NFC-cashless transaction pioneer Yeldi Softcom

NFC early mover Yeldi, the queue buster

By Anusha Ashwin
http://www.voicendata.com/queue-buster-yeldi/

Can an ordeal on a boat ride in the Island of Maldives pave way for the origin of a digital wallet company? Yes! It can. Way back in early 2008, Ra Arjunamurthy the Founder of Yeldi Softcom, was holidaying in Maldives when he encountered an ordeal in paying cash to the boatman for a ride in the middle of the sea. A born-entrepreneur, Arjunamurthy, then had a sudden brainwave about using Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to create products in cashless transaction and digital payment space. He believed that the NFC technology could bring a revolution in the cashless payment ecosystem.

Chennai-based Yeldi has now emerged as a company that is actively engaged in research, products and end-to-end services based on NFC technology. The company is co-founded by Arjunamurthy’s daughter Lakshmi Deepa, who is a rare woman entrepreneur in the digital wallet space.

In 2009, the breakthrough was quite naturally set for Arjunamurthy, as that was the time when Android-based smartphones were progressively developed and as he worked on the prototype for an NFC Device and a digital payment card, Google, in 2011, launched ‘Google Wallet’, which validated that his research and product development were on the right track. Google Wallet is a peer-to-peer payments service developed by Google that allows people to send and receive money from a mobile device.

Queue Buster Product Strategy

Talking about the genesis of Yeldi, Founder Arjunamurthy says, “I wanted to create a product using NFC technology which would disrupt the market and as a seasoned telecom entrepreneur my experience indicated that the best bet was to target the cash market. With the line slowly blurring between offline and online world, there was a need to create cashless transactions for enhanced customer experience. I wanted to hit cash transactions at a level for people in the bottom of the pyramid as well as the top. That is the area where real financial inclusions take place. Also, I just did not want to create an NFC-based product but also wanted to be a value-added-service company catering to the needs of the customer from start to end in cashless transactions.”

While product development started in 2008, Yeldi’s business launch took place only in 2012 and commercial operations, in fact, started in mid-2015. In the interim period, Yeldi’s core product development team consulted various technology experts based out of US, UK, France and China. Yeldi developed its core NFC technology in collaboration with NXP Semiconductors. In 2009, the company was registered; 2010 to 2012 were the formative years for the company, where considerable investment was made in R&D. Arjunamurthy collaborated with NXP for the highly-secured chips and also identified a Chinese manufacturer for the NFC-based handset.

“My vision was to create a product that caters to every cashless petty transaction like the day-to-daykirana shop. Just imagine a housekeeper or maid using a pre-paid card to make a small transaction for purchase of groceries. You just need to top-up the card with money and the transaction details are sent through an SMS to your handheld Yeldi device. Similarly, I found a significant need for cashless payments in every vertical. Be it at restaurants, gas stations, healthcare centers, booking tickets and many more. If there is a queue for any service, my product should be that queue buster there,” says Arjunamurthy.

Catering to both B2B as well as B2C verticals, Yeldi’s products have found success in varied verticals like healthcare, hospitality, multiplex, airlines, corporate establishments and banks. Yeldi caters not only to the Indian markets but also overseas markets. A brief explanation of Yeldi’s products and services are listed below:

Yeldi’s Handset: Yeldi’s NFC-enabled handset has all the features of a latest Android smartphone. Besides the obvious functionality as a 3G/4G smartphone, it works as a secure mobile Point-of-Sale Terminal. In its functionality as a POS terminal, Yeldi’s handset will interact only with Yeldi’s own tags, ensuring utmost security. Currently, there are two models priced approximately at Rs 8,500 and Rs 12,000 respectively.

iTapIt: The National Development Bank Plc (NDBP) in Sri Lanka has launched a pre-paid wallet cum debit card, iTapIt, for use among its customers, malls, restaurants, tea plantations and at schools with the technology being provided by Yeldi. Sri Lanka’s tea and rubber plantation workers use this card to mark their attendance, record the number of hours worked and even collect wages through a simple tap.


