Author: manu prasad

  • Taxiforsure.com

    Taxiforsure.com, an aggregator of taxis and car rentals, aims to ensure that commuters find a cab easily with transparent fares. In conversation with co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna. ….

    [scribd id=115919078 key=key-19enezho84p7ou76ln3m mode=scroll]

  • Interviewed on Lighthouse Insights

    It’s a bit scratchy, courtesy a really bad broadband connection, but poor Prasant has done the best with the material he had been given. 🙂 The chat was on Myntra’s social media strategy and how it manifests on various platforms. In addition to the more visible Facebook, and Twitter , it also covers our experiments on Pinterest, YouTube and even Foursquare. Most importantly, it covers one of the pillars of our social media strategy – customer care using Get Satisfaction. And finally, I gave a few thoughts on social commerce as well. Yes, I was asked for it. :p

    Read more at Lighthouse Insights.

  • clip2Box

    Wisdomleaf’s clip2box is an app for Box users that helps users ‘clip’ text images and video on to the cloud.  In conversation with founder Anupama Parthasarathy

     
    [scribd id=115190706 key=key-114lyotvb7i7gzmie2ch mode=scroll]

  • A new era of work

    Sometime back, I had written about institutional realignment – on how the internet will slowly eliminate the middlemen across industries and disrupt every institution that we have built thus far – political, societal, economical, professional, cultural, health and so on. This would have massive impact on our sense of identity and how we live as a society.

    A couple of weeks back, I read this interesting post at Pando Daily titled “Are we becoming a world without big companies?” The post quoted AngelList founder Naval Ravikant “the world would be increasingly made up of very small startups interacting with each other through APIs. No big corporations.” The corporation, at this point in time, plays a lot of middlemen roles – from our sense of identity to global relations – and continuing from my earlier thought, I think the internet will disrupt this one too.

    Which then makes one think of the workforce currently employed in the corporations – that’s most of us. 🙂 From 3D printing which is poised to disrupt the already shaky manufacturing industry and the not-so-shaky distribution systems to singularity, which will have major implications on our health, education and employment, there are macro changes that will affect us. Even the best minds would not have a definite answer on what/ where the jobs of the future would be. As Ray Kurzweil has stated in this interesting interview, “People couldn’t answer that question in 1800 or 1900 either. ” (when asked about the scene in 2000)

    It then brings me to something I believe will be the key to survive and flourish in the coming age – the willingness and ability to live with uncertainty. In this excellent read in the WSJ titled “Learning to Love Volatility“, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that rather than trying to predict black swan events, we should be building institutions that are not fragile and can withstand and even benefit from disorder and unexpected events. Though an institution is the protagonist here, I think there are lessons for individuals too.

    In a way, humans could be considered open APIs that big corporations and governments used to meet their ends, it would be interesting to see a future that reverses this. 🙂

    until next time, be the change….

  • The story of #bachpanstyle

    Myntra’s twitter accounthit a couple of milestones last week. For starters, it overtook me in terms of number of followers – not that I am way up on the charts or hugely active on twitter these days, but it’s good to handle a brand that has more followers than I do, especially when it has more than quadrupled in the last year. 🙂 Growing a personal brand is fun, but as a professional in the domain, growing a brand on social media is more fun because of the increased number of challenges and constraints.

    We have focused mostly on getting the basic stuff right – Customer Care, (utilising GetSatisfaction to a fair degree) promoting interesting content relevant to our domain – created and curated, presence on the website, and when we were confident of taking it to the next level experimenting with various contest formats. Not the “let’s make it trend” kind, but ones that have some meaning for us as a brand/business and that’s fun for our followers on twitter as well.

    And that’s what gave us our second milestone. Long before brands arrived on the scene, Ashu Mittal, (to begin with.. thanks Surekha for the correction) Surekha, Roshni, The Comic Project, b50, Aalaap had made Children’s Day a fun event on Twitter by getting people to change their DPs – to a childhood photo – for a day. I have participated too, at least for a couple of years. Though I didn’t inform them (because I am still unsure on how I should deal with personal relationships in a work scenario) this was also a hat tip to them. All users had to do was share a childhood pic of theirs with a description of it and use #bachpanstyle. We used our larger FB crowd for publicity, ran the contest on Twitter, and made a Pinterest board specially for it. It was a lot of fun, and also got us our second milestone – a little bit of coverage (courtesy Lighthouse Insights) for the activity. That was a first for us. 🙂

    The cake had some icing too! The next day, my Twitter daily digest showed me a tweet from Surekha about #bachpan and changing DPs. Since the contest was over and done with, I sent her the board we’d made. And got this

    Being appreciated is always a great thing, and more so when it comes from my twitter-childhood friends. 🙂

    until next time, childlike glee 🙂