Technology

MakeMyTrip Flying High on Airline Bookings

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MakeMyTrip Airline BookingOnline Travel & Hotel Bookings site MakeMyTrip management Mr Rajesh Magow (Co-founder & CEO – India) and Mr Mohit Kabra (CFO) in a call highlighted the status of their business amidst most airlines have already reduced OTA (online travel agents, such as MMYT) commissions to 1% (from 5-6% earlier), but allowed OTAs to charge a convenience fee on bookings. Management thinks that the revenue model might shift to a ‘convenience fee only’ model with zero commissions in the worst-case scenario.

MMYT delivered a solid Jun-14 quarter with USD 35.5 million in revenues i.e. 26% of the upper-end of its FY15 guidance of USD 136 million. Despite the strong quarter, the company did not increase guidance primarily to ensure that the demand uptick witnessed in the seasonally

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Taxi Booking – New Battle Ground for Chinese Internet Giants

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Baidu and car rental company Yidao Yongche yesterday announced that the two companies will jointly launch a business car rental service “Baidu VIP Car” The Chauffeur driven service will be supported by Baidu Map, with the first app to support the service soon to be released on the Android platform. Founded in 2010, Yidao is a leading car rental company in China. Its service currently covers 74 cities in China and also 3 cities in the US.

With China’s three largest internet platforms all having launched ventures within the car rental market, the space seems to have become a new

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Can Telcos Opt for Payment Banks to Push Mobile Money Business ?

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RBI has released draft guidelines for payments bank licenses. We view Indian telcos, with their large customer bases and wide geographical reach (e.g., Airtel’s 1.5 mn retail outlets), as strong contenders. The overall objective appears to be to encourage financial inclusion by providing payments / remittance/ small savings services through technology based, high volume-low value transactions.

A payments bank will be allowed to offer services like demand deposits (maximum Rs100,000), payments / remittance services, and

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Zomato to Add 1 International City / Month – Raise More Funding

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Zomato Expands International MarketsZomato is the leading restaurant classified site in India. Started in FY09, it is currently present in 13 cities across India and reported revenues of Rs306mn in FY14 (vs. Rs114mn in FY13). Info Edge (INFOE IN) owns 50% stake in the company.

Zomato is present in 41 cities including 14 in India and 27 outside. It has 750 employees in total of which 300 each are in the content and sales teams and 60 in the technology team. Initially the content team develops the profile of restaurants in a city and only after scale is reached in terms of traffic the sales team starts the monetization process. So far, Zomato has reached sufficient traffic to start monetization in 7 of 14 Indian cities and FY14 also witnessed significant

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List of All Online / Mobile Payment Gateways / Channels in India

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Citrus Payment Gateway India - Split BillsWe have received numerous request from Readers / potential entrepreneurs to make a list of all the Payment Gateways for Online & Mobile Transactions in India. By Popular Readers’ demand, here is the list based on the who was the fast in the Indian market.

  • Payseal/ICICI Bank ICICI Merchant Services 2000
  • Billdesk Indiaideas.com Ltd 2000
  • CCAvenue Avenues India Private Limited – 2001
  • Transecute Transecute India Pvt Ltd (Directi) 2001
  • EBS E-Billing Solutions 2005
  • Paymate Wallet Paymate India PVt. Limited 2006 [Mobile]
  • DirecPay/Timesgroup TimesofMoney Ltd. 2008

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Music Streaming – Amazon Prime Onslaught on Spotify & Pandora

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Online Music Streaming WarOnline Computing Giant, Amazon launched Prime Music which provides its Prime members with unlimited, ad free access to more than a million songs at no additional cost to their Prime membership. Amazon Prime membership now includes free 2 day shipping, Prime Instant Video, Kindle Lending Library, and Prime Music, quite a lot of content for $99/year. Prime Music is likely to be featured on Amazon phones, which is expected to be unveiled few hours from now.

In terms of features and functionality

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YouTube Tops 20 Bn Video Views in May – Heads for $4.5 Bn Ad Revenue

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Youtube Latest Video ViewsGoogle’s Online Video Streaming Service YouTube doesn’t disclose any figures about Monthly Views. However, estimates from VidStatsX reveal that worldwide video views on YouTube in May 2014 was 20.8bn, Year-over-year growth in video views is ~100%. The total number of videos available on YouTube was 3.5mn at the end of May, this has been relatively stable year-to-date. The total number of YouTube subscriptions to Top 1000 publishers was 1.4bn at the end of May and

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How has Apple’s Platform Evolved + Matured over Decade ?

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Apple platform EvolutionThere appears to be a pervasive belief that The Next New Thing from Apple will have to be a hardware device that will change the story just as the iPod, iPhone and iPad did when they were launched, particularly since it is becoming more apparent that Apple’s hardware has become less differentiated relative to the competition. After all, the platform (iTunes content, apps, etc.) provides switching costs and without a robust source of switching costs, any new hardware category is unlikely to remain differentiated for long. Just as the iPod was unlikely to remain dominant without the iTunes music store, and the iPhone changed the mobile handset market by leveraging bite-sized apps, any new hardware category needs to leverage and enhance differentiated functionality on Apple’s platform.

Furthermore, with streaming music

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3 Key e-Commerce eco-system enablers in India

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e-commerce ecosystem enablesIn a survey of around 25 industry participants such e-commerce companies operating in the fields of classifieds, online travel, e-tailing, mobile advertising, logistics, payment and data analytics, we found the Top 3 eco-system enabler for e-commerce to be grow leaps & bound in India as under.

Affordable mobile devices/tariffs
Declining smartphone prices, falling mobile data tariffs and improving 3G coverage will help accelerate the adoption of e-commerce in India. We expect the mobile opportunity in India to be bigger than fixed-line as many first time users of e-commerce will access the internet via a mobile device given the faster pace of smartphone penetration than PC penetration. As such, we expect

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MakeMyTrip – Business Verticals Review and Outlook

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MakeMyTrip Business Verticals MakeMyTrip (MMT) offers a comprehensive suite of travel and travel-related services and products. The company’s two primary lines of business are air ticketing and hotels & packages. Additionally, it provides rail and bus tickets, car hire, and ancillary travel services, e.g. travel insurance and visa processing.

Air Ticketing Business
The air ticketing business is primarily targeted at domestic travel within India and international travel to/from India. Over FY10-F13, MMT’s domestic air travel transactions have increased at 29% CAGR to 3.4m, whereas international travel transactions have risen at a 39% CAGR to 0.35m. MMT has real-time access to inventory of all major (full-service and LCC) domestic airlines

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