The Symbiosis Institute of International Business (SIIB) in association with IAMAI organized Coffee, Conversations, and Marketing – a marketing seminar- on 27^th August 2010 at Symbiosis Campus, Pune.
Apart from SIIB students, those from Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resources Development (SCMHRD) and Symbiosis Centre for Information Technology (SCIT) also participated in the seminar
At Coffee, Conversations, and Marketing, speakers discussed on various topics including how digital marketing has taken over the world, and how businesses should change strategies to benefit from this revolution, the financial impacts of social media marketing, apart from all aspects of digital marketing.

Speakers:

• Mr. Debashis Mitra - Director, Sales and Marketing, Mercedes-Benz India Private Ltd.
• Mr. Kiruba Shankar – CEO, Business Blogging Pvt. Ltd.
• Mr. Purnendu Kumar – Asst. Vice-President, Retail & Consumer Products, Technopak Advisors Ltd.
• Mr.RajivDingra – Founder & CEO, WATConsult

Panelist:

• Arnab Mitra – Director, India, Media Contacts
• Chaya Brian Carvalho – Founder-MD at BC Web Wise Pvt. Ltd.
• Pawan Goyal – Managing Director – Asia & Middle East, Tribal Fusion
• Nitin Mathur – Senior Director, Marketing, Yahoo!

It was an enchanting experience to ponder over the future of marketing over a coffee, amidst an energetic bunch of marketing students. This seminar definitely stands to be informative.

For all those who couldn’t attend the event live, follow the conversation on Twitter and face book

Looks like Bla(o)ckberry users have got some interim relief, as Govt has given some time given the CWG visit and US president Barrack Obama’s India visit in November…

NEW DELHI: It’s politics and not technology that finally swung the BlackBerry issue. American President Barack Obama’s — whose addiction to BlackeBerry is well chronicled — impending visit to India in November with a large delegation of similar enthusiasts; international arrivals on account of the CommonWealth Games and political pressure from the Canadian government appear to have prompted the home ministry to temporarily postpone its plans to blackout select BlackBerry services from August 31.

This contradicts the popular belief that BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) struck a breakthrough with the home ministry and security agencies on the matter of encryption in its critical meeting on Monday. The large anticipated inflow of international visitors over the next few months includes a major US delegation of both government and industry officials accompanying President Obama. Many of these visitors are likely to use the Blackberry Enterprise and Messenger services, the very offerings that are under the domestic security lens.

Read more: Obama’s visit & CWG give BlackBerry relief – India Business – Business – The Times of India

Symbiosis Institute of International Business (SIIB), Pune and IAMAI are organizing Coffee Conversations & Marketing this Friday.

Date: Friday, 27th August 2010
Time: 9 Am to 5PM
Venue: Auditorium, Symbiosis Infotech Campus

Here’s the Minute-to-Minute Programme agenda of the same

Inaugural Session (9:15 a.m. to 1:30p.m.)
9:15 a.m. to 9:20 a.m. Film on SIIB
9:20 a.m. to 9:25 a.m. Lighting of the Lamp by Dignitaries
9:25 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. Introduction & Welcome Address by Dr. Rajani Gupte, Director, SIIB
9:45 a.m to 10:40 a.m Mr Debashis Mitra
Director – Sales & Marketing
Mercedes-Benz India Private Limited
10:40 a.m. to 11:35 a.m. Mr Kiruba Shankar
CEO, Business Blogging Pvt Ltd
11:35 a.m to 12:30 p.m. Mr Purnendu Kumar (Assistant Vice President – Retail & Consumer Products),
Technopak Advisors Pvt Ltd
12:30 p.m to 1:25p.m. Mr Rajiv Dingra
Founder and CEO of WATConsult
1:25 p.m to 1:30 p.m. Vote of Thanks
1:30 p.m to 2:45 p.m Lunch
Post-Lunch Session (2:45 p.m to 4:00 p.m.)
2:45 p.m to 4:00 p.m. Panel discussion: Old tricks won’t work any more – (Old ways of marketing taken over by new digital ways of marketing)
Panelist:
Vishal Sharma, Chief Executive Officer, iThink Labs
Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO WATConsult
Ratan KK, Founder Associate, GutsGo eMarketing

Do read the blog http://siibmarketing.blogspot.com/ for more details…

The India Symposium is aimed at promoting the exchange of experiences and expertise through formal as well as informal interactions among our eminent and distinguished panellists and participants to not only help them understand the various contemporary challenges on corporate and industry level but also to make sustainable relations at cross-country level.

Next edition of India symposium would take place at Zurich, 27th Aug. Theme for this edition of India Symposium is “Reigniting Growth, in times of increased uncertainties”

Venue would be Renaissance Hotel, Zuric (Thurgauerstrasse 101, 8152 Zürich-Glattpark, Schweiz Contact: 044 874 50 00)

View Larger Map

For complete details, refer
http://www.india-symposium.org/symposium.html

or contact

India Symposium
Stationsstrasse 9
8306 Zurich
Switzerland
Phone +41 43 2559188
Fax +41 43 2559188

alternatively

c/o Asia Research Centre
University of St. Gallen (HSG)
Dufourstrasse 40a
9000 St. Gallen
Switzerland

Phone +41 71 224 2489
Fax +41 71 224 2471
Mail info@india-symposium.org

A photo by Kiruba Shankar

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has been created as an attached office under the Planning Commission. Its role is to develop and implement the necessary institutional, technical and legal infrastructure to issue unique identity numbers to Indian residents.

