FreeCharge’s Digital Wallet Targets Rs 1000 Crore

FreeCharge, India’s leading digital platform for recharge and utility payments, with a volume of over 200 million transactions annually, today announced the launch of FreeCharge Digital Wallet. The ‘comprehensive and trusted’ digital wallet service will transform mobile and web transactions by facilitating easy and secure payments. The wallet is being launched in partnership with YES bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks and targets Rs 1000 crore over the next few years.

With an ecosystem of 8.2 million daily unique users, 4 million monthly engaged hours, 15 million stored cards, combined with GMV of over USD 4 billion, the FreeCharge Digital Wallet is set to become India’s most used wallet in the next 6 months.

In line with Snapdeal’s vision of building the most impactful digital commerce ecosystem in India, the FreeCharge digital wallet will enable a culture of digital payments through multiple partnerships.

In addition to a large and robust network of merchant partners, FreeCharge will partner with FINO - a payments bank licensee to build scale and ability to reach even the under-served.

FreeCharge Digital Wallet is powered by cutting edge technology, consumer behaviour insights and innovations in payments. It is a robust and flexible platform that leverages enabling technologies such as HCE, NFC, QR code and BLE to bring in efficiencies in the consumers’ purchase experience.

Commenting on the launch, Kunal Shah, CEO and co-founder, FreeChargesaid “FreeCharge has hit an important milestone in its journey today. With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we are all set to transform the way people make payments. A secure, easy to use and feature-rich service, the wallet is equipped with state of the art technology and a robust partner network, making it a truly game-changing service that will bring value to consumers and our partners in the ecosystem.”

Congratulating FreeCharge on this milestone launch, Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder, Snapdeal said, “Our aim is to bring in efficiencies in payments using digital commerce to cater to every consumption need that a user may have. Consumer needs are constantly evolving and we feel it is the right time to launch a trusted and feature-rich digital wallet service. At Snapdeal we are building an ecosystem that powers billions of digital commerce transactions. With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we will now play an even more intrinsic role in our customers’ lives”

Commenting on the way forward for the Digital Wallet, Anand Chandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer, Snapdeal said, “We are very excited about this landmark product launch. With 87 million combined registered users, we will ensure a seamless transition by offering easy integration and access to the platform resulting in a superior consumer and merchant experience.”  

HyperVerge Winner of G-Startup India at GMIC Bangalore 2015

GMIC Bangalore, India’s major mobile conference, has announced the winners of their flagship startup competition, G-Startup.  HyperVerge, a Bay-area based startup, which uses deep learning to organize images emerged as winners at the competition. A global platform, G-Startup is emerging as one of the most prominent launch pads for innovative mobile startups to showcase their product, reach out to international investors and collaborate with peers and industry experts.

 

Launched for the first time in India, G-Startup saw competition from 120+ startups from across the world.The previous editions of G-Startup have been held in San Francisco and Beijing. Some of the previous winners and runner-ups at the competition include companies likeFleksy Keyboard and Open Garden, who’s product FireChat is a disruptive mobile communication platform that also works without a data plan and where there is no Internet connection or cellular phone coverage. Other big names that have participated in the G-Startup competition include Chinese cab giant DidiDache that recently merged with KuaidiDache to create one of the world's largest smartphone-based transport services valued upwards of $8.5 billion and Visual Lead, an Israeli QR Technology companywhich recently received strategic investment from Alibaba.

 

Speaking about winning at G-Startup India, Kedar Kulkarni, co-founder of HyperVerge said, “We are extremely excited to win the first ever G-Startup competition in India. GMIC being one of the biggest conferences in India has been a fantastic platform for us to showcase our product and gain visibility in the right circles. In fact, after coming to GMIC, we have already seen investment interest from atleast 3 groups from China. We now look forward to going to GMIC Beijing 2016 and compete with the rest of the winners from across the globe.”