Meal Card: National carrier Air India has implemented Yeldi’s pre-paid cards for micro-payments at its Chennai and Hyderabad IRCTC-run canteens. Some 3,000 ground staff employees have subsidized meals at these canteens. This is Yeldi’s first venture in offline transaction and in a closed group format. With Yeldi’s pre-paid card wallet, Air India employees just flash their NFC-enabled cards at Yeldi’s NFC-enabled smartphone that acts as a payment receiver to make payments for their coffee or lunch. The canteen management certainly rate Yeldi’s technology as advantageous as it busts the queue and is more secure and the hassle behind handling cash and tendering change has been eliminated. The queue gets cleared within minutes and it avoids the cumbersome transaction of small payments.

Laundromat Card: Upmarket Delhi-based Laundromat Gaurdini, which caters to a host of politicians, celebrities and industrialists, now accepts Yeldi cards for payments. Explaining in detail, Arjunamurthy says, “Usually such high profile people do not pick their clothes from Laundromats on their own. A chauffeur or a maid is assigned this work, and they might not necessarily have the knowledge to operate a debit or a credit card. This is where Yeldi plays a role. The Gaurdini laundry card owner can pre-load a fixed amount between Rs 1,000-2,000 onto the card. And anyone with the card can make payments by flashing it near the Yeldi device and the bill amount is automatically deducted from the card.”

Hospitality Card: High-end condominiums like Bounce Back and Nirvana are one of Yeldi’s clients in the hospitality sector. Yeldi’s cards act as a pre-paid card for residents at every point as an access card like at the gymnasium, club house and other in-house facilities.

Ara eTap: This was launched in 2012. Ara eTap is an NFC sticker-based mobile payments service. Consumers who sign up for the service will be provided with an NFC sticker or a tag to attach to their mobile phones. The customer can buy an ara eTap, which is a tag, use the secret PIN given to him/her and can transact across all major product and service outlets.

Merchant Business Boosters: This is best suited for owners of portable restaurants, small (Kirana) shops, retail chains or an e-commerce online portal. When a merchant purchases Yeldi’s handset, he is given 500 Yeldi’s digital wallet cards. A tap-and-pay feature allows the merchant’s customers to pay for the transaction, which can be mobile recharge, payment of bills, and booking movie tickets among others.

Yeldi’s Mobile App: The mobile app is inbuilt and can be customized for every customer. The app will allow customers to place orders or schedule appointments, check the latest offers, view past transactions, etc.

Ambitious Roadmap

With a strong belief that his products have the potential to disrupt the digital wallet market and the potential to replace credit cards, Arjunamurthy spells out his plans for the future. He says, “Being at the cusp of digital wallet innovation, scaling up will be a natural phenomenon for Yeldi. Our products have been widely accepted nationally and internationally. In the coming years, Yeldi will foray into Qatar, Philippines, Bangladesh and Malaysia. By the end of 2016, Yeldi will tie-up with 16 national and international banks to launch a service similar to Sri Lanka’s National Development Bank.”

In the next 18 months, Yeldi intends to sell 300,000 units of NFC phones, which means that consequently along with the phone there will be a scale-up of sales of digital cards, tags or stickers. Yeldi will gain commissions from each transaction. A plan is also underway to manufacture the phones in India. “I am in advanced stage of talks with a manufacturer to make my handsets here in India as the demand rises. The reason behind this thinking is that once my phone is sold to a customer, my job does not end there. My company has to be a continuous service provider like an email service provider. Every time a customer makes a recharge with Yeldi’s card I am benefitted. Large part of the Return on Investment (RoI) for me is dependent on this recharge market.” The company is also in talks with some of India’s premier educational institutions to seek advice on creating an absolute secured handset in India.

Currently, Yeldi has an employee base of 100 and is planning to expand the headcount to 240 by 2017. Building an efficient sales team will be the company’s human resource manager’s primary focus as the company has three products in the pipeline and the launch has been scheduled for the next two years. Creating a pan-India presence will be the sales team’s top priority.

Yeldi, since inception, has been a bootstrapped company. Until recently in March 2016, the promoters of the company diluted 26 per cent stake in favor of an undisclosed private equity investor. Yeldi is currently valued at $200 million and Arjunamurthy’s aim is to touch $2 billion by 2018. “$2 billion is just a figure. My company’s true value will be recognized when my products earn 1 million subscribers. Garnering 1 million subscribers is my ultimate goal,” he says.