The vision of the Authority is to issue a unique identification number (UID) that can be verified and authenticated in an online, cost-effective manner, and that is robust enough to eliminate duplicate and fake identities.

The first number would be issued between August 2010 to February 2011. Over five years, the Authority plans to issue 600 million UIDs. The numbers will be issued through various ‘registrar’ agencies across the country.

Features of Aadhaar:

• It’s a 12 digit number – no numbers
• Random numbers – no intelligence
• Standard attributes – no profiling or application information
• All residents including children get number
• Flexible Authentication interface to partner
• Unique authcodes for each request

Here is brief note from the presentation given by Mr. Sanjay Aggarwal, G M, Operations, IRCTC on the Importance of Prepaid Money Cards in Railway Ticketing Growth.

Facts about IRCTC:

• In Business of online Rail Ticketing Sold more than 7.9 million Tickets in july10
• Peak tickets –more than 3,15,000
• Average Tickets perday 2,55,421+
• Total Revenue in 2009-10 -6748 crore+
• Average ticket size around Rs.800
• Registered user around 16 million+
• More numbers of non A/C passengers(60%+)
• Still we are 35% of India Railways

He also shared with us the share of payment instruments in IRCTC:

• Credit cards 22.4%
• Net banking debit cards 38.4%
• Cash cards 15.5%
• Others 23.75%

How many times did you think of switching to some other operator but held back purely because of the inconvenience of having to change the number all over again?

Looks like much expected and anticipated number portability is finally happening. The latest deadline for introducing the facility has been extended to October 31…

“The implementation of MNP has been delayed four times over the past one year as operators are not ready with their networks. The latest deadline for introducing the facility has been extended to October 31. Earlier, MNP was likely to be implemented in a phased manner in the first phase by December 31, 2009, in metro cities and Category ‘A’ Service Areas and in the rest of the country thereafter by March 2010.”

Read full news on The Hindu

Here some of the excerpts of the media coverage we received for IAMAI’s 3rd Financial Inclusion and Digital Payments Conference:

Indiainfoline

IAMAI has extended their complete support to the government to create a favorable environment to drive financial inclusion. and said that its members will work out business models that are conducive to push digital payments’ growth. This was stated by senior economists, experts and industry captains at the 3rd Financial Inclusion & Digital Payment Conference. More…

Watblog.com

Digital payment solutions will most definitely be popular once there is awareness between the consumers, and if there is a clear understanding between the regulators and the institutions. Such conferences will hopefully help in both the situations, more importantly the latter because unless the regulators and the institutions have a clear cut understanding, it doesn’t make much sense to spread the word to the customers. More…

International Business Times:

Identifying digital payments as the way forward to push economic growth, the conference provided a platform to discuss and deliberate the best plausible approach required to model a system to drive digital payments and financial inclusion. More…

India microfinance News

Speaking at the event organised by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in association with ItzCash Card, eminent Economist, Shri SS Tarapore cautioned that strong regulatory pressure to deliver on financial inclusioncan end up in a number game and added that financial inclusion should be led by an understanding of the needs of the customers rather than achieving targets. Calling for a pragmatic way to achieve financial inclusion, Shri Tarapore said, “The ideal approach to delivery of financial services on mobile phones would be to create joint ventures between banks and telecom companies with limited banking licences.” More…

MicrofinanceFocus

The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) in association with Itz Cash recently conducted the 3rd Financial Inclusion and Digital Payments Conference titled “Cash to Cashless Society” in Mumbai. More…

moneylife.in

On the occasion of the 3rd Financial Inclusion & Digital Payments Conference organised by the IAMAI (Internet and Mobile Association of India), industry experts spoke about the hurdles in the process of financial inclusion and whether solutions like prepaid cards and mobile money can be effectively harnessed to aid in the efforts.More…

ibtimes.com

Speaking at the conference, KG Karmakar, Managing Director, NABARD, said security and right-sizing of technological issues concerning financial inclusions have to be handled with the same zeal. “A common, accessible and easy platform in rural areas has to be formulated to bring about financial inclusion. Digital payments are the best way available to us presently to do this, provided concerns like security are addressed.” More…

Financial Inclusion has been a hot topic of debate in our last conference at Mumbai. This post is about an organization called RangDe, which is spearheading the initiative of micro credit and thus offering financial assistance to thousands of rural entrepreneurs.

RangDe identifies villagers who are looking to start their own small businesses- a vegetable shop or a saree business or a kirana shop or a sweets & snacks business and so on and help them with seed funding. These village entrepreneurs will only be needing a reasonably small amounts-from Rs 5000-15000 to start their small business and traditional financial institutions like Banks will not entertain them-either because the amount is too small for any profitable lending business or these people have no collateral to offer.

I happened to meet Rangde founders at an event called Cerebrate and got an opportunity to more about their mission.

Unlike village money lenders who charge upto 30-50% interest rate, Rangde charges just about 8.5% and has a repayment rate of 99%.
During past few years RangDe has made a positive impact to several individuals in Andhra, TN, Kerala, Maharastra, Orissa and many other states. Read this post to know more about my experience with RangDe or refer to Rangde official website