Rocket Internet - an apt name for the company by the Samwer brothers. They like to move at amazingly fast speeds - and with a no nonsense attitude, no fretting over irrelevant details, moving with a package as light as possible, and sell the subsidiary firms at a a significantly steep valuation. Often attacked by entrepreneurs for being a clone factory (Rocket is known to replicate proven successful models in developing economies in emerging markets, and get a good market share with an aggressive roadmap and huge marketing spends) - I somehow fail to see what's wrong with the attitude Oliver and his two brothers have followed. If you come to scrutinize companies under a microscope, you'll find very few who have tried to innovate. Let's take example of a few:

1. Cleartrip, Yatra, Goibibo - Got onto the OTA party after seeing the kind of traction MakeMyTrip had been generating. MakeMyTrip itself was not the pioneer in this space, for there were a number of OTAs already existing globally.
    
2. Snapdeal - Jasper, the parent company, was selling physical coupons of outlets and retailers to companies and firms for a long time before they witnessed the spotlight Groupon had been enjoying, and after that it was all a matter of launching a web-system that could use their network of retailers. After that, the daily deals frenzy simply went beserk in India. At one time, I remember having counted some 33 portals offering "the best deals" to consumers (Someone give them a dictionary. They seem to completely miss out on what "best" means.)
    
3. Flipkart - Even Techcrunch calls it the Amazon of India. :-) The Flipkart boys were Amazon employees, so they obviously understood the potential of the market more than others (at a time when India on a large scale was still unaware of what e-commerce is)

I can go on and on, taking one company at a time, but I believe you get the idea by now. So, every single one of the companies you see around yourself seems to be a clone of some format or the other. So why is it that Oliver Samwer is facing the heat (and on some level the hatred as well) so much. Well there are few reasons behind that as well.

• Jabong, the prime focus of Rocket in the Indian ecosystem these days, has been spending cash like nothing you have ever seen on advertising. Advertising is the same as real estate, or any other economic scenario for that matter. The higher the demand, the more expensive will it become - since the supply of course is limited. So, advertising in front of the Indian consumers is getting more expensive and then some more. (Rocket is running three companies in India right now - Jabong in Fashion and Lifestyle, Heaven in Online Home Decor Shop, and FabFurnish - the Furniture shopping mart)
   
• The VCs pumped in a significant amount of money in e-commerce space in the past fifteen months - every other e-commerce company was getting a fat cheque. And then the cash reserves started getting depleted. The e-commerce players had somehow gotten under the impression that the money will keep on coming from the VCs and the burn out rate is not going to be a problem. People learnt otherwise the hard way - Taggle and VogueMagnet had to shut shop when they finally realized this was not a viable model, and LetsBuy - Oh, did they learn their lesson the hard way (and had to allow being acquired at a fairly embarrassing valuation). This is a problem Jabong does not face. It is not financed by Rocket, it is owned by Rocket; so there is no nonsense to deal with. Rocket has a roadmap, and they know how much are they willing to spend to get there. Sure, they can also shut shop if things don't go well; but then even that number is something their management has always had at the back of their head. So, the plan they have chalked out - it's pretty much outlined right from Day 1.
   
• Companies started by Rocket do not have to constantly run around to cater to any issues the VC may raise, or an alternate path they were to suggest. Or lets say being asked for a roadmap - any roadmap. Anything the VC asks for, becomes a priority. Is it possible that subsidiaries of Rocket do not have to deal with all this? Nope, they also have to present all this data to the big daddies sitting in Germany; but this is known to them from the very beginning. They know what will be the growth charts that would be expected of them, what is it that they need to present, and when is it expected. So, there are no unfair surprises. The company's "founding members" can focus on running the company, and not running around like a dog with their tails between their legs.
   
• Oliver and his brothers have been successful in closing some pretty sweet deals in the past, and they are aware of the potential Indian e-commerce space has to offer as well. My guess is - this is a pie they would not give up on for anything. And sure, they have the money!
   
• India is cheap - Money makes money, everyone knows that. So in order to sell a company at the tune of $300-million, you sure can expect to dole out a substantial sum as well. They have done it in past, so they are obviously comfortable with it. But when it has come to India, advertising just got a whole lot cheaper as compared to doing the same in US or Europe. So they can comfortably shell out some money, and get may be more visibility as compared to what they would have received in Europe.
   
• THE HOLY GRAIL OF ALL REASONS - All right, so this all states how Rocket Internet has been skewing the dynamics of the Indian e-commerce space. Disturbing, isn't it? But somehow we still are not very sure of how this is impacting the other players to such an extent that they simply hate the guts of the Samwer brothers. Its simple mate, there is one possible exit option that small startups keep at the back of their head - being acquired by a bigger player. But Rocket is someone who flashes this banner on Day 0 of setting up shop - We will sell our business once we have gained a sizeable market share. Oooh, competition! And take Amazon or eBay (the only two players big enough to buy out the India operations of Rocket; and with Amazon planning to enter Indian market in second half of 2012 - I would not ignore the possibility of such an occurence) - if they acquire the Indian subsidiary of Rocket - Jabong, that's just killing the dream of some other startup who would have been working hard for this one day of glory.

