While returning from school the 12 year old ran towards the 9 year old rag picker and gave him all his chocolates. On asking why he said, cause its your day too.
~ Prabina Pani
Author: Prabina Pani
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While returning from school
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She received the first prize
“She received the first prize in the race, but what made her famous that day was the red stain on her shorts.”
~ Prabina Pani -
Twitter : The 140 Characters Story
When I was a kid a “tweet”meant birds chirping, but now not only has the meaning changed considerably, also it can have a superlative impact on social workers and their“followers”. Twitter is not just helping in sharing news through status updates, it’s also creating news.
Before the advent of Twitter, little did people knew about reading blogs and those who did never heeded them much for information but regarded them just for mere entertainment. In a world where personal opinions and local news never reached to the ears of the masses, twitter formed its own house of media where news flew around the world in a matter of few tweets and re-tweets. Be it important news like Chennai Floods or be it the colour of the dress, twitter has sung them all to our ears.
So how was this not more than 140 characters status update website created?
For the neophytes, twitter is not the brain-child of a single man. Evan Williams is not the sole founder of twitter, as reported earlier by many news channels, but he is surely an imperative part of the team. Later on the channels added the names of other founders yet leaving the name of one of the key founders unsung.
Ex-googler Evan Williams had a start-up called Odeo. It was going to be a podcasting platform.
Odeo’s Expansion was halted when Apple released iTunes podcasting. It was then when Evan, Biz Stone (another ex-googler) and Jack Dorsey (an Odeo employee) were forced to reinvent the whole thing. The company started holding official "hackathons" where employees would spend a whole day working on projects. Rebooting the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where they broke up into teams to talk about their best ideas. Jack first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. As described by Dom Sagolla, one of the makers, “We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.”
One day in February 2006, Glass, Dorsey, and a German contract developer Florian Weber, presented Jack's idea to the rest of the company. It was a dispatch service that connects a person to his/her friends through text messages on cell phone. Everybody in the group got the idea instantly and was interested in making it. They called it Twttr.
Later Noah Glass, the man behind making of Odeo, suggested the name Twitter.
Evan was cynical about twitter at that time but he put Glass in charge to build a version 0.1.The rest of the company focused on maintaining Odeo.com, so that if this new thing flopped they’d have something to fall back upon.Everyone among the early members agrees that original hunch for Twitter sprang from Jack Dorsey's mind. But it was predominantly Noah who plunged for the project to be started.
“There was a moment when I was sitting with Jack and I said, 'Oh, I do see how this could really come together to make something really compelling.' We were sitting on Mission St. in the car in the rain. We were going out and I was dropping him off and having this conversation. It all fit together for me.”, says McClure, Founder of 500StartUps and Ex-Twitter Employee.
The common SMS carrier limit then was 160, so any update longer than that would split into another message. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. Thus they settled on 140characters, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message.
In August 2006, a small earthquake shook San Francisco and word quickly spread through Twitter — an early 'ah-ha!' moment for users and company-watchers alike. By that fall, Twitter had thousands of users.
Odeo's investors didn't like Twitter, so Evan did them a huge favour by buying back all their stock and making them whole. Twitter was then 2 months old and had only 5000 users but Evan by then had the vision that Twitter had a great chance to become the next big thing.
Five years later, assets of the company the original Odeo investors sold for approximately $5 million are now worth at least 1000x more: $5 billion.When the early investors were asked of how they felt after hearing about the success of the company, most of them believe that Williams gave them a shady deal.A few wish that Williams had been more upfront about what he was planning to do next, as they would have loved to re-invest in Twitter.
After buying OdeoEvan surprisingly changed its name to Obvious Corp.What he did next was shocking to all. He fired Noah Glass, one of the key founders without whom Twitter would’ve faintly existed today. Why you ask? The most common answer heard is that the two had clashing personalities. Everyone in the company says so. Basically: Glass is loud and Williams is quiet.
