Parle Products, one of India’s pioneers in the biscuit and confectionery manufacturing segment, has announced its association with Mumbai’s most popular Pandal in Lalbaug. This year, devotees of Lalbaugcha Raja will witness India’s first crowd sourced #BiscuitGanesha-an opportunity for devotees to be a part of its making. A 8 foot tall Ganesh idol made out of their favorite Parle Biscuits will be placed at the waiting area in the Pandal.
Recognized as one of the oldest and most revered idols of Lord Ganesha, each year the Lalbaugcha Raja witnesses millions of devotees that travel from all over the county to pay homage. Being one of the most loved brands, Parle Products this year, will add to their excitement as they wait in serpentine queues to pay their respect and pray to Lord Ganesha. Devotees will be asked to participate by sending in their tweets/comments using Hello #BiscuitGanesha on Facebook and Twitter. For each tweet Parle receives, users will get a customized response that showcases a dedicated Parle biscuit being put up in their name on the idol, thus building the #BiscuitGanesha. At the end of each day, Parle will share a time lapse video of all the entries they have received so far. Parle Products will also organize various spot contests and competitions with exciting prizes to be won, thus engaging with devotees and loyal consumers alike.
Speaking about the association Mayank Shah, Deputy Marketing Manager, Parle Products said
Every year millions of ardent Lord Ganesh followers visit Mumbai especially for the darshan, standing in long queues for many hours. With this innovative engagement, we plan to make their wait interactive and interesting and offer them an opportunity to win exciting prizes.
Last year, we had a similar activity which had received great response from the consumers; hence this year too we wanted further consumer engagement hopefully resulting in a better connect with our brand. We are getting the idol made specially from artists in Kolkata who have been known to craft beautiful figurines from varied materials.
The association will continue through the 10 days of the festival beginning on Thursday, 17th September, 2015. Hope that guys in Mumbai catch a glimpse of the Lalbaugcha Raja 🙂
The eCommerce sector has witnessed an unprecedented growth since last couple of years. The growth was driven by rapid technology adoption led by the increasing use of devices such as smartphones and tablets, and access to the internet through broadband, 3G etc. which led to an increased online consumer base.
With many companies like Motorola, Xiaomi, One-Plus etc. opting for 'Online-Only' mode via exclusive launches through e-commerce route, it is a sector that has expanded pretty fast. With the launch of Flipkart's Ping, online-shopping will no longer be a lone show and you can now involve your 'Social Connections' in the important decision of buying a particular product.
But what if could you combine Online Commerce with Social Networking for the purpose of doing something for a Social-Cause… it sounds interesting 🙂 An online venture Gudville wants to convert Online Commerce into 'Impact Commerce' by helping a Cause at no extra cost to you.
Gudville : What, Why
What is Gudville
Gudville Shopping is a way of Impact consumption that helps you support causes that you care about while you shop online. By shopping on partner stores – Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal, through Gudville, you can earn Cause Donations [Wishes] and shopping vouchers [Gudville Points] everytime you shop.
The other partner stores of Gudville include Jabong, YepMe, TrendIn, Croma, Pepperfry etc. The interesting aspect about the partnership is that Gudville has ensured that it has partners across different e-commerce businesses e.g. Horizontal e-commerce like Flipkart, Snapdeal & specialized or vertical e-commerce sites like Pepperfry, TrendIn etc.
Have a look at how Gudville can create a difference through shopping as demonstrated in the video:
Gudville Shopping Buddy
Gudville plans to convert casual online-shoppers into impact shoppers by encouraging them to shop through Gudville Shopping Buddy. Gudville Shopping Buddy is a browser extension/add-on to make it easy for shoppers to make this world a better place by shopping on various partner websites.
You can download the Gudville Buddy for Chrome from here The Firefox extension can be downloaded from here
How does Gudville Shopping Buddy work
After installing Gudville buddy, you can check the list of Impact Offers on their partner websites through the add-on. Once you select an offer, you would be routed to appropriate shopping section on the chosen e-commerce partner.
Gudville Shopping Buddy accounts your online shopping to influence a donation for a non-profit organization of your choice and earn Gudville Points which can be redeemed.
Adding the Gudville Shopping Buddy does provide a 'Social Angle' to your shopping experience. We performed a dry-run by shopping on Flipkart using Gudville Shopping Buddy & the experience was seamless. The question that definitely comes to mind is "How does an NGO benefit if you shop using Gudville Shopping Buddy" ? Well, Gudville helps the non-profits to build their influencer base through various campaigns that they can run on Gudville.
