Venkat's Profile

Hi Dmitry,

With the failure of Google glass, it is said Google is letting users get used to Virtual reality through its super cheap Cardboard product. Do you think they could leverage their initial success to make the larger market adapt to VR? Do you think their long term goal is to relaunch google glass again?

Hi Alex,

A very interesting blogpost. Sorry, my comment section had a problem earlier, so I couldn’t post. Do you think traditional nightclubs are in trouble as this would give instant boost to in-house parties that anyone could replicate at low cost. Do you rate WaveVR app as a low-end disruption to nightclub activities.

Hey Dan! Great insights. I have raised the pertinent issues about cost and time involved in VR content production in my blog post on NYTimes. Could you give your viewpoints on any strategy that Nytimes could employ to reduce both costs and time as they would have to fight for instant news in the future.

Thanks, Bonnie! It is an important question. I think NYTimes should use its huge subscriber base as a tool and play to its strength. Many content providers and device manufactures look to target varied users and they find media to be one of the areas as well. Co-innovation with these players by totally zeroing their cost to create content is key to their success.

A very interesting read. I liked the idea to crowdsource for the bot to learn from public. The result would have been fantastic had it worked. It would have been much better if the machine learning algorithmic rules came out without any loopholes for the public to exploit. Have you come across any other company which exercised a similar approach?

That’s a really good observation, Amy. At present, most of the transactions happen for social causes which adopts donation-based model. Yes, rewards-based model looks very shallow as there is no motivation for crowd funder to give his money to the project as there is no incentive. To scale-up, Impact guru has to innovate more to incentivize crowd funders. For example: there is so much one could improve in the debt/loan based model where trust factor between donors and businesses is still a problem.

Great article, Alex. As you rightly pointed out, sellers should face difficulty in multi-homing as they have to keep up their commitment to transact their ticket to the buyer. Is there any penalty that StubHub applies it on seller for not withholding this commitment? Why do you think it is virtually impossible for the seller to list his/her ticket on 2 platforms? How stubhub enables this?

I agree. They are yet to solve problems for premium customers. They are venturing into that zone. Also, for now, unmarried couples cannot book OYO rooms because of cultural sensitivity. They are piloting few hotels to relax that regulations. It would be interesting to see how their complimentary business on Townships pan out. Since the profit margins are higher in such ventures, they are betting heavily to make it a success.

Hi,

It is very interesting to note the way Amazon’s sustainable innovations. What I find interesting is the fact that they are expanding their device portfolio – Alexa and Echo is a great addition to kindle. It remains to be seen whether they would diversify their business into hardware.

Hi Jing,

Yes, Paytm is planning to enter into consumer financing area acting as a bank which would give the users some interest on your monthly principal balance.