College of Engineering in Bangalore, started Pennyful fresh out of college. Yadalam spoke to BW Online's Tanuja Chatterjee about Pennyful, its acceptance in the Indian market and other aspects of its functioning. What is Pennyful.in all about? How does it function?Pennyful is a company incorporated in the year March’2010. We are into three separate lines of business. We started off with Pennyful.com that is a cashback coupon website for the US market, launched in January’ 2011. It is a simple concept. We have a cashback offer through Pennyful. Basically what that means is wetie up with various ecommerce companies in India for example if I take Pennyful.in , we tied up with say Yatra.com. So instead of directly going to Yatra.com, the users will turn back to Pennyful, and then we will redirect it to Yatra.com, where the user will still pay Yatra.com and get the tickets or whatsoever. So we will not be involved in those processes. All we will do is we redirect the users to Yatra website. There are two things that Pennyful offers i.e. the above mentioned cashbach offer and the coupon codes. The cashback is the money that we pay you on top of every other deal and discount. So let’s say Yebhi is offering a fifty per cent off on a shoes section, so you will still get the fifty per cent off on the final price that you pay because you went through Pennyful, and then we will pay you part of the money as cashback. We also have a bunch of coupon codes that offer instant discounts. So for instance, Yebhi might have Pennyful enlisted on their site. So when you go through Pennyful and reach Yebhi.com, at the checkout, the user will need to enter the coupon code that will fetch him instant discount. And automatically the cashback will be credited to his Pennyful account. How was the feedback of users in US?Today we work with 1,500 different e-commerce companies as much in partners. We showcase around 42 major products from the platform. So it’s been around 2 years now since Pennyful has been live. In India we launched in November’ 2011. It’s been just over a year and the feedback has been amazing. How did you come up with this concept? Before Pennyful, were you working with something in the same lines?While I was in college, I was experimenting with e-commerce sometime before the company was started. So I came across this whole industry of Philip marketing, which essentially is when we are allowed to market the products of another company or brand in exchange for generating actual sales and revenue for them. Thus, I started my first venture of Pennyful.com right after college. Can a user directly use your coupon by logging in the concerned shopping portal, or it always have to be through your channel?That is the single requirement that we have that the shoppers always has to go through our channel to avail the cashback money in their Pennyful account. Eventually the reason behind this is that our engagement with the ecommerce sites is such that we refer customers to them and in exchange to the referral we get a cut of whatever spend happens on the concerned portal, and that part we share with our associated consumers as a cashback rebate. Though sign up is not a requirement to browse the offers on Pennyful.com, but before the user actually reach the concerned portal, he will need to sign up and create an account on Pennyful. Mainly the reason is that once the consumer transacts with the shopping portal, then the cashback that they will earn will be credited to their Pennyful account that eventually acts as a virtual piggy bank for all cashback that they earn across all 100 plus partners of ours. So weather they shop from Yatra.com or a Fipkart or a Myntra and so on, the user will get a cashback into a common Pennyful account of the consumer. What kind of revenue model do you follow? This more or less seems to be affiliate marketing. So how do you derive revenue?Under affiliate marketing, there are three more models in the industry today. The first type of model is the ‘cost-per-click’ model where the merchant for instance Yebhi.com will engage publishers like Pennyful.in and say we pay them on every click of the ad that happens. The second type is known as ‘cost-per-lead’ that means Yebhi will pay the publisher for every sign up that happens and lastly the ‘cost-per-sale’ which is actually what Pennyful follows, i.e. we will not charge our partner shopping portals on any clicks or traffic submissions or even for sign-ups. We only charge them for an actual transaction that takes place. Don’t you think the time frame of 1-7 days of fetching cashback in the account is a bit too much! I mean, the customer has to keep a track of the transaction and check the cash details regularly for a week!Basically it is a twenty four hours frame that happens, but for legal reasons we have maximized the time frame to 7 days. Sometimes, the consumer may receive the order confirmation to say that the transaction has been tracked on the next day of the purchase. If a consumer purchases a product from a portal, and doesn’t like it and returns it back after 7 days, will you take back the respective cash gained from the concerned transaction from the customer’s account?The cashback is posted within 1-7 days into the concerned customer's Pennyful account with a status 'Pending'. There is a 30 day or slightly more (depending on the shopping portal) period which accounts for the return period. If a consumer got a product and decided to return it back after 20 days. This 1-7 day frame commences from the day when the return period is over. So once the return period is over, and the merchant informs us, then we make it available and this time the status changes accordingly. “Pennyful is not liable to pay any cashback if the order is not tracked/recorded for any reason” Don’t you think the customer may have to suffer due to this?Again here the reason is the legal standpoint. If the customer directly visits some merchant’s website and further claims for the cashback, of course then Pennyful hasn’t received its cut and the whole flow haven’t been followed. We have visually 2 or 3 such incidents happening. It is just a preventive measure. Cases that we have actually gone through, is that every time when a click happens on Pennyful towards a website that is also tracked by us. We never had a situation where a customer has come to our