New Delhi, Intensifying the protest against deep discounts and disruptive offers by e-commerce majors Amazon and Flipkart, traders on Friday staged a day long hunger strike in several parts of the country under the aegis of the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT).During the protests in about 500 cities across the country, traders also demanded government action against the e-commerce companies working in transport, logistics, travel, home buying, consumer durables and other segments, a statement from CAIT said."We want Indian e-commerce market free from all glitches, unhealthy and unfair business practices, and till government take any action our national agitation will continue" said Praveen Khandelwal, Secretary General of CAIT.Addressing the protesting traders at Jantar Mantar in the national capital both CAIT National President B.C. Bhartia and Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said that Amazon and Flipkart are now trying to build a narrative of being trader-friendly and are luring small traders to join their platforms, the statement said.The traders' body said that the online platforms are indulging in preferential seller system and more than 80 per cent of their sales are made by just their 10-15 preferred sellers.CAIT also criticised the government's move to partner with Amazon and Flipkart in the MSME segment."Both Bhartia and Khandelwal said that it is very unfortunate that MSME ministry announced earlier to partner with these companies who are flouting FDI policy of the government," it said.Earlier in the month, protesting the decision, CAIT had called upon Union MSME Minister Nitin Gadkari to reject any such proposed move and said that it would not accept any kind of "collusion" of the government with Amazon and Flipkart.CAIT said that it is a "deep rooted" conspiracy of Amazon and Flipkart to enter into crony capitalism under the garb of bringing foreign investment which is being used for cash burning in maintaining predatory pricing and deep discounting, controlling inventory, having preferential seller system and exclusivity of products which is against the mandate of the FDI policy.It had previously urged Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal to conduct an investigation into the "violation" of FDI norms and also whether there is any violation of Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).
By Sarah HalzackThe first year of the decade now drawing to a close — the following headline appeared above a modest 445-word article on a tech-industry website: “Instagram Launches With the Hope of Igniting Communication Through Images.”It’s an almost comically quaint description of exactly what the company has done over the past nine years. On its way to amassing more than a billion users, Instagram has become many things: a joyful storehouse of family photos, a sledgehammer for celebrity tabloid culture, a shadowy abyss of teen bullying. Oh, and it has also become the most powerful force in shaping commerce this side of Amazon.com.The smartphone app has notably served as a platform for new forms of consumer marketing. But its influence on spending is far more profound. Because everyone now lives their lives on camera, Instagram has played a crucial role in altering both the look and nature of products people buy and the physical spaces where they shop.Certain items were elevated to the must-have list this decade because they were shareable — that is, they photographed especially well or had a flair of whimsy that racked up the likes and comments. So the Ugly Christmas Sweater went from ironic joke to something Walmart Inc. had to stock in droves, while matching family pajamas invaded department stores.Product designers and merchants have gotten wise to this dynamic and have responded in kind. They brought shoppers pool floats shaped like swans and floppy sun hats with cursive kiss-offs like “Do Not Disturb.” They served up eye-catching rainbow bagels, Unicorn Frappuccinos and latte art. They scored with kids’ games such as Pie Face that were perfect for video snippets.“Bride Tribe” tank tops. Mermaid toast. “Live Laugh Love” wall art. It is doubtful any of these things would even exist if not for Instagram.In some cases, whole product categories have benefited from the photo-centric world that Instagram has created. The beauty business had several booming years this decade, powered by trends such as contouring and strobing that made women feel duck-face-ready. Sales of houseplants skyrocketed as Millennials outfitted their homes with fiddle-leaf figs that lent an artful flourish to photos.And then there are the stores themselves — if that’s still the correct term in the Instagram era. Retailers have created spaces that are alluring sets for photos, such as Tiffany & Co.’s addition of a robin’s-egg blue café to its Manhattan flagship and Canada Goose’s “cold room” sprinkled with real snow. Concepts like Museum of Ice Cream and Rosé Mansion aren’t so much stores as gallery-museum-commerce crossbreeds built on the back of Instagram.Meanwhile, restaurateurs have adapted the lighting in their dining rooms to be conducive to photos, knowing diners’ pictures are among their most powerful marketing tools. Splashy lettering, loud wallpaper, neon signs — these have become the default aesthetic of eateries looking to nab a spot in Instagram feeds.Restaurants are just one component of the so-called “experience economy,” a broader category of consumer spending that has been utterly upended by Instagram. The vacation-photo arms race has led to certain picturesque landmarks being choked by visitors and public lands being degraded. Hotels are also being forced to adapt. Industry giant Marriott International Inc., for example, debuted in 2014 a chain called the Moxy, where guests can opt to have their tiny rooms festooned with photo-friendly inflatable flamingos.Perhaps Instagram’s most peculiar commercial influence has been its role in creating entirely new spending occasions, particularly around life milestones. Maternity photo shoots have become commonplace; so have birth and newborn photo shoots. Same for “Trash the dress” and home-buying photo shoots. Some of these rituals started becoming trendy before Instagram’s rise, but it is the app that has cemented them as an ordinary thing to drop hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on.Relatedly, there now exists a weird species of consumer goods