The digital divide: the wealth at the bottom of the pyramid ?

A interesting interview with Alana Semuels in marketplace podcast last week made me reflect on the digital divide, and on those at the bottom of the digital pyramid (apologies CK Prahalad). Ref: Your Amazon deliveries don't just magically appear at your door. The interview and Semuels’ detailed account of experiences as an Amazon Flex driver in The Atlantic (link) made for an interesting read. She recounts

My tech-economy experience was far less lucrative. In total, I drove about 40 miles (not counting the 26 miles I had to drive between the warehouse and my apartment). I was paid $70, but had $20 in expenses, based on the IRS mileage standards.

Semuels’ observations are significant since nearly $1 out of every $2 spent online in the US is going to Amazon (link).

Halfway across the globe in the Silicon-Valley of the East, life seems to be no different for those at the bottom of the digital pyramid. Motorists in Bengalurue are learning to avoid the ‘delivery boys’ in bikes with heavily laden bags crisscrossing gridlocked traffic

The e-commerce delivery-boys (yes, it is mostly guys who are into delivery) earn a minimum wage – about $200 to $300 per month, while accounting for other expenses.



 In the article, Alana Semuels highlights

All my frustration really hit when I went to the second office building on Market Street, home to a few big tech companies. One of them took up multiple floors, smelled strongly of pizza, and had dog leashes and kibble near the front door. Young workers milled around with laptops and lattes, talking about weekend plans. They were benefiting from the technology boom, sharing in the prosperity that comes with a company’s rapid growth. Technology was making their jobs better—they worked in offices that provided free food and drinks, and they received good salaries, benefits, and stock options. They could click a button and use Amazon to get whatever they wanted delivered to their offices—I brought 16 packages for 13 people to one office; one was so light I was sure it was a pack of gum, another felt like a bug-spray container

The e-commerce delivery-boys in India and China who are delivering packages to their tech-savvy brethren higher in the digital pyramid are bound to be echoing a similar sentiment.

There is perhaps a silver lining here as, Semuels writeup also acknowledges:

People are worried that automation is going to create a “job apocalypse,” but there will likely be thousands more driving and delivery jobs in upcoming years..... “We’re going to take the billion hours Americans spend driving to stores and taking things off shelves, and we’re going to turn it into jobs” 

Bottomline: The digital economy has defined invisible lines separating those at the top and bottom of the pyramid. However, such delivery jobs in developing economies like China and India are an opportunity for young, semi-educated youngsters to earn a living. Without such opportunities, scores of them might end up unemployed or remain under-employed.

Thanks for reading! Please click on Like, or Share, Tweet and Comment below to continue this conversation or share your favorite 'trend to watch' | Reposted from linkedIn Pulse blog | Also a link to an earlier blog on the topic: Digitization: Solutions to physical-world problems?!

My Indian ecommerce experience: When rubber fails to meet the road!

There is a tremendous amount of hype over India’s homegrown eCommerce startup and incubator culture. Many are attracting venture capital and partnership proposals, some are tying up with larger, more established global firms, while some are dreaming of growing up organically. There is also an emerging sub-segment of innovators developing IS/IT ‘tools’ catering to other startups, a niche within a niche!

Living in America, working for a multinational, I generally get my inputs on these developments from fellow Digirati and articles in the media. During a recent trip ‘back home’ to visit my parents, I got to engage in conversations with friends and former colleagues, some of whom had left the comfort of a steady paycheck to explore and experiment with hi-tech startups. It was also an opportunity to ‘experience’ their services first-hand.

One such experience with the much-hyped startup OlaCabs stood out for me. The on-demand cab service, Ola, touts itself as India’s answer to Uber.  “Ola started as an online cab aggregator in Mumbai, now based out of Bangalore and is among the fastest growing businesses in India” - Wikipedia.



Here is a summary of my experience of Ola’s service – the good and the bad.

The Application: Registration and onboarding


The registration and onboarding process is seamless. All one requires is a smartphone with internet/Wifi, to download and use the App. After downloading and registering the cellphone and email-id, one is good to go.

As a technologist, I get to use a wide variety of applications on different devices. My first impression: the mobile App is easy to download and use.  The application is slick, and easy to use, and recognizes one’s location. To book a cab, the user is given just a few options - the way it should be – and the App uses the cellphone location data to identify the user’s current location.

The service experience: Could be better!


While traveling to Bangalore, I generally pre-book a cab from a local taxi service. The guy has a few cars and drivers on call, who are generally available, and has been reliable and economical for years. The process is neither hi-tech nor digital. Just walk up to the Taxi-wallah, give him my phone number, pickup time and preference on the kind of car I want, agree on the rate and I am good to go.
The hype over the online service and word-of-mouth recommendations from friends prompted me to try Ola. What could go wrong? My parents live in central Bangalore area and I could always fallback on other cabs if my Ola-experiment didn’t work out.