site, clicked through and not got the cashback. At least, Pennyful is sure that when customers click through our website, we surely carry out the commitment for what we are known. How do you address the consumer grievances?As I said, we have control of the consumer actions from the point they log into their Pennyful account until they reach the merchant’s website. So anything related to the product that they have actually bought, any payments that may have taken place will still be taken care of by the merchant’s website. For Pennyful, we have our customer care team set up to cater to such issues. We have email support and call support as well. We did start live chat sometime back which we are trying to bring back as soon as possible. What happened to the live chat aspect?Actually we are going through the website renovation process. If you look at Pennyful.com which is the US website, basically we are trying to remodel India into that kind of website. These two are completely two different types of websites. So that’s the reason that some of the features are on halt for now. What made you wait for so long to enter the Indian market?When I started the company, online shopping scenario was absolutely new in India. There were not many investors; there were not many companies to begin with. So the market was really not that large. And even if you look at it today, Indian ecommerce market is growing at 30-35 per cent year on year which is really incredible. So we decided to start in India because of the fast paced growth that Indian e-commerce market was experiencing. So that is the reason we did take a call at 2012. But if you look at absolute numbers, it is still much smaller than other markets. In the US, in 2012 the consumer would have nearly spent $1,200 for online shopping. In India, if you see comparative values, it is just likely to be Rs 1,000 only, that is approx. $200. So in the absolute value of the spend that is made is substantially less in India. But having said that, if you look at it in terms of the pattern, the consumer is actually shopping more in terms of frequency, which is much more comparable metric. So for example in the US an avid consumer of Pennyful would transact between 6-7 times, and in India we are seeing very similar number (around 6 times). That is also interesting to say that even though it is very new culture, somebody who is comfortable with shopping online matches frequency of being our consumer. What are you doing on the advertising front for Pennyful?We have seen excellent results in terms of referrals. So we have refferal programme on Pennyful where the consumers earn bonus cashback for reffering their friend. So what we have actually noticed is that for every 100th user of Pennyful that has been reffered by their friend, 72 per cent of them have shopped at least once which is quite a high percentage. So that is something on which we have been capitalising on and it’s just today that we have launched a campaign for the referral section on Pennyful .in where the consumer just needs to give a miss call on the mentioned number that will fetch him a unique number through call or message on their contact number. So this call or message would be registered into their Pennyful account. For every 5 friends that the customer refer , it will fetch Rs 100 to the customer’s Pennyful account. Your future plans...The reason why Pennyful exists is to empower the consumer and make her every penny count while shopping online. To that end we actually launched a programme called Medicash.in in February this year. It is India’s first and only free health care programme. We try to apply our expertise in online rewards and cashbacks and further apply it to the offline healthcare space. So we are now also able to offer cashbacks and discounts to consumers on how they spend in an offline scenario with respect to healthcare for families, corporate hospitals or diagnostic centers etc.
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As of 2012, humans and machines generated almost 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. For every byte of structured data that is being properly mined, there are 4 bytes more of unstructured data. According to IBM, of all the digital data in the world today, almost 90 per cent was generated in the last two years alone. There is close to 3 zettabytes (around 3 billion TB) of data in the world today, and this is throwing up unprecedented challenges for organisations trying to make sense of it. So much so, that an entire industry is developing around ‘Big Data’. On the sidelines of the Nasscom BPO Summit 2012 in Gurgaon, BW|Businessworld and the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) organised a roundtable to discuss the new ecosystem around Big Data. The panelists included Som Mittal, president, Nasscom; Mohit Thukral, senior vice-president, Genpact; Roopa Kudva, CEO and MD, Crisil; and Sundar Ramaswamy, CEO, AbsoluteData. Excerpts from the roundtable:Rajeev Dubey: The best explanation I have heard about Big Data is that when GBs become ZBs — leapfrogging TBs and PBs (petabytes) — you are talking ‘Big Data’. But the rate at which it is being generated, this could be a dated definition faster than we think. Also, there is a lot more to Big Data than just the data itself, such as the 4 Vs — volume, velocity, variety and variability. So, can we have Som Mittal to start off with whether what we are talking about Big Data is completely new or is it an amalgam of many things?Som Mittal: All of what you said. In the early 1990s, the PC was 40 MB. What you were computing was not really data. All that has changed (with) 10 GB pen drives today. And what has enabled this change is the cloud. The cost of storage has become very low, (and) that is an opportunity for Indian companies...because of something new. Earlier, (a) data was not there, (b) when data was there, there was no technology to mine it, (c) when both options were available, there were no resources, and (d) it wasn’t affordable. All the four parameters are now coming together. It was a natural extension for us to leverage this. (Our customers are now) saying that you handled our supply chain, our transactional process and customer interaction; you have gathered some data, now what more can you do for us? That’s the driver.Rajeev: Mohit, so is it old wine in a