The Wired Enterprise
Digital supply chain

Fieldwork: e-Choupals empower rural consumers

This is one happy trend. It has rendered companies more efficient, enhanced the quality of their products in most cases, reduced end-user costs in some and, finally, enabled a legion of consultants to make money off it. It, of course, is the digital supply chain. Definitions first: some people define a supply chain as something that links a company's suppliers to it; others prefer a larger definition and to them the supply chain is something that links a company's suppliers, channel partners (read: dealers), even customers with it. As is evident from both definitions, all supply chains have two layers, an information one, and a physical one, with the physical flow of goods usually being in the opposite direction to the flow of information. The net facilitates the real time flow of information and with cost reduction being a popular theme across India Inc. all through the 1990s, companies large and small have adopted digital supply chains. And as ITC has shown with its e-choupals (there are 5,300 of them serving 3.2 million farmers), digital supply chains can engender creative business models. What started as an effort to provide real time information on the prices of agricultural commodities to farmers and do away with intermediaries, has grown into a phenomenon that facilitates the creation of an empowered and informed rural marketplace, one that the company can tap as it chooses.

-E. Kumar Sharma

Numbers game: It is definitely a bull market for online trading

Click To Trade
Online trading

Actually, BT's listing of durable dotcoms should give this away: there are three online brokerages on it, Indiabulls, icicidirect, and the SSKI-promoted Sharekhan. Each has had to hybridise the pure trading model, but the fact remains that between them, the three boast some 800,000 customers that prefer to do their trading online. "The market changes every moment and price discovery is an ongoing process," says Jaideep Arora, Director, Sharekhan. "That is the key reason for the success of online broking."

-Priya Srinivasan

Wired, That's Us
Intranets

Knowledge management systems, corporate policies, rules while entertaining people, queries related to hr policies, bulletin boards, listing of corporate events... phew! These, and just about anything else that can be of some use to employees can today be found on intranets (the internet, see, but it is a secured enclosure for the company alone) of companies across the country. Some organisations have gone a step forward and built intranets that span their vendors and dealers. Auto major Maruti, for instance, has one that connects 215 vendors and 350 dealers with the company (that's the digital supply chain bit all over again).Priya Srinivasan

No paperwork: Karnataka's Bhoomi project has consigned manual land registers to history

Rule-based
e-governance

There is a simple reason why India needs to go the e-governance way: despite a surfeit of laws and regulations, most of the country's administrative entities govern not on the basis of rules, but on the basis of exception; software (or code) is rules-based; and by adopting e-governance systems, governments across the country can become more efficient, less corrupt, and maybe actually achieve some of the things they are supposed to. Not surprisingly then, the states that have experimented with e-governance projects have found the returns (in terms of gains in efficiency and public acclaim) significant enough to persist with them, even launch new ones. Karnataka's Bhoomi project (computerisation of land records), initiated in 1999, went live in 2001, and, according to the state's it secretary, M.K. Shankaralinge Gowda, has "become self-sustaining and emerged a good revenue model". That means the Rs 5 farmers pay for a copy of the document is enough to meet all expenses associated with the project. The state has done away with manual land registers (some 176 Bhoomi kiosks serve the purpose). There are more success stories, such as Andhra Pradesh's e-seva, an over-the-counter facility for the payment of utility bills and 160 services of 12 government departments (260 centres in all: 214 centres in 117 municipalities across the state, and 46 in and around Hyderabad and Secunderabad). The significant thing about both Bhoomi and e-seva is that they have survived changes in government. Now, if e-governance can graduate from a random trend to an endemic one.

-E. Kumar Sharma

My Space
Blogs

It would be this writer's educated guess that there are a few thousand Indian blogs out there (that are maintained regularly; say, once a week). Bloggers in India are yet to achieve the muscle they have in the us-the 2004 Presidential election saw bloggers being invited, along with their counterparts from traditional media, for campaign events and Nick Denton, who runs several profitable theme blogs, including Wonkette (politics), Gizmodo (technology) and Fleshbot (pornography), was recently named among the most powerful people in the us media by Media magazine-but the micro-publishing revolution is here to stay. Well, if my editor junks this contribution, guess where it is going up?