 

The eminent jury for G-startup India consisted ofSasha Mirchandani, ‎Founder & Managing Director, Kae Capital, Amit Somani, Managing Partner, Prime Ventures and Hiro Mashita, Founder & Director, M&S Partners.

 

According to Amit of Prime Ventures and Hiro of M&S Partners, “It was a pleasure to be a part of the jury of the first edition of G-Startup. The quality of startups that displayed their products and the depth of research they had done was impressive to say the least. The G-Startup competition by GMIC provides an excellent opportunity for startups from India and China to collaborate and learn from each other. HyperVerge impressed us the most with the the deep technology expertise demonstrated by them. What got us even more excitedwas the fact that such differentiated mobile products are being created out of India”.

 

G-Startup’s platform has given several disruptive mobile startups international exposure. As part of the win, HyperVerge will get a round-trip airfare to Beijing for GMIC Beijing 2016, where they will be given a demo booth to showcase their product. With Beijing being among one of world mobile ecosystem’s key centers for innovation, GMIC organizers hope that HyperVerge would also get to collaborate with their global counterparts.

 

Talking about G-Startup, Gurpreet Singh, President, Asia, GMIC said "We are excited to bring our flagship startup competition to India after China and the U.S. Since 2010, G-Startup has emerged as a leading global platform to nurture and support startups. Startups that have gone through the platform have achieved wide-ranging success, from achieving billion-dollar valuations to being acquired by tech giants like Apple and Google. By bringing this platform to India, we wish to help and bring the same level of support and success to Indian startups."

 

GMIC brings together some of the most advanced and disruptive companies in the Mobile Internet Space. It hosts Mobile Executives, Entrepreneurs, Developers and Investors across global platforms to build partnerships, learn from industry thought leaders and study mobile technology trends. Some of the well-known names that were a part of GMIC include Sachin Bansal (Co-founder Flipkart), Naveen Tiwari (CEO, Inmobi), Kunal Shah (CEO, Freecharge) Fu Sheng (CEO Cheetah Mobile), Li Tao (CEO, APUS Group) and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm), among others.

Zopnow Explores SCRO Solutions As It Diversify Into Apparels & Fashion Garments

By Manu Sharma

One of the recent startup entrant’s in the online grocery space -- Zopnow -- believes that technology is the way forward and so along with their self-developed robust platform are also exploring the supply chain, retail and Omni-channel (SCRO) solutions as they diversify into apparels and fashion garments.

Technology Essential for Seamless Connection

On the technology front. Zopnow has already developed its own platform across various devices like mobile, app and website. So technology enables the insight of the inventory of all the outlets - Hypercity and More -stores across the five cities. IT also helps acquire customers and route their deliveries within the shortest time. However, seamless connection in today's digital age is still a concern and so is the need to reduce costs, increase profitability and improve collaboration & deliver on the customer promises every time.

Scaling Up the IT Infra Critical

Addressing the gathering of the 9^th Edition of Supply Chain Practitioners’ Council held recently at the JDA Software campus in Bengaluru, Mukesh Singh, CEO of Zopnow says, “Time and delivery are critical components in our business and so have developed our own open source platform and the website has been developed using php and Java. So today we have a team of IT staff who manage and maintain the services. But as we move forward need to scale up our network and security is essential for the company. As an entrepreneur, we are definitely interested in new and innovative SCM technologies.”

Healthy Margins for Apparels & Fashion Brands

As per industry reports the online retail segment is expected to turn into a $2.8-billion industry by 2016. Lately India is indeed seeing a flourishing online market for apparel & fashion brands, which offers e-tailers a healthy margin of 30-40%. On the other hand, e-grocery gets them a margin of 10-12%.

Diversify Next Step Forward for the Business

Presently, Zopnow has an exclusive agreement with two of India’s largest grocery chains – K Raheja Corp group’s ‘Hypercity’ and Aditya Birla Retail’s ‘More’ to deliver groceries across cities like Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Gurgaon. Zopnow also plans to expand into other major cities in the coming months. 