new bottle, or is Big Data really different from the data centre and analytics combination that has always existed?Mohit Thukral: It is new. The magnitude of data is a lot. We have over 1 trillion devices today, from 300 million devices over eight years. Firms in India and around the world see so many transactions going through the system. What you do with these transactions is going to be the key. Today, a lot of firms don’t do market research; they use social media network and tools to do market research, which never happened five years ago. As more and more of us get on to more mobile devices, more data will flow, and you will require more computing. So, I think, we are at the cusp of a change.Rajeev: Roopa, how real is it, especially from the point of view of the 4 Vs?Roopa Kudva: It’s not that we are talking about stuff that’s already being done, (and) which we are seeking to do more efficiently with more value addition. This is the first time this is going to happen. Traditionally, companies, government and enterprises of all kinds always captured data and the focus was internal. Like, to improve efficiency, for forecasting in engineering firms, etc. Why this is transformational and new is because for the first time, it is about understanding the customer better and figuring out new opportunities to grow. The other new element is the variety of sources from which the data is being captured — internal sources, security cameras, other devices and tweets — diverse and numerous. Capturing data is new, quantum of data is new and, more importantly, what you are seeking to use this data for, is new. Rajeev: Sundar, what’s the big challenge in Big Data? Is it handling the data itself, or making sense of it?Sundar Ramaswamy: For me the Big Data challenge is taken away with technology trying to capture that data pretty well. The bigger challenge is when you look at the variety of data and how you can get those sources together to make a consistent meaning in a compressed manner; to be able to assimilate different types of data to make sense out of it. It is going to be unstructured, so you are looking into the quality of data. The bigger challenge is how you overlay the analytics over it (technology) to make a consistent, actionable, real-time meaning for people to react to.Rajeev: There is a need for faster processes, storage and retrieving. Can computing, and the other areas around it, keep pace with Big Data?Som: I don’t think today we have enough computing power. (But since) cloud is enabling sharing of both computing resources as well as the storage sources, it is not going to be a constraint.Mohit: There is so much data that you can keep juggling and computing it. But, at the end, companies will have to get smarter to pull out what (they) are looking for.Sundar: Many companies are making investments in technology and are asking consultants about what they should do with all of this. I really don’t know how I am going to make a difference to getting the analytics out to make meaningful decisions. Clients would like non-human intervention in algorithms to go. They want to create a Gen-I algorithm, which has human intervention but the improvements of those algorithms should be built into the technology we have overlaid, until there is a disruptive need for human intervention on those models. We need people with a background in computer science and psychology to come back to analytics and help this field to grow. The second piece is IP (intellectual property). People who can create IP in this field will differentiate the winners from the losers.Roopa: Where technology and Big Data (come together), it is called ‘visualisation’, that is, visually depicting what you see from the data. Not just simple crafts, charts, but heat maps. However, the question of what to look for in the heap of data needs to be addressed.Rajeev: How much of the unstructured data are we trying to make sense of? How much of it is being captured and how much is going waste?Mohit: A lot of the data today doesn’t get captured. There will be a lot of unstructured data available which is critical and you need to pull out the relevant information, and make it more adaptable to your business (and) your customers. How to improve efficiency in a business? How to increase your market share? What customers are saying about your company, product or services? Social networks, where people are blogging or tweeting about you, are unstructured data because they are all over the place.Sundar: To answer your question straight, we haven’t done enough. Having said that, I think there is a lot of investment being made in trying to make that happen. People will need to look at our traditional algorithms and re-engineer them. To give you an example, if we did market mix models right now, we would never have considered social media as an input. Now people have to rethink ways of doing it. Is it moving at the right speed, ‘No’.Som: There is a big distinction between all of us in our industry. We have been working for ‘clients’. Every time someone uses the term ‘customers’ we are not talking about our customer. When we are talking about Big Data, (it) actually (belongs to) our client’s customers. The domain is no longer a technology or an expertise domain; it’s understanding our customers’ business so that we can advise them on the data being generated.Rajeev: How is the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry trying to leverage Big Data and where has it been more successful than elsewhere?Mohit: The business process management (BPM) industry is pretty ahead in the game. The two main users of data are financial services and retail. Because they are B2C (business-to-consumer) businesses and more consumer-oriented, we have built a scalable business. We have mathematicians, statisticians, econometricians, etc, and built a Big Data or analytics business. The next evolution for firms in the business analytics area is going to be to understand the end customer, their business needs and domains. You have to look at how you build products that are used by your customers and then how do you service those products.Roopa: The estimate is that the (global industry) size was $5.3 billion in 2011, and by 2015 it will be $25 billion. That’s a 46 per cent CAGR (compound annual growth rate). For India, that number will go from $200 million to