that no one needed before they revealed big news via a visual medium. Search Etsy for “pregnancy announcement props,” and you’ll find thousands of items: chalkboard-style signs, pacifiers and dog outfits emblazoned with baby announcements. You’ll find similar props to herald engagements, gender reveals and birthdays by photo.All of this is before contemplating what an essential tool Instagram has become for brand advertising. So-called influencers — a class that includes both Hollywood actresses and suburban moms with fewer than 10,000 followers — have perfected the art of hawking everything from fashion to protein drinks to tampons to credit-card rewards programs to their audiences in exchange for fees or free gear.In a $600 million testament to Instagram’s power as a marketing platform, beauty industry giant Coty Inc. took a majority stake this year in Kylie Cosmetics, the makeup brand that Kardashian clan member Kylie Jenner had made a hot seller largely thanks to clever promotion on the app. Fast-growing digital upstarts such as Fashion Nova and Revolve Clothing provide additional powerful examples of Instagram’s ability to put a brand on the map.Instagram’s impact on shopping in the 2010s isn’t as easily quantified as that of Amazon. The online retailer’s transformative role can be seen in its estimated 38% share of the U.S. e-commerce market, a market value that briefly touched $1 trillion and CEO Jeff Bezos’s No. 1 or No. 2 spot on Bloomberg’s Billionaire’s Index.What Instagram did is change consumer culture. It turned shoppers into a performative swarm of shutterbugs presenting Clarendon-filtered (or maybe Juno-filtered?) versions of themselves and their surroundings to their followers. It changed not only how things are bought and sold, but why. When period-piece movies are someday made about the 2010s, the aesthetics used to evoke this decade— all-white kitchens, neon-colored foods, major sleeves — will be the ones that sparkled in Instagram’s onscreen world. Real life never looked quite so glossy.
New Delhi: E-commerce platform ShopClues narrowed its losses to Rs 68.58 crore in the year ended March 2019 compared to the previous financial year. The company, which is registered as Clues Network, had registered a loss of Rs 208.14 crore in 2017-18, according to documents sourced by business intelligence platform Tofler.ShopClues' revenue from operations also declined 24.7 per cent to Rs 204.07 crore in 2018-19 from Rs 271.2 crore in 2017-18, it added.Its total revenue fell 23.3 per cent to Rs 209.46 crore in 2018-19 from Rs 273.30 crore in the previous financial year.When contacted, ShopClues co-founder and CEO Sanjay Sethi said that in 2018-19, the focus was clearly on reducing losses."With revenues remaining relatively flat for us, we have been able to reduce the losses by 67 per cent. Following the merger with Qoo10, we strongly feel that ShopClues, with our differentiated position as a value-for-money marketplace and our thriving ecosystem of more than 7 lakh small and medium merchants, will now have access to global markets via their strong presence in Southeast Asia," he added.In October, ShopClues had announced inking an all-stock deal with Qoo10 to merge operations with the Singapore-based firm.The collaboration, it had said, would bring "new strategic opportunities for both companies as it opens up cross-border opportunities for consumers and sellers across Asia". The terms of the deal were not disclosed.Qoo10 is an e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia that serves small and medium enterprises through its localised online marketplaces in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China and Hong Kong.
Amazon Inc, the world’s largest online retailer, is being known these days as more of a technology company, and rightly so.Technology is at the core of whatever Amazon does — from algorithms that forecast demand and place orders from brands, and robots that sort and pack items in warehouses to drones that will soon drop packages off at homes.At its new Go Stores, for instance, advances in computer vision have made it possible to identify the people walking in and what products they pick up, helping add them to their online shopping carts.Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, is always pulling new rabbits out of his hat, like next-day or same-day shipping and cashier-less stores. Besides, there is Blue Origin, the aerospace company privately owned by Bezos, which is on a mission to make spaceflight possible for everyone.Be that as it may, a lot more disruption aimed at reaching the common man is on the anvil.The most far-reaching and impactful technologies being developed today are for Amazon’s own use, but some others have the potential to disrupt every sector.The technology marvels that Amazon Web Services — the largest profit driving unit in Bezos’ stable — is working on could jolt several industries, including in India, in the same way that Amazon once disrupted retail. “In retail, while things like the size of the catalogue, advertising and other stuff might play a role in success, at Amazon, I think success is largely technology driven,” said Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels.The ecommerce giant is using advances in technology to disrupt several sectors outside of retail though — medicine, banking, logistics, robotics, agriculture and much more. Interestingly, some of that work is happening in India.Initially, the thinking was around allowing enterprises in these sectors to grow by using its cloud storage and computing capabilities.Now, Amazon’s reach has become more nuanced and it has moved up the value chain. For example, no longer is Amazon offering banks a place to securely store information, it is going beyond by offering tools to detect fraud, making it unnecessary for the lenders to build expensive data science teams in-house.It is a similar story in other industries, made possible due to the massive amounts of data that Amazon collects and processes.“We give people the software capability, so they no longer need to worry about that side of things. Most of our services are machine learning under the covers (and) that’s possible mostly because there’s so much data available for us to do that,” Vogels said.Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
