New Delhi: It is that time of the year when the three big e-marketplaces Flipkart, Amazon, and Snapdeal, offer discounts across the different categories of products. This is the best time to purchase a new phone for yourself or upgrade your home interiors, wardrobe, or kitchen.
You may manage to get some flat discount on a product, but are you aware of the tips that will get you a maximum discount during the big online sale? Here you go:
1. Shopping on app results in maximum benefit, as possibilities of money return, cashback, or extra discount are more while shopping on an app. So, keep the app of the big shopping sites downloaded or updated on your phone.
2. If you shop for more than Rs 15,00 on Amazon’s app and use the HDFC Banks debit or credit card, you would be eligible for a 15 percent discount on a product. The discount offered will only be 10 percent if you shop on the website.
3. Using an Amazon wallet will also give a benefit of Rs 150.
4. Shopping on the Snapdeal app through HDFC Bank’s card will also give a discount of 15 percent; shopping through ICICI Bank’s card will offer a discount of 10 percent and a discount of 5 percent if payment is made through net banking.
Those using net banking or SBI card will get the maximum benefit on Flipkart.
7. The discounts on the sales keep changing throughout the day. The maximum discounts can be available at night, while the lowest discounts are offered in the peak hour or the daytime.
8. Some companies show an inflated retail price for comparison. It is best to compare the discount being offered on different shopping sites. Also, verify the MRP from the parent site of the product.
A user can keep the product in the shopping cart for 15 minutes; if a product is an n short supply and in your cart, make a quick decision whether you would like to buy it.
Big sales are around the corner – Flipkart’s Big Billion Days Sale 2016, Amazon Great Indian Sale, and Snapdeal’s Unbox Diwali Sale are all about to shower discounts on us, and if you need to get any new gadgets, then it’s a great time. Even if you don’t need new gadgets, it’s a great time to get the ones you want. The problem, of course, is finding something in the plethora of deals that all the big sites are going to throw in your general direction.
Half the sales are going to be for items you’re not interested in. While there are definitely going to be people out there who were waiting eagerly for a discount on combs, it’s safe to say that most people were instead looking for deals on new TVs, phones, and other high-value items. The sales cover a wide range of products, though, making finding the things you want difficult.
Add to this the fact that none of the e-commerce sites are above artificially inflating discounts, and you have a bunch of “deals” that are best avoided, further cluttering the offerings and forcing you to research everything even as there’s a ticking timer making it harder to find the best deals. And since all the sales are happening simultaneously, you’ve got to check everywhere before you put down your money or risk a bad case of buyer’s remorse.
Of course, you should visit Gadgets 360 because if there are some great deals that we think our readers will benefit from, we will be letting you know about them. But apart from that, what else can you do?
As we told you in an earlier article, there are a few simple things that can help. Make sure your apps are updated, that your payment details are saved, and if you’re on the desktop, sign in to the sites so you have the fast checkout. Most of all, if there’s any product that you really want, add it to your wishlist so that you can find it easily during the sales.
Since you’re reading Gadgets 360, you probably want to buy electronics, and so we’d also recommend following @DealsForGeeks on Twitter – the handle picks out online deals and tweets them so you can find plenty of great offers that way. You can also sign up for alerts from them by visiting deal alerts. You need to enter your name, email ID, or Twitter handles to receive updates when products go on sale. We liked this because the team has stated that the IDs it collects are only for alerts, and these will be deleted after the festive season sale. You can list all the different products you’re interested in and get an alert if/ when they go on sale.
Apart from that, it’s also a good idea to install a browser extension to allow you to check the prices of a product on all the major sites. This means that if you see what looks like a good deal on one site, then you don’t have to waste time checking the others to find out if it really is a deal.
Reliance Jio has been surrounded by problems ever since it started testing its telecommunication services in India. Still, it had successfully delivered the fastest internet speeds on mobiles to impress its users. Of late, the tables seem to have turned as users started complaining about Jio’s 4G speeds, which is alarming for the new telco trying to place itself among Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea.
