IRCTC Impact – momentaneous or persistent?

Recently India has witnessed a new player in Air/Flights ticket booking domain. It’s IRCTC, yes the biggest e-commerce portal in India, who has jumped into profit making air-ticketing business. The news reports that they are selling 1,500 per day through the portal with a turnover of about Rs 50.00 lakh each day! Thats are danger sign for existing player. (src: travelbizmonitor.com)

I think the high traffic to IRCTC is just because of their 10% cash-back promotion offer. When I compared IRCTC with Cleartrip, IRCTC rates were around 5% higher. As far as I see, ClearTrip is one of the best air-booking engine around. Their user interface and presentation are the best and prices are also comparable.

Whatever the case, IRCTC has already big issues in scaling their existing rail-booking portal, and they have failed in every sense. It’s been over 3-4 years number of tickets booked on the portal is growing steadily and they haven’t done any significant thing to scale the website. The poor website sucks and fails at the peek time, wasting time for fellow travelers. I remember wasting my many hours for booking ‘tatkal’ tickets and at last (at 9am) I decide to go and book through counter the other day. My advice is to shut down the site for an hour (8am to 9am), or show your competency in scaling it.

Still there are many ways to make money in rail-tickets, but before that quality and availability should be your first duty towards nation and not jumping into totally different domain!

Android Vs iPhone

Recently in the Google IO developers conference Vic Gundotra, VP-Engineering, did a direct attack on Apple Computers and its product iPhone. Here is what he says

If we did not act, we faced a draconian future where one man, one company, one carrier would be our future.

He also blamed Apple for Draconian future by bringing closed competition and closed devices!

Read more at Tech Crunch

Your Love for Money!

Do you need a book to learn ENTREPRENEURSHIP? My answer is NO, these books are just to keep you motivated and raised. Entrepreneurs are even not born. They are groomed in their childhood, their minds are filled with strong motivations, they have realized a lot of things way earlier in their life, and this spark leads them to do things differently. I even see few mid-aged (30-50) people starting new ventures, i do not add them in the list of entrepreneurs, they are businessmen from the very first day. Entrepreneurs starts in their early age, working by themselves, learning day-by-day, and one day they build a sustainable organization. This day they may become businessmen!

these days I am reading the book High Performance Entrepreneur by Subroto Bagchi. The book takes milestones of an entrepreneur’s file one at a time in well organized chapters. The most amazing and thoughtful chapter I found is ‘Profile of an Entrepreneur‘, where he lists few qualities entrepreneurs must have. These are necessary conditions, but not sufficient! I love reading this book just because it pumps some sort of energy into me. The life is full of ups-n-downs, no matter you are an entrepreneur or a ordinary man… you got to deal with it and get lessons at each step. Here is what Subroto writes along with my views:

freedom: This is the first and foremost feeling you need to have. Freedom – a desire to do things for yourself, a desire to do things differently, a desire to chase your dreams  no matter what other say. Human nature is perfected to diverted from his goals, and this freedom is a fuel to it. Freedom comes with great responsibilities. You need to be disciplined, organized, focused.

flexible: Flexible to do any thing – from idealization to marketing, from development to execution. I work in IT and found lots of people who are not willing to work on second programming language. All they want to stick to one language in their lifetime. The only thing I say about them is they haven’t seen the other world!

egoless: needless to say!

love for money: Subroto insists not to ignore goddess Laxmi ever. He still says – if you do not love to make money, do not start a business. An entrepreneur cannot afford to loos opportunities  that helps in gaining money (in their particular focused area).

- ankit

RK8UGUK4CH57

Directi following Google?

Recently, an India based company made a big decision. To provide customized domain email solutions for free to all students and teachers. Earlier GoogleApps used to do this worldwide. Clearly directi is following Google, to serve ad and earn money. But a question that bother me is how abt privacy?

When a institute decides to move it’s email to someone else’s home, there is a serious privacy issue  implied. Why do institutes trust these big companies, Google/Directi. After all everyone knows that system administrators are god for any software system. They know everything and they can do anything. The question is -  Is it still secure / trust-worthy for teachers  to communicate exam question papers over email, when these services are operated by third parties?

- ankit

Attachment: Mail from Directi

We at Directi are committed to reach out to the Indian student community and as a part of our new educational initiative we invite you to make the most of our offerings to suit your institution’s requirements. We would love to provide you with the necessary infrastructure to boost your institution’s collaboration endeavors.

• Free email for life to all students, faculty, staff & alumni, e.g. student.name@institute.ac.in or student.name@institute.org
• Free hosting of Institute’s website, e.g. www.institute.ac.in or www.institute.org
• Free personal blogs/web-pages for all students, faculty, staff & alumni
• Microblogging application for instant information sharing across the institution
• Dedicated local support personnel

These services are hosted on our top-of-the line infrastructure and require no investment on the institute’s end. This offering also comes with our dedicated support personnel available 24 hours to provide any assistance to the institute administrator. For more details, please click here.

College Admission Management System

Colleges and Universities can now use Enroller.in platform for conducting their admissions online. The Enroller.in platform is good for individual colleges as with minimum investment they can have their admission form submissions online.  THe platform facilitates to college online applications as well as offline application. It will be your single place to store all admission related information. The applicatns can use any web-browsers to file their application. Enroller.in does not clutter with messy text/ads unlike other website. And the application forms is designed keeping institutes requirements in mind.

Having an online system for admission management saves time and money. Besides, it definitely helps in building a brand for institute. Here are a few direct benefits -

1. One stop solution for all requirements of admission procedure
2. Complete control over process
3. Fast, Scalable, Customizable
4. Fast turn-around time
5. Reduced man power and paper work
6. Ease and flexibility to applicants
7. Wide spread (anytime, anywhere)

The platform gives institutes a management web console, from where they can list/view/manage/email all submissions. Applicants can partially save their forms before submissions, raise query which are answered by institute representative. The system have online payment too integrated. For additional details check out college admission software.

If a institute decides to develop their own such system, it’s going to cost them between 20-40K  (INR, for a minimum set of usable features), plus additional cost for setting up online payment. The Enroller.in is a money saver, and should be choose. No big investment is required, and an institute can anytime decide not to use, no binding at all!

Hello world!

Welcome Guest,

Check out my official web-log at ankitjain.info.

I do own a few domain names like ankitja.in, ankit.tk, ankitasdeveloper.tk. My LinkedIn profile, Flickr stream.

- Ankit