E-commerce in India: From a mistrusted medium to a tool of urban convenience

The first thing almost every working individual does after sitting on his desk is to open up his mail account to check mail. But instead of the essential ones, we end up visiting commercial links from various online retailers to check the best products they have on offer. From electronic gadgets, appliances, apparel, footwear, gifts to even availing discounts on services available in and around your place, online shopping is the way to go these days.

But it wasn’t the case a good few years ago. Even with the advanced outlook in place, Indian consumers ended up reverting to good old ways of investing time and energy before every purchase big or small. Marketplaces were overflowing with true shoppers with a variety of options at hand. But the honchos with a vision were not afraid to think out of the box and were eagerly looking at the opportunity of an online business portal to connect to customers for whom the physical distances made it inaccessible to have an in-person experience. But even before the concept picked up, it was blotched by the shady Baazee.com issue. It was a downward spiral for the company until EBay decided to acquire it. With a brand name acknowledged worldwide stepping onto Indian shores, e-commerce got a new lease of life and gave fresh hope to entrepreneurs who envisioned virtual establishments.

The murky was replaced with the innovative and there was a distinct influx of penetration in an otherwise dormant domain. Before even starting to list out the websites we have today, it is absolutely essential to acknowledge that venture capital investments for these ideas have a big role to play for the growth and mass expansion of the major players in the virtual market today as well as their ability to cater to the large consumer base. Another factor which has substantially helped the e-commerce business to flourish is well…our hectic lives. The vast majority of professionals at this time work in privatized companies and MNC’s with long working hours and less number of holidays dictating the demanding nature of work. And the last thing one would want to do in such an unrelenting schedule is to actually go out for shopping. One would rather just prefer if all the options were available at the disposal of their personal space without much effort which made it a win-win scenario for E-commerce.

And you have got to be thankful to these risky yet feasible initiatives which have made shopping a hell lot easier. Now you can purchase movie tickets (BookMyShow, TicketPlease) to travel tickets (MakeMyTrip, Yatra, and GoIbibo), purchase electronics (Flipkart) to apparel (Fashion n You, Myntra and Jabong) to even avail the best daily deals in your region (Snap Deal, Deals and You). And the amount of e-commerce websites that have mushroomed during these past 2-3 years has made it a virtual consumer battlefield. Even government organizations have been influenced with the advantages of internet based businesses and they have also integrated booking and registration processes for their online portals.

Call it variety or saturation, but the number of options available to us as potential consumers makes e-commerce the preferred mode of shopping. And with companies backing their services up with in-house logistics and after sales support team along with easy user interface and payment options, the dominant emergence of e-commerce as a medium is justified.

From Auditorium to TV: The evolution of 3D

I remember going to Nehru Planetarium quite a few times during my schooling days in Delhi in the name of class trips. The whole ethnicity of the place used to leave us kids amazed and the space show was the cherry on the cake. Just seeing planets, moons and stars revolving around you in a dome-shaped structure gave the heart-thumping feeling that you were actually in space. I can still recall that the next few days were spent with lingering feelings of the experience. At the time I believed that it was the closest one can get to virtual reality and then 3D happened.

The first Indian 3D film “Chhota Chetan” was released way back in 1984 and then re-released in 1998. That is when I first came to grips with how 3D works. As funny as the flying skeletons in the film were, it revealed a whole new avenue of entertainment. And since 3D was still in a very beginning stage, we watched it with Red CYAN 3D glasses. But that was it during the time for 3D as nothing concrete developed on that platform. The second half of the first decade of 20^th century was the emergence of HD entertainment as people were still reveling in the massive SD (240-480p) to HD (720p) upgrade. And along with that came the LCD TV’s to replace the bulky CRT’s.

But the real renaissance period of 3D has coincided with the emergence of the IMAX cinemas in India. Industry insiders still believed that 3D was never going to be commercially viable, but IMAX changed that. After being a rip-roaring success across US, the IMAX 3D technology was made readily available for Indian audiences. My first IMAX experience was during my 2008 internship in Hyderabad when I got to see “Beowulf” and my was I left impressed. The combination of high definition and digital 3D made the protagonists come alive on screen. And that is where my love affair with 3D started. Major consumer electronic powerhouses after seeing the positive reaction of audiences towards 3D started to pump the moolah towards 3D home entertainment and engaged their workforce to produce 3D projectors and TV’s.

The initial 3D TV’s came with active-shutter in both plasma and LED technologies. While the majority of the masses were enthused about the concept of being able to watch 3D at home, there were not too many takers as the technology was exorbitantly expensive at the time. And there were major flaws of flickering and ghosting on these TV’s along with the bulky electronic glasses which were a constant source of headache for users. Eventually, the likes of Toshiba and LG did some more homework and decided to part with their active 3D technology in favor of passive 3D. And it did come as a welcome relief for the growing community of 3D consumers to have 3D technologies which was similar to the 3D in theaters. At present, the 3D medium is silently gaining popularity with most companies investing big time and more and more in the crowd showing favorable enthusiasm towards 3D. And a real blueprint that the 3D is here to stay has been the vote of confidence from James Cameron (creator of the blockbuster “Avatar”) and his constant pursuit to make passive 3D mainstream; one thing which he believes can only be defined by TV’s.

Now the ground reality is that only a certain part of the population can afford 3D TV’s at the moment because their cost factor hasn’t dropped significantly over the years, but the early adoption of the technology by manufacturers seems to suggest that mainstream and household 3D domination isn’t too far away.