Glass says the whole mess left him feeling "betrayed."
"I felt betrayed by my friends, by my company, by these people around me I trusted and that I had worked hard to create something with. I was a little shell-shocked. I was like, 'Wait…what's the value in building these relationships if this is the result?' So I spent a lot of time by myself. And working on things alone."
The company came through many ups and downs. Not only there were struggles in inventing a completely new idea but also there were in-house betrayals and shocks. Despite such a mess twitter made it through. In February of 2007 Jack wrote something which inspired everyone on board: “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.“ In the same year twitter won an award in the Blog category at SxSW interactive conference in Austin, Texas.
Twitter in the year 2011 was awarded the most used site. Today it has more than 1 billion users and a crap load of tweets per day. The story behind the internet giant is not only inspiring but also eye opening.
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SpaceX : A Future Vision For Mankind
Nelson Mandela once said,
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Elon Musk did prove it right. Elon didn’t just want to become an entrepreneur, he wanted to radically change the world for a better future.
Elon Musk, the name behind PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, is no certified space scientist but a person with a strong mind and a brave heart.
He realized that he can make a global change by focusing on areas like sustainable energy, the Internet and making life multi-planetary
In 1995, Musk enrolled in the prestigious Stanford University in the field of applied physics and material science.
But within no less than 2 days of the college, he left the graduate programme with brother Kimbal to create his first IT Company Zip2.
The company was an online city guide that provided content to online newspapers which was a new thing in the Internet. After residing in the rented office and using locker rooms of local stadium for shower for months, Musk’s Zip2 had won contracts with major players in the industry, including The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. But the young entrepreneur had bigger dreams. So, in 1999 he sold his company to Compaq and earned back a fortune of $22m.
Later in that year Musk started to work on electronic payment systems. He co-founded X.com, an online banking company using money from the sale of Zip2. In March, 2001 X.com merged with rival company Confinity to develop the first digital wallet. Later on they renamed the company as PayPal. In 2002 E-bay bought the online payment portal for $1.5b and Musk receiving a share of $180m which was enough to raise funds for his future prospects.
Musk had already started planning about his space exploration technologies corporation (SpaceX) at the turn of the century.
He was fascinated by the idea of colonizing mars by building up a greenhouse on the foreign soil which in the future could have become a basis for a self-sustaining ecosystem.
But the transportation costs were touching skies. So now the trick was not how to get to the orbit, but how to do it in an economically viable way.
Musk asked his friend Jim Cantrell, an aerospace consultant, to help him out. They travelled around the world to find the rockets needed. While they travelled, Elon borrowed Jim’s books on rocket technology.
"He'd been borrowing all my college textbooks on rocketry and propulsion. You know, whenever anybody asks Elon how he learned to build rockets, he says, 'I read books.' Well, it's true.", said Jim in an interview.
NASA dropped its hands as they believed there was no cheaper way to build this ride. So Musk had to do it using off the shelf technology by taking the old developed stuff of NASA and streamlining it.
On March 2006, Elon Musk invested $100m in SpaceX. He calculated that the cost price of all the parts required for constructing a launch vehicle were only 2% of the launch vehicle price in the United States. In 2006-2008, the first 3 flight attempts of Falcon 1 failed. On September,2008 the 4th mission had finally succeeded in reaching the orbit. The Falcon 1 made it to the history books in 2009 as the first privately funded, liquid-fuelled rocket to put a satellite into Earth orbit. NASA was impressed by these achievements and signed a $1.6 billion contract.
“The one major important distinction that sets him apart is his inability to consider failure.” Said a co-founder. Indeed he outsmarted most of us by just being determined towards his goal.
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Nirma : The ‘sabki pasand’ venture
What is the first thing which comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘NIRMA’ somewhere? Nirma Soaps, detergents, even university, or probably it’s decades old catchy detergent song ‘Sabki pasand Nirma’. Evidently the song as well as the brand has become ‘sabki pasand’ with time but have you ever wondered who would be the man behind these products and institutions. Must’ve been a professional degree holder in marketing or management from one of the prestigious Institute of the country, right? Wrong!
