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Flipkart looks at hackathons for new solutions to engage people, grow business
Business Standard | Romita Majumdar | Mumbai June 24, 2017 | Gridlock Hackathon |
Its seventh such annual hackathon will come to a close today, with over 100 solutions emerging from.
Flipkart is looking at hackathons as a way to fast track innovations and build solutions that can be implemented in its business quickly. So far, the company says a little over a dozen such solutions born at hackathons over the past six years have made it to production. The company’s seventh such 24-hour annual hackathon will come to a close on Friday, with over 100 solutions emerging from it. Flipkart says unlike other schemes to help engineers come up with new innovations, hackathons work best because they have fewer restrictions on what engineers can build. “It’s an engagement program to empower our engineers to create something that excites them. Engineers have a green signal to take projects to production, get experimental data and then take a call on its viability. The teams just come together organically with their ideas,” said Amar Nagaram, Engineering VP at Flipkart. The theme of innovations range from increasing customer impact, easing customer experience and simplifying employee interface to social welfare. Flipkart is also running another Hackathon in Bangalore to help solve the city’s traffic woes. The contest is open to people outside the organisation as well. The management takes a backseat during hackathons to allow “Flipsters” or employees to indulge themselves in 24 hours of absolute innovation. Participants are given a free run to take their hacks to production and ensure that they are workable. In the past more than 30 hacks have gone into production with almost a dozen still in production. “It is a seamless engagement of product, business and engineering teams to innovate, ” added Nagaram. Almost 70 per cent of Flipkart’s engineering team participated in this year’s hackathon.
Flipkart’s hackathons have thrown up innovations that have not only reduced company spending but also increased ease of use for customers. The hackathons do not necessarily focus on business-centric hacks for innovation. After the Nepal earthquake participants created a hack that allowed the creation of chain of networks to help people access internet connection in times of disaster. “Even on regular days we resolve a number of problem statements but this is just concentrated 24 hours where we just hack and not think about anything else,” he said. Hacks have to be completely usable to qualify for evaluation. The evaluation is a four-hour long process spanning ideas from almost 200 teams of three to four participants each. Sometimes Flipkart hackathons are opened up for non-organizational participants like the current Gridlock event. Does it help to attract talent? “After being exposed to 24 hours of Flipkart’s core infrastructure, people have expressed interest to work here, although that is not necessarily the intention of opening it up to outsiders,” said Nagaram. Hackathon are becoming more common across India’s technology landscape, as companies look to speed up development, come up with creative ways to solve problems and even look at employment or partnerships. While startups are well versed with the hackathon culture, larger organisations too are picking it up. SBI has already launched a hackathon to reimagine banking technology while TCS has launched nationwide hackathons to zero in on future recruits. – Courtesy / Take a look at https://www.hackerearth.com/sprints/flipkart-hackathon/
Nexhop – Empowering Brick and Mortar Stores and Reimagining Them in the New Millennium
BW Disrupt | 03 June 2016 | |
Nexhop’s Indo-Canadian team consists of 8 core members working full time in two locations Toronto and Bangalore. Ashis, Surajit and Benny have worked together in Toronto before starting Nexhop. Benny holds Master of Engineering in Technology Innovation Management from Carleton University, Canada.
The current Online marketplace is crowded with shopping sites and customer hardly give a damn if the discount in one site is not up to his expectations and product hunt goes on forever. Also customer has no clue if the online seller is a genuine one or they are selling counterfeit items. The only credible source is the review and that’s always (say 99%) in the one to two star zones. In many cases customer has to wait for days and the anxiety builds up over time and ultimately kills the joy of shopping because of inherent delays in delivery and bad customer service. “These problems made us think what can be done to improve the online shopping experience and make it as fast as possible so that the customer can benefit from faster, trust worthy and reliable services online and the existing system of retail businesses can also get a boost from the emerging e-commerce phenomenon. We also noticed that the stores are providing an equal amount of discount but since they don’t have a platform to showcase the deals, they lose out and eventually miss a potential sale. And this made us think what we could do to make the world a little more simpler by solving these twin issue of reliable and trusted online shopping experience for customer and increased online sale for stores,” says Ashis Mohanty, Co-founder, Nexhop. With that thought in mind team started working with the brick and mortar stores to bring them online and help them catch up with the growing online market and that’s how Nexhop was born. The startup was founded by Ashis Mohanty, Surajit Nath and Benny Marianayagam in 2015.
“We are a technology company with focus on stores, their customer base and ease of use. Our complete solution helps stores to connect, engage and retain their online customers. Customers can opt to pick from Stores so that their urgent buying needs can be resolved quickly, eliminating the need for long/uncertain delivery times and ultimately helping stores to increase customer foot fall. Nexhop creates online brand identity for Retail stores that subsequently builds a loyal customer base for the store in the online world.” says Surajit. The customer app (iOS and Android) comes with features like Call the retailer, Digital receipt tracking in the cloud, Pick from Store option for the customer convenience and adding stores as favorite to get their best offers. Nexhop’s Indo-Canadian team consists of 8 core members working full time in two locations Toronto and Bangalore. Ashis, Surajit and Benny have worked together in Toronto before starting Nexhop. Benny holds Master of Engineering in Technology Innovation Management from Carleton University, Canada. “We got a strong team. Sindhya was a pro iOS Developer and Priyanka was a successful Business Development Manager in their previous roles. Prahlad holds a MBA degree from Symbiosis Pune. Vijaya and Tinto are ace Android developers with many successful apps under their names. Nexhop has also partnered with Vickram College of Engineering in Madurai to offer internship program to final year students to have a consistent inflow of tech talents.” Says Benny. Company currently has 80+ stores onboard, 6000+ products in inventory, 4000+ customers are using the android and ios apps in three months. The startup is currently bootstrapped and discussions are on with multiple VCs in India to raise its next rounds of funds as well. “We are currently operating in Bangalore and having a plan to expand to pan India and American region soon. With the Offline Retail segment expected to be a Trillion $ market by 2020, the scope of growth is limitless”, says Ashis. – Courtesy – All your neighbourhood Stores, now in an App – http://nexhop.com/
Shout out to engineering students, be ready for fat packages by startups
Business Insider | BI India Bureau0Aug 12, 2015 |
The biggest cash-cow in the Indian market, the e-Commerce sector, will be offering handsome packages to graduates of best engineering colleges in the near future. As reported by Economic Times, at least 11 startups will be offering packages in excess of Rs 20 lakh this year to graduates of country’s best engineering colleges like Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, apart from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). If previous year’s records are to be believed, the average package offered to a BITS Pilani graduate was around Rs 7.5 lakh.