about $1 billion. The three sectors that will account for the bulk of this are financial services, telecom and retail. But, for India, we are saying that in this path from $200 million to $1 billion, in the first year (2012) the mix is going to be 84 per cent technology and 16 per cent analytics, but five years down, analytics will be 30 per cent. Initially, you need to invest to set up the data architecture, technology, the backbone, the hardware and in designing the whole system.Sundar: The global stage is on an equal footing. Nobody’s really cramped the court there. Given our talent, our experience to really take a lead in shaping how Big Data gets played out, we have the right kind of investment and scale to run those experiments, to leapfrog, create our IP and lead the charge. That is the opportunity I would exhort India as a service industry to do.Roopa: With one nuance though…we’re now talking about cutting-edge IT stuff in terms of analytics and I believe that initially the Indian BPO industry will also have to learn to leverage global talent for this in a way it hasn’t done before. It would not be unusual to see Indian firms putting together a team of 15-20 people of PhD source from all over the world, from the US, eastern Europe, India. That’s good for the Indian BPO industry because it’s all about the shift from BPO to BPM.Rajeev: What’s the weakest link in the Indian Big Data ecosystem and abroad, and why is that lagging?Sundar: One, is talent. While we say we have a great mathematical logical structure in our education system, there’s a long way to go to make them analytics-ready. Second, is changing our own mindset about upfront investment and IP, and leverage top talent to be able to do it. If we miss that boat, we will lag.Mohit: Why you would need global teams to work on this to create cutting-edge changes is because a lot of the domains in those industries lie outside the country.Som: We’re talking about a new class of people being hired. The fact is that we are catching this opportunity early, and trying to carve it out later. Rajeev: What is triggering the wave of M&As in the industry? Is it the innovation or lack thereof?Som: The main reason for M&As is (that) you cannot build domain expertise through on-boarding and training in classrooms; it’s such a slow process. You need to do acquisitions so you get domain experts. A majority of acquisitions — while there are some that may have been done for revenue accretion — are to get people with knowledge.Mohit: One is to acquire expertise. The M&As in this space are niche firms, not massive players like IBM. These are $20-30-40-million firms and you are just plugging them into your larger pool for speed to market.Rajeev: What’s going right for Big Data is that regulators in financial services, healthcare and telecom are backing it. So, what’s in it for the regulators?Mohit: Regulators want more information to share, so they want companies to be more transparent. Companies are getting swarmed with regulators asking for more and more information. Specifically in the US financial services today. Companies will have to get smarter to make data available, else costs are going (to go) up. Compliance costs have gone up 15-20 per cent.Rajeev: Coming back to the $200-million-to-$1-billion opportunity, where do we stand in exploiting this?Roopa: We’re early in the game. It’s new for everybody. We are there, which is good; understanding that there’s an opportunity and (that there are) initial investments. Many new firms have come up, that is testimony to the fact that India is moving to capitalise on this opportunity.Rajeev: But, if we look at it right now, the Big Data work here is mostly with the captives?Roopa: I would not agree. You see a nice mix of captives and third-party firms. It’s gone beyond an arbitrage. It’s about knowledge, capability, skills. It will continue to be a mix of in-house as well as sourcing from third parties. (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 25-03-2013)
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If Google Chrome chants that ‘the web is what you make of it’, Opera Software seems to have taken upon the task of giving you exactly (and only) what you want from it. With the aim of customising mobile internet services on a qualitative and quantitative basis, the company has created the Opera Web Pass; a product that follows a pay per use model of subscribing to the internet that offers time- or site-specific data to their users. Sunil Kamath, Vice President for South Asia at Opera Software reveals that the ideology behind the Web Pass is to introduce customisation in mobile internet browsing while making it more accessible. “If you look at the market in India and around us, which share a similar ecosystem, the number of feature phone users as well as smartphone users is increasing. There is a huge surge in the mobile internet vertical business and people are accessing the web more frequently than ever before. However, there is a large segment of population in the market today who are not able to afford an internet service on the phone, because the way internet is sold is very mechanical and technical,” he says. The primary intent of the Web Pass is to lower the anti barrier for consumers on the one side and make the experience user friendly on the other. It is no surprise that the Web Pass has been launched on their flagship product, the Opera Mini, mobile browser. Of the 237 million users of Opera mobile browsers, 215 million use Opera Mini, worldwide, with India being the largest market (in terms of volume and growth). In India, Opera has partnerships with Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Tata Docomo. Opera Mini works seamlessly across all platforms from Java to Android and iOS. “. We are available across app stores, devices and original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s are preloading opera mini as the default browser on their feature phones — Samsung Star 3, Samsung Star 3 Duos and Champ Deluxe Duos — before shipping them out. Kamath explains that currently on the Opera Mini homepage, which has graphic tiles or tabs such as speed dial, one of the properties will be replaced by a tile that reads Web Pass. “The moment you click on the page it will have all passes listed with a short description of what it is for the end user. The user