“Now that it has been three years since we have entered into groceries, we have decided to diversify into apparels and fashion garments. We have a technology tie-up with Hypercity and More, wherein we have access to their inventory and also physical access to their chain of stores across the country,” remarks Singh and adds, “we believe many customers already appreciate our quick delivery, access to inventory and delivery network. We definitely want to diversify and there is no doubt on that as it is the next step forward for the business. We in talks with leading retail chains including -- Pantaloon, Reliance Retail and also K Raheja.”

Earlier Model Not Viable

In the beginning, Zopnow had come out with the warehouse model with partnership with MNCs like HLL, P&G till 2014 to run their operations. Since then they have shut down on the warehouse model and now station their staff at the physical stores.

Retail Solution Success Story

Shoppers Stop, another leading Indian branded store have scaled up from one format and one company to five companies, eight format and 200+ stores. Initially, when they had about five stores they looked for ERP solutions to scale up and that’s where JDA Software came in. Today, the retailer has over 200 stores and since it difficult to track all its customers' and so they needed a proper system & process in place and the backbone was JDA’s Merchandise Management System (MMS). Today the firm is very profitable due to the availability of merchandise across stores and have gained from optimized inventory and also replenish orders.

Similarly PepsiCo, ITC Foods, Asian Paints are all experiencing similar breakthrough’s by using JDA’s solutions.

EMC COE Emphasis on Open Flexible & Cost Effective Platform for Surveillance

EMC India Center of Excellence (COE) announced the launch of Surveillance Lab in Bangalore. EMC has made a multi-year investment to form the industry’s largest, most advanced test and certification Surveillance Labs. The Surveillance Lab will help organizations to reduce the deployment risk and support requirements and also provide a proven, repeatable architecture and a known performance baseline for production environments.

With the government of India’s increased emphasis on the development of smart cities, safety has become a major concern for all the stakeholders. Thus, making the role of technology extremely crucial, especially surveillance technology. Shielding people, infrastructure and critical data from deliberate or accidental threats is serious business—and it’s a business that’s growing at an unprecedented rate. In the present scenario, video surveillance has become the largest and fastest-growing component of the physical security industry in India.   

Industry research released by IHS Technology forecasts the sales of video surveillance equipment to reach $26B in 2018, growing 2X faster than the overall IT market. The advancement made in technology and the increasing demand to strengthen the security has led to new requirements for video surveillance. Leading vendors in sectors like transport, manufacturing, IT, ITeS and government are quickly transitioning to the digital era, where large pools of high resolution video and data can be stored safely, retained and used for intensive analytics whenever required.

The new Surveillance Lab in Bangalore complements EMC’s dedicated lab in North Carolina, USA that’s been testing with partners for more than 6 years.   To ensure the quality of physical security applications, which is supported with EMC’s portfolio of products, EMC has partnered with the leading surveillance vendors. The lab will offer EMC Proven Solutions documentation for field sales, delivery teams and partners, Reference Architectures (RAs), white papers, technical notes and sizing guidelines, as well as technical presentations to the customers.  The key features of the lab includes dedicated engineering team, partner testing & validation, proof of concept and test to fail philosophy.

“Security is one of the most important components of a smart city. The development of dedicated surveillance lab testifies our commitment to physical security. It also underscores our commitment to global surveillance market as well as the customers in India and across APJ. Our expertise in the technology and in the security domain offers leading physical security vendors a forum that will allow video surveillance workload to be more manageable and enable easy analysis of the available data,” said Sarv Saravanan, Senior Vice President & General Manager, EMC Centers of Excellence – Asia Pacific Japan. He further added that “through this lab we aim at creating awareness about the importance of overall surveillance practice and also our advanced test/validation capabilities”.