An interesting turn of events in the Indian e-commerce space. I am still not very sure if Amazon would want to buy out Jabong or not, but they seem to be one of the few players who can afford to do so; and Rocket certainly does not intend to keep the shop running under its umbrella without an expiration date - its just too boring for the Samwer brothers. Let us see how things finally pan out.

[P.S. Although highly unlikely, but I would not be very surprised if Google decides to take up Jabong - given they are able to generate a significant market share in India. Granted, Google is not in the space... till now! But at the same time, they are not much far away from it either.]

This is EXCITING!

With all the buzz and activity surrounding Cloud Computing, Saas (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and now IaaS (if you have not yet heard of it, google Infrastructure as a Service), it doesn't take much to say that the future belongs to the biggest Cloud Computing player out there. But the question is, who is the biggest player; and is their dominance likely to be unchallenged?

Although Amazon has been playing its cards quite close to the chest when it comes to disclosing any numbers about the extent AWS or Amazon Web Services has penetrated the cloud computing market, it can safely be claimed that right now AWS is leaving all others in a trail of dust. Every other startup in the silicon valley is availing services by AWS, and it is estimated that Amazon is already earning over a billion dollars per year from more than half a million servers it is currently running.

So while we can safely award the #1 place to Amazon owing to its immense penetration of AWS, it is likely to face fierce competition with others in near future, the one leading the race is none other than Google.

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Among the start-ups I have been following, there is one that is worthy of its name - InMobi, a mobile advertising platform - something that started back in 2007 as a SMS based localised shopping deals and ads. Finally realizing the potential of mobile phone applications and the penetration of handheld devices in our lives, they went ahead to become a platform that provides a bridge between mobile-app publishers and advertisers. But this, here, today is not about InMobi. It is about an interesting article I read by Shamanth Rao (Head of Campaign Management, APAC regions at InMobi) - on how you and I are paying for every Akash tablet the government is selling around.

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Had the Kindle Fire not been for $199, it may have been facing a lot of criticism right now – after all it lacks quite some features that as a user I would have expected it to come with. It has no camera, no microphone, and the biggest shortcoming – no 3G capabilities. But at the price-point Amazon has offered it for, it is still a pumped up tablet high on steroids and that too at $300 less a price as the cheapest iPad2. It is the package that will make a difference – as evident from the numbers just discovered. The Kindle Fire has been pre-ordered at an average rate of 50,000 per day; taking the number of pre-orders up to quarter-million in the last five days.

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I've said this before, and I'll say this again - Amazon is on Fire! But I never realized that they literally were riding 'on Fire'. The world's largest online retailer unveiled its much talked about under-$200 tablet earlier this week - Kindle Fire. A device that has a screen size small enough (7-inch display) for it to fit comfortably in your hands, and at a price tag less than half of Apple's cheapest iPad ($499), it is clear that Amazon has Apple in Fire's crosshairs.

Fire is more or less a bumped up version of the Kindle e-book reader, packed with features and runs on Android. The way I see it, Amazon will be able to leverage its dominance in the e-commerce space to ramp up the sale of Fire, and give a real challenge to the iPad with its attractive price tag, and feature-rich product.

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Few weeks back, it was Google that was doing what currently Amazon is doing to me. Tracking down everything that the company has been doing is proving to be a Herculean task with every passing day. Announcing the proposed launch of an ambitious 7" android-based tablet, followed by the complete redesign of the Amazon website (a move targeting an increase in usage of the site on second screens), planned entry into the $10-billion Indian e-commerce market, and now the rumors of Amazon coming up with something that can be called Netflix for books - I don't even understand where they are getting the time to even execute everything. All of it at the same time.

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A $10-billion e-commerce market - thats how companies see the Indian market. So that goes out to explain why most of the startups lately have been in the e-commerce segment. But here is the kicker, now that this $10-billion cashcow is turning the heads of the senior executives at the seattle based e-commerce megagiant, Amazon, there ought to be some disturbance in the kids-camp of Indian e-commerce players. Because, thats what they are - a bunch of kids when it comes to Amazon. While the biggest e-commerce player in India, Flipkart is valued at a whooping $200-million, it is still light years away from the $95-billion valuation Amazon can mightily boast of!

Things have been pretty riled up in the Amazon camp as well - first the proposed* launch of a mighty cheap android-based tablet to give a tough fight to the market dominance of Apple Inc's iPad, followed by a complete redesign of the Amazon website (to be made live for users worldwide soon) and now the distinctive beacon signalling its intention of making an entry with splash in the much prospective Indian e-commerce market - I've got to say, the folks have been keeping themselves pretty busy.

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The world's largest online marketplace - Amazon - is all set to launch a new android based 7" tablet, which is expected to spice up things in the tablet market extensively - much owing to its low $250 price tag (expected). And now the details of Amazon revamping its whole web-portal to improve user experience while using Amazon on your tablet lays all the more stress on how much aggressively Amazon is planning to market the new tablet.

With the new tablet expected to be released in the next few weeks, Amazon started testing a major redesign of the website late last week, an overhaul that is expected to make the Amazon site easier to use and navigate on tablets.

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