Facebook plans awesome launch next week: CEO | Reuters

Facebook plans awesome launch next week: CEO | Reuters

Consumer Encounters | Mobile Banking

When I went to the bank today to hotlist my ATM card, I realized how vast an opportunity is lying for grabs and has caught no one's attention till date.

Most of the service providers have been talking about mobile banking for long, and has been advertising their products with great marketing budgets. Kudos !!. But none of these ever realized the prime spot / target to hit. The customer is still wary of internet banking gateway and has lots and lots of doubts that remain unanswered when it comes to mobile banking. Most of the consumer queries revolve around the process and security concerns for the same. It is not easy to come up with a strategy to counter this, but the least of consumer queries should be handled through the marketing and advertisements themselves so as to establish a relationship of trust with the consumer, which is the most important parameter for any product / service provider today.

Now, establishing the relationship of trust within an Indian consumer is still somewhat tricky but not entirely unaccomplishable for any product / serive provider.

To advertise mobile banking / m commerce, one has to keep in mind the following things discreetly:

• Secure gateway transaction

• Consumer secure mindset patterns

• Proper channelizing
• Consumer frame of reference understanding

This is not that difficult as it sounds. It's just a process of connecting back to the consumer to the very basic of their needs when it comes to monetary transactions. It's about providing the same security level as provided by a cheque or cash or ATM for that matter. The provider must understand why a consumer is so much in sync with these services and feels secure about them. And the most important question, why is not the same with mobile banking. You achieve this and you achieve the heart of a consumer, and gateway to a successful m-banking business marketing & distribution model.

Another key point here is about your key audience. Elderly might not specifically find this service too attractive for them because of the visual / accessibility problems with the device. This also provides with an opportunity window in a totally different arena: accessibility in a device. These two can be effectively combined to launch a competitive service model.

Feel free to engage with me on building the same !!

Available on these service apps now !!

Consumer Encounters | Mobile Service Apps. Ideas 1

i was at my doctor’s today, and it was a total chaos there. i happen to engage a discussion amongst the patients waiting over there and what came out of the discussion was a pretty obvious picture for most of the health service centers in india.

highlighted by:

/heavy rush

/chaos at the counter

/irritated patients

/irritated staff

/exhausted doctors

/time mismanagement

out of this obvious discussion what came out clearly was the mismanagement in terms of patient time table.

average patient - doctor interaction time = 15 minutes

average patient stay at the hospital = 5 hours

now, thinking logically its a clear mismatch and what is needed here is like a time table application for patient doctor which regularly update patients about their appointment timings and updates the doctor too, hence avoiding chaos as is there already.

patients are also wary of the fact that there are people who use their social networks to meet the doctors ahead of their time and hence delaying normal patients.

an update time table application for doctor-patient will benefit both in terms of managing their times, and some patients won’t even have to visit their doctors ever again in a health center when all of this could be easily achieved sitting comfortably at their homes.

i am working on such an application and its features. buzz me with ideas and doubts to make this place a better place to live in :)

Oasis - Stop Crying Your Heart Out

Free Economy -> Hacking Lifestyles -> Future Scenarios

Consumers these days are changing rapidly in terms of their product / service demands & usage. It seems consumer intelligence as a term is taking a totally different notion altogether. It is turning more into an Intelligent Ingenious Hacker Consumer who understands how to use more & more of free products / services and shares this knowledge onto a bigger social / professional networking platforms. On one hand, MNC'S are in a die hard situation to launch the right product / service for their valued consumers……on the other hand, these consumers are trying die hard to crack these products / services for a free usage.

Take the latest example of windows 7, MS Office 2010………..great products, great price value. But these are available and being used free of cost in most of the parts of the world. I especially dedicate this usage to sites like holyplanets, deviantart, torrents and similar portals for providing a shared consumer case of HACKER CONSUMERS.

Trying to install any paid software version, just type install software name and crack on youtube and you will have n number of video tutorials as to how to accomplish the task. These types of consumers are increasing day by day exponentially.