Startups like Zomato, Practo, Endurance, InMobi, Code-Nation, Housing, Unicommerce, Sprinklr and Codigami are among those who have lined up to hire fresh talent from the colleges and are offering attractive salary packages. The trend might also challenge a couple of top traditional recruiters. Campus sources informed that only three startups offered Rs 20 lakh-plus packages last year and that the number is nearly four times with a number of startups raising offers and new ones getting space into the list. These startups are offering more compensation than well-established companies. Popular recruiters Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, for instance, pay in the bracket of Rs 14-15 lakh, while Microsoft offers Rs 18 lakh for domestic postings. Visa, which hired around 250 students across engineering campuses last year, is paying Rs 18 lakh for Indian roles. According to the Campus sources, the presence of so many cash-rich startups will spark a fierce talent war with traditional, well-known recruiters for the best and brightest among the graduating batch of 2016. “A number of bright students who would otherwise get into traditional development roles in branded companies, get swayed by the compensation and join these startups,” said G Balasubramanian, chief placement officer, India and Dubai, BITS Pilani University. But it’s not just about the money, it’s got a lot to do with changes in outlook as well. – Courtesy
Smartphone Revolution Helps India’s IT Services Sector Look Inward For Growth
International Business Times | | February 10 2015 | Technology |
India’s information technology services industry has a new growth engine: e-commerce. And, it’s one that needs no H-1B visas as a booster, as online shopping has taken off in a big way at home, forcing a corresponding rise in investment on new technology. Long viewed as soaking up U.S. jobs as part of its lucrative outsourcing business, India’s IT services sector is now gearing up to serve demand at home, as millions of people start using their smartphones to shop online and try out other services such as ridesharing. And, building the software required to support this newfound taste for online shopping is providing opportunities to an industry that had always looked abroad. Currently, the sector earns over two-thirds of its revenue from clients in the United States and Western Europe.
“India is jumping the technology maturity curve and is emerging as a digital economy,” R. Chandrashekhar, president of National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), India’s main IT industry lobby, said in a statement on Tuesday. Nasscom released its latest estimates for the industry’s prospects on Tuesday, predicting that domestic growth would outstrip overseas sales, and continue to accelerate. The domestic IT and back-office processing market is rapidly approaching the $50 billion mark. In the current fiscal year, which ends March 31, the market is expected to be worth over $48 billion, at an annual growth rate of 14 percent. This is faster than the average industry growth, which Nasscom pegged at 13.1 percent for the current fiscal year, and is “largely being driven by the booming eCommerce segment,” the lobby said in its release.
In the next fiscal year, starting April 1, Nasscom expects domestic revenues (including from e-commerce) to grow at a rate of 15 percent to 17 percent to between $55 billion and $57 billion. Exports — still the mainstay of the rapidly evolving industry — will rise 12 percent to 14 percent to between $110 billion and $112 billion in the next fiscal year from $98.5 billion in the current fiscal year. Overall, the industry is expected to add $20 billion in revenues to grow about 13 percent from $146 billion in the current fiscal year. Recent umbrella programs announced by India’s new federal government to consolidate existing projects — such as building a national optic fiber network — and new ones including raising a 100 smart cities, and promoting manufacturing in India under the ‘Make In India’ initiative are also aiding the technology-investment climate in the country.
In online commerce, India shares a phenomenon that’s sweeping developed markets as well, as retailers spruce up their online storefronts and companies such as Amazon.com in the U.S., and Flipkart in India, look for more automation. Forrester Research analyst Peter Sheldon expects growth will come from two areas — commerce management software that will power online storefronts and manage tasks such as pricing and purchase transactions; and order-management systems that are used to orchestrate complex order-processing scenarios. “Many firms will outsource the burden of support, scalability, and upgrades – shifting to SaaS and on-demand platforms,” Sheldon said, in a blog post. SaaS refers to software provided as a service, off the Internet, where the user pays on the go, rather than buying licenses and installing software on the company’s computers.
In the current year, India’s IT industry added approximately 230,000 new employees, taking its workforce to more than 3.3 million direct employees. And, as the smartphone boom grows in India, new businesses such as ridesharing are rushing in and bringing their own requirements for software engineering talent. Ola Cabs, India’s biggest ridesharing service firm, is looking to recruit 1,000 people with technology and engineering skills, in 2015, the company said in a press release Monday, after concluding a “hackathon” to identify talented software programmers. And, the company wants to fill more than 200 of these vacancies as early as March, according to the release. “Digital (technologies) became mainstream during the year, with industry increasingly investing in digitized solutions to drive future growth opportunities,” R. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Nasscom and group chief executive of Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd., said in the statement.
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