Amazon is moving up the value chain in offering services backed by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to automate repetitive tasks done by human beings. Enterprise customers will simply be able to buy into these services with minimal customisation and without a large data science and artificial intelligence team. In December, AWS launched its Fraud Detector service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent activity online, such as payment fraud and creation of fake accounts. Even large banks in India have struggled to put together teams to build machine learning models for fraud detection, but with such a service they can train their systems easily. Code Guru is another service that uses Machine Learning to do code reviews and spit out application performance recommendations, giving specific recommendations to fix code. Today, this is largely done manually, with several non-technology companies struggling to build great software for themselves due to bad code. Transcribe Medical is a service that uses Amazon’s voice technology to create accurate transcriptions from medical consultations between patients and physicians. Medical transcription as a service is a big industry in India, and India’s IT service giants hire thousands to review code. These services are expected to replace mundane manual tasks, freeing up resources for sophisticated tasks, and could lead to disruption in several sectors in the country.Medicine
Hospitals in the United States have to save imaging reports for years. Earlier these were stored on tapes, since doing so digitally cost millions of dollars. The advent of cheaper cloud storage meant new scans could be saved digitally, making them accessible to doctors on demand. Now, doctors could refer to a patient’s earlier CT scan and compare that with the new one to diagnose an ailment, said Shez Partovi, worldwide lead for healthcare, life sciences, genomics, medical devices and agri-tech at Amazon. The power of cloud and AWS’ own capabilities in medical technology have only expanded since. Healthcare and life sciences form rapidly scaling units of AWS, which is building a suite of tools that allow breakthroughs in medicine — from hospitals using the tools to do process modelling or operational forecasting, refining the selection of candidate drugs for trial or delivering diagnoses through computer imaging. Developed markets will be the first to adopt such technologies, but AWS is seeing demand surge from the developing world, including India. “Not everyone is within a mile of a radiologist or physician, so diagnostics through AI could solve for that. Further, there’s a lack of highly trained people, but when all you have to do is take an image, it requires a lot less training,” said Partovi.Space
Bezos, in his private capacity, is now looking to connect remote regions with high-speed broadband. He is building a network of over 3,000 satellites through “Project Kuiper”, which will compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Airbusbacked OneWeb. The bigger bet is in outer space though. His rocket company Blue Origin has already done commercial payloads on New Shepard, the reusable rocket that competes with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The capsule atop the New Shepard can carry six passengers, which Bezos looks to capitalise on for space tourism, a commercial opportunity most private space agencies are looking at. It is also building a reusable rocket - Glenn, named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth — which can carry payloads of as much as 45 tonnes in low earth orbit. Bezos’ aim, however, is to land on the Moon. His Blue Moon lander can deliver large infrastructure payloads with high accuracy to pre-position systems for future missions. The larger variant of Blue Moon has been designed to land a vehicle that will allow the United States to return to the Moon by 2024.Robotics
Amazon’s take on robotics is grounds-up. The company has been part of an opensource network that is developing ROS 2 or Robot Operating System 2, which will be commercial-grade, secure, hardened and peer reviewed in order to make it easier for developers to build robots. “There is an incredible amount of promise and potential in robotics, but if you look at what a robot developer has to do to get things up and running, it’s an incredible amount of work,” said Roger Barga, general manager, AWS Robotics and Autonomous Services, at Amazon Web Services. Apart from building the software that robots will run on, AWS is also making tools that will help developers simulate robots virtually before deploying them on the ground, gather data to run analytics on the cloud and even manage a fleet of robots. While AWS will largely build tools for developers, as capabilities such as autonomous navigation become commonplace, the company could look to build them in-house and offer them as a service to robot developers, Barga said. With the advent of 5G technology, more of the processing capabilities of robots will be offloaded to the cloud, making them smarter and giving them real-time analytics capabilities to do a better job. For India, robot builders will be able to get into the business far more easily, having all the tools on access, overcoming the barrier of a lack of fundamental research in robotics.Enterprise Technology
AWS might be a behemoth in the cloud computing space, but cloud still makes up just 3% of all IT in the world. The rest remains on-premise. While a lot will migrate to the cloud, some will not. In order to get into the action in the on-premise market, Amazon has innovated on services that run on a customer’s data centre, offering capabilities as if the data is stored on the cloud.With Outposts, which was announced last month, AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools will be able to run on a customer’s data centre. Essentially, this will allow enterprises to run services on data housed within their own data centres, just like how they would if it had been stored on AWS. The other big problem that AWS is looking to solve is not having its own data centres close enough to customers who require extremely low-latency computing. For this, the company has introduced a new service called Local Zones, where it deploys own hardware closer to a large population, industry, and IT centre where no AWS Region exists today. Both these new services from AWS could be valuable in India given the lower reach of cloud computing among enterprises as well as stricter data localisation requirements.
