Technology

Internet Businesses Productivity – Traffic Up, Recovery still to come

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Leading Internet company InfoEdge released some interesting numbers to us. The 2020 August Naukri.Com’s Jobspeak indicates hiring activity in the IT / ITeS industries was up 14%/16% MoM. Hiring trends in Auto & auto ancillary, BFSI and Construction / Engineering/ Cement / Metals companies also improved 17%, 12% and 3% MoM, respectively. However, hiring activity was down 10% MoM in Oil & Gas / Power / Infrastructure industry and overall hiring situation continues to remain substantially weak on a YoY basis (-35% YoY).

What does Similarweb’s Internet Trends Indicate ?
In recruitment classifieds segment monthly traffic trends in

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How TikTok clone – Instagram Reels can monetize short social videos ?

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Instagram Reels a clone of the banned Chinese App TikTok is a potential positive around engagement, on what should be a highly monetizable vertical for Facebook Inc. In addition, we see the move as a defensive play in helping retain usage that might have otherwise shifted to TikTok from Instagram.

Product Managers had to debate on How much incremental consumption Reels offers versus cannibalism – does it take time spent from higher monetizing newsfeed or lower monetizing stories ? In our view we think it can drive a pickup in overall consumption and cannibalize more time from Stories, a modest positive if proven correct.

Does the format lend itself to more ads per minute or fewer ? This is composed of two factors. How many clips per minute a user can

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What were Consumers Searching on Google during COVID-19 ?

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Google the Largest Consumer Internet engagement Platform has assigned three labels to display the Indian consumers behavior in the COVID-19 Pandemic.

  • The Shock – new, sudden changes in top of mind concerns,
  • Small Change – some equanimity in accepting the new normal and
  • Speed up – an acceleration of nascent trends

The Shock En masse, Indian web consumers went from their regular searches to searches related to the Chinese virus – all about it, and how to beat it. Massive surges were seen in searches for sanitizers, masks and soon, immunity boosters. With sanitizing becoming a compulsion, cleaning products also came center stage. Consumers were lapping everything on these subjects they could find. The early days were dominated by

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Vedantu – EdTech founders Win ET Startup Award

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Vedantu company is the second most valued ed-tech start-up in India following its USD 100mn fund raise at a valuation of USD 600mn during a Series D round led by Coatue Management, Tiger Global, GGV Capital, Omidyar and Westbridge Capital. Its founders Vamsi Krishna, Pulkit Jain and Anand Prakash won the ET Startup Award for 2020 under the Category – Come Back Kids.

Interestingly, the Vedantu’s valuation has more than doubled in just three months, as it had earlier raised USD 7mn from KB Global at a valuation of USD 280mn in April 2020. We believe the latest fund raise comes under the backdrop of the fast growing adoption of the online medium for learning purposes in the country that was visible even prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic has further

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Covid-19 impacts JustDial’s Traffic + Income

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Chinese Virus Covid-19 has impacted JustDial’s Portal & App traffic from the start of the lockdown in India. Traffic has started coming back slowly on easing of restrictions in tier-I / II cities. SMEs are taking a cautious stance on advertisements.

JustDial’s revenue stream is dependent on spending on advertisements by SMEs. Loss of revenues for SMEs, on account of Covid, has driven them to stop / defer spends on the platform. Further, the business mortality may also result in erosion of company’s client base. Also, July collections currently stand at 60% of pre-Covid levels. The company highlighted that challenges in the business are to sustain for at least 1-2 quarters.

Tier II/III cities represent 34% of revenues and 55-56% in terms of campaigns. 55% of both listings and traffic are from tier I cities. Growth in tier II/III indicates lower ticket sizes (~40-45% of tier I). Also, the lockdown restrictions are

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Will InsurTech Startups crack the Trust Deficit and Win ?

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InsurTech landscape is quite nascent in India. This mainly comprises of Digital Platforms offering Complete Policy Buying & Management known as the Aggregators. The current InsurTech penetration is quite low, i.e., 2.76% in life insurance and 0.93% in non-life insurance compared to the global average of 6.5%. Lack of customer trust remains the key hurdle facing the InsurTech segment, and so far, industry players have found it as a hard nut to crack.

Digital Insurance Aggregators These are the aggregator platform that enables customers to compare and buy insurance products of both new-age online insurers and traditional insurance companies. There has been a significant uptick in the number of aggregators since

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ICICI Strictly Enforces Data Leakage Prevention

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India’s leading financial group ICICI which operates in the domains of Banking, Insurances, Securities Trading, Credit Cards etc has very strictly enforced the Data Leakage Prevention Policy over the network.

DLP is a process inside ICICI Bank under Information security group for Bank’s Data Security. This process identifies any leakage of data based on the policies created by multiple Business Units (BU’s) inside ICICI Bank. DLP team monitor those sensitive / confidential data to ensure that

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Why Google / Microsoft Following Facebook Investment in Telco Data Carriers ?

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Facebook the Social Network company also owns the most popular messaging app for SmartPhones in India WhatsApp. Facebook, unfortunately has been running the Indian division under deep loss and wasn’t able to Monetize the WhatsApp Platform. iBankers bridged the synergies WhatsApp shared with Jio Platforms and Zuckerber readily agreed to invest a whopping $10 Billion in the newly formed company by Reliance Group – Jio Platforms Ltd This intensified the war of Silicon Valley Big companies relying on 4G/5G Data Networks.

Google has ramped up its digital advertising business geared towards programmatic and video advertising, Google is focused on building a subscription business in

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Fintech Startup / Companies in India

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We had covered the List of Payment Gateways available in India about 5 years ago. Our readers have commended the good job that we have done in providing coverage about the FinTech Startups in IndiaThey requested a list of all the companies operating in the FinTech vertical that pass our Ethical & Technology adoption parameters and here is the refined list.

LendingKart – Focused on Unaddressed demand for SME lending. We were excited by their usage of Artificial intelligence and machine learning driven underwriting.

BankBazaar – Platform offers bouquet of Loans

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LendingKart – Internet Financing for Micro / Small Enterprise

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Micro and Small Businesses in India need capital to support growth, expansion or operations. They have traditionally been funded by family and friends, but are now more open to and prefer borrowing from third parties. There are several reasons why banks do not adequately address this demand. The need for funding for SMEs might be short-term or immediate or the requirement of a credit history or collateral might hinder their prospects. LendingKart jumped to address this demand by giving

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