Emergic: November 22, 2006 Archives

Microfinance in India

In India, the history of rural finance is typified by the image of a nationalized banking system which has failed to deliver credit and, if it has, not been able to recover it. Microfinance, by contrast, is increasingly being seen as an innovation in lending and the panacea for rural India's indebtedness to money lenders.

The recent focus on microfinance in India marks a paradigm shift in orientation. The recipients of state-sponsored subsidized loans in the early 1980's, 75 million poor households today have become the driver of new assets. While no accurate estimate of the size of the Indian microfinance market exists, M-CRIL (Micro-Credit Ratings International), a leading micro credit rating agency based in Gurgaon, puts the estimated demand at Rs. 480 billion ($10.7 billion). That is calculated for 60-70 million households at an average household credit demand of Rs. 8,000 (less than $200).

Indian banks may soon saturate high- and middle-income customers with retail loans and home loans, and are under pressure to move to low-income and even poor households. To do this, they are choosing to partner with MFIs, most of which have current recovery rates of over 96%. Foreign banks with little or no presence outside India's major metros are also looking to work with MFIs to secure their micro-lending market shares.

Deeshaa (Rural Development) | PermaLink | Comments (5)

Micro-finance will take off because of the huge demand (directly or indirectly) - for pressing consumption needs as nearly 30% of the population below poverty levels the demand.

What is not clear is its poverty alleviating effects - and on that regard it is controversial.

An excerpt from Aneel Karnani article in todays Business Standard:

..most (poor) people do not have the skills, vision, creativity, and persistence to be true entrepreneurs. Even in developed countries with high levels of education and infrastructure, about 90 per cent of the labour force are employees rather than entrepreneurs. Even with greater availability of financial services in developed countries, only a small fraction have used credit for entrepreneurial purposes. Most clients of microcredit are not microentrepreneurs by choice and would gladly take a factory job at reasonable wages if possible. We should not romanticise the idea of the “poor as entrepreneurs”. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) uses a more appropriate term: “own account workers”.
check.

Micro-credit is an excellent delivery and monitoring mechanism but it needs a whole lot of fine-tuning if it is to meet its original developmental objectives. Again, technology can be a solution.

Posted by Joseph K Antony

Contrast this with what Forbes has to say about MircoFinacing http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/nov/10spec.htm

I too personally find the recovery figures for MF projects especially Grameen bank dubious - 96% is too high and there definitely is a catch somewhere ...

However, microfinance might work to fund 'year-on-year' credit cycle for farmers and small shopkeepers in semi-rural areas (outskirts of towns, villages near cities and villages with local 'mandi's ...

Posted by Nikhil Kulkarni

Microfinance has always been available in India. I had witnessed loan transactions in Andhra (India) called, “one Anna loans” in the nineteen fifties. In this scheme, a pan shop owner borrows one rupee and returns it in daily installments of one Anna for the next thirty days. (The Anna was a coin with a value of one sixteenth of a rupee.) In an emergency, a rural bus owner borrows one thousand rupees and returns in installments of thirty rupees each day for the next ninety days. Those were enormous interest rates! Availability of money for lending was not the problem; the ultra high interest rates were. The interest rates mentioned in the Wharton report (“25 to 35%”) are reasonable compared to the cases I cited above. But these are still high. They should be linked to the prime rate plus (about) one percent. The risks in micro loans should be covered with insurance (and rebates of premiums for good performance).
I knew of a man who borrowed funds at the beginning of a season, went to farms daily through out the season, bought, and brought produce and sold it to local merchants. Despite high interest rates, he used to make good money. But, he was so tired by the end of a hard working day that he used to spend most of the earnings at the local liquor shanty. Men entrepreneurs seem to risk their business money, health, and lives (as in suicides). Obviously, behavior and separation of personal funds from business funds are important characteristics leading to success. The success of women entrepreneurs vis a vis men may be an indicator of this behavior and responsibility with money.
Furthermore, in order to guarantee success, banks or whoever gets involved with rural (and even urban) micro-financing have to be involved in guidance with business plan development, marketing, and selling whatever the enterprises produce. As the Wharton article points out, administrative costs can be overwhelming the business benefits because it is the urban educated that administer the programs at relatively high salaries and low productivity. Business knowledge and skills have to be transferred to rural folks.
I hope technology can be a savior. One example of technology is speech based accounting systems, where the illiterate business people may manage their finances by talking to PCs.