I planned to book a cab to the Bangalore airport for 9.30 am, the following day. I figured this would give us adequate time to get to the airport and check-in with baggage for a 12 pm flight. While booking a “ride later,” the App does not provide an option to select a car size. That morning, I got an SMS message that a ‘mid-size’ Mahindra Verito, license plate XYZ would be arriving. At about 9.15 am the driver called and said he was in front of our house and I came out of the house with our bags. The driver looked at the luggage and said only one of the two suitcases would fit in the trunk and he couldn’t take the other one in the vacant seat up front or the luggage rack on top. He didn’t want to negotiate an extra baggage fee and just left, leaving my wife and I scratching our heads. To say I was irked by the lack of courtesy or customer service would be an understatement: didn’t the guy know that passengers going to the Airport would have luggage? What would the customer do if he left them stranded?

Time was beginning to run out and I was really glad I had left a buffer for my maiden Ola-experiment. My parents, whom I was visiting were amused, and began prodding me to make a switch and call the local Taxi stand.

Undeterred, I decided to continue with the Ola experiment.

I decided to use the App again, selecting the “Ride Now” option. Interestingly, this option allows the user to view available Cabs of different sizes in the vicinity, showing approximate time. I looked up a “large SUV” that was about 15 minutes from our house and decided to book it. The Ola App confirmed my request and promptly gave me the cab guy’s name, make of car (Tata Innova) and the driver’s cell-phone number. Within a couple of minutes, I got a call from the driver who confirmed my location and also confirmed that he could take us with the luggage to the airport.

The cab arrived promptly and the guy even helped pick up and load the suitcases and drove us to the airport. At the airport, he said the distance – from home to airport - calculate by Ola app was a bit off and would I be willing to make up the difference. Having arrived on time, I obliged, including a tip on top.

Bottomline: It’s all about Service, Stupid!


The Ola experience made me reflect on service management. At the end of the day, the customer is paying for the service: a cab that arrives promptly, a driver who is courteous and responsive and gets the customer from A-to-B.

An App is just a tool, an enabler that the customer isn’t paying for. A slick, easy to use mobile app is really useless without a world-class service to go with it.

Ola, and its competitors must remember the market. If a single driver turns out to be unresponsive, the word-of-mouth and reviews on social media can drown the tremendous amount of hard work that goes into engineering and developing a service! And in a market like India, the competition is not just another online service, but the ubiquitous call-taxis, autos and other modes of transport that are easily accessible!

End-note: Would I be willing to use Ola again in the future? For me, it has been a hit-and-miss experience with Indian eCommerce. For my next trip, I will probably stick to hailing local cabs or walking up to the local taxi-guy!

(Repost from LinkedIn Pulse)

The business of Internet, Government and society

In a span of about 15 years or so, internet and wireless communication technologies have become globally ubiquitous and pervasive. And like other utilities - access to electricity, water and telephones - people in western societies have taken access to internet and wireless for granted. Even in developing countries where access to basic utilities is spotty at best, wireless and internet technologies are becoming more pervasive largely due to a combination of commercialization and a laissez faire attitude of governments.

Most consumers have come to expect that breakdown in “service,” even for a short span of time can only be due to a major force majeure - hurricane Sandy for example – nothing less

While many governments have taken a laissez faire attitude towards developing infrastructure for internet and wireless communication, they are not exactly being hands off. Government policy planners and bureaucrats, just like their counterpart business leaders and executives have come to realize the significance of “controlling” access to the infrastructures and access to these technologies.

Internet and wireless infrastructure is increasingly being viewed as a strategic asset that can impact National security. Shutting or disrupting access to wireless and internet in essence also shuts down

• Commerce: Businesses and international commerce increasingly relies on pervasive internet technologies and access to wireless communication. Rather than develop their private LAN, WAN, MAN and area networks, corporations are more than eager to ride on top of public internet infrastructure. Public internet infrastructure is thought to be inherently more reliable since the points of failure are widely dissipated. It is also much cheaper to use than to develop private infrastructure. 
• Communication: According to U.N. Telecom Agency report, the world has about 6 Billion cell phone subscribers. A mind boggling number when you consider the population of about 7 billion people
• Entertainment: Entertainment, streaming movies, videos, games, music, social media etc etc all depend on pervasiveness of internet and wireless technologies. A disruption to either backbone can shut down the sources of entertainment.

Till recently, the primary risk to commerce on public internet networks was the threat to Network neutrality. However, recent incidents are making Digirati and corporate strategists reflect on broader risk to businesses that are increasingly dependent on public internet and wireless infrastructure for global commerce

• Government’s shutting down access to internet: Censorship on the internet is just tip of the iceberg. The risk to businesses is a complete shutdown of access to the internet in a country or region! Just Last week, Syrian government briefly  managed to return its citizen to the digital dark ages. One can be certain that other governments are assessing their capabilities in this regard. (Ref Forbes article : These Are The 61 Countries Most Vulnerable To An Internet Shutdown)
• Governments are increasingly relying on cyber-warfare as a powerful tool in their arsenals “in June 2009, someone had silently unleashed a sophisticated and destructive digital worm that had been slithering its way through computers in Iran with just one aim — to sabotage the country’s uranium enrichment program and prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. (ref Wired article: Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History)

Business strategists and corporate policy makers are only starting to assess all the dimensions of the risk of leveraging public internet and wireless infrastructures. However, there a more prosaic way of looking at the risks: Much as we liked to think otherwise, risks inherent to “traditional infrastructures” (supply of water, electricity etc) apply to next generation infrastructures too. If we take this argument, traditional risk mitigation strategies should be applicable to technology infrastructure management too?