Dr. Karsanbhai Khodidas Patel is the founder of the present Rs. 3550 crore Nirma group with main activities in detergents, soaps, cosmetics, and salt.
Though Karsanbhai Patel does not have a professional degree in marketing, yet he proved that a professional marketer does not need a formal degree in marketing to be successful!
If marketing is to find the gaps and fill them, Karsanbhai Patel just hit the bull’s-eye.
Karsanbhai Khodidas Patel is a benefitting example of a self-made man. Coming from a humble farmer family, he understood the need of the masses to serve a segment that was neglected but at the same time highly profitable. He established his firm in the lower income segment of the detergent market, gradually overtaking many heavyweights and multinationals, to emerge as a winner. Literally, he made money by washing others’ dirty linens.
He is the founder of powerful brand NIRMA which he aptly positioned using 4 Ps of marketing, viz. Product, price, place and promotion, to his advantage.
Karsanbhai Khodidas was born in 1945, in Ruppur village in north Gujarat in a family of farmers. He graduated in Chemistry at the age of 21. In 1969, Karsanbhai Patel, a chemist at the Gujarat Government's Department of Mining and Geology manufactured phosphate free Synthetic Detergent Powder Nirma (named after his daughter Nirupama), and started selling it locally. Karsanbhai Patel dedicated his after office hours for manufacturing his detergent powder in the backyard of his house and then carried out door to door selling on his bicycle while going to his work place, which was 17km from his home. . He gave a money back guarantee with every pack that was sold. Karsanbhai Patel managed to offer his detergent powder for Rs. 3 per kg when the cheapest detergent at that time was Rs.13 per kg and so he was able to successfully target the middle and lower middle income segment. It gave the bigger established brands a run for their money and soon occupied the top market share. To add to all this, Nirma was made of an innovative formulation, which global detergent giants were later on compelled to emulate, it was phosphate free and hence environment friendly, and the process of manufacturing was labour intensive, which offered large scale employment.
Nirma became a huge success and all this was a result of Karsanbhai’s entrepreneurial skills. Within a short span, Nirma had completely rewritten the rules of the game, by offering good quality products at an unbeatably low price.
Nirma's success was attributed to its focus on cost effectiveness. From the very beginning, Patel had focussed on selling high-value products at the lowest possible price. The company endeavoured to keep improving quality while cutting costs.
Karsanbhai jagged up one success after another. After establishing its leadership in economy-priced detergents, Nirma foray into the premium segment, launching toilet soaps Nirma bath and Nirma beauty soap, and premium detergent Super Nirma detergent. Overall Nirma has a 20% market share in soap cakes and about 35% in detergents. Nirma also has successful operations in neighbouring countries.
As far as corporate social responsibility (CSR) is concerned, Nirma has made some good efforts by starting Nirma Education & Research Foundation (NERF) in the year 1994 for the purpose of running various educational institutes. In 1995, Karsanbhai started the Nirma Institute of Technology in Ahmedabad, which grew into a leading engineering college in Gujarat. Nirma has also set up Nirma labs, which prepares aspiring entrepreneurs to effectively face the different business challenges. Nirma also runs Nirma Memorial Trust, Nirma Foundation and Chanasma Ruppur Gram Vikas Trust as a part of their effort as a socially responsible corporate citizen. It also owns Nirma University.
Challenging established multinationals needs extreme courage and to win in the long run needs marketing foresight. Karsanbhai Khodidas Patel, once a government servant with the knowledge and experience as a chemist offered a good product and was aggressive in marketing strategy. He made the multinationals to follow Nirma and introduce substitutes such as Wheel. In this respect, the Nirma case can be compared to those of Ford, Apple, Sony, and Honda, all one-of-a-kind entrepreneurs who built their empire on gut feeling rather than following the classical patterns taught in business schools. This is a genuine road from rags-to-riches one would like to follow.