“As India strides towards developing smart cities, the pressure to develop cutting edge, scalable and proven security solutions is massive. EMC’s Video Surveillance lab offers the private security vendors a platform that is open, flexible, cost-effective and is analytics-ready. EMC wants to be an enabler and strives towards developing purpose-built platforms that leverage its enterprise storage expertise and business partnerships that are focused on the growing security space,” said Michael Gallant, Global Practice Lead, Surveillance & Security, EMC Corporation. He said “working together with our partners we want to offer customers integrated solutions that are customized to their needs for simple deployment and the management of large scale video data that is generated today.”  

VMware Rides on $2.3B Business Mobility Market in India

VMware, Inc, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility has reiterated its strategy to help customers in India realise the benefits of Business Mobility and transform their business processes. The company's strategy aims to free businesses from more than a decade of client-server focused IT – which enabled mobile access to a limited number of productivity applications – and now deliver a more user- and application-centric experience.

The total addressable enterprise mobility solutions industry in Asia Pacific, which includes applications, devices, security, middleware, and professional services, is expected to grow from US$22B in 2015 to US$26.7B by 2017. The market in India is also slated to grow from US$1.7B in 2015 to US$2.3B in 2017 over the same period.

“With Indian organisations paying close attention to the future of business processes in the mobile-cloud era, we believe that India is on the cusp of the next major technology wave in Asia Pacific,” said Sanjay Deshmukh, general manager, Business Mobility, VMware APJ. “With a new generation of smartphone-powered workers who have easier access to end-user devices and network connectivity, businesses here are prioritising and reorienting themselves around mobile innovation, apps and services.”

“The Asia Pacific market for mobility is in very early stages, with 80 percent of organisations ill-equipped to harness 3^rd platform technologies, including Mobility, Cloud, Social and Big Data Analytics, to compete in the market,” said Charles Reed Anderson, Head of Mobility and IoT, IDC Asia Pacific. “We see the next 18 months as a critical period for companies to accelerate efforts and investment in the enterprise mobility space. Companies are currently placing too much emphasis on devices and BYOD. Our recommendation is that businesses increase their investments in security, middleware and infrastructure, to enable better competitive innovation.”

VMware offers a unified hybrid cloud platform that creates business innovation, new business models and delivers new applications instantly and securely to internal and external customers on any device.

“Today, we believe that VMware is the clear leader in business mobility, with a comprehensive portfolio of solutions that will enable organisations to adopt true business process transformation, satisfy their employees’ business needs and drive business agility,” Deshmukh added.

VMware’s Business Mobility offerings are directly linked to its foundation in cloud infrastructure, uniquely positioning the company to address IDC market predictions on growth in infrastructure investment. In addition, VMware’s newly aligned Business Mobility sales team will offer mobile security, virtual desktop infrastructure and mobile enterprise management solutions that according to IDC, are top-of-mind amongst C-level executives in Asia Pacific.

VMware recently announced that it has centralised its business mobility sales team in Asia Pacific and Japan, which will be led by Sanjay Deshmukh, General Manager, Business Mobility, VMware APJ. The integrated, go-to-market team will address customer demand for a holistic approach to managing IT, based on VMware’s Architecture for New IT that enables any application to securely run on any device.

Business Mobility in India

India represents one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in Asia-Pacific. According to IDC, smartphone shipments to the country grew by 44 percent in Q2 2015, as compared to the same quarter in 2014, with Samsung, Micromax, Intex, Lenovo, and Lava leading the market. As devices become more affordable, IDC expects India to maintain a double-digit growth rate in the smartphone market, eventually overtaking the United States as the world’s second largest smartphone market by 2017^.

With the number of mobile internet users in India projected to double and cross the 300 million mark by 2017 according to a report by KPMG. business mobility is emerging as a top priority for Indian enterprises. 

The company recently announced new solutions, services and partnerships for its Business Mobility offerings. These include the introduction of VMware Identity Manager, the industry's first identity-as-a-service offering, integrated with VMware’s leading enterprise-class mobility management and security platform. This provides IT with a central place to manage end-user provisioning, access and compliance.