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As the current Jio users take advantage of the Welcome Offer, which gives them free internet till December 31, access to Jio apps, and unlimited HD calls, the drop in speed is rather disappointing. Jio hasn’t acknowledged the ongoing speed issues, but there have been some technical workarounds.
We already addressed the major problems Jio users were facing with their connections and the basic settings to correct them. If Jio’s speed issues hit you, follow these simple steps to improve browsing.
To boost your phone’s internet speed, clear cache on your phone. There are tools on Google Play Store that will help you with that, but users can manually go through individual app folders and clear the cache.
Next up is to keep the phone from running unnecessarily in the background. Go through your phone’s apps carefully and delete the ones that are not useful. This will consume less power and data due to a default setting in some phones, which permits background data usage. If an app is important to have, go to the settings and find the app to limit background data consumption.
If you are experiencing slow browsing problems despite having Jio 4G, you can disable the browser’s images, Gizbot reports. This will not load images on a website and show the text, which will definitely increase your speed. But this cannot be a universal step as many users would want to see the images on the websites, so proceed based on your individual requirement.
As per the annual report by The Broadband Commission, India has now surpassed the United States to become the second-largest internet market in the world. The report titled ‘The State of Broadband 2016: Broadband Catalyzing Sustainable Development’ states that India now accounts for 333 million internet users, trailing China’s 721 million users. In addition, the report notes that India also recently outranked the US to became the second-largest smartphone market in the world with an estimated 260 million mobile broadband subscriptions.
While India is now a leading internet market, The State of Broadband report highlights that India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Indonesia together account for 55% of the world’s offline population. The commission believes that if basic mobile phone access can be evolved to high-speed mobile broadband access, it could make smartphones a major instrument in driving UN Sustainable Development Goals.
When it comes to household internet penetration, the Republic of Korea leads the rally with 98.8% of homes connected and online, followed by Qatar at 96%, UAE at 95%, respectively. In addition, the report states that Iceland has the highest percentage of individuals using the internet, while Monaco comes up first in fixed broadband penetration with over 47 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants.
Looking into the future, the Broadband Commission predicts that 47% of the global population, that is, around 3.5 million people, will be online in 2016.
Following the decision to cede US Government control on Internet policy, four states of the USA (Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Nevada) had contested the move. They filed a lawsuit in Texas against the US Government to block the transition after failing to get Congress to block the move. Now, these states have voluntarily dropped the lawsuit earlier this week, paving the way for global stakeholders to play a greater role in evolving the future of the Internet.
The Hyderabad meeting (ICANN57) is being hosted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), with support from the Government of Telangana. Here international stakeholders from the government, business, civil society, non-government organizations, research institutions, technical communities, among others, will discuss a broad range of Internet-related topics and develop policies for the Domain Name System.
“Some of the topics that will be discussed at the Hyderabad meeting include: Internet governance, enhancing the accountability of ICANN, ongoing work to embrace a multilingual Internet, in particular, the Neo-Brahmi scripts, as well as updates on the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Program,” said Jia-Rong Low, Vice President & Managing Director of ICANN Asia Pacific at a pre-event media interaction organized at Hyderabad.
ICANN meetings are held three times a year in different regions to enable attendees worldwide to participate in person. These meetings offer various sessions such as workshops, open forums, and working meetings on the development and implementation of Internet policies enabling face-to-face discussions and exchange of opinions among attendees dedicated to the continued stable and secure operation of the Domain Name System.
“We are very pleased that the ICANN57 meeting is being held in India. We welcome all the delegates to this meeting. This 57th meeting is historic because it is the first meeting post the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) stewardship transition. This meeting represents our continued interest in Internet governance and synchronizes well with the Digital India program of the Government of India,” said Rahul Gosain, Director of MeitY. Its mission is to promote the inclusive and sustainable growth of electronics, enhance India’s role in Internet governance and enhance efficiency through digital services and secure cyberspace.
“The Government of Telangana looks forward to welcoming the international delegates to Hyderabad. We also encourage our local communities, from students to businesses and academia, to come, attend and take part in ICANN57,” said Jayesh Ranjan, Secretary to Government of Telangana, Information Technology, Electronics and Communications (ITE&C) Department.