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Dilafrose Qazi : A Ray Of Hope In The War Torn Kashmir
Right to Education Act (RTE) has been enacted by the Parliament of India since 4th August, 2009 which describes the modalities of the importance of free and compulsory education for children. But there are places where instead of getting free education, you may’ve to pay something way more precious than money i.e., your life. Areas of Jammu and Kashmir fall under such an inferno.
Despite such struggles there is a lady in the state who was brave enough to provide quality education to children and improved the conditions of women in the abode of dead. Dilafrose Qazi started part-time courses for women, and eventually set up the SSM College of Engineering, the first private engineering college in all of Kashmir.
“My biggest achievement has been to get people to embrace, as well as pursue education. I don’t believe in giving alms.” – Dilafrose Qazi
Dilafrose’s life is a heart sinking piece of inspiration for the whole world. This woman persisted single-handedly trying to help women and children in the conflict-ridden state of Jammu and Kashmir, despite lack of security from the militants, rage of religious fanatics and harsh weather conditions.
“My biggest achievement has been to get people to embrace, as well as pursue education. I don’t believe in giving alms.” – Dilafrose Qazi
Unable to land into a government job, she decided to start her own venture. From her rented house in Rajbagh area of Srinagar, she started her journey with vocational courses for women in 1988. She taught girls cutting, cooking, stitching and shorthand.
Dilafrose Qazi was born in Baramulla in the Kashmir Valley. Her family was poorly educated and no one ever had a proper schooling experience at the first place. Dilafrose’s father made leather garments, and her mother wove pashmina shawls. But her mother was determined to nurture her children with a proper education and send her children to a free government school. Qazi completed her Master’s in Education as well as got a degree in Law from the Kashmir University. Unable to land into a government job, she decided to start her own venture. From her rented house in Rajbagh area of Srinagar, she started her journey with vocational courses for women in 1988. She taught girls cutting, cooking, stitching and shorthand. That was also the year she got married. Her venture picked up, but so did the spleen of the militants and religious zealots. She had to pay if she wanted to grow further and since Dilafrose had no other source of income, she had to shell out ransom to keep her classes going. Even her family was not spared; her refusal to the diktats of her antagonists led to the kidnapping of her father, brothers and husband. After her family members were kidnapped, she was told that if she didn’t give up her cause, that anyone who dared to unlock the college doors would be killed. But still she did not give up.
She relocated to a safer place and procured a small land in the backward Baramullah district. Still there were agitated religious leaders who would impede her from educating women. But she was resolute enough of her goal.
Qazi even opened a sister college in Haryana for Kashmiris, helping ensure that the next generation would have sources of livelihood. She was also nominated alongside 90 other brave women from India for 1000 women for Nobel Peace Prize.
“There was no question of surrendering before anyone with vested interest. Instead of entering into a war of words, I opened a free school for the local children and made people, especially those who opposed me, to realise the importance of educating women” she says. That small school today stands to be a hefty engineering college.
Qazi continues to set examples for the women, as well as the men of her community. In pursuit of this goal, she has established schools for girls, an engineering and technology college as well as embroidery classes for women, camps for the medical and psychological treatment of women battered by the daily violence going around them, a dairy farm for rape victims, and rehabilitation programmes for militancy-hit families. Qazi even opened a sister college in Haryana for Kashmiris, helping ensure that the next generation would have sources of livelihood. She was also nominated alongside 90 other brave women from India for 1000 women for Nobel Peace Prize.
Qazi believes that to provide education is the best weapon to fight any evil. From fighting against militants to fighting against her own people, losing her entire family and staking her own life every single second, Dilafrose Qazi has set an outrage among the natives of Jammu and Kashmir to raise their voices against the orthodox and fight for their basic human rights.
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How Flipkart changed the face of e-Commerce in India?