Posted by Som Karamchetty, PHD

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Fast Iterations

[via Thejo] User Interface Engineering writes:

"We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along," the lead designer said. Everyone in the group laughed until he continued, "I'm serious. We don't assume anything works and we don't like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn't. We've found that about 90% of it doesn't work."

NetflixWe were talking with the design team at Netflix. Netflix.com is one of the most successful web sites in the world: the sole customer interaction point of their home DVD-rental business. Over the past 9 years, the site has grown from nothing to serving almost 6 million customers who use the site to prune their rental queues, rate movies, and handle any billing and transaction issues. The designers of Netflix.com have a smashing success on their hands, but we didn't find them resting on their laurels. They want to get even better, and for them that means iterate, iterate, iterate.

Software | PermaLink | Comments (2)

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Blogging as Business

The Economist writes:

Now, however, a third category is emerging: the mom-and-pop blog. “In the old days, we used to be called newsletter publishers,” says Om Malik, a technology writer who quit his job at Business 2.0 magazine in June to work full-time on his blog, GigaOm. He has hired two other writers, and his blog now attracts about 50,000 readers a day, generating “tens of thousands” in monthly revenues. Costs, including salaries, are around $20,000 a month.

One big reason why his blog works as a small business, says Mr Malik, is that an ecosystem of support is appearing. Like Ms Armstrong, he farms out advertising sales and administration to a firm called FM, launched last year by John Battelle, who once ran magazines such as Wired and the Industry Standard. In his old business of magazines, says Mr Battelle, the cost of acquiring an audience was “stupendous”—at Wired it was about $100 per subscriber. The cost of building a readership for a blog, by contrast, is nil. Once you have a lot of readers, however, the bandwidth costs become significant, and most medium-sized blogs cannot afford to hire the sales people needed to generate sufficient revenue. So FM's 15 sales people negotiate with advertisers on behalf of blogs they represent, keeping 40% of the resulting revenues.

BlogStreet | PermaLink | Comments (1)

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3 and Mobile Data

Ajit Jaokar writes about UK-based 3's decision to have a fixed rate pricing for mobile data and follow an open gardens strategy.

For years, the Mobile Data Industry wanted Web valuations without embracing the ethos of the Web.

And everything was done to show how ‘Mobile Data’ is different

We tried Location
We tried talking of ‘performance’.
We tried ‘User experience’.
We tried ‘content’ and also ‘relevance’

Most of all, we tried ‘walled gardens’ and we avoided fixed rate billing

Walled Gardens and the lack of Fixed price billing were the two biggest factors throttling the uptake of the Mobile Data Industry.

Telecom | PermaLink | Comments (1)

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Marketing and Social Networks

Technology Review writes:

If any social-networking company has found a way to rake in cash, it is MySpace; for example, Google recently agreed to pay $900 million for the exclusive right to provide Web searching and keyword-based text ads on the site. Of course, targeted advertisements distributed by Google and other companies provide the revenue that keeps many Web-based businesses afloat. But MySpace's venture into consumer marketing has gone far beyond traditional advertising. The site has given members the technological tools to "express themselves" by turning their own profiles into multimedia billboards for bands, movies, celebrities, and products. Think MTV plus user photos, bulletin boards, and instant messaging.

I realize that in criticizing a pop-culture mecca frequented by millions of people, I risk sounding just as out of touch as DOPA's supporters. But after spending the last few years chronicling the emergence of social networking and other forms of social computing for this magazine, I had higher hopes for the technology. To me, the popularity of MySpace and other social-networking sites signals a demand for new, more democratic ways to communicate--a demand that's likely to remake business, politics, and the arts as today's young Web users enter the adult world and bring their new communications preferences with them. The problem is that MySpace's choice of business strategy threatens to divert this populist energy and trap its users in the old, familiar world of big-media commercialism.

