The small and medium enterprises (SME) sector is worried if Centre's decision to permit 100% FDI in single brand retail sector will help the sector or not.
The Indian government has permitted 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) in single brand retail. It has notified the regulations and stated that all wholly owned global brands will be needing to source minimum 30% of their need from the domestic small and cottage industries, which have a maximum investment in plant and machinery of $1 million (almost Rs 5 crore).
The Federation of Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (FISME), which is an apex body for the sector, has stated that the mandatory sourcing rider won't be making much of difference.
Internet marketing is also known as web marketing, online marketing or e-marketing. It is a broad term and cannot be confined to just marketing through the internet but also through other mediums such as the wireless or email. The world, as postulated by Marshal McLuhan, can be regarded as a global village. McLuhan envisaged the world as interconnected by an electronic nervous system; this is popularly regarded as the internet. We live in the world of cloud computing where everyone is connected. No one can escape technology seeing that, everyone from a rickshaw puller to a billionaire, carries a mobile.
Web Presence Technology is the pulse of life of the present generation. When a company establishes itself, it is extremely important for it to have a web presence. This acquaints the customers not just with the product but also with the company. Nowadays, the consumers are intelligent and the internet is the best medium to lure them. The media has a strong impact on the mindset of the people, who live in the world of virtual reality. Due to its nature, the internet medium allows consumers to research and to purchase products and services conveniently. So the internet has become a must in order to make a positive utilization of internet marketing.
Age of Information It is essential for SMEs to realize that we live in the age of information. The way information is conveyed plays a very important role in boosting the sales of the product. This is the world of mediacracy and there could be nothing better than the internet to attract customers. Marcus Sheridan, the owner of ‘The Sales Lion’, says that effective content leads to winning the trust of the customer which further helps to get a lead in the market and thereby increase sales. So embrace internet marketing if you want to remain ahead in the promotion of the sales of your company.
Fast and cost effective mode The best part is that with a small amount of investment just about anyone can have a web page on the Internet. In this manner, almost any business can reach a large market, directly, fast and economically. It is irrespective of the size or location of the business. This medium is cost effective as any SME can save its funds through internet marketing. This is because, anyone who can read and write can have access to the World Wide Web. According to the Internet World Stats, India has a large number of internet users which has gone up to about 100,000,000 till December 31, 2010.
Interactive medium The internet has consolidated itself as a very powerful platform with an impact on the working culture and the manner in which people communicate. It has changed the working environment and affected the way businesses operate. It is about interaction — interaction creates relationships and those relationships open up the opportunities for you to share information about your products and services. Good personal relations can actually boost your sales.
Thus it is important to ensure that your website is user friendly, concise and up to date. In this way you can inform the world about the latest developments in your firm. Make good use of the innovative method of marketing through the internet to generate a more positive responses towards your business.
Convergence. This is one of the most spoken of words in times today when we discuss Internet and Mobile. There are many companies which are leveraging the internet and the mobile very effectively and are taking their businesses to the next level of growth. In the knowledge economy that we live in, where information and quick access to relevant information drives businesses, as customers take decisions based upon the information provided to them.
If your business is still struggling to be online OR leverage the mobile for achieving its strategic objectives, then it sure is a time to act fast, as your competitors might be leveraging these low cost, high penetration technologies to reach out to prospective customers and engage them into highly effective and meaningful conversations, which turn into actual business.
Get the Smart URL working for your business!
So you have a website for your business which is what you share with everyone you connect with, to get more information about your business. To enable such audience to engage with information on mobile, you have to create a mobile based website. Now obviously creating this website requires a whole skill set, which you as a start-up/ business owner might not have and could not afford.
Let Mobivite work for you!
A low cost online solution, Mobivite, which enables your business to create mobile based websites and generate a Smart URL, which essentially is a common URL which once typed from a particular device automatically takes your audience to the intended site/ landing page. This ensures that your users are always reaching to the intended information online.
How to create a Smart URL?
The above screen capture shows how you can use per created templates to create a mobile page for your business along with a Smart URL. Once you login to the website, you are re-directed to the following screen:
Once you choose the project goal, you are re-directed to the following screen, as shown in the screen capture below:
Using the various tools, you can quickly build a custom mobile website to promote your event, with payment modules and give it a smart URL.