Now the bigger question arises, what do the companies do now? If they are exhausted with paid products / services………..there are two sets of variables here. One can be listed as an uncertainty which is increase or decrease of hacked services. The other can be easily termed as a certainty which is the demand for space. By space I mean the space to keep these products / services. Depending on the equation, the space can be a hard disk drive or a virtual cyber space which many of the sites like adrive are providing these days. Plotting these two, uncertainty and the certainty on a graph, the future scenarios may look like in the following picture: 

Scenario for Free Economy Companies

Now the way things are going on the official future will be seeing a lot of people looking for hacked products / services and online space. The only thing they will be willing to pay for is the security of their data. Hence, security in an online environment and virtual space will be the top most priorities when it comes to paid services in the future.

This will also result in changing business and revenue models for majority of companies. More and more companies will be landing themselves in the services domain rather than product domains, since the services will be what the consumer will be willing to pay for.

It's a high risk situation and not the ideal scenario for companies. The ideal scenario is listed somewhere in quadrant 4 where the anti-hacking systems rule and consumers will be willing to pay for the products / services they subscribe to. Well, as humans and as loyal consumers we all may agree that this ain't gonna happen in any future.

It's a choice for the companies which future they chose practically and design their strategy for.

Living in Fear or Faith??

 

It's the most important question of our lives that we never face out of the possible answers that we already know in our conscious. We, as humans, and as responsible members of society have learned to hide the truth and keep living in fear without a rationale.

What am I talking about? I am talking about the biggest faith system on this planet. We all call it GOD. Some of the research questions worth asking here are as follows:

/who is God?

/why do we believe in God?

The answer that we all deny and are terrified is that God finds its origin from the fear within ourselves. And God itself is a systematic fear within us. The fear that something bad will happen if we don't do things according to what is prescribed by his agents, priests or others. Most of us want to please God by being at its place, temple, church, mosque or Gurudwara.

Lets create a hypothetical situation to understand God better. For every good thing, there is an equal amount of bad thing. If there is God, there is the Devil. And both of them are equally powerful. For if God is more, then it will reign and there will be no bad influences or people. If Devil is more powerful, then Devil will reign. So we agree that both are equally powerful. If they are equally powerful, then why place our belief in God, why not in Devil. As God tests us, but Devil's test is easy to pass and you will be rewarded wonderfully. Confused !!..................do not try to deny the argument without thinking it over.

Its our culturally built system that automatically denies anything being said against so called God.

There is God and there is Devil, but they reside within our mind and within our thoughts. They don't need a separate temple or place of worship. Your conscious is your God, or it can be your Devil depending on the choices you make. We all reap fruits of our own doings. God is neither a forgiver nor a punisher. It won't punish you and it won't reward / forgive you either. If that was the case, every terrorist, rapist, criminal will be the biggest worshippers. You just pray a million times to be forgiven for a murder, a rape or any crime.

Think again about what you believe in and what's your belief system. Don't believe in anything without a rationale. Believe in God is not bad, until it reaches the point of superstition and denial of the logic. No belief system or faith system guides you when you don't believe in it but fear it. Do not be fearful, be rational and faithful.

My Best Friend.............

