Honing the ability to envision products that need building
I find myself in between cars, having sold my Honda City in Feb 2023 after owning it for 13 years. I had just crossed 80K kms, which if I ignore the 2 years the car sat unattended in Bangalore, comes to approx 606 km per month (513 km per month if I include all 13 … Read more
Jeff Bezos is famous for focusing not on his competition, but on what the customer needs. He’s been quoted as saying – “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.” With that in mind, I find it surprising that Amazon still hasn’t put in place one … Read more
This idea is derived from the earlier idea I’d posted about around peer-to-peer lending & borrowing of Kindle ebooks. If you take that a step further, and tweak the lending duration from ‘x weeks/months’ to ‘forever’ – then it becomes nothing but a secondary sale market for ‘used’ Kindle ebooks. Amazon would be hard pressed … Read more
Currently Cred allows for users to add their cards in the app so as to track spends and make payments on time. However, as you load any card, the Cred app automatically decides what color to assign to the corresponding visual card image that it shows within the app. The idea is to let users … Read more
2021 has seen a stark increase in transaction fees on popular crypto networks, none so more than Ethereum, where user-facing fees have regularly crossed $100 for long periods of time. The idea is that every platform, centralized or decentralized, worth its salt should provide the “ability to let users schedule a transaction when the associated … Read more
As the UPI payment ecosystem in India has grown by leaps & bounds in the past few years, one of the challenges that users are facing is the finality of transactions, or what one would call, the irreversibility of transactions for the sender. This has led to an uptick in online scams, primarily driven by … Read more
Online shopping platforms allow for multiple types of payment options like credit cards, debit cards, online banking, UPI, and wallets. However, not sure how many people have noticed that there’s one glaring opportunity that is being missed out, which is completely in the control of these online shopping platforms. The idea is to allow for … Read more
The use of QR (Quick Response) codes has proliferated in places like India as it acts as a quick and simple way to transfer money to the recipient without having to even key in the 10-digit mobile number (and waiting for apps like Google Pay to live search on their database to show you the … Read more
Not sure if people have noticed that we’re sending mixed messages to those in our lives who are less digitally savvy than we are, and we need to arrest this before it’s too late. When online scammers first started fooling people, we started telling our loved ones… ‘Don’t share your OTP with anyone’. Now when … Read more
<An abridged version of this article was published in the October 2021 edition of the WIMWIan, a tri-annual magazine with a readership of over 18000 IIM Ahmedabad alumni> The IIMA Public Policy Alumni Special Interest Group (PP ASIG) is currently in the midst of a webinar series on cryptocurrency to understand the space and come … Read more