Non-profits also benefit from other online consumption activities that Gudville facilitates for its supporters and influencers. Gudville Shopping is one way to influence funds for these non-profits where donation of 1% of the purchase amount goes to a non-profit when you shop online on Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal using Gudville Shopping page or Gudville Shopping Buddy
You can refer to the other details about the Gudville Shopping Buddy from here
Gudville : Non-Profit Associations
Along with 'Impact Shopping', Gudville in it's old avatar used to facilitate it's users to create their own 'Impact Campaigns' also termed as Ripple Campaigns, but now all the user needs to do is use the Gudville Shopping Buddy to Shop & create an impact [Chrome & Firefox]
Gudville has tied-up with 500+ Non-Profit organizations & it drives campaigns with/for them.
Gudville : Road Ahead
Gudville : The impact of App-Only Mode
Since Myntra decided to shutdown it's website couple of months back & decided to go 'App-Only', many e-commerce biggies also have that plan on their cards. The topic has been under constant debate & many companies are vary to take that route. But with increasing mobile penetration, arrival of 4G & reduced data rates, App Only would definitely be an important agenda for many of the e-tailers [Source – TOI].
One of the reasons cited has been 'Price Comparison' since that is not possible on mobiles [through browser add-ons]. On a similar note, we would also love to see a stand-alone Gudville mobile app that would act as an aggregator for the 'Impact-ful Offers' across it's various partner sites.
One more change that might be of interest in it's browser add-on is "to make the user aware that a particular e-commerce site is Gudville's partner & have a Gudville icon on the product page". This would result in incremental user-awareness & user-growth [something like what MakkhiChoose extension does to your online-shopping].
Gudville : Offline Partnerships
Gudville can explore offline-partnerships with CSR department of various organizations. The partnership could be for CSR programmes taken by the organization that are not designed to produce profits or directly improve the business performance.
Gudville can leverage these partnerships by awarding employees of the partner organizations or universities with 'Gudville Points' based on the impact of the CSR activity. This would create a two-way impact by converting the Employees into online, impactful shoppers & hence leveraging the use of "Social aspect of Commerce" & "Social aspect of Responsibility" 🙂
We are sure that conversion of 'Offline Shoppers to Online Shoppers' for creating grass-roots impact would be there on Gudville's agenda !!
Closing Thoughts
If you are an online shopper & want to ensure that your online-shopping affects lives of millions than download the Gudville Buddy [Chrome & Firefox]. Do share your experience in the comments section.
Earn 'Gudville' while you shop with the Gudville Shopping Buddy…
FreeCharge, India’s leading digital platform for recharge & utility payments, with a volume of over 200 million transactions annually, has announced the launch of FreeCharge Digital Wallet. The ‘comprehensive and trusted’ digital wallet service will transform mobile and web transactions by facilitating easy and secure payments. The wallet is being launched in partnership with YES bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks.
With an ecosystem of 8.2 million daily unique users, 4 million monthly engaged hours, 15 million stored cards, combined with GMV of over USD 4 billion, the FreeCharge Digital Wallet is set to become India’s most used wallet in the next 6 months.
In line with Snapdeal’s vision of building the most impactful digital commerce ecosystem in India, the FreeCharge digital wallet will enable a culture of digital payments through multiple partnerships.
In addition to a large and robust network of merchant partners, FreeCharge will partner with FINO – a payments bank licensee to build scale and ability to reach even the under-served.
FreeCharge Digital Wallet is powered by cutting edge technology, consumer behaviour insights and innovations in payments. It is a robust and flexible platform that leverages enabling technologies such as HCE, NFC, QR code and BLE to bring in efficiencies in the consumers’ purchase experience.
L-R- Anand Chandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer, Snapdeal; Govind Rajan, Chief Strategy Officer, Snapdeal; Kunal Shah, CEO and co-founder, FreeCharge
Commenting on the launch, Kunal Shah, CEO and Co-founder, FreeCharge said
FreeCharge has hit an important milestone in its journey today. With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we are all set to transform the way people make payments. A secure, easy to use and feature-rich service, the wallet is equipped with state of the art technology and a robust partner network, making it a truly game-changing service that will bring value to consumers and our partners in the ecosystem.
Congratulating FreeCharge on this milestone launch, Kunal Bahl, CEO and Co-founder, Snapdeal said
Our aim is to bring in efficiencies in payments using digital commerce to cater to every consumption need that a user may have. Consumer needs are constantly evolving and we feel it is the right time to launch a trusted and feature-rich digital wallet service. At Snapdeal we are building an ecosystem that powers billions of digital commerce transactions. With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we will now play an even more intrinsic role in our customers’ lives
Commenting on the way forward for the Digital Wallet, Anand Chandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer, Snapdealsaid
We are very excited about this landmark product launch. With 87 million combined registered users, we will ensure a seamless transition by offering easy integration and access to the platform resulting in a superior consumer and merchant experience
About FreeCharge
FreeCharge is India’s leading digital platform for recharge and utility payments which provides prepaid, post-paid, DTH and Electricity bill payment for almost all Indian service providers. FreeCharge was founded in 2010 by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon and had received funding of over $120 million in the last 4 years. In the largest acquisition in the consumer Internet space yet, Snapdeal acquired FreeCharge in Apr’15 resulting in India’s largest m-commerce ecosystem. For more details, please visit FreeCharge
CanvasFlip, a cloud based Prototyping & Usability testing platform has raised $1.2 million USD in seed round from Silicon Valley based venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners.