Union Minister for Information Technology and Law & Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad and K Chandrashekhar Rao, Chief Minister of Telangana (the newly-constituted 29th State of India) Hyderabad as its capital), will address attendees at ICANN57’s opening ceremony on November 5, 2016. Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, ICANN President and CEO Göran Marby, and ICANN Board Chair Dr. Stephen D Crocker will also meet and respond to journalists’ questions at a news conference the same day. About 2,000 delegates from 80 countries are expected to participate in this conference, leading to crucial Internet Governance-related policy decisions.
At least some Indian language scripts may start appearing in the internet domain names next year, effectively ending the monopoly of English over the internet medium in the country. The process of finalizing the necessary rule sets for 22 Indian languages identified by the Government of India was progressing towards this direction, say the Indian officials involved in this exercise.
The move is aimed to facilitate millions of those who do not know English to become Internet users in the country, which already ranks number 2 in terms of Internet users next to China.
“Next year, I hope, at least a few of these 22 languages will be seen appearing in the domain names,” Samiran Gupta, head of India at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN), said on Wednesday.
The work on the multi-lingual internet involving the neo-Brahmi scripts such as Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, and Tamil, etc. has been currently going on at C-DAC(Center for Development of Advanced Computing), and the rule sets being created for each of these language scripts would be put out for public feedback before introducing them for writing internet domain names soon, according to him.
However, this would only be a partial achievement for putting the Indian language scripts on a par with English or Chinese or Russian, among other languages whose scripts were universally accepted in creating the Internet domain names with them. According to Gupta, what will be followed after this is the creation of e-mail ids in those language scripts and their universal acceptance across the e-mail service providers.
The ICANN is holding its 57th meeting in Hyderabad from November 3-9, 2016, amidst India-backed efforts to embrace Indian language scripts and set a stage to expand the Internet user base much faster country.
Announcing the agenda and topics of the upcoming ICANN’s meeting on Wednesday, Rahul Gosain, Director, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology(MeitY), stated that almost half of the 1 billion new Internet users of the world would be added by India on the back of these and other efforts by the Government of India.
This is the second time India has been hosting the meeting of the internet body, which had held its 31st meeting in India in February 2008. The present conference assumes a particular significance by being the first meeting ahead of the transition of governance of the Internet into a multi-stakeholder community model from the stewardship of the US Government. ICANN is expected to evolve the new form of governance of the Internet at its Hyderabad meeting, which the Telangana government is co-hosting.
Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, ICANN president, and CEO Goran Marby, among others, will attend the formal inaugural session on November 5. The MeitY’s mission was to promote inclusivity and sustainable growth of electronics, enhance Indian’s role in Internet governance and enhance efficiency through digital services and secure cyberspace, the Ministry official said.
Some of the topics that will be discussed at the Hyderabad meeting include Internet governance, enhancing the accountability of ICANN, ongoing work on multilingual internet, in particular the Neo-Brahmi scripts, as well as updates on the new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) program, said ICANN Asia Pacific vice president and managing director Jia-Rong Low.
New Delhi: The internet is free and open, or so we like to believe. In recent years, several countries have blocked particular applications, shut down specific digital services, turned off mobile telecommunications services, or disrupted the entire internet.
In a recent paper, Internet shutdowns cost countries $2.4 billion last year by Brookings Institution, a non-profit public policy organization, author Darrel M. West analyses the economic impact of temporary internet shutdowns. West examines 81 short-term shutdowns in 19 countries over the past year and estimates their impact on those nations’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Based upon this analysis, West finds that between 1 July 2015 and 30 June 2016, internet shutdowns cost at least $2.4 billion in GDP globally.
India faces the highest economic loss at $968 million, followed by $465 million loss in Saudi Arabia, Morocco ($320 million), Iraq ($209 million), the Republic of the Congo ($72 million), Pakistan ($69 million), Syria ($48 million), and Turkey ($35 million), among other places. These are conservative estimates that consider only reductions in economic activity and do not account for tax losses or drops in investor, business, and consumer confidence. West argues in the paper that internet disruptions are creating significant detrimental impacts on economic activity in several nations around the world.
