ONE DAY IN the late 1990s, when engineer K. Vaitheeswaran was browsing the web, he noticed an advertisement for books. He clicked on the ad and landed on a website called Amazon.com. Astonished by the business opportunities offered by the internet, he quit his job at Wipro and started India’s first e-commerce company in 1999, along with five others. From a single room with a desktop computer at the Newbridge Business Centre in Bengaluru, the six intrepid entrepreneurs launched Fabmart—an online platform to sell music cassettes.
From writing content and collecting payments to packing and shipping items and handling refunds, the Fabmart founders had to learn everything from scratch. Many of the problems were solved with jugaad ideas. Signing up music labels, for example, was a herculean task as no one knew of Fabmart or understood its concept. Unable to get the metadata of songs, the entrepreneurs bought just the cassette covers from the label. Similarly, to copy the content on to Excel sheets, they rented a marriage hall, spread bed sheets on the floor and hired interns to scan the cassette covers and enter the data. “Things are infinitely more convenient today,” writes Vaitheeswaran in his book, Failing to Succeed: The Story of India’s First E-Commerce Company. “E-commerce companies get well-structured and formatted metadata from book publishers and music or movie companies which they upload in bulk on the website at the click of a button.”
Denne historien er fra December 29, 2019-utgaven av THE WEEK.
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Denne historien er fra December 29, 2019-utgaven av THE WEEK.
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William Dalrymple goes further back
Indian readers have long known William Dalrymple as the chronicler nonpareil of India in the early years of the British raj. His latest book, The Golden Road, is a striking departure, since it takes him to a period from about the third century BC to the 12th-13th centuries CE.
The bleat from the street
What with all the apps delivering straight to one’s doorstep, the supermarkets, the food halls and even the occasional (super-expensive) pop-up thela (cart) offering the woke from field-to-fork option, the good old veggie-market/mandi has fallen off my regular beat.
Courage and conviction
Justice A.M. Ahmadi's biography by his granddaughter brings out behind-the-scenes tension in the Supreme Court as it dealt with the Babri Masjid demolition case
EPIC ENTERPRISE
Gowri Ramnarayan's translation of Ponniyin Selvan brings a fresh perspective to her grandfather's magnum opus
Upgrade your jeans
If you don’t live in the top four-five northern states of India, winter means little else than a pair of jeans. I live in Mumbai, where only mad people wear jeans throughout the year. High temperatures and extreme levels of humidity ensure we go to work in mulmul salwars, cotton pants, or, if you are lucky like me, wear shorts every day.
Garden by the sea
When Kozhikode beach became a fertile ground for ideas with Manorama Hortus
RECRUITERS SPEAK
Industry requirements and selection criteria of management graduates
MORAL COMPASS
The need to infuse ethics into India's MBA landscape
B-SCHOOLS SHOULD UNDERSTAND THAT INDIAN ECONOMY IS GOING TO WITNESS A TREMENDOUS GROWTH
INTERVIEW - Prof DEBASHIS CHATTERJEE, director, Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode
COURSE CORRECTION
India's best b-schools are navigating tumultuous times. Hurdles include lower salaries offered to their graduates and students misusing AI