can click on the pass he wants and from that moment on the pass is activated. It becomes part of the user’s browsing behaviour,” he says. Personalised Browsing The fact is that most users wouldn’t know how many megabytes of data they are consuming, in a day for instance; their awareness is limited to the broad figures (from which once can derive an approximate estimation)provided by the telecom service provider with regard to how much data can still be purchased within the plan period. On the contrary, if they were asked about which websites they browse, one could gauge their browsing behaviour, which is the essential focus in developing the Web Pass; creating content packages in a manner that the consumer understands what he wants to buy. “From an end user’s perspective, instead of buying unlimited data or 2GB data for a fixed amount, (s)he can choose to buy Facebook for one hour and pay Rs 5 or 10 (depending on how the telecom operator’s pricing strategy),” Kamath informs. Alternatively, one could also decide to purchase a sports pack around the IPL, for example: a package such as this would include to six major cricket sites, and a subscription based tariff plan could be generated on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. “In the backend we make sure that those sites are not charged per kilobytes but are free for the end user for a fixed period of time. The moment the user’s pass expires, he will be greeted with a renewal option on the homepage of his/her Opera Mini browser. Similarly there could be data packages around news or entertainment websites, so on and so forth depending on the creativity and pricing strategy of the telecom provider, Kamath feels. One can imagine them drawing inspiration from DTH providers who have considerable expertise in successfully rolling out different content packages for different target demographics. Last week, Bharti Airtel became the first telecom operator to launch the Opera Web Pass in the Indian market. The advantage with this product is that it offers an easy enough solution for people have subscriptions to (2G/3G) data packet connections from Airtel, for instance, as well as those who don’t. The Opera Web Pass was previously launched in Malaysia in November last year. “(The Web Pass) is in the interest of the operators to grow their ARPU (average revenue per user), and that is the value proposition. There could be an incremental revenue upside from the operator’s perspective plus it puts him in a position to develop a better price and product proposition for his customer,” Kamath reasons. The Web Pass is the result of an integration of the advertising engine within Opera and the Opera Mini platform, which effectively means that Opera is able to target consumers within the Browser framework, keeping a track of what previous web passes a user has purchased, and thereby making purchase related suggestions. Screening Possibilities While technology continues to form the DNA of the 18 year old Norwegian software company, Opera, Kamath claims, is expanding its horizons and owing to some of the significant acquisitions made in the last 12-18 month period, the company have a distinct advantage over other players in the market. “We acquired an app store called Handster, in the US, recently and now the Opera mobile store is the 5th largest in the world. We also acquired two agencies in the US and the UK which get advertisers on board, we create campaigns and coupled with Ad marvel (an ad servicing platform acquired in 2010), we have the complete eco system in our control; we have the advertisers on one side, we have the serving platform (through Ad Marvel) and we have Opera Mini and other third party publishers as the publishing network,” Kamath elaborates. With all of that in place, Opera is concentrating on consolidating its position as a consumer organisation where they the company has significantly large verticals of business on desktop, an devices (Kamath defines the category as any UI which is not a mobile, tablet or desktop) such as set top boxes, gaming consoles, DTH, car browsers in developed markets such as US and EU. With regard to the television domain, Kamath says that “If you go to a local electronic shop today and ask for a Sony Bravia (launched in September 2012) which comes with an opera TV store, Opera branded TV store browser. Opera is in n the process of signing local app developers who would be interested in interacting with TV consumers at present. The company has been present in the TV space for about 8 years. “We have an Opera web based software development kit (SDK), which is supplied to OEMs across the world, who take our SDK and build their applications or EPG (electronic programme guide)on top of it to make it a full browser experience for the users,” states Kamath. When it comes to the desktop market in India, Kamath says that while Opera can’t compete with “deep pocket players” dominating the market in India, the company is seeking an alternative distribution channels to increase desktop penetration. Despite the extent of their B2B business, mobile is the biggest growth driver and continues to be on top of the company’s priority list. The Opera mobile app store showcases 10,000 developers and 80,000 apps at the moment. “We get a significant amount of traffic on our app store since we are a cross operator, cross device, crossover store. We are not limited to a particular device, or operating system. Since we are a global organisation with presence in many countries, we have a good mix of apps coming from all over the world” says Kamath while claiming that Opera Mini users browse the web 10 x times more than those who use other browsers. There are more than 13 million unique users in India every month consuming from the opera mobile store and half a million downloads, which Kamath considers favourable statistics.. In terms of market size, after India the largest markets for Opera Mini are Indonesia, Russia, Nigeria and Mexico. Yet, “we are not shying away from the developed markets,” maintains Kamath. “With developed markets the focus is not on cost saving, compression of data but to do with the browser experience, high end devices, not feature or smart feature phone market. While price sensitive, emerging markets are good for advertising as a business as well,” he says, emphasising on the importance of both.
