Author Archives: Hemant Khandelwal

About Hemant Khandelwal

Hemant Khandelwal, Head, Harness India, making get ship done of software in smarter, faster & intelligent way! Know more

Overlay maps for superior visulaization

Posted in Data visualization, Ideas
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Overlaying custom information or crowd sourced information where a location based decision has to be made is very interesting. I recently did an entry on eRealtor market in India and I feel the real estate websites can make use of such maps in different ways. The possibilities are many and can help provide differentiation.

Where else such a map can be used? What other location based searches that you do? Can this be used for hotel bookings and travel planning websites where customers can share their experiences? Imagine a map where you can clearly identify which is a good location to stay and which is not. Now zoom out at state or country level and you know which is a good place to make travel plans etc.

Wearables – What Consumers Are Buying

Posted in Hot, Internet of Things (IoT)
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Earlier this year I did a blog post on wearable device market and also created a snapshot diagram of some popular wearable devices. Since then the market has exploded and now there are over 100s of wearable devices out there.

Now, let us look at what consumers are buying. Here is the distribution according to this report –

source – Techcrunch

The growth in the number of companies and wearables that have come up recently and the above data shows an increasing interest from consumers around wearables.

I am also interested in knowing about the frequency of usage of these devices as well any drop-off rate after a period of usage. I believe that to provide the next set of challenges and opportunities for new and existing companies to solve!

Smart Watch – Why I may wear one!

Posted in Hot, Internet of Things (IoT)
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Earlier this year I did a blog post on wearable device market and also created a snapshot diagram of some popular wearable devices. Since then the market has exploded and now there are over 100s of wearable devices out there. Sometimes it is difficult to keep pace with all the new devices that are coming up but there is lot of buzz in the market with Apple launching its maiden watch.

Apple Watch

Why will I use a smart watch?

Let us first compare a smart watch with a smart phone – since it is in some way a step-down version of phone in terms of size and features. Today, consuming information on phone is a 5-step process –

1. Take out the phone from pocket
2. Activate the phone
3. Press the unlock button
4. Type in your security code
5. Open the relevant application

If you are looking for extremely quick information consumption, these steps on phone get in the way. This is where I feel lies the most critical utility of smart watches. Smart watches will serve as extremely rapid information consumption devices.

And that will be my most common use case. I will use it for notification services, calendar services and any other information that I want to consume rapidly – faster than I can do today with phone.

I have frequent need to locate my keys, wallet and my phone. Yes, I do. I expect my watch to act as a locator. And there are already watches like Filip that help locate your kids. I am not a fitness enthusiast but I can understand how smart watches can help with health tracking and provide rapid information about your health data.

I expect future smart watch applications to provide applications based on user profile and certain set of rapid information consumption. A traveler profile – using weather, appointment, flight status notifications or a busy executive profile or a fitness profile. All of them consuming relevant information in the quickest possible way.

eRealtor market in India

Posted in Marketing & SoMe
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The Indian reality market has seen huge explosion in the last decade. In response, there are several players who have emerged in the eRealtor sector providing online assistance and brokerage that can help you buy, sell or rent homes of different shapes and proportions. Some of the notable ones are –

1. IndiaHomes
2. 99acres
3. Housing.com
4. CommonFloor
5. Makaan
6. Mabicbricks
7. IndiaProperty
8. PropTiger
9. HomeShikari

Realty Market

As a core function, all the eRealtors provide services such as map based listing, filtering features, mobile support, verified listing, site photographs, information about nearby locality etc. For a consumer, it is difficult to select any one of them based on features alone – since there is some uniformity about the hygiene features that everyone provides.

Which one are preferred by customers?

I did research on traffic share and technology used by the eRealtor companies and the analysis point to a certain usage and search pattern but I feel it is finally the overall experience of doing business and service that makes customer stick to some eRealtors compared to others. Secondly, marketing plays a very important role in driving traffic in a multi-player market that offer little perceived differentiation. Some of the players like 99acres and Magicbricks are big on marketing and receives top traffic in this sector.

Lastly, company that gets attention from consumer is the one that establishes leader status in a niche position. For example Housing.com with its map-based innovative search got much media attention that helped them get significant traction from new customers.

I will publish the research matrix in one of my next blogs.

Even a simple transaction is no longer simple – Recharge coupons story

Posted in Decision Making, Disruption Opportunities
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Life was simple when cable television and mobile started prepaid model. All you have to do is to decide the right recharge amount to continue to use the service, go online and recharge. The only additional complexity was selecting the call rate for different recharge option in case of prepaid mobile.

It ain’t simple any longer. I was recently trying to recharge my cable television account and I was shown a variety of coupons that I can get *free*. And then you have services like paytm and freecharge that formalizes this business model.

recharge

While the idea of using coupons to market and get customer is great, there are few problems with this approach.

1. A simple recharge option has to go through a complex decision making process. The reason I am online is not to shop but to recharge the account.  The decision making and hence the transaction is slowed down because there are just too many coupons to chose from.

2. Feeling of losing out on something. There will be a tendency to perhaps check all the coupons to avoid the fear of losing out on something free. After navigating to the third page, it is easy to forget that you logged in to recharge your prepaid account and not shopping.

3. Most options are not useful. At least that’s how they appeal to me. Maybe I was not looking to shop but to recharge or maybe I do not have need to use any of the options in near future.