Flipkart issues

As Flipkart's valuations have been sliced by as much as 40 percent, and as the company hews to a new mantra and business model, this is a good time to look at how it ended up in this mess in the first place.
By Rajiv Rao for New Tech for Old India | May 26, 2016 -- 02:15 GMT (07:45 IST) | Topic: E-Commerce http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-flipkart-lost-its-way-and-other-lessons-from-the-great-indian-ecommerce-orgy/



The co-founders of Flipkart, Sachin (l) and Binny (r) Bansal

The bells of doom began to toll for Flipkart early this year when a few investment funds with small stakes in it began to downgrade their investments by as much as 40 percent, sending a high-voltage current through the spines of the tech community.

These haircuts didn't apply to only Flipkart of course. However, since it was the biggest ecommerce player out there -- helmed by founders perceived as arrogant who were constantly in the news trumpeting a gargantuan funding round or a big-ticket hire or some other imagined milestone instead of paying attention to bread-and-butter issues like customer satisfaction and product diversity -- its fall from grace was going to attract the most attention.

Naturally, Flipkart isn't going anywhere soon. It still has millions of customers, a sprawling infrastructure, capable senior management (even if they are all formerly misguided or deluded), money, and a commanding lead over its other domestic rivals.

The only problem is the ecommerce equivalent of a large, great white shark circling the company and its name is Amazon.

While revenue growth at Flipkart and its peers has slowed alarmingly, Amazon's has grown and its market share has accelerated enormously in recent months. Plus, its war-chest is brimming and seemingly bottomless.

Amazon is also equipped with a much sharper, savvier brain that has been honed by decades of combat in the industry. Right now, it seems like a no-contest between itself and Flipkart, especially when Flipkart's customer service reputation and brand image have taken a walloping.

Which is why this is a good time to take stock of where Flipkart went wrong and what it is doing -- primarily in reaction to the circling great white and of course the slump in its business model and valuations -- to right the listing ship.
ABANDONING FRUGALITY

Certainly not the only company to be guilty of this, Flipkart though was the embodiment of the madness of the ecommerce boom that swept India in the last few years. As Mint observed, Flipkart (along with its smaller rival Snapdeal) kept adding people to its rolls before they could even find them a suitable position. Even if you account for a shortage of talent in the country, this kind of excess was a sign of things to come.

Another obsession was to fill its ranks with mega-salaried Silicon Valley and ex-McKinsey hires rather than people with retail brains who would be able to translate their off-ground experience into the online world.

"There is a reason why Silicon Valley-returned managers (not techies) have a tough time settling in," said veteran investor Haresh Chawla in Founding Fuel. "They are used to dealing with homogenized audiences in the west and this is the first time they are coming in contact with the chaos that is India, the diversity that comprises its consumers and the work ethics that create its organisations," he added.

Also, these American transplants soon ran into stubborn walls of resistance embodied by existing local senior management and other stakeholders who were protective of their turf. Getting things done was a herculean task for them.
INNOVATION AND GMV

This was perhaps the Achilles' heel of Flipkart -- its reliance on Gross Merchandise Value alone as a metric that it would measure to gauge how well it did. If Flipkart sold a mobile phone for the equivalent of $100, that selling price was the GMV. In a normal world, an online retailer would make a sliver of that sale -- around $2 to $3 -- and book it as revenue. However, in Flipkart's case even this amount didn't materialise as they were selling most things for a loss and financing it via their VC injections, a popular practice known as "deep-discounting" that chased customers rather than profitability.

Much like in the last dotcom boom where even seasoned Wall Street analysts were resorting to absurd metrics to justify insane valuations, ecommerce players in India hung their entire business models on the hook of the total cost of goods regardless of how much money they were bleeding.

They constantly tried to one-up each other by pointing out that their individual GMVs were bigger than that of rivals. It was like boasting about the size of your truck engine in comparison to your neighbours' even though both engines weren't working and the trucks hadn't left their driveway in months. And when Flipkart's GMVs began to slump in the last 6 months, you know something was seriously wrong.

