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, […]

HP puts NFC in Enterprise printers – like I said last year

Earlier today I came across this article on NFCWorld.com – “HP puts NFC in Enterprise Printers“ Not so long ago, I did an assessment for enterprise printer makers on this blog and had proposed a product strategy to map innovation cycles between printers and contact-less technologies. Happy to see it was in line with what dominant printer makers are […]

The 50th entry – a collated list …

It has been a while since I have started this blog. It has been enriching being more disciplined in creating original content (while curating some). Looking back over these 49 blog post entries, I thought it might be a good time to take a pause – and collate in the 50th entry some of the original […]

Design for people, not awards – Timothy Prestero @ TEDxBoston

“Timothy Prestero thought he’d designed the perfect incubator for newborns in the developing world — but his team learned a hard lesson when it failed to go into production. A manifesto on the importance of designing for real-world use, rather than accolades. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)…” Product Design for actual use > outcomes > manufacturing & […]

Smart e-Governance – An entry strategy for Smart Cities

There is a lot of discussion and hype around Smart Cities. Analysts use different criteria to define Smart Cities as an aggregation of different types of services. While the obvious Smart Players exist, several companies also aspire to grab a big chunk of this pie. With this mind, they are all busy charting out plans […]