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Higher coupon rates and comfortable collateral cover are prompting affluent investors to invest in non-convertible debentures (NCD) of real estate companies.Wealth managers such as Karvy, India Infoline and Edelweiss, among others, are selling 'collateralised' real estate NCDs, which promise to pay 16 – 18 per cent per annum to investors, in large numbers.Each NCD offering has a size of 200-300 crore. In most cases, the threshold limit for investors starts at 10 lakh, and goes up to 1 crore. Sheth Developers, Kumar Housing, Lodha Developers and Wadhwan Group are among real estate companies that have issued NCDs over the past few months.NCDs are similar to bank fixed deposits in many ways. These securities are issued by companies for varying periods, often one to three years, and are listed on stock exchanges. However, most real-estate NCDs are not listed.“Real estate NCDs are quite safe for investors. The collateral kept to protect investors is as high as 2.5–3 times the money invested," said Sunil Mishra, CEO, Karvy Private Wealth.“Some of these issuances have a monthly pay-out option. The money raised via NCDs is only deployed at the project level; this product is used to raised funds for 2 – 3 years,” Mishra said.Funds mobilised from investors are deployed at the project level. Most NBFCs and wealth managers only agree to sell NCDs of builders with a track record of developing more than 5 lakh sq feet in a city. Most NCD issuers start the repayment of principal in 18-22 months time, wealth managers said.According to Raghvendra Nath, MD, Ladderup Wealth Management, the most comforting factor in real estate NCDs is that these are secured issuances. On the negative side, investors are taking a high risk exposure in the portfolio by investing in these NCDs, he said.Investors should understand real estate NCDs well before committing funds. They should understand the sector well and also companies (NCD issuers) in which they are investing.According to equity analysts, real estate is still a sector with no real “growth visibility”. In overall terms, real-estate developers may continue to face sluggish demand, high construction costs and liquidity pressures.
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Why did it take so long for your third book to come out?The book, The Oath of the Vayuputras, has grown very long. It’s more than 160,000 words, which makes it nearly twice as long as my earlier books. I guess there were many loose ends to tie-up! So it took me a long time to write which consequently, delayed the launch of the book. What explains your interest in mythology? How did you start off with the trilogy in the first place?I was fortunate enough to be born into a very religious family. My grandfather was a priest and both my parents are very religious. So I guess that’s where much of my interest and knowledge on this subject comes from. Tell us about your writing schedules. When and where do you write?I am a morning person, so I write in the mornings. It’s important that I hear music while writing; music which has to match the mood of the scene I am writing. Besides this condition, I can pretty much write anywhere. I have written the third book in various places, in a café in Singapore, in a temple in Benaras and at my home in Mumbai. Can you share with us one of the most memorable moments you had while writing this book? The most memorable moment for me was when I got the ‘Har Har Mahadev’ speech (In the first book, The Immortals Of Meluha). I remember clearly; I was having a shower, when suddenly, the speech occurred to me. I started crying, rushed out and wrote the speech down. And then as I usually do with important scenes, I went to my wife and told her the speech. Her expression confirmed to me that the speech was working. Tell us about the kind of books or vedic texts you had to access learn more about Indian mythology…I learnt most of our Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas the old fashioned way — through shruti, through listening. I learnt all of this while growing up, listening to my grandfather and my parents. Maybe that’s why they are embedded in my brain. But of course, I read a lot as well. It’s good to read different interpretations; it expands your understanding of the core text. What’s your energy drink?In the morning, I like a glass of milk. I don’t drink as much alcohol now as I used to in my younger years; but when I do, I like red wine. What according to you makes a book a good read and/or a bestseller? It’s a mystery. I always believe that you shouldn’t set out to write a bestseller. You should write a book that flows from your heart. Let fate decide whether it’s going to be a bestseller or not. The Oath Of The Vayuputras By Amish Tripathi Westland Publications Pages: 600Price: Rs 350What's the hardest thing about being a writer?Making money is the hardest part. Regrettably, writing is not that lucrative a profession, though a few are lucky enough to make a living from it. That’s why I always suggest that it’s good for a writer to have a job on the side — it ensures that he won’t have to compromise on his writing just so as to pay his bills. So, what next?I haven’t decided on the topic of my next book series. But it will certainly be in the space of mythology/history. Tell us about the books you read in 2012…Of the books I have read in 2012, one of the best ones was India, A Sacred Geography by Diana Eck, a professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University. Eck is an American; but her understanding of India is so deep, that I genuinely believe she must have been an Indian in her previous birth. She understands India better than many Indians do. The book can be slightly serious for those not inclined to the subject. But it's a very good book. I also liked Breakout Nations by Ruchir Sharma. What I liked about the book is the sheer width of its coverage. Sharma has covered many nations in it, and obviously, considering the broad width of analysis, he hasn't analysed each country in nauseating detail. But it gives you a broad idea of what's happening in each country’s economy, which can give you a guideline to analyse further. Em And The Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto is the another book I liked - it's a rather sad story about four people: a Mother, Father, Son and Daughter. And it's told from the son's perspective. The mother suffers from a mental illness and the book chronicles the challenges the family faces and how they handle it. Despite the extremely sad subject, it doesn’t get melodramatic. I particularly like the character of the father, a solid, old-world man. Pinto says