CanvasFlip is a cloud based prototyping & usability testing platform allowing Product Managers, UX teams and NonTech Entrepreneurs to validate their idea and user experience without writing a single line of code. Users can create prototype [clickable demo of apps] from design and share it with other stakeholders to get actionable analytics on these prototypes. Validating flow and user experience at the design stage helps companies to save significant
amount of time and development iterations.
In the last 23 months, CanvasFlip has grown to a 140+ enterprise customer base consisting of some very successful enterprises including Paytm, MakeMyTrip, Dine Out, Tech Mahindra among others.
It’s great to have the support of one of the world’s largest venture funds. This is more than financial backing. Even before this investment, the Bessemer team has been helping us to evolve the product and business model. We [CanvasFlip Team & Investors] share the vision of CanvasFlip solving major painpoints in the UX space. These funds will be used to enhance product capabilities and enable growth practices. We have started exploring the international market and may soon open a front office in Silicon Valley.
Raghav Bahl, Vice President, BVP commented on the development saying
CanvasFlip enables product managers to validate mobile application design, by providing rich and conclusive usage feedback from the target user segment, even before a single line of code is written. This helps product managers reduce the time taken to bring the application to market and also, save on expensive development resources. Finally, this is a passionate founding team with a deep understanding of the consumer pain point and strong product development skills.
About CanvasFlip
CanvasFlip was founded by 26 year old duo Vipul Mishra & Manish Jha in Hyderabad as an online animation platform and after a series of pivotal experiments, it emerged as a prototyping & usability testing solution. Vipul and Manish started their professional journey with Tech Mahindra and have been part of many innovations together including Yougle, FbViralVideos etc. For more information, please visit CanvasFlip
Ogle, India’s fastest growing premium on-demand streaming platform, successfully teams up with India’s largest online marketplace Snapdeal. The online portal will be the exclusive marketing partner for Ogle till the end of 2015. In addition, Snapdeal customers will get three months of free Ogle subscription when they buy smart TVs, tablets and mobiles from the website.
Earlier this year, Ogle gained a lot of traction for its latest live streaming stint at the Lakme Fashion Week 2015. Following the overwhelming response to Ogle’s pre-booking of subscription on its own website, this service will be now available to potential subscribers only via Snapdeal
Ogle streaming service comes with remarkable features such as buffer-less & ad-free streaming. Ogle enables online streaming across various connected devices and also caters to low bandwidth issues. Providing an array of cult online content across genres, Ogle streams buffer-Free even at bandwidths as low as 0.5 mbps.
The subscription offerings come at INR 49/day, INR 249/month & INR 2400/annum
Speaking about the latest association, Pritish Nandy, Chairperson, Ogle Technology Group said
Ogle’s one-of-its- kind association with an e-commerce giant like Snapdeal will be a great innovation for this field. This new venture will create a larger audience reach for Ogle from the subscription point of view as well as from a market leader point of view. This association will also be a favourable deal for Snapdeal. Free access to Ogle on their newly bought devices will definitely be a unique experience for the buyers. With our user friendly features, and our commitment to the association, we aim to strengthen our expertise.
Throwing light on similar sentiments, Karan Khara, Vice President, Strategic Alliances, Snapdeal said
Ogle is a great addition to our digital entertainment offerings. With increasing consumption of online videos and growing preference for International content among the young consumers in India, we are confident that this streaming service being offered at an affordable price point will find great traction.
Opening its doors across international boundaries very soon, Ogle will enable the premium online streaming service to reach out to a larger audience and significantly change the way content is consumed online.
Mindtree has partnered with MetricStream, the market leader in Governance, Risk & Compliance [GRC], to help simplify regulatory compliance for financial firms. Mindtree will leverage MetricStream’s Zaplet, a cloud-based open platform to build, deploy and manage a variety of GRC applications for financial firms globally.
Mindtree’s expertise in the financial sector combined with MetricStream’s market leadership in the GRC domain will enable clients automate and manage regulatory processes from trade validations to tracking.
Together, the companies will co-develop a comprehensive trade-reporting framework to support multiple regulations such as the Dodd Frank Act, the European Market Infrastructure Regulation Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, and the upcoming Markets in Financial Investments Regulation. This will enable financial institutions to reduce operational risks and avoid penalties levied for inaccurate reporting.
Kamran Ozair, Executive Vice President & Head of Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, Mindtree, said
Increasing global commerce, digitization and fraud is putting tremendous compliance pressure on financial institutions. This partnership will allow us to provide robust compliance solutions and help clients simplify regulatory requirements and reduce associated expenses.