Once you are done editing the home page and other functionalities of the site, you can simply publish the same, by clicking the publish button on the bottom end.
Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to create new opportunities or SMEs to grow. To know more about how you can leverage the internet and new media technologies, drop in a comment to this post and our team of experts will be happy to help!
Panini Keypad – Helping SMEs overcome language barriers using mobiles
Mobile users are all around us. India alone has over 700 million phone connections and definitely over 400 million unique phone users. Phone calls in India are already the cheapest in the world and the practical, social and economic advantages of staying connected are for everyone to see. These have resulted in India becoming the fastest growing mobile phone userbase in the world. It is already the second largest, close on the heels of China.
The huge mobile subscriber base also includes Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs). These SMEs have to rely on the mobile revolution for reaching out to their customers and require Indian languages support for their various applications. The application could be a part of the service itself or could be a part of advertising and marketing campaigns which involves taking feedback & data inputs from users, interactions with customers etc. Sky is the limit for these applications where business relies on the phone for its communications within and outside the organisation.
However, if were to look at these phone users and their usage of the phone a little more closely, we will discover that most of these users do not even have an address book on their phones. They manage from last dialed numbers and have some important numbers stored in a notebook that they carry with them. How disabling is that? And they have never sent a text message. They cannot do so because they do not know English and Indian languages are not supported on the phone. And there closes the entire opportunity of digital inclusion in the form of m-governance, m-education, m-commerce, m-health and so on which are opportunities as almost everyone uses the mobile phone today. The reason behind this gap is that to do any of the above, one has to seek information, and to seek one has to type.
Supporting Indian languages on the phone (or even the computer) has remained an intractable problem for long because Indian scripts have too many characters, their word construction rules are different and complex and there are too many scripts. There are so many characters that there is no space to print them on the little face of a key and multitapping from memory is useless because it goes to 7 or 9 taps per character. Also if you put any one, say Malayalam on a phone, it becomes useless in the neighbouring province and hence that is not economically viable for any manufacturer. Therefore, how desirable and critical it may be to put Indian languages on the phone, there was no practical way to do this.
Hence, Luna Ergonomics came into existence in 2008 to provide a solution for these challenges. It's aim was to find that way to practically support Indian languages on the phone because without it, no further fruits of the telecom revolution in India would be obtainable, more critically on the data side, to interact with the possibilities of the Indian language Internet from the mobile – all that 3G and 4G would be about to 80% of India's phone users.
The solution to typing in Indian languages that takes care of all the above impediments has had to come from a patented invention of an entirely new way of typing which is supported on a basic phone as well as a modern touchscreen phone seamlessly with the same usability. The solution is called PANINI KEYPAD for Indian languages, named after the ancient Sanskrit grammarian and it already supports the 9 major languages of India namely Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi and work continues on others.
The Panini Keypad is fully developed, offered as a free downloadable from our website PaniniKeypad.com and is already being used by over a million users to type easily and fast in Indian languages on the phone to send SMS, store address book, post on facebook, send tweets etc. One can demonstrably type in Hindi faster than one can type in English on an equivalent phone using the Panini Keypad. The Panini Keypad needs no printed characters and therefore can support all the Indian languages on the same phone. There is no multitap because the average is one keypress per character entry and it does not need the user to know any English because the input is done directly in Indian script and not via English/Roman.
How does it do this?
The Panini Keypad is an intelligent responsive dynamic virtual keypad.
In this, the limited set of characters that the user has the highest probability to type at any point of time are shown on the screen and the user can choose directly in a touchscreen device or indicate with the numeric keys of a basic phone.
When a character is outside the predictions, the user can choose the Next List button.
Apart from the beginning of a word, that happens very infrequently which is the demonstrated efficacy of this new technology.
The character probabilities have all been pre-estimated through research in each Indian language independently carried out by Luna Ergonomics
There are also other innovations of ergonomics because not only are the characters predicted accurately, they are also put into positions which are most comfortable to the thumb and fingers. The characters appear on your fingertips, easy to find and point.
The Panini Keypad estimates characters that the user could be writing next and places them according to their probabilities to positions most comfortable for the texting thumb. Also, these characters have been developed for all Indian languages.