Nicholas Carr has more.

Software | PermaLink | Comments (1)

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TECH TALK: Cyworld: Success

Alan Moore of “Communities Dominate Brands” talked to Benjamin Joffe of Plus Eight Star Ltd, who outlined the early days and key success factors for Cyworld:

According to its founder Young Joon HYUNG, Cyworld's success is the resul of a combination of factors which allowed his vision to come true. This vision was a development on concepts such as the "six degrees of separation" and an adaptation to the individual of ERP concept (Enterprise Resource Planning). Cyworld's founder called it 'PRP' for 'Personal Resources Planner', which he developed during his PhD Thesis on 'trust-based information sharing' at KAIST, South Korea's MIT, in 1999.

This was the founding concept, which could be implemented because of:
1). Korea's highly advanced broadband infrastructure
2). Meeting with a perfect timing with the digital camera boom in Korea in 2002
3). Persistence until broadband penetration in households reached 60%

Other experts we interviewed mentioned the importance of:
1). Introduction of cybercash ('dottori' or acorns) with a large array of payment methods
2). Paradigm shift from the advertising-reliant online services
3). Shift from mass community to personal community
4). Buy-out by SK Communications, which boosted both marketing and technical infrastructure

Business Week had this to say about Cyworld in a September 2005 article:

One feature that has helped Cyworld take off is "wave riding." It works like this: When you're reading posts on bulletin boards or looking at photo files, you can click on the name of someone who has added a remark or photo you find interesting and you'll be transported to that person's digital room. If you like the art or music, you can introduce yourself and put in a request to become a "cybuddy." If accepted, you can use your buddy's goodies -- from art to photos -- on your own page. The chain of wave-riding visits creates communities on the Net, which often develop into clubs of common interest in the real world: clubs for fishing, bike riding, and going to jazz performances, among others.

Letting users post as many photos as they want is another big draw. The growing popularity of digital cameras and camera phones means youngsters increasingly use digital images to share experiences or express themselves. An average of 6.2 million photos are uploaded to Cyworld each day, many of them directly from cell phones. "I use Cyworld as the photo archive for my family," says Kim Joon, a 31-year-old software engineer who met his wife through a Cyworld club for virtual "families" in which he first played her husband. "My 1-year-old son will have a photo log of his life in Cyworld 20 years later."

Business 2.0 wrote about the personalisation and virtual currency aspects in Cyworld in July 2006:

As Cyworld gathered a critical mass of users, it discovered a new business model. Using the site was free; personalizing it was not. If you wanted to decorate your mini-homepage, you could choose from tens of thousands of digital items - homepage skins, background music, pixelated furniture, virtual appliances. But you had to pay for them with "dotori," or acorns, and you had to buy the acorns with real money.

The virtual goods were cheap - typically less than $1 apiece - and consumers had no problem paying for them. A well-appointed mini-homepage reflected your social standing, and users who did not decorate were considered boring.

This year Cyworld expects to make $140 million in sales, with acorns accounting for 70 percent of that. That means Korean consumers will shell out more than $100 million this year for Cyworld's virtual inventory. Most of the rest its sales comes from mobile services, where customers pay to upload photos (90 percent of all images uploaded in Korea go to Cyworld).

Tomorrow: Success (continued)

Related Entries: [All]
TECH TALK: Cyworld: India [November 24, 2006]
TECH TALK: Cyworld: Key Features [November 21, 2006]
TECH TALK: Cyworld: Overview [November 20, 2006]

Tech Talk | PermaLink | Comments (4)

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Dell Latitude D500t................. $200
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Sony Laptops
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BONAZA...........BONAZA.............BONAZA............BONAZA.............BONAZA........
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Nokia N92.......$200USD
Nokia N83.......$175USD
Nokia N91.......$180USD
Nokia N90.......$170USD
Nokia N70.......$150USD
Nokia N71.......$155USD
Nokia N72........$160USD
Nokia N73........$165USD
Nokia 7360.......$165USD
Nokia 7380........$175USD
Nokia 7370........$170USD

