Are Vertical Integration and Coopetition based business model related?

Coopetition (Cooperation + Competition) has been an aggressively researched topic in the recent past. I was introduced to this term only during my studies at HEC Paris and while I read this interesting article – ‘Coopetition based business models‘ it brought a few more thoughts to my mind. This piece on strategy-business.com puts forth various perspectives about Coopetition based […]

Smartphone Industry in India – Spoilt for choices

Before I left for France in Jan 2012, the Indian Smartphone market was dominated by Nokia, Samsung, RIM & Sony. As per data (from a report) back in 2011 Nokia was a market leader in the Smartphone industry with ~45% market share, Samsung & RIM (now Blackberry) together at 36%. Apart from this five Indian Smartphone makers including a […]

Can firms challenge critical mass in multi-sided platform markets?

I came across this nicely written piece about platform markets – “From Netscape to eHarmony: The High Risks and Big Rewards of Platform Markets” on http://strategy-business.com Technology eco-systems are common in markets with multi-sided business models – For e.g the smartphone app-store connecting developers & phone-users, online-marketplace & storefronts connecting buyers & sellers. The article introduces the […]

Is my SmartPhone NFC enabled?

Two interesting pieces of news from NFCWorld.com Vodafone to launch NFC mobile wallet across Europe Mobile network operator Vodafone‘s NFC mobile wallet is going live today in Spain, will be available in Germany in mid-December and expand to the Netherlands, UK and Italy in spring 2014. Vodafone Wallet works with a range of NFC phones as […]

Google’s move will impact Secure Element makers

Google, a mobile platform maker (of Android), starts to de-emphasize carrier-based NFC. As per IDC’s report (Aug 2013), Android accounts for 79% of the Smartphone shipments as on 2Q2013. iOS (through iPhones) accounts for another 13% of the Smartphone shipments. If Google manages to establish the Host-Card-Emulation standard as an alternative to the secure-element(SE) based NFC transactions, […]