this interesting line in the book when describing the father: "They don't make men like this anymore; men who are built for endurance, not for speed.” I believe the book is semi autobiographical. Tell us about the kind of authors you like to read?I read books by all kinds of authors, though I prefer non-fiction over fiction. I give every book a chance. I browse a lot, I read a lot, I buy a lot of books which are thankfully tax-deductible now due to my profession. I give every book about 40 pages of my attention. If I don't like it, then I don't read any further. But if it catches my fancy, I complete it. I don't work with any biases. I like to read opinionated books; where the book starts with a hypothesis and the rest of the book goes on to justify and support that hypothesis. I find that one tends to learn from such books. I like books with a purpose, with an agenda. Maybe that’s why I prefer non-fiction books. Do you think publishing industry will see more of Mommy Porn?It’s difficult for me to hazard a guess on that. I haven't read the Fifty Shades series. I may not pick it up. However, I think it's wrong for anyone to judge what others are reading. India is a free country. Everyone has the right to read what they want. Let people decide what they want to read. Your view on content in books for children…In India, books for children are at two extremes. Either we have historical/ mythological content or imported content. What we also need is modern Indian content. For instance, if you buy a book on foods for your toddler, you will see scones in it. It doesn't have idlis or paav bhaji. Abhi, India mein scones kaun khata hai, bhai? Adults may not know about scones and hence will not be able explain it to their child. These are not part of our daily diet. So, I would hope to see some localised content which is modern and Indian. Interestingly, my wife has the same view and has actually started a children’s book publishing company called funOKplease with this very philosophy. These days we see several authors talking about their book via social media. How important is the role of an author in promoting the book?An author should never forget what the core is about. The core of his existence as an author is the book and being true to it. So an author must write the book with his heart completely in it. But you cannot say that marketing does not matter. And that attitude, which I see persisting in some parts of publishing, is childish. I am a voracious reader and I can give you long list of books that should have been massive bestsellers. But very few people have read those books; simply because they haven’t heard of them. Authors will have to focus on marketing and cannot delegate it to the publisher. You cannot hand over your baby to someone else. Note: The interview was conducted before the launch of The Oath Of Vayuputras on 28 February 2013businessworldbooks (at) gmail (dot) com
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There is an old joke about a businessman interviewing people for a manager’s job. The last candidate was an accountant who, when asked how much two plus two was, responded with “How much do you want it to be?” Apply that to corporate balance sheets and you will find a number of ways in which numbers ‘add’ up.
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When India’s Controller General of Patents announced a ruling on March 9, 2012 that granted a non-exclusive and non-assignable compulsory license to Natco Pharma to manufacture and sell a generic version of Bayer’s Nexavar, a drug used to treat advanced-stage liver and kidney cancer,NGOs and patent advocacy groups applauded. The ruling meant that Natco could now sell a monthly dose of the life-saving medicine for Rs 8,800 ($172), a discount of 97 per cent on the innovator price.What seems not to have been considered are the likely far reaching and disturbing implications that this ruling has for global commerce and development, such as the inadequacy of competition and trade policy standards.Protecting Intellectual PropertyWe know that a society’s ability to generate, exploit and share technological advance is possibly the most important driver of economic value creation. Policymakers endeavour to promote non-specific conditions to incentivise entrepreneurial risk taking. Patents are a key example of this. They stimulate risky research and foster innovation and diffusion.But there are risks, even in this. One, overloaded patent officers may grant monopoly status to an already existing technology. Next, patents may give rise to monopolistic pricing or, by means of technology licences or standard setting, affect related stages of production and use in ways that result in welfare losses. To remedy the former risk, technology assessment may be broadened by inducing third parties to challenge the validity of patents in court; addressing the lattermight call for price discrimination to eliminate welfare losses or for the use of compulsory licensing to increase market choice. Each response is fraught with conceptual and practical difficulties related to patenting, reference pricing, parallel trade and valuation. The issues become even more complex in the context of pharmaceutical products and emerging markets.For many years, product patents were not awarded for pharmaceuticals: Japan and Switzerland did not offer such protection until 1976/77; Spain, Portugal, Greece and Norway followed in 1992. Drugs were simply deemed too important to patent and leave vulnerable to monopoly abuse. However, mounting costs and risks in drug development and the difficulty of otherwise securing commercial advantage eventually tipped the balance in favour of legally enforceable exclusivity. And so, following the inclusion of the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) in World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules in 1994, members were obliged to honour pharmaceutical patent protection by 2016.TRIPS relies on national patentability criteria with respect to incremental innovation or functional equivalency and provides for enforcement, dispute settlement and transition mechanisms to ensure minimum standards for protecting intellectual property rights. As such it regulates among other things parallel imports, the use of exclusive marketing rights and the protection of undisclosed test data. At the same time, member countries commit to common compulsory licensing standards when seeking market relief. But particularly with regard to the latter, perspectives continue to differ.Protecting Public NeedSince its adoption by the 1883 Paris Convention, compulsory licensing has been allowed in almost all patent systems to respond to