One can experience it by downloading the usability of software from www.PaniniKeypad.com. It is also available at all leading Appstores, Getjar, OVI, Opera, operator decks etc. This new usability has brought about a dramatic improvement in the speed and ease with which one can type in an Indian script on a phone.
To understand the technology it is important to look at the following two videos.
Global usability technology?
After developing first for Indian languages, we decided to work towards other languages of the world as well. Thus we developed the technology that is running on the phone for English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, Russian, Hebrew, Finnish, Swahili, Korean. The global family of products is branded CleverTexting. All of these languages are available as java downloadable from our website CleverTexting.com and also from iPhone Appstores under CleverTexting. And these are growing popular worldwide as the awareness of it is spreading. We have already reached promising stage of work for the Chinese language.
CleverTexting in Arabic, which offers a simpler usability to type in Arabic to send SMS and emails, now released in iTunes Appstore with several other languages including English that you must try if you have an iPhone.
The technology is not only applicable for the mobile phone but for all digital devices like the tablet, PC, IPTV, gaming consoles, STB, ATM and so on. The technology has already been developed in various platforms like Java, Android, iPhone, Windows and in native C for embedded solutions in hardware and SIMs.
This unique new technology is being hailed as a breakthrough by industry and all eminent quarters of the world including the International Telecommunication Union, United Nations of which Luna Ergonomics is one of the handful of members from India. It has won many awards including the Nasscom Foundation Social Innovation Honours 2011, Lockheed Martin India Innovation Gold Medal, Red Herring Global 100 and TieCon50, 2011
This invention has solved the problem of how Indians will be able to type on their phones in regional languages fast and easy. Go ahead, be amongst the first ones to know about it, try it.
The author is the article is Major Abhijit Bhattacharjee, Founder and CEO of Luna Ergonomics Pvt Ltd, India.
Mobile is the way to go. The future of communication and engagement is changing with the mobile technology making a whole new space, with new forms of communication emerging even as we speak!
But there are so many apps available, how does it help my business?
Technology is changing the way businesses operate today. The mobile technology has affected everything from productivity to Travel, Networking to the way you keep yourself updated and also how you communicate better and faster with your teams.
Here we present to you some of the most interesting apps for business users: Travel:
Traveling for business executives is a part of their profile. Traveling may involve client visits, exhibitions/ events etc. What is you would have had a travel planner which shows you who all are your friends who are at the same place where you are traveling, which you can connect with!
TripIt does the job for you!
Platforms available on: BlackBerry, iPhone, Android
USP: it allows you to explore connects with people/ friends/ business connects while you are traveling in any part of the world.
Productivity:
Do we need to stress on how crucial is productivity for the businesses of today? A simple example in case is sales teams in organisations and also customer service teams in various organisations. Their productivity directly affects the operational and delivery capability of the business.
Evernote lets you be productive on the go!
Platforms available on: BlackBerry, iPhone, Android
Evernote allows you to snap a photo, take a screenshot, type in text, or speak your note to capture information on the go. And once you’ve captured the information, it helps you organize and find it by making all of the information in your photos or notes searchable.
Business Networking:
Your network is everything. Every business owner/ senior executive will agree to this. Networking is one of the strongest and critical most part for any SME and what better than networking while on the move?!
LinkedInfor mobile enables you to keep in touch and be updated with what is happening in your professional network at all times.
But there may be times, when its about networking and exploring opportunities with friends and family, which are generally present on facebook. The facebook for mobile app lets you do just that!
News on the go:
Many people today access information on the go. They want to keep themselves updated with what's happening in and around their business ecosystem. Sometimes just getting a hang of the latest news in the circuit can help you take critical business decisions, win deals at times, come up with pro-active pitches and the rest.
The Business Week mobile app makes all the information available at your fingertips LIVE!
Platform available on: iPhone, BlackBerry
For business which want to keep track of International news in their respective domains, The Wall Street Journal Mobile App paves way for LIVE information throughout the day, keeping you abreast of happenings all around.
There are many more mobile applications which are coming in by dozens for business users on platforms like BlackBerry, iPhone and Android etc. These are changing the way business is conducted globally and giving a sharp edge to the executives over their competition.
To know more about how you can develop a business app for your own SME (monitor sales) etc. drop in a comment and our team of experts will get back to you!