What can be done

The current model needs to be flipped. When I am shopping, show me the option to recharge and not the other way round. The money for this recharge can still come from the mobile or cable provider. The benefit with this approach is that it will give me a sense of instant discount or benefit on the purchases that I am making. The coupons are suddenly useful. While I may accumulate more in my prepaid account but there is almost a certainty of using the extra recharge sooner or later.

Time is ripe for more On demand TV in India – Tata Sky story

Posted in Disruption Opportunities
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Anyone who is using cable TV services from Tata Sky is familiar with this screen. When it rains, you lose the signal. In the world of internet connectivity of 4G and beyond, this is just unacceptable.

Tata Sky

So why people are still hooked to cable services in India? Its cheaper. Monthly subscription is INR 500 ( < $10) with almost unlimited channels. The other one being low penetration of internet bandwidth and on-demand options.

However in a country like US, 7 in 10 TV households have a DVR, subscribe to Netflix, or use Video-on-demand (VOD) from a cable or telco provider, per new data from Leichtman Research Group (LRG), with about 1 in 10 using all three services. 61% of all cable subscribers have used VOD — compared to 43% in 2008, and 10% in 2004.

I consider areas where customers continue to use product and services despite poor quality of service as having the highest potential for disruptive opportunities.

I do not have current data on cable and VOD viewership in India but with services of existing cable service provides, on demand TV adoption for on demand TV can only accelerate.

Future of Information Consumption

Posted in Hot, Ideas, Leadership
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I recently had long meetings involving several hours of technology and market research. Needless to say those meetings were tiring. There is so much of information that is available that it is almost impossible to comprehend every bit of it. All I wanted was an easy way to collect and digest information faster and in a less tiring way.

This is when my I jokingly started discussing about if there is a way we can inject all relevant information directly into our brain – perhaps by taking an “information” injection!

Information Consumption

I see many folks, smart people that I meet suffering from this problem of “information-overload”. There are times when as many as 25-50 browser windows are open on the folks’ machine. I always ask, “When do you have time to read all of this”. And most of them admit that when the browser windows crash, they rarely open that link again. Opening several windows only build pressure – pressure of reading rather than understanding and building knowledge.

But this has to change in future. Today, we are physically limited by our senses (eyes, ear) to consume more information. It is like the current system is built on USB 1.0 data transfer speed and while we need USB 3.0 or beyond speeds.

Interestingly, I just watched a TED video from Nicholas Negroponte talking about a pill that we can take in future to ingest information. I can’t agree more having discussed about the same idea when faced with the challenge of consuming information rapidly. I feel more and more people are running into this issue and someone somewhere will take up this as an opportunity to find a solution.

How are you solving the challenge of information overload today?

So, what problems does the Internet of Things solve?

Posted in Hot, Internet of Things (IoT)
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In the last article, I provided a very short explanation on the Internet of Things. So, what problems does IoT solve? Some of the areas where the IoT is making progress are

1. Healthcare – Patient monitoring and home care systems

2. Smart grids – Utilities in general but more specifically efficient energy consumption

3. Industrial Internet – Efficient maintenance and energy conservation

4. Transportation – Smart logistics

5. Consumer wearables – Fitness, consumer engagement etc

There are many verticals where companies are beginning to experiment with IoT related technologies and I will be writing about what specific problem IoT is solving and how it is providing value and monetization opportunities.

3 Ways Engineers can think like Product Managers

Posted in Decision Making, Ideas
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In product companies, the business teams highly solicit good ideas coming from the engineers. While engineers often come up with many bright ideas, they lack a proper structure that can guide them through the idea development phase and prioritize top ideas. Once you have an idea, use the following three classifications to evaluate your idea, rate it or present to others.

1. Customer Value

A simple way to check customer value of your idea is to measure in terms of better, cheaper or faster? Is the new feature or idea better than whatever else that already exist, perhaps in a competing product?

If you use a 1-5 scale where 5 denotes highest customer value, call the highest value of 5 as customer delight. So, instead of a numeric scale, really think of a scale where high value indicates customer delight and low value indicates hygiene.

CustomerValueMeasurementScale

So, the question to answer is – “Will the idea provide delight to the customer or be seen as hygiene?”

2. Business Impact

How will this idea impact the business of your product? Measuring business impact is already a very challenging task for product managers and can be daunting for engineers. A simple way is to think if your idea will feature prominently in the decision making of your customers. For example, a feature that improves performance of the system can have high business impact.

Typically you would expect high customer value to be associated with high business impact. This is not true in cases where the user of the product is different from the decision maker. For example, you may have an enhancement request related to changing the user interface workflow with maximum user votes. This request has high customer value but not high business impact. Simplifying licensing can have high business impact but low customer value.

3. Engineering Effort

This effort analysis should not be difficult for engineers. You have to decide if building this idea is a low effort or high effort initiative. If it is high effort, can it be done in phases? Low hanging fruits with medium customer value or medium business impact often find their way into the next product releases.

Overall Priority Calculation

Many a times these ideas are targeted towards existing Go To Market (GTM) – and hence some of the aspects around target customer, size, opportunity, channels and how to reach target segment need not bother engineers. If you have multiple ideas, or  if you are managing multiple ideas as a lead, mentor or manager, you can tabulate and sort your top ideas as shown below.

Idea_valuation_table

And you now have enough scope to apply mathematics as you feel like to decide priority.