-Kushan Mitra

Net-working: Most Indians access the net at cyber cafes

Every-net
Cyber cafes

First, the numbers: India has more than 200,000 cyber cafes; and more than 60 per cent of the country's 39 million net users access it from a cyber café. Most representatives of the genre are one-pc Mom & Pop stores with mere dial-up access. However, companies such as Sify and Reliance Infocomm boast nationwide chains, at least 10-15 PCs per outlet, and broadband access. In other parts of the world, cyber cafes are just another point of access; in India, they are often the only one and help bridge the digital divide. For the record, surfing rates are now as low as Rs 10 an hour.

-Venkatesha Babu

Mobile Warriors
Teleworking

No, this isn't about people working on the move. Rather, it is about the offshoring of services, something that the net (in one form) made possible. It started with lowly medical transcription, but has now taken on an entirely new meaning with business process outsourcing of high-end services such as equity research, patent filings, even legal work. And to think it all began with entrepreneurs that could rustle up a few hundred employees who could speak English, some computers, and adequate bandwidth.

-Sahad P.V.

Fat Pipes
Broadband

It was only in January 2005, just under 10 years after the beginning of the internet age, that true broadband (read: speeds of 256 kbps and higher, and at a price designed to increase usage) arrived in India. That was when state-owned telcos, BSNL and MTNL, launched their services; private telcos responded by slashing their own rates and between January and June 2005, the number of broadband subscribers soared nine times, from 50,000 to 450,000. With the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India putting out figures to show that over 60 per cent of new internet users in the April-June quarter signed up for broadband, not dial-up access, the trend is well on its way to becoming a phenomenon.

-Sahad P.V.

Ticket To Ride
Online ticketing and travel

Proof that travel and ticketing sites are at the vanguard of the Indian internet revolution comes from a report put out by the Internet and Online Association of India, a federation of internet companies, that shows that online ticketing accounted for 63 per cent of the Rs 570-crore worth of e-commerce transactions that India witnessed in 2004-05. That's a cool Rs 370 crore. With India's growing slew of low-cost airlines hawking tickets online, this segment will continue to drive e-commerce in the country, which is expected to touch Rs 2,300 crore in 2006-07.

-Sahad P.V.

Killer App
e-mail

To those born in the 1990s, even to those who got acquainted with the killer app in that decade, it is difficult to visualise life without e-mail. Today, barring Luddites and technophobes, everyone has an e-mail account and bulk of the traffic that traverses the net is believed to be e-mail. Strangely enough, if e-mail was the killer app of the 1990s, anti-spam technology may turn out to be that for this decade.
-Venkatesha Babu

Five That Failed

Cricket Sites
Despite India being cricket country and Indians being cricket-crazy, not too many cricket sites have done well (the exceptions are cricinfo.com and cricketnext.com). Why? Perhaps for the same reason sports magazines haven't done well in India. For the record, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) does not have an official website

Communities
This magazine has partnered, on occasion, with coolavenues.com, a community site for MBAs (PGDBMs included) that continues to tread the middle ground between surviving and thriving. Yet, most other attempts at building communities around vocations or anything else in India have failed. Then, similar attempts in the West have failed too.

Real Estate Portals
Another domain that witnessed an influx of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs offering everything from 360-degree virtual interfaces to easy financing options. Apart from a rare indiaproperties.com that continues to thrive, the others have largely gone belly up or remain pale imitations of the classified sections of newspapers.

B2C Commerce
The horizontals (think Indiainfo.com, Indya.com, 123India.com) wanted to sell everything from books to holidays. Easybuymusic wanted to sell digital music downloads; Jaldi wanted to aggregate demand and offer consumers hefty discounts;... surely, you get the picture? None worked. Then, Webvan didn't either in the US.

B2B Exchanges
For eight months, between April and December 2000, B2B exchanges held forth the promise of being the next big thing. Today, exchanges such as Essar's Clickforsteel, Tata and SAIL's MetalJunction, and Jindal's eSteelmart are simple auction sites, not exchanges. "There is no price discovery that happens on these portals; it is just vanilla auctions that take place, not even reverse auctions," says an executive at a steel portal.