anti-competitive, non-working or blocking behavior or cases of public need. However, countries with comparatively lower levels of local patenting activity tend to view patents as a vehicle to access technology from abroad rather than to stimulate innovation. Between 2001 and 2007, developing countries made use of TRIPS stipulations to issue more than 52 compulsory licenses for pharmaceutical products alone. Breaking patents became a means to enforce technology transfer and price concessions.TRIPS permits compulsory licenses to enable production mainly for domestic use (i.e. 51 per cent of capacity) when reasonable commercial negotiations have failed; without prior negotiation when a national emergency or other circumstance of extreme urgency has arisen; or without prior negotiation if production is for “public, non-commercial use.” In addition, reacting to the global spread of HIV/AIDS, the Doha Declaration on TRIPS of October 2001 affirmed that countries may undertake compulsory licensing for broadly defined public health reasons. Further negotiations resulted in a waiver of production limitations if a country lacks manufacturing capabilities or to remedy an anti-competitive practice. In addition, various other TRIPS provisions, particularly with regard to compensation requirements and licensing practices, were expressed in ways that gave member countries considerable discretion in formulating domestic laws to safeguard the ‘public interest.’ Needless to say, what is in the public’s interest depends on who is defining it.Conflicting Interest?The challenge observed by many in emerging countries is that TRIPS-compliant patent enforcement translates into higher prices for life-saving drugs, delayed generic competition and weakened local production. Consequently, compulsory licensing becomes a vital tool to elevate access to medicine as a right above the concerns for trade.For example, Thailand issued compulsory licenses for heart disease and cancer drugs under the ‘public non-commercial use provision’ to be able to deliver on its universal healthcare promise. Having achieved universal coverage after more than 50 years of protracted political debate, Thailand is leading an emerging market trend towards improving healthcare that is rapidly expanding in terms of both the share of the population and the range of drugs that are included. As part of this trend, governments are distributing drugs to patients free of charge - an action which, in the absence of any WTO definition, may very well be considered ‘public non-commercial use.’ Yet, by applying the ‘public non-commercial use’ rationale to non-emergency, non-infectious diseases, such as cancer and heart disease, Thailand is converting compulsory licensing into an effectively unconstrained method of pure cost containment. Furthermore, a widespread use of this model would not only require the developed world to shoulder a disproportionate share of the necessary R&D expenditures but at the same time present it with an attractive option to shed that burden. To avoid this rather bleak outlook for the future of pharmaceutical R&D, there is an urgent need for a WTO panel review. Strengthening intellectual property rights incentivises research on diseases that are specific to developing countries, promotes technology transfer through the localisation of R&D and production investments and thereby contributes to improving typically inadequate health service infrastructures.(Ralf Boscheck is Professor of Economics and Business Policy at IMD. The views expressed here are his own)
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Recently Google upped and announced it was going to shut down its RSS feeds service, Reader, and that's that. Users have up to July to get used to it or whistle Dixie. I was as upset as many others who rely on Reader, specially as the basis of beautiful news apps. I still am most annoyed but at the same time a little amused at how one can get so indignant at losing something one never paid for or earned in any way. I was taken aback with their announcement but earlier this year I had already gone through similar experiences though it was not with products that are as important to me as Google Reader is. The first was a photo editing app that gave my pictures a beautiful finish. Jazz was filed with presets customised and saved for my use. And then came an update and off they went. The app no longer gave the same results and I all but had to abandon it much to my sorrow. But then I contacted the developer and clamored for the lost features. He said the app was most powerful now but to me that wasn't the case at all. After some discussions, he said he would give the missing controls back — and in a few weeks, he did. I was overjoyed, not only at getting my app but at being heard. Thousands of people would feel the same if Google listened and gave us back Reader. True, someone else will come up with a solution if Google doesn't and perhaps a better one, but Google will go on to the next thing having changed the loyalty of many users including influencers like Om Malik who is annoyed enough not to try out Google’s new note taking app, Keep. Marco Arment, maker of Instapaper says it's all business and every company has the right to do what works for them and while that's true, I think users that are loyal are as important, specially when you have so many products and new projects. Buy-in and just plain buy would happen more readily if users had a background of trust, not betrayal to go upon. Another service that turned the tables on me was a social analytics startup, Crowdbooster. After serving up a weekly diet of flattering numbers in my email, it decided to go paid. Nothing wrong with that, and Crowdbooster did it elegantly enough, offering deals to switch over. I might have if it had been important enough for my work but ended up saying goodbye pleasantly and forgetting about Crowdbooster.Google could have done a Crowdbooster.on us, giving us the choice to pay or go find something else to do but I suppose that was too much trouble.As I write this, I get email from my blog hosting service with apologies for some unexpected downtime and reassurance that they're fixing the problem right away. That's the small but important sort of thing we take for granted. But really, it's something that goes a long way towards building trust. A company's gotta do what it's gotta do, but there's a way to do it.By say, August, all but those who depended on Reader, including many bloggers, will have forgotten about Reader. All will be forgiven. Some of us will always wince when we hear the word, Reader.(mala(dot)bhargava(at)gmail(dot)com)
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