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14 notes &

ETnow had aired an interview with Flipkart co-founder - Sachin Bansal in its Starting up program this week. While the majority of the information in this 13min long video is widely known, there were few bits of information which I found quite interesting:

  • Flipkart was initially meant to be a comparison engine but back then there were not a lot of e-commerce companies to compare.
  • Flipkart started with a consignment model but today 80% of the deliveries happen through warehouses.
  • Books has 20% profit margin which is much higher than other products. Hence they started with books.
  • Books now contribute to 50% of Flipkart’s revenue followed by Electronics.
  • Flipkart currently has 1.5 million customers with 70% repeat rate.
  • Digital Music Store launching in the next couple of months. It will offer streaming music as well as paid downloads.
  • The company is expected to surpass 500 Crore Revenue by March 2012.

Filed under ecommerce flipkart india indianstartups startups tech

1 note &

It’s almost seems like Google doesn’t even care what happens to Reader or its community, as niche as that may be. In fact, it’s been rumored that as far as Google is concerned, it would love kill off Reader entirely if it could

Sarah Perez from TechCrunch writing about former Google Reader product manager Brian Shih.

Quite sad!

Filed under google googlereader tech

Notes &

The Android Philosophy

Joshua Topolsky sat down with Android’s head of user experience, Matias Duarte to talk about Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ and the general Android philosophy.

Some of the quotes which I found interesting were:

On Honeycomb we cheated, we cut the corner of all that smaller device support. That’s the sole reason we haven’t open sourced it.

Honeycomb was like: we need to get tablet support out there. We need to build not just the product, but even more than the product, the building blocks so that people stop doing silly things like taking a phone UI and stretching it out to a 10-inch tablet.

I guess this was aimed at all the manufacturers who were releasing tablets with Android 2.x. Funny part is that the manufacturers are still releasing tablets with Android 2.x but these tablets are now relegated to either low-end or mid range segment. The irony however is that these tablets are still preferred over Honeycomb tablets because of the lack of quality apps on Honeycomb.

With Android, people were not responding emotionally, they weren’t forming emotional relationships with the product. They needed it, but they didn’t necessarily love it.

Interesting point! Completely agree with Martias here though.

Filed under android mobile tech verge