Avail More Profitable Omni-Channel Supply Chain from JDA Software

​JDA Software Group, Inc. has announced new integrated fulfillment capabilities that combine the power of JDA Intelligent Fulfillment and Labor Productivity solutions with Order Management solutions from IBM Commerce. By leveraging this powerful technology collaboration, companies can process orders more intelligently and profitably across sales channels in real-time to ensure customers have a flawless end-to-end buying experience.

 “The convergence of physical and digital retail has changed how you need to deliver on the customer buying experience.  The customer is the new boss and they want their product, at their moment, at their price, delivered their way. As a result, companies need to offer personalized, differentiated customer experience while delivering the order as promised,” noted Wayne Usie, senior vice president of retail, at JDA. “In the past, retailers made fulfillment decisions without a holistic view of inventory, labor and transportation availability and costs, and have historically sacrificed profit margins to deliver customer satisfaction. With this release, we have bridged that gap and provided the foundation to solve this problem by integrating with IBM to provide the necessary visibility in execution to labor and demand impacts -- allowing companies to begin improving profitability with each omni-channel order.”

“Many retailers force shoppers to choose between convenience, product selection and price as they shop across channels. In fact, some shoppers that select the ‘pick up in store’ option might need to visit multiple store locations to fulfill their entire order, which ultimately tarnishes their brand experience,” said John Mesberg, General Manager, Offering Management and Strategy, IBM Commerce. “By leveraging the combined expertise of IBM and JDA, retailers can present order fulfillment options in real-time that delight demanding customers and ensure that a great experience lasts from the first click to when they have their purchase in hand.” 

The latest JDA release delivers major benefits to both retailers and shoppers alike:

* “Click and Collect ordering delivers simple, customized ordering for shoppers, and cost savings for retailers. Instead of navigating a confusing array of options, JDA offers a simplified experience that allows shoppers to select their preferred pick-up or delivery time and location as part of a streamlined, simplified buying experience. Behind the scenes, JDA and IBM integrate the order management, the warehouse management and the transportation management systems to fulfill each order profitably. For example, retailers can reduce inventory by linking to distribution centers and hubs while maximizing transportation assets because shipments by automatically consolidating shipments and optimizing routes.

* “Rescue the Return minimizes the cost of product returns. Product returns are becoming significantly more costly for omni-channel retailers who lack visibility into incoming returns, and the resources needed to process these items. As a result, returned items at a store location rather than being added back into inventory and sold to a customer. JDA’s new release features an intelligent returns authorization process where the order management system alerts the warehouse management system of expected returns. By including returned items as part of available inventory, teams can proactively fulfill orders and reducing the number of mark-downs in order to minimize lost sales, and maximize margins.

* Destination-driven demand shows the true source of orders. When shoppers can’t find the product they’re looking for in a store, store associates typically arrange for delivery from a fulfillment center to their home. However, traditional fulfillment systems fail to attribute this demand to that store location which results in forecasts and inventory plans which, over time, fail to deliver an accurate assessment of what is in stock, which can ultimately impact the customer’s experience. With these new capabilities, teams have insight into each customer’s omni-channel order details which enables accurate forecasting and replenishment of stores and, more broadly, improved upstream inventory positioning to reduce labor, transfer and shipping costs in the future.      

“As omni-channel retailing continues to advance, we believe that integration between physical and digital channels is vital, as is tighter integration between eCommerce, Order management and all elements within the supply chain. This will be key to driving better customer service through increased responsiveness and at the same time, improve business efficiency, said Peter Swann, operations director, Debenhams. ”We believe customer  expectations will continue to increase and that the collaboration between IBM and JDA in developing their Intelligent Fulfillment suite of solutions, could provide companies with the platform to meet those expectations but also do it in the most profitable manner.”