In today’s environment, it has become imperative for financial institutions to have a robust compliance framework which enables them to operate efficiently and manage risks. MetricStream’s cloud-based Zaplet GRC platform provides such a framework and enables our partners to build solutions to meet these critical needs. We are extremely excited about our partnership with Mindtree.
About MetricStream
MetricStream is the market leader in enterprise-wide Governance, Risk, Compliance [GRC] and Quality Management Solutions. MetricStream solutions are used by leading global corporations in diverse industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Energy and Utilities, Food, Retail, CPG, Government, Hi-Tech and Manufacturing to manage their risk management programs, quality management processes, regulatory and industry-mandated compliance and other corporate governance initiatives. For more information please visit MetricStream
The second quarter of 2015 was wrought with high profile vulnerabilities and hacks. Cyber criminals became more inventive in their attack methods to infiltrate and abuse existing technologies that are often overlooked. India emerged as the top targeted nation by data-stealing malware to hijack business transactions and steal information from small and medium sized businesses.
Each re-purposed existing malware, tool-kits & techniques to target victims from India, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Taiwan and the United States [US], among other countries.
In the second quarter, we saw a shift in the threat landscape with cyber criminals becoming more sophisticated and creative, amplifying existing methods of attack, and using them in new ways. The ethereal outlook on the threat of cyber-crime can no longer be held by the general population. This quarter demonstrated that the potential damage caused by cyber attacks extends far beyond a simple software bug to hacks of airplanes, smart cars and television stations.
Coupled with the fact that attack volumes are of the magnitude of hundreds of millions, the threat that cyber criminals pose today is more tangible than it has ever been.
Some of the key numbers from Q2 2015 demonstrate the challenges of today’s threat landscape are:
Number of malware detections across APAC in Q2 2015: Over 118 million
Number of spam messages blocked across APAC: Over 396 million
Hits to malicious URLs from users across APAC: Over 214 million
Hits to malicious URLs hosted in the APAC region: Over 50 million
Hackers are taking more strategic approaches, refining their approach and targeting more selective victims to improve their infection rates. This is reflected by the exponential increase in the use of several traditional attack methods, including a 50 percent increase in the integration of the Angler exploit kit, a 67 percent growth in overall exploit kit-related threats, and CryptoWall ransom-ware becoming highly targeted, with 79 percent of infections occurring in the U.S.
Additionally, government entities have realized the full impact of cyber attacks during the second quarter with massive data breaches on both the Internal Revenue Service [IRS] in May and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management [OPM] system in June. The OPM data breach was the largest of its kind to date, exposing personally identifiable information of approximately 21 million individuals. Other government agencies were impacted by targeted campaigns using macro malware, new command and control [C&C] servers and the continued use of newly exploited vulnerabilities and 0-days Pawn Storm.
A blog post regarding the report can also be viewed here. For the complete report, please visit this link.
About Trend Micro
Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in security software, strives to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Trend Micro enables the smart protection of information, with innovative security technology that is simple to deploy and manage, and fits an evolving ecosystem. Their solutions are powered by cloud-based global threat intelligence, the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ infrastructure & are supported by more than 1,200 threat experts around the globe. For more information, visit TrendMicro
In alignment with its philosophy of financial fitness, Money View – an android app – has recently incorporated yet another feature to its app called ‘reimbursements’. This feature can be used by anybody maintaining bills to track all out-of-pocket outlays thereby curtailing the hassle of physically maintaining or logging in expenses.
The ‘reimbursable’ feature is particularly helpful and saves time for busy professionals who travel extensively on business either locally or out of station and have to maintain records of incidental expenditures for submission.
There are two ways that the Money View app helps its users maintain their bills – by categorising the bank SMS alerts one receives, under ‘reimbursements’ & by uploading photographs of hard-copy receipts taken with the user’s smartphone and then uploaded under the Bill & Receipts category which can further be tagged with a note on the type of expenditure it represents.
The following, further illustrates how this feature works, in a simplified manner
From banks SMS alerts
When a financial transaction is made (debit card, credit card, NEFT), one immediately gets an SMS notification that is summarized on the app (Rs. 780 – Dining, Rs. 1000 – Transport etc.)
On clicking on the particular transaction, the ‘Edit Transaction’ window opens up
By selecting ‘Yes’ and ‘Save’ under the entry ‘Reimbursable’, this particular detail gets captured
Cash transactions can also be manually entered and marked as ‘reimbursable’
Through receipt images
After taking a picture of the bill receipt the image can be uploaded on the app directly under the category – Bill/ Receipt (Add New)
Thereafter, the specific details of the expenses have to be entered for further reference by making entries under ‘Notes’ – (Lunch with Client etc.)