As Chawla points out in his now-infamous Flipkart takedown, if that wasn't bad enough, it turns out that over one half of Flipkart's GMV came from selling smartphones where the Moto series alone accounted for $500 million. The lack of product diversification leads to devastating consequences in terms of luring repeat customers and growing your overall business.
USER EXPERIENCE

This is the next logical link to a lack of product diversity, according to Chawla. A healthy ecommerce business involves hawking a range of products and thus attracting a variety of customers to your site. This forces you to up the ante in terms of search functionalities and other user-friendly bells and whistles, giving your customer a more memorable experience. None of this was happening at Flipkart. In fact, Chawla said that the reviews and Q&As were at a whole different level on rival Amazon's site.

This is what happens when you flog phones to someone who is bargain hunting for just that one product for the entire year and will probably never come back to your site.

APP-ONLY STRATEGY

In an act of inspired lunacy, as I wrote about here earlier last year, Flipkart decided to abandon its mobile and desktop website and opt for an app-only strategy. Sure, Indians have by-and-large skipped the PC revolution for a mobile one, and this fact probably inspired the move. In addition, patchy internet connectivity across the country and the ability to completely own the customer experience within the portals of the app, feed him or her constant updates, and collect important customer-metrics may have been too tempting a rationale at the time.

Customer service and loyalty are the new mantras at Flipkart, replacing GMV

Either way it was bone-headed. Anyone could see that faster mobile connectivity was around the corner, that low-cost Android phones that were the pre-dominant kind used in India had tiny storage space and that you would lose a large chunk of people who simply preferred the mobile/desktop web browsing experience. Flipkart learnt the hard way and eventually abandoned this strategy, but not before it cost them.
FINAL ANALYSIS

Flipkart has now recalibrated their strategy and to the amusement and chagrin of many have arrived at a new mantra: Customer satisfaction and loyalty above all else, to be measured by a brand spanking new metric much-touted in the press. This is NPS, or Net Promoter Score. "NPS breaks down into what product selection is available, how fast it is available, whether it is available all the time, and at what price," CEO Binny Bansal told Mint newspaper.

It has also hugely reduced hiring to "a trickle" -- but even here it isn't winning any points. Itdeferred by six months the joining date for the 17 job offers it made at the premier B-School in the country, the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, which has attracted not just ire from IIM but a font of negative press as well.

However, that is nothing compared to the biggest worry plaguing Flipkart's as we speak -- namely, the great white shark known as Amazon cruising effortlessly in Indian waters, gobbling up market share as each day passes.

7 Social Media Tools For Small Businesses

7 Social Media Tools For Small Businesses To Manage Their Social Presence



With the positive effects of social media marketing becoming more and more apparent, most small businesses have started working on a social media marketing strategy.

One of the main aims of social media marketing is to stay relevant to your audience. This might be harder for small businesses as they have more to juggle, in terms of handling tasks. Social media tools and apps can help reduce the stress of multi-tasking and keep your social media activities consistent. Below are social media tools for small business to help make your life as a social media marketer easier.
Social Media Tools for Small Business
DrumUp

DrumUp is a must have app for managing your social media presence on multiple accounts. For small businesses, content curation can be a life saver when it comes to maintaining consistency. Curation allows you to seem knowledgeable by posting others’ content with a mix of your own.

DrumUp has multiple functions that are great for content curation and sharing like content recommendations, feeds, scheduling and re-posting. It delivers a list of fresh, relevant content based on your keywords — straight to your dashboard. You can also add feeds to get content from. You can then schedule out posts with a single click or plan it out specifically.

While scheduling, it suggests a list of hashtags you can use with the posts. You can also create custom posts effortlessly and schedule them out. The app allows you to re-post your content over a period of time so your queue is never empty.

DrumUp has a Chrome extension that recommends content and lets you schedule it while you’re reading other material.
IFTTT

Social media automation can save small businesses a ton of time — it eliminates mundane tasks, so you can focus on more important ones. IFTTT stands for If This Then That — it’s a tool that takes social media automation to a whole new level.

As the name suggests, IFTTT lets you create functions or “recipes” that make apps work together. For example, if you have a blog on Blogger, you can create a recipe that automatically schedules tweets every time a new post is published. You can have an unlimited number of recipes to perform functions as simple as keeping your profile pictures in sync to saving photos to Dropbox.