He says: “As the digital economy expands, it will become even more expensive for nations to shut down the internet. Without coordinated action by the international community, this damage is likely to accelerate in the future and further weaken global economic development.”
Internet disruptions over the past years find that there is a rising trend of governments disrupting the internet and quotes a study by University of Washington researchers who identified 606 occasions between 1995 and the first part of 2011 where 99 different governments deliberately “interfered” with the normal operation of the internet. To ascertain the number of times disruptions have happened in the past year, West collected cases from internet searches, English-based news coverage, and lists compiled by non-profit organizations that track such disruptions.
Overall, he cites 81 disruptions in 19 countries during this period. This includes 22 in India, Iraq (22), non-ISIS controlled parts of Syria (8), Pakistan (6), Turkey (3), and 2 each in Bangladesh, Brazil, North Korea, the Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Vietnam, among other places. West also identified six categories of disruptions: national internet, sub-national internet, national mobile internet, sub-national mobile internet, national app/service, and sub-national app/service (including VoIP).
Overall, these disruptions cost countries a total of at least $2.4 billion over the past year, with an impact ranging from the highest in India at $968 million. These disruptions lasted 753 days in total across all countries. West also cites several notable internet disruptions. One took place in Saudi Arabia in May 2016. Citing economic damage to telecommunications providers, the government blocked the functionality of several apps related to VoIP, texting, and instant messaging; those impacted included WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Skype, among others.
The move cost the country $465 million in GDP. India, for instance, shut down mobile internet services in Rohtak on February 19, 2016, in response to street demonstrations in Rohtak and Jhajjar. The disruption lasted more than a week and cost $190 million. Law enforcement officials explained that “this has been done so that rumors are not spread as this could lead to the situation getting out of hand.”In Brazil, a local judge ordered telecommunications companies to block access to WhatsApp on May 2, 2016, following an earlier shutdown in December 2015.
The May shutdown blocked access to the country’s predominant communications service for a day and cost the Brazilian economy $39 million. West concludes by saying that government officials in many countries worldwide appear increasingly comfortable blocking access to online services and apps, despite the significant economic and social damage that internet service disruptions bring to their countries. Whether their ostensible motivations are public security or political self-preservation, government officials should understand the wide-ranging and destructive consequences of these moves.
Shutting down access to popular services or the whole internet—even for a short period of time—undermines economic growth, puts lives in jeopardy, separates people from friends and family, and erodes confidence in the governments that take such drastic and ill-advised steps. West said in an email interaction: “Government leaders need to understand they shoot their economies in the foot when they disrupt the internet. Shutdowns harm small and large businesses and lead to big economic losses. As the digital economy grows, these costs will accelerate.”
Consolidation is not an unfamiliar word for new-age Internet businesses. It signals a maturing of the industry after a burst of innovation backed by venture capital money. If the Indian Internet industry’s roughly decade-old history is scanned, the real take-off with consumer adoption started only around 2010-11. Around the same time, a little-known international firm played the first strong bugle of the many to come; the latest was this week.
As South African media and Internet conglomerate Naspers Ltd agreed to merge travel services firm Goibibo with NASDAQ-listed online travel agency MakeMyTrip Ltd, it has not just repeated what it has been doing for the past five years but also quietly added heft in India’s digital market.
Naspers already owns a 15% stake in India’s top e-commerce firm Flipkart, a majority stake in one of the two largest consumer-to-consumer classifieds venture OLX, and runs a large digital payments business with PayU and Citrus. With a little over 36% effective stake in MakeMyTrip after the deal is concluded, Naspers will also become the single-largest shareholder of India’s top online travel agency.
“Consolidation makes a lot of sense,” says Arvind Singhal, chairman at consultancy firm Technopak Advisors. “We will continue to see more consolidation, not so much to achieve more profitability but to gain dominance.” An email query sent to Naspers on its investment and consolidation strategy for the Indian market did not elicit a response until this article’s filing.
Pioneers of consolidation
Naspers virtually started the big wave of consolidation now sweeping through India’s Internet industry with deals involving FirstCry and BabyOye, Myntra and Jabong, Ola and TaxiForSure, Titan and Caratlane, and Future Group and Fabfurnish.
