Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much of this kind of work is happening on mobile apps versus on a regular web application?

Samar Singla: A lot of our work is server side. I would say almost all of these are mobile first. When they get traction, they typically start something on the web. Essentially, it is more than 80% mobile first.

Sramana Mitra: What is your general feeling about this mobile first strategy on this scale? The mobile platforms are getting very crowded with apps. Everybody wants to have an app on the mobile, but it’s not a very good user interface. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you are producing these kinds of applications also for large companies. Is the McDonald’s example a real example?

Samar Singla: McDonald’s is not a real example. We have done something for Coca-Cola. We have done two marketplaces for them. I cannot disclose the projects. They are, very soon, going to be in public domain. You might have heard of this Coca-Cola entrepreneur program. They just started doing press releases about it. Before that, nobody knew about that. We are one of their suppliers. We do most of their technology for that program. A lot of those products are actually marketplaces.

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Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 1)

Phil bootstrapped Avoka using services around an Adobe product, and then developed core IP and a product of his own at Avoka. The methodology is tried and true, and worth learning from.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the beginning of your story. Tell us where you’re from, where you were born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances.

Phil Copeland: I was born in Sydney, Australia in 1958. I attended school in Australia and studied Architecture in the late 70s and graduated in the early 1980s. People of my generation had little computer education at school and even at universities. My first exposure to computing was when I was writing my thesis on passive solar design. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Samar Singla, CEO of Click-Labs (Part 2)

Samar Singla: How do we build up marketplace components? It could be peer-to-peer marketplace. In that case, there are some more steps to the marketplace. Finally, there’s the user side mobile application. Then there will be a billing component. If you look at these, there are probably about 10 such modules, which we have developed in a very generalized sense. Once we have those, it is very easy for us to build them together. We do the plumbing. Every module in this works a little differently. Dispatching solution works differently for a plumber on demand than for a taxi on demand. That’s the way we bring this to life. These are not really API-based stacks but this is module-based.

Sramana Mitra: Even though it’s an API-based interaction, it is a module that kicks in gear in some of these applications. You treat that as another module that you bring in to the application.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: E-commerce has been a category where a lot of people have bootstrapped businesses to some scale. You talked about your sweet spot being this half a million to million range. A large portion of that is probably bootstrapped businesses right?

Rick Wilson: Absolutely, I would say the vast majority.

Sramana Mitra: What are you hearing from this community? Are these people trying to scale? What is the thought process in your community? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 6)

Rick Wilson: The trend we see there is that they want to go direct. They want to build a community around their product. I think Kickstarter has really brought that down even from the million dollar plus range to the zero dollar plus range where you can do a product video, get a personality out there, and build a community. Once you build a community, you have enough momentum to go figure out the logistics. If you’re selling a single SKU, outsourcing fulfillment is easy. If you’re selling jewelry and you have 5,000 SKUs, it gets a little more challenging. Even all of those problems are now solvable by one to five person teams, which was impossible a decade ago.

Sramana Mitra: I would say e-commerce is probably the domain that is seeing the maximum impact of ultra-light startups. Would you agree with that? >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 4)

Rick Wilson: On one hand, you have this free-wheeling, open source world where as long as someone knows what they’re doing, they can literally do anything. On the other hand, you have what I call apple-ification where all of the hard choices have been made for you. There’s some brilliance to that for sure. The successes of Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Volution have shown that there’s a demand for that. I would say that’s the biggest change in the last seven years. Today, to be an e-commerce owner, you don’t have to be a particularly technical person whereas in 2007, you needed to be somewhat technical. If you go back farther than that, you absolutely had to be technical to have an advantage.

Sramana Mitra: That’s correct. Shopify and Volution are catering to the more starting merchants. Bigcommerce is catering to the slightly larger sweet spot of $1 million to $30 million revenue. Magento is the larger player. Where do you fit into that picture? >>>

Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 1)

Consumer Credit is a $10 trillion dollar industry that Al and his team are trying to turn on its head. Aided by Big Data and machine learning, they are creating a direct to consumer lending model that may have far reaching impact on the financial services industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. We can talk about your co-founders, but let’s start with your background a bit and share with the audience where you’re from and where your personal journey started.

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