“Today, only 16 percent of companies are able to serve multiple channels profitably, in part because their order fulfillment systems are not integrated with other key systems. Most retailers cannot see the true cost of fulfilling a specific order, including inventory, labor and transportation costs,” said Usie. “For the first time, JDA’s collaboration with IBM balances a customized buying experience for shoppers with a realistic cost-to-serve model. This unique capability creates an opportunity to balance high levels of service with high levels of profitability, even in today’s challenging omni-channel environment.”  

World's Cheapest & Largest Solar Park Likely in Karnataka

The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) organized the Annual Power Conference in the city recently, with its theme ‘Solar Power in Karnataka - Chartering the Path for a Bright Future.’  Leading industry experts highlighted the optimistic sentiments and the opportunities that the policies of   the Centre and the State governments have opened up in this sector.

The conference dwelt in detail on key issues relating to the Centre’s ambitious plans to generate 100 GW of solar power in the next seven years alongside Karnataka’s pioneering effort to notify a separate policy to tap this all important source of renewable energy. 

The meet saw speakers cover important issues relating to government policies and challenges, roof top solar power, emerging technologies in the sector besides highlighting grid evacuation, availability and load despatch.  Equal emphasis was laid on the all important aspect of the financial model of generating solar power.

In his inaugural address Maheshwar Rao, Managing Director, Karnataka Power Corporation Limited said that the state envisaged a capacity addition of 2000 MW by 2021 through grid connected utility scale projects. This would be in addition to grid connected roof top ventures.  Besides, the policy, he said proposed to increase energy access through solar power grid solutions. In this context, he added that the state’s policy aimed at installation of over 400 MW of solar rooftop projects by 2018.Harvesting solar energy through rooftop installations helped in reducing dependence on diesel based captive and back up generation units.

At the same time he referred to the challenges that the solar sector posed even as it continued to evolve. Particular mention was made of the lack of enforcement of Renewable Purchase Obligation (RPO) target. This, he said, was a critical issue which was cramping development of renewable resources. Likewise, poor financials of state power utilities continued to be a cause of concern in the process impacting the viability of renewable energy projects.

Of equal significance was the issue of land availability and acquisition. However, speaking on the issue, G V Balaram, Managing Director, Karnataka Renewable Energy Development Ltd, said that the state government was set to generate over 1000 mw of solar power through the lease holding of land alone. An estimated 15000 acres of wasteland near the IT capital had been found for setting up a solar park with the possibility of generating over 1600 MW, to start with. He said the government hoped to develop such parks to generate at least 6000 MV of solar power.

In fact, he sad once ready this would be the world’s largest and cheapest solar park.  NTPC and other parties had also evinced interest in putting up solar power plants here ranging between 500 MV and 600 MW. 

Vedamoorthy Namasivayam, Senior Director and Energy & Resources Industry lead, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. Ltd, gave an overview of the challenges in the renewable energy sector with emphasis on economics, environment and security. While favorable state level policies, feed-in-tariff regime, viability gap funding mechanism, capital subsidies and progressive net metering arrangements had created a supportive environment, he said critical issues continued to plague the sector. His views were echoed by  Ashish Khanna, Chief Executive Officer, Tata Power Solar limited. He said while the ambitious targets showed the determination of the government in realizing its goal in terms of solar power generation land acquisition process, long approval and clearance processes, did create bottlenecks. One of the key issues affecting the spread of technology, he said, is related to inadequate grid infrastructure. While intermittent power generation from solar technology did pose a major technical challenge.

In this context, he added that the government’s vision in tapping solar power was good but the problem really lay in the execution of plans. It was also important to invest in technology while putting up the desired infrastructure.

S Chandrasekhar, Past Chairman, CII Karnataka, & Managing Director, Bhoruka Power Corporation, maintained that the focus on solar technology, initiated with the launch of the National Solar Mission in 2010, was positioned to take advantage of the huge potential of this renewable power source. It aimed at leveraging the current trends of declining solar costs. 

With the Union government’s recent decision to scale up the installed solar capacity, from 3.7 GW to 100 GW by 2022, the focus on the development of the sector had taken centre stage in the Indian power sector.