The conglomerate struck its first key deal when it acquired a majority stake in auto classifieds portal Gaadi.com in 2011. This came ahead of Flipkart’s acquisition of LetsBuy in 2012.
In 2013, it bought India’s top bus ticketing venture, redBus, through bimbo. As a cross-category Internet firm that has built multi-geography businesses with the same or different brands, Naspers has been doing what Germany’s Rocket Internet has been trying to do, only more successfully and in a very different operating style.
Naspers, however, has not always been successful. It gave up in the auto classifieds business by selling Gaadi.com to CarDekho. It also threw in the towel in the cash-burning e-commerce category when it shut down Tradus.
Tradus was previously a horizontal e-commerce marketplace and later pivoted to become a hyperlocal grocery and food products marketplace before Naspers pulled down the shutters.
Singhal, in fact, says it’s too early to decide if Naspers’ game plan is a success. “Whether it’s e-commerce, travel service, payment services, or classifieds, all of these are still being played out. All the investors in the larger digital commerce space have taken a longer view; they are all looking at India with maybe a 10- or 15-year plan rather than a five-year view,” he says.
Mahesh Murthy, the founder of Pinstorm and co-founder of Seedfund, is more critical. He says he is not sure if Naspers’ huge bets on Flipkart, OLX, PayU, and Ibibo can be called a success at all. Flipkart’s future is uncertain; local companies have defeated OLX, PayU operates in a sector where many others are leading, and MakeMyTrip has acquired Ibibo, he says.
“They (Naspers) have invested in the loser in each space,” says Murthy. “Their gameplay is very vulnerable,” Murthy adds that Naspers has not won any market share in any category. “They came to the country saying we would run our own business, but now they are saying we would be passive investors and would not run any business ourselves. This was a big change at Naspers; they have taken a massive step back,” he says.
Other opportunities
While Naspers may not have succeeded in some areas, it has been quick to tap into other opportunities.
In one of the largest takeover deals in India’s nascent but rapidly growing fintech sector, Naspers-owned online payments company PayU acquired Mumbai rival Citrus Pay for $130 million (Rs 865 crore) last month.
According to the company, the deal will increase PayU’s India customers to 30 million. It expects to process 150 million transactions in 2016 worth a total of $4.2 billion, growing at 50% annually. According to a recent report by Google and Boston Consulting Group, this business will benefit irrespective of who wins or loses the more glamorous e-commerce battle as the digital payments industry in India is estimated to be worth $500 billion by 2020.
Naspers also re-entered the auto classifieds market, albeit through another arm. It is now back in the used-car business in the country with Strada. in under OLX.
The move seems to be aimed at taking the competition head-on in the classifieds business where OLX competes with homegrown Quikr, one of India’s 10-odd unicorns, or private companies with a valuation of $1 billion or more. Quikr had last year floated sub-domains as verticals. Auto classifieds were the first such vertical and launched in August 2015.
Arshad Khan, the latest sensation, works at Islamabad’s Sunday Bazaar. An Instagram post on October 14 by an aspiring photographer has gone viral Mr. Khan says people have taken more than 150 pictures with him so far. A blue-eyed handsome young chaiwala or tea seller from Pakistan has become an internet sensation after a local photographer posted his picture on social media.
Arshad Khan, who works at Islamabad’s Sunday Bazaar (Peshawar Chowk), has women gushing over his good looks. The Instagram post on October 14 by aspiring photographer Jiah Ali (@jiah_ali) went viral and caused a sensation, with #chaiwala being among the top Twitter trends on Monday.
The story was picked up by international media, including popular US website Buzzfeed. In an interview with local TV news, the blue-eyed Arshad indicated that he lived in Islamabad for the last 25 years and joined the tea stall a few months ago, Daily Pakistan reported.
When asked if he knew what Twitter or Instagram is, Arshad replied that he has no idea what those things meant. Brother of 17 siblings, he expressed his ecstasy on becoming famous in one day. Talking to Dunya News, he said that he is happy with his overnight popularity. Still, it isn’t enjoyable when people gather around him for pictures during working hours as he is supposed to work to earn a livelihood.