Well, there is no prize to the guessers as the obvious answer is Dhruv Sharma. He is the one I am always in conflict with and that’s something that I like and enjoy the most. He is always against me whenever there is a discussion.
I don’t know where to start from, so I will start from scratch. When I entered the university, I was the hot favorite amongst the girls of our class. Enough said, I was close to the only babe of the class and Dhruv and company (Rastogi log) always thought of me as a girl chaser. I wasn’t. Initially, Dhruv and I were arch rivals. The very sight of each other……….we felt like punching each other hard in the face and kicking his ass hard. I don’t exactly know how and when we bonded. Dhruv was the only hosteler in our class, so ragging or night out parties meant that we had to stay with him. May be it was my stay in the hostel that led me know him better and bond us better.
I am sorry, but I am sounding a bit gay to myself at this moment. For those, who doubt me…………….i am getting married this year. Coming back to the original topic, Diwakar Rastogi…………(I always believed that he is not from this planet, and believe me if there is life on any other planet than earth…….its his home planet). He acted as catalyst, a platform for our friendship.
I think the first time Dhruv and I get to know each other was Aaghaaz nite at University. It was freshers party organized by the student council of Panjab University and it meant all our classmates (boyz only) night together at the hostel. I had alcohol for the first time that night along with my dear friend Abhishek and the rest of the political party representatives from our department. Dhruv doesn't drink…………neither do I (now). Well, like every male classmate Abhishek's heart was pumping only for the babe of our class………and since she was closest to me in the class in terms of talking, having lunch and nothing else…….he doubted that I am also flirting with her. Let me be honest here, since I entered University I had only loved a single girl to whom I am going to get married this year……everyone knows this still everyone thinks I was flirting with the babe of our class. After getting drunk, Abhishek abused me and punched me very dramatically. Dramatically ?? Yeah, because his punches werent actually hitting me hard, it was only the voice of 'dhishum' from his mouth that hurt my ears. He was drunk and I wasn’t. I told Dhruv to take this guy off me before I hit him really hard and Dhruv did the same. Abhishek puked for another half an hour. Dhruv talked to me and we had a nice laugh over Abhishek's and other guys' condition when they were fully drunk and calling up the babes of their respective classes at 12 in the night. Some even sang for their girls on the phones.
We went to Dhruv's room and had a normal talk. Things went smooth the rest of the year, and then came the legendary trip to Jodhpur. I really enjoyed this trip with the whole of the department. I cannot possibly forget what my other best friend, Diwakar did on the very starting of this trip. Our train journey from Chandigarh to Jodhpur was about 22 hours duration. We boarded at around 10 in the night, and we all went to sleep by 3 in the night after long gossip and chat sessions. Diwakar's berth was near my berth………At 6 in the morning, I see Diwakar is not on his berth. I went looking for him and found him all dressed up with shoes on and he was applying moisturizing cream on his face. I admired him for a moment to be an early riser after going to bed so late in the night. The very next moment, I grabbed my stomach, couldn’t breathe, went running to other guys and laughed my heart out. Our dear friend Diwakar Rastogi thought that we had reached our destination, and he was all dressed up to get down and enjoy. He even asked me to get ready.
On reaching, Jodhpur everything went well for a little fights and pleasant moments. I was placed in a room with Dhruv and Tejinder. The problem with the room was that there was a water cooler in front of it and the door couldn’t be locked. The wind always opened the door. We three guys were always in our chaddis (underwear), and there were these girls who would not stop drinking water and having a peep into our room. One fine day, a girl walked in to our room to have a chat and we realized that she is on the door and we are only in our national dresses…….the underwear. Like trained soldiers, we were in positions within seconds. Dhruv jumped to the rear of the door, I grabbed a pillow to cover and my goods and threw a bedsheet towards tejinder to cover his. It all happened in a matter of seconds and we just couldn’t stop laughing at this and the girl was clueless what happened……….
In one of the other stories about my best friend Dhruv, it was 8th of december, my birthday. I dressed smartly to reach the university as soon as possible to receive birthday wishes. I thought, it should be Dhruv who should wish me first since I am his best friend and he will be making plans to surprise me with a birthday party or gift for me. I went straight to his room where he was with our senior Mr. Doon. Dhruv said hi and went to the bathroom. I realized he is planning to surprise me and acted if nothing has happened. I was singing songs, jumping, playing with bat and ball in his room when doon realized I am extraordinarily happy and well dressed today. It was after an hour spending there and having all types of chats that doon asked me if it is a special occasion. I embarrassingly told him and Dhruv that its my birthday. It was Dhruv's turn to get embarrassed now. That asshole, forgot my birthday inspite of the fact that the very previous day we were talking about it.
In spite of all the funny situations and small fights we had, he remains my best friend till date. I must say he is one of the very few people on this planet who know what is going through my mind. He has always been there for me and I respect him and his thoughts immensely though we are always in conflict. More stories to come ……………………………..