Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Pravin Gandhi, Seedfund – Mumbai, Bangalore, New Delhi, India (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Vandana Upadhyay Irina: You invest not only in technology companies but in companies in other sectors, right? Pravin: Yes. India has many opportunities and challenges; technology adoption is not the best here. There are enough opportunities in different business models on how to do things better and more efficiently.

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Sankarson Banerjee, CIO of IndiaInfoline (Part 11)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: How active is this market segment comprising Netmagic-type cloud services in India? Are there a lot of startups coming up in that cloud segment? SB: No, no. Data centers have large startup costs, and there is a [high] barrier to entry. So, I don’t see that

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Sankarson Banerjee, CIO Of IndiaInfoline (Part 9)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini SM: You are saying that in terms of the Indian market, customers want local support network and vendors to have retail offices [in India]. SB: Yes. Netmagic is located in India, and that offers a face which people can see and relate to. I would say this is

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Building India’s Amazon: Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal (Part 7)

Sramana: Does your customer base access Flipkart only through desktops and laptops? Sachin Bansal: We have mobile commerce, but it has very little traction.

Building India’s Amazon: Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal (Part 6)

Sramana: At this point, India has developed a digitally savvy consumer base which is very affluent. How will this impact the future of Flipkart? Sachin Bansal: I expect that people will adopt e-books, but at a rather slow pace. The digitally savvy consumer base may have money, but most of them have the same background

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Building India’s Amazon: Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal (Part 5)

Sramana: Internationally, the book industry is going through huge changes. Now that you have years of experience in the book industry, what are you hearing in terms of dealing with e-books and e-readers? Amazon expects that e-books will overtake paper books in the near future. Sachin Bansal: I have been following that, but as I

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Building India’s Amazon: Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal (Part 4)

Sramana: Let’s fast forward to March 2009. How have the relationship with the distributors and the operational mechanics of your business changed? Sachin Bansal: We actually opened another distribution center in Dehli. To our surprise, almost every distributor in India knew about us, so it was not hard to make a new relationship in Dehli.

Building India’s Amazon: Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal (Part 3)

Sramana: How much money did you put into acquiring inventory to sell? Sachin Bansal: They had computer systems which maintained inventory of their stock. We received a download of that every day.