Shopping in India has changed a lot over the years and people are shopping online like never before. One of the key reasons for making online shopping so reliable & convenient in India is the emergence of e-commerce giant Flipkart. The mega online shopping store was introduced to the industry 8 years ago and online shopping has revolutionised the e-commerce and instilled faith in great customer service since then. Flipkart is now arguably the country’s largest and most exciting e-commerce company.
Success stories around the world always follow the roads rarely taken by any and have struggle around and strong determination at the heart of the tale. Flipkart is no exception.
They quit their jobs at Amazon, Bangalore, pooled together 4 lakhs from their savings and headed out to chase their dream. Today Flipkart generates over 1.5 crore of deals per day.
Rewinding 8 years from now, working out of a two-bedroom apartment in the city’s upscale Koramangala suburb, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal were just another couple of geeks nurturing their own big idea. Both the IITians had the idea to launch an online bookstore tailored to unique needs of Indian customer. They quit their jobs at Amazon, Bangalore, pooled together 4 lakhs from their savings and headed out to chase their dream. Today Flipkart generates over 1.5 crore of deals per day.
”In order to make sure that our targeting was right, we would give bookmarks to only those who were coming out with books in hands; the people who have made purchases.”
“In the beginning it was a two-man show. We did everything ourselves” says Sachin Bansal. Binny and he spent the second half of 2007 writing code for the site, picking up books from local book shops, dealing with customers’ queries and what not. Instead of blowing money on online and printed advertisements, they used to stand outside Gangaram Book stores on Church Street and hand over Flipkart bookmarks and pamphlets to the people coming out of the shop. Sachin had said in an interview, ”In order to make sure that our targeting was right, we would give bookmarks to only those who were coming out with books in hands; the people who have made purchases.” Despite many difficulties in the initial stages of getting the book vendors to tie up and permissions for the credit card payment gateway, the company later expanded and started selling electronic goods and lifestyle products.
From previous experience in Amazon and studying current e-commerce customer behaviour they observed some loopholes in the implementation of their big idea and tried to fix them. They observed that not just companies were unable to satisfy the customers due to delayed deliveries, also the cost to customer was increasing. Moreover, Indian consumers may be shopping more online, but the vast majority still prefers to touch and feel a product before paying for it.
Innovators Sachin and Binny came up with the concept of ‘Cash on Delivery’ and payment by card on delivery. This was done to soothe the grievances of all those souls who had given up on online shopping owing to bad shopping experiences. People just couldn't trust the online services. But with COD, they started to put their faith into it. What adds to the customer experience is the option to return if a customer does not like a product. If not for anything, Sachin and Binny Bansal can make it to the history books for this alone.
Another problem was the supply chain system. If the goods are not delivered on time then it results in decrement of customer count by a large margin. This problem was tackled by launching their own supply chain management system. The company can thus ensure that customers receive their purchases within the promised time on paying no extra money. It also helps streamline payments.
Flipkart was the most ridiculous thing he had ever done.
Some other major challenges faced by the founders was to get tie-ups with major book-vendors and to get approval for the credit card payment gateway. Astonishingly today, Flipkart has almost each and every book vendor/publisher on board and even its own payment gateway, Payzippy.
Sachin would say, Flipkart was the most ridiculous thing he had ever done. With a small capital of 4 lakhs rupees, their business idea of online book store has revolutionised business across India – a society not very popular for books. The company was set to raise funds of around 5000 crore in the year 2015 which is huge for a 7 year old company. Flipkart has acquired a stature comparable to the major players like P&G and Tata Global Beverages.
From handing bookmarks to handling a multi-billion dollar company, Flipkart's journey is no less than the saga of a typical Bollywood film having all those moments of a crisis, nail-biting finish, race against time and a victorious finale. Setting all the odds aside Flipkart has efficiently made it through the Indian e-commerce industry and inspired many young entrepreneurs to start working on their dreams.