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Walmart buying Flipkart is dumb for its shareholders
Before Flipkart came to India, I was buying technical books from Amazon.com and having them shipped to India by paying ridiculous amounts for shipping. I am unashamed to say I am addicted to Amazon for well over two decades now. Then as soon as Flipkart started, I started buying from them – in those days they sold only books, yet their customer service was exceptional and was unheard of in India before them and they rocked. The growth they have achieved now was set in stone in those early days. But as soon as Amazon India opened in India, I switched from Flipkart and getting a Prime subscription sealed the…
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Ecommerce in India between 2004 and 2022
🛒In 2004, I made a presentation titled eCommerce reality and myths in India. It was interesting to compare how many of the points that I covered then have remained or changed in the last two decades. One thing is unmistakable and that is the scale, which has now grown to a level unimaginable then. In this post, let me use the data points from 2004 and 2022 to discuss how online shopping & digital payments have changed & remained the same in the two decades. 🛤️In 2004, IRCTC (Indian Railways ) sold 100,000 tickets per day, today they do more than 500,000 (half a million). In 2021, Swiggy delivered 🚚1.5…
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Sony Bluetooth Headset WH CH510
I have been using for some months now, the NG Earsafe which are open-air Bluetooth headphones and Soundcore Life Note. Recently my son took the Soundcore from me, so I wanted to buy a new headset for me, this time I wanted an over the ear headset so that it is less damaging to my ears. I went with Sony WH-CH510 for INR 2999 (USD 40) from Flipkart. Disclosure: I write reviews about products that I have bought for my usage and paid in full. There were no sponsorship or advertisement, or commission of any sort involved in this post. It has been a day and I like the headphones;…
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Round power strip for India
This is one of the simplest gadgets I am writing about here. It is about the ubiquitous power strips or (as called in India) extension box. These are boxes that you use to plug a gadget to power when the cord doesn’t reach the wall outlets, or you want to connect more than one appliance to wall socket. Disclosure: I write reviews about products that I have bought for my usage and paid in full. There were no sponsorship or advertisement, or commission of any sort involved in this post. Till about two decades ago, I remember seeing our electrician or the local electrical shop making these extension boxes by…
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Mesh Wireless network in my house
Prelude I have been writing here about my home networking experiments for more than a decade. In 2010 I shared the daisy-chaining wireless access points, in 2014 about installing a load-balancer to get failover between the two TELCOs (Airtel & BSNL), and, in 2019 on the two wi-fi routers (TPLINK Archer C50 & Mi Router 3C) I had bought. On the last one, it seems I had erred in my choice, as the routers didn’t have a Gigabit LAN port which I needed. In the recent weeks of 2020, I have been facing issues with frequent call disconnections during video calls and spotty connections in many places in the house – these…
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Nokia Media Streamer – Android TV
I have written in the past about my experience using the various Android based Media Streaming devices like Firestick, Google Chromecast & NVIDIA Shield Player: the best player out there; and about a new SONY 43 inches Android TV I had bought. Disclosure: I write reviews about products that I have bought for my usage and paid in full. There were no sponsorship or advertisement or commission of any sort involved in this post. My son has a six-year-old Toshiba 46 Inches TV, he has an XBOX One connected to it, but he is missing streaming apps like Disney+ Hotstar on the platform, so he wanted me to get him…
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Has Indian eCommerce lost its sparkles?
I know I am not their target customer. I am already an ecommerce addict. Even then, I find the “Big Billion Days Sale” or the “Great Indian Festival” to have gotten uninteresting to say it kindly. Having window-shopped on Amazon India & Flipkart I hardly found anything worth saving (by buying). If I am going to spend Rs.50,000 on a laptop, why am I going to be attracted by a Rs.500 discount? Or an Amazon Echo Show at Rs.5000 (MRP 8999), when no one will want one even for free. The market analysts might point this to be a healthy sign of ecommerce firms maturing and stopping their deep discounting!…
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Lights for video calls and taking photos
Studio light for indoor photographs and video recording In the past, we had our DSLR cameras to take pictures and when coupled with appropriate lenses they can take good photos whether used indoors (with powerful flashlights) or outdoors. Nowadays, many of us are taking a lot of pictures with our smartphones which don’t perform well indoors, often it is due to the poor lighting conditions in our houses. A couple of years back, I realised this need and decided to invest on a studio quality soft light. The one I bought was called “HARISON Trilux Mark II Studio Light” and was Rs.3500 from Amazon India. The spotlight supports fitting three…
