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WHAT HOT Come Together, Right Now! The only two survivors left in the Indian online auction market embrace each other in a bid to stave off the tough times. The new baazee begins. By Roshni Jayakar When the going gets tough, the tough get together. Two of the survivors in the online auctions market have come together in an all stock transaction. Baazee.com, arguably the largest online auction site in the Indian virtual space, has acquired Bidor buyindia.com, its strongest competitor so far. Set up in 2000 by two Harvard Business School grads, Avnish Bajaj and Suvir Sujan, working then for Goldman Sachs and Boston Consultancy Group respectively, Baazee has survived through the crash and created a platform for the sale of goods and services numbering over 300,000. Its product range spans a gamut of categories from arts and antiques to travel in a total of 19 categories.
The deal will entail acquisition of registered user base, website, brand name and trademark by Baazee.com. Says Niren Shah, CFO, Baazee.com: ''Online models are like a vicious cycle. When you are creating a marketplace for consumers to transact, when more buyers join to trade, there will be more sellers and the market place becomes more liquid as more consumers come to the site to transact.'' Consider some of the figures. Last quarter, the transactions on Baazee.com jumped by 200 per cent on a month-on-month basis. In October alone, about 20,000 transactions were completed. As against this Bidorbuyindia.com had about 4,000 transactions to boast about. Observers note the acquisition will help Baazee in terms of savings in revenue, costs, and capital expenditure. There will be marketing synergies as both the companies go in for alliances with online partners or media partners. Moreover, online auctions are technology intensive. With Baazee.com Inc, the parent of Baazee India, acquiring the auctions technology developed by Bidorbuy.com on a co-ownership basis, Baazee.com will have an edge in terms of technology. Also, says Shah, ''We could get into retailing that technology on asp basis.'' Avnish Bajaj, obviously, is not restraining himself to survival talk: ''It's important to recognise when it's the right time to consolidate. When we started off there were 12 auction sites. Today there are just two. Now we will consolidate and enter the next level.'' Good confidence that. The
Hope Show "Those who have eaten well today give
others the hope of a better tomorrow."
Predictably, the surest voice came from the cords of Bill Gates, Microsoft's 'Chief Software Architect', fresh from the now-fading monopoly controversy. His take was that the best years of the tech boom-what he kept calling the ''digital decade''-were yet to come. As proof of the techno-joys that were lying ahead, Gates unveiled 10 companies' prototypes of Tablet PC's. These new machines, running a special version of Windows XP, cost as much as a laptop. And most of the models come with a notable absence of keyboards. ''Within five years, I predict it will be the most popular form of pc sold in America,'' Gates roared in line with his habit. At Sony's presentation, Kunitake Ando, the company's President and coo, moved forward the Sony tradition of putting the future ahead of the present. To the dismay of his audience, Ando, received a live video feed on a Dick Tracy-like watch-which he then transferred to a desktop pc just by flicking his wrist near the screen. An assistant used the same close-proximity gesture to transfer photos from a laptop onto his Clie palmtop. Jeff Hawkins, chief of Handspring and the creator of the PalmPilot, added some spice to the show by playing Scott McNealy. He came down heavily on the Microsoft predictions and dismissed the Pocket pc palmtops as a flash in the pan, pointing out that the masses don't exactly long to do spreadsheets and Word documents on a three-inch screen. And didn't he dole out his own share of hope? Hawkins said that the cost of mobile-phone service will eventually drop almost to nothing, since most of the infrastructure needed was already in. The real challenge, he predicted, will be making all of this free, ubiquitous access to the airwaves secure. So far, malicious hackers haven't entered the mobile-phone realm, he said, but they will-and none of the existing phone operating systems are ready for them. Well, as one delegate quipped later, hackers these days pose the only threat that comes with hope. Meet you next year. 1 2 |
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Well, when
hunger seems to be the order of the day, all they can offer is hope, hope,
and hope, in that order. The Comdex Technology Trade Show that was
underway in Las Vegas last fortnight was a spatial manifestation of this
murky reality. Pundits, for a change, kept to themselves... entrepreneurs
stuttered with promises of a wired world that is well, only just round the
corner, as near as it was last year... and thankfully, the public didn't
had much to be skeptical about. The new economy was betraying signs of
premature senility.