For beginners, the app also suggests recipes that are useful based on a niche of your choice. It works with over 280 channels/services and is a must have tool for serious marketers.
RiteTag

RiteTag is a social media management toolkit that works across 14 major websites including Twitter, Facebook and Tweetdeck. The app is most useful for Twitter as it can enhance your tweets with a single click. While creating a tweet, clicking on the RiteTag button lets you add images, hashtags, GIFs, emojis and customized CTAs on all your shared links.

One of its main features is the ability to analyze hashtags — it shows you recommended hashtags, which ones are most used, which ones are trending, and which ones aren’t popular. You can also automate sharing by connecting it with your favorite content curation services or RSS feeds.

The app also has a Chrome extension to make it more accessible.
Commun.it

Commun.it is a Twitter tool that is a favorite among big brands but is extremely valuable for smaller businesses as well. The tool eliminates all the noise from your timeline so you can see the most important updates.

It’s most important feature is the ability to show you whom to follow and unfollow. It lists users into three groups: Influencers, Supporters and Engaged Members, based on a variety of factors — this enables you to target your audience more efficiently.

It also provides free Twitter analytics, allows team members to manage your account and recommends people whom you should respond to.
Feedly

As mentioned before, content curation is vital for small businesses. Feedly is one of the best tools for discovering great content from a variety of sources. It is an RSS reader that can gather feeds from multiple sites based on your preferences. You can add feeds from publications, blogs and even YouTube channels. You can also monitor news about your company, product and competitors by plugging in Google Alerts.

Feedly also gives you secure access to your company’s internal portals and SaaS applications. All your feeds can be organized into collections so that they are easily accessible in the future.

You can integrate Feedly with a multitude of other apps that enable you to save content for later and share it on your social accounts.
Canva

With social media, visuals are a great way to grab your user’s attention. However, social media managers for small businesses rarely have enough time to create detailed visuals — this is where Canva comes in. Canva is the easiest way to design beautiful images to go along with your social media posts.

The tool provides features that make it easy to turn ideas into visuals. You can create images with quotes, conversation bubbles, custom icons, and stickers. It can enhance images further with it’s various amazing filters/effects and the ability to straighten, crop and resize images. In case you’re too busy to start from scratch, it comes loaded with a ton of customizable layouts that can be changed to suit any occasion.

Canva is great for creating visuals for anything from social media to blog posts.
ManageFlitter

As you grow your social presence on Twitter, it is necessary to keep track of your followers, your reach and analytics. ManageFlitter has numerous features, including PowerPost — which shows you the best time to post your Tweets for maximum reach. It also provides you with free analytics to make sure your campaigns are getting the desired engagement.

One of ManageFlitter’s best known features is the group Unfollow or Follow option that lets you unfollow/follow a large number of people based on a number of criteria including influence, date of follow and many more. The search feature also comes in handy when you want to find influencers.

At the end of the day, social media is about connecting with your audience and creating new opportunities for business growth. You can use all the tools in the world but if you’re not being smart, then it’ll all go to waste. Using a combination of these tools can free up your schedule and give you time for new ventures.

Just remember to choose social media tools for small business wisely and to use them smartly.

Snapdeal rolls out Shopo, a zero commission marketplace

New Delhi - India's e-commerce companies are snapping at each others' heals to get more sellers on their platforms. After Paytm announced a zero commission marketplace for sellers some months back, it was the turn of Snapdeal to do so today.

Snapdeal has launched 'shopo', a platform where sellers pay zero commission to place their products. This is in line with Snapdeal's ambitious target of getting a million sellers on to its platforms in the next one year.

So shopo allows anyone to open a shop online, chat with prospective customers and agree on a transaction - all without the seller having to shell out any fee.

Snapdeal's Shopo is modelled on Taobao

But unlike Snapdeal, on shopo the buyer then has to conduct the actual transaction offline. Which means there may be no delivery, return or replacement guarantees, unlike those available on Snapdeal.

Snapdeal's Kunal Bahl said as shopo progresses, improvements will be added to the current model but it will always remain zero commission for sellers.

The sellers will stock their own inventory, do their own deliveries etc. This is the Alibaba promoted Tao Bao model where again sellers are allowed to sell online for no commission.
Will Snapdeal's shopo gamble pay off remains to be seen.

http://www.firstpost.com/business/another-desi-taobao-snapdeal-launches-shopo-zero-commission-marketplace-2345102.html