Arshad said that people had taken more than 150 pictures with him so far. Twitteratti has been abuzz with comments on Arshad’s good looks. “Hello Indians, this is a chai way from Pakistan mashallah,” said one post. ‘I present you with a chai walla (tea seller) in Pakistan who forgot that he should’ve been modeling instead,” said another.
“Meet the steamin’ hot ‘chai wall’ from Islamabad (Pakistan), who’s going viral as we speak,” went another post, with a picture of Arshad attired in blue and pouring out tea. “A chai way from Pakistan is now famous on Indian social media. This is truly aMan kee Sasha,” said one Twitter post.
Another Twitteratti, commenting on the current India-Pakistan tensions, said: “India and Pakistan are divided by terrorism and cricket but are united by hot chai wall. Funny but true.
Citing the fast growth of India’s e-commerce website Paytm, which provides services to 130 million people in India, a write-up in state-run China Daily said, “India is not just another developing country–it is the world’s fastest-growing economy.”
“A huge internet population, a rapid growth of mobile internet users, political stability, established institutions like the judiciary, a thriving start-up ecosystem, renowned IT expertise, and the promising market potential… all these factors have made India an attractive, almost irresistible proposition for Chinese investors,” the report said.
Apart from Ant Financial, China’s internet giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd have already invested in Indian tech companies; it said Network Posting.
Smaller players and even start-ups in China are rushing to India. They see the country as the next frontier in internet-based businesses and a promising market for replicating Chinese tech giants’ success stories.
While the Chinese investors look to flock to India to cash on the fast-growing e-commerce market, there are also anxieties among Chinese investors over growing calls for a boycott of Chinese goods in India following China’s blocking of India’s move to ban Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar at the UN and blocking India’s bid to become the member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG).
Chinese officials said China’s investment in India currently touched about $3 billion, which Indian officials said not much compared to the potential. Quoting a report from itjuzi.com, a website dedicated to data on tech investments, the report said India has emerged as one of the most popular destinations for Chinese tech investors, second only to the US.
In the first half of 2016, Chinese internet giants and venture capital firms invested more than 42.1 billion yuan ($6.26 billion) in 60 tech-related projects overseas, including 10 in India and 33 in the US. “India will be the next big internet market after China,” said Eric Shu, a senior partner with the Hangzhou-based venture capital firm InCapital.
“We believe many successful business models in China’s internet industry can be copied in India,” Shu said, adding that as China’s economic growth slows, Chinese investors are looking for opportunities abroad. Forrester Research Inc., a recent report, said metropolitan cities in India and China are progressive pioneers that lead the demand for products and experience innovation in the Asia-Pacific region. The Indian market is similar to that of China in many respects.
Li Tao, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Beijing-based Apus Group, which provides launchers, browsers, and other apps for mobile phones running on the Android operating system, said India’s mobile internet market is at a stage where China’s was three to five years ago.
“Unlike people in the US and China who gradually made the transition from using personal computers to access the internet to using mobile devices for the purpose, Indians do not need to go through the process. They can directly jump into the era of mobile internet,” he said.
Founded in 2014, Apus Group expects to have 80 million users in India by the year-end. The company set up a venture capital fund in late 2015 with its partners. With an initial investment of three billion rupees ($45 million), the fund focuses on investing in Indian mobile internet startups.
For investors such as Apus, India is unique because millions of Indians already use smartphones for online shopping, communications, banking, news, entertainment, ticketing, bill payments, education, so on, the report said.
The aggressive expansion of Chinese smartphone makers in India has been fuelling the trend. Chinese firms sell affordable handsets in India that are popular among millions of consumers, the report said.
The promising future aside, India’s poor finance infrastructure and the low per-capita income make it difficult to earn good returns on investment in the near term, said industry insiders.
“There are several business models for apps to make a profit. But Indian netizens are not ready to pay for services yet. For now, the only practical way for internet business in India to make money is to sell online advertisements,” Zhang Lei, CEO of YeeCall, a Beijing-based startup that offers an instant messaging app in India, said.PTI