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Dell Latitude D600.................. $290
Dell Latitude D500t................. $200
Dell Inspiron 6000.................. $350
Dell Latitude D505.................. $340
Dell Latitude D610.................. $460
Dell Latitude D510.................. $320
Dell Inspiron 9300.................. $530

Sony Laptops
Sony VAIO VGN-T1.................. $680
Sony VAIO VGN-FS315............... $420
Sony VAIO VGN-S3.................. $450
Sony VAIO VGN-TX1................. $840
Sony VAIO VGN-FS215............... $310
Sony VAIO VGN-S4.................. $470
Sony VAIO PCG-K35................. $550
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Sony Bravia XBR KDL-V40XBR1 - LCD TV - 40" ...........$1200usd
Sony Bravia S-Series 40" LCD HDTV ................$1220usd
Sony Bravia 32" Flat-Panel LCD HDTV .................$700usd
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WELCOME...TO ERICCLADMIKS ....ELECTRONICS COMPANY(EEC)............ Ltd
BONAZA...........BONAZA.............BONAZA............BONAZA.............BONAZA........
END OF YEAR SPECIAL SALES PROMOTION WITH SPECIAL DISCOUNT BOTH WHOLESALES AND RETAILS..........................

Nokia Phone.............
Nokia N93........$250USD
Nokia N92.......$200USD
Nokia N83.......$175USD
Nokia N91.......$180USD
Nokia N90.......$170USD
Nokia N70.......$150USD
Nokia N71.......$155USD
Nokia N72........$160USD
Nokia N73........$165USD
Nokia 7360.......$165USD
Nokia 7380........$175USD
Nokia 7370........$170USD

*Dell Laptops
Dell Latitude D600.................. $290
Dell Latitude D500t................. $200
Dell Inspiron 6000.................. $350
Dell Latitude D505.................. $340
Dell Latitude D610.................. $460
Dell Latitude D510.................. $320
Dell Inspiron 9300.................. $530

Sony Laptops
Sony VAIO VGN-T1.................. $680
Sony VAIO VGN-FS315............... $420
Sony VAIO VGN-S3.................. $450
Sony VAIO VGN-TX1................. $840
Sony VAIO VGN-FS215............... $310
Sony VAIO VGN-S4.................. $470
Sony VAIO PCG-K35................. $550
contact us via email...... shop4electronicltd@yahoo.com

Sony Televisions
46" Sony Bravia LCD Television - 1080p..............$1800usd
Sony Bravia XBR KDL-V40XBR1 - LCD TV - 40" ...........$1200usd
Sony Bravia S-Series 40" LCD HDTV ................$1220usd
Sony Bravia 32" Flat-Panel LCD HDTV .................$700usd
Sony Bravia 32" Flat-Panel LCD HDTV ..................$600usd
Sony - Sony Bravia 32' Lcd Tv - 32' - Ntsc, Atsc - 178 .....$600usd
Sony KDE-61XBR950 Television..........................3000usd
Sony KDE-42XBR950 Television..........................1000usd
Sony KDE-42XBR950 Television.........................1000usd
Sony PFM-42X1/S Television...............................500usd
Sony KDE-42XS955 Television.............................550usd
Sony FWD-50PX1/S Television..............................1200usd
Sony KLV-32M1 Television.......................................400usd

PANASONICS TELEVISIONS
Panasonic TH-42PD50U Television............600usd
Panasonic TH-42PX50U Television...........1000usd
Panasonic TH-50PX50U Television...........1500usd
Panasonic TH-42PWD6UY Television.......500usd
Panasonic TH-42PD25U/P Television.........400usd
Panasonic TH-42PHD8UK Television.........450usd
Panasonic TH-65PHD7UY Television...........2500usd
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Panasonic TH-37PX50U Television................500usd
Panasonic TH-42PX500U Television............800usd

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Sharp LC32P50E 32" LCD Television FOR JUST........... 298usd
Sharp LC26P50E 26" LCD Television FOR JUST................. 255 usd
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