You see it in processes where something spreads to its vicinity.
This isn't really a natural example, but if you draw a square on a sheet of graphing paper. Next iteration you fill in each adjacent square. Repeat this process until you get tired of it. The radius increases linearly at a constant rate, but the area, the number of squares, as a function of each iteration, is growing quadratically.
Take a circular forest in a place where there are no fires and no logging. Its rate of growth is proportional to its circumference, which is proportional to its radius. Its area as a function of time is a quadratic function.
Suppose the value of a network to an individual user is proportional to the number of users. Then the total value of the network, summed across all its users, is proportional to the square of the number of users.
I’m a startup founder where most of our employees are based in India. I don’t condone this move by Razorpay. However, as someone else pointed out, the legal process in India is not robust, and it is biased toward people in power. Here are some constructive ways to avoid situations like this:
1. Register your company outside of India. The US is an excellent option because of the solid legal framework.
2. Encrypt the data. Ask for access from your customers, even for your own support teams.
3. Use international companies for services whenever possible.
It would be great to have a regular process to delete old data if you don’t need it for business purposes, and this is hard to do because you could develop an innovative way to add customer value using the old data you don’t know of today.
Unfortunately, the data part won’t work very well because of the strict data localization laws that require financial data to be stored in India. Related to this, Amex and MasterCard were banned from issuing new cards in India. The ban on MasterCard was removed recently (nearly a year later) after compliance. The ban on Amex is still not lifted.
> It would be great to have a regular process to delete old data if you don’t need it for business purposes, and this is hard to do because you could develop an innovative way to add customer value using the old data you don’t know of today.
It is not "hard to do" just because you would like not to do it. This is the first step you should be taking, not faffing around with international corporate registrations and encryption to create weak protection for data that you shouldn't have in the first place.
We use both Twilio and Plivo in our text messaging products in CallHub. Both are great vendors to work with. We'll not move to Amazon just for a lower price. The things that we value are,
1. Quality of delivery
2. A consistent API across all our telephony needs.
3. Great support when we need it
I especially love the fact that these vendors are constantly innovating and give us early access to those innovations as well. The most recent was Twilio's release of studio.
CallHub probably has more demanding requirements for a call and SMS platform than most customers. If I understand your business correctly you provide robo-calling (!) services for political parties. Most companies use Twilio in very basic ways.
In terms of innovation in SMS and telephony, there are also numerous ways you can see Amazon surpassing Twilio. For example, combining speech detection, automation, etc. from Alexa with their platform.
callhub.io | Senior UX/UI Engineer | Bangalore, India | Full Time | OnSite
We are looking for someone to own the complete user experience and user design strategy for CallHub. We are a small startup so you can choose to contribute all other areas of the company as well. More details here,
https://hasjob.co/callhub.io/ymzp3
Contact augustus+hn@callhub.io
---- About CallHub ----
We help political parties and advocacy groups in their campaigns and causes, using our award winning cloud based telephony platform. Customers round the globe use CallHub to reach people quickly via phone calls and text messages. More than 750+ customers use our product. Our customers include Uber, Accenture, major political parties in UK, France, Australia and the US.
CallHub (callhub.io) | Bangalore, India | Senior Software Engineer
We are looking for a Django and python developer to join our core development team in Bangalore. We build delightful telephony applications for businesses and communities. We are profitable and growing fast. We have more than 200 customers across 11 countries and have sent more than 2 million messages.
We offer market salary and stock options. See our values and more details here, https://callhub.io/jobs/
CallHub (callhub.io) | Bangalore, India | Software Developer
We are looking for a Django and python developer to join our core development team in Bangalore. We build delightful telephony applications for businesses and communities. We are profitable and growing fast. We have more than 200 customers across 11 countries and have sent more than 2 million messages.
We offer market salary and stock options. See our values and more details here, https://callhub.io/jobs/
Wow! This is great. The prices of infrastructure services like AWS, Plivo are mostly falling down. I wonder if these price drops are forced due to competition or if the services expect to see an increase in usage due to price drops.
In Bangalore, rickshaw fares have been going up, while cab fares have been going down in the past few years. Currently, it costs Rs.13 per KM for a rickshaw[1] and it costs exactly the same, Rs.13 per KM, for a small cab[2] during the day in Bangalore. During the night, rickshaw is 50% more expensive than using a cab.
A cab is clearly a more comfortable ride than a rickshaw. I don't see how the rickshaw business will continue to operate and grow under these conditions.
My father is a cab driver and your Math is way off course. In order to break even, Cab drivers and most travel agencies offering cab services use a mix of fare systems. If you are hiring a cab for a day, the cab fares are mixture of 'time' and 'distance'. For example, there is a minimum half day charge for 4 hours or 40 kilometer, or multiples of that plus any additional billing for extra kilometers driven.
Tourist cabs are charged separately.
Autos are far far cheaper than any cab you can hire. But the margin of profit in Autos is way less, so the general quality suffers.
The reason your Meru's, Ola's or even Uber can offer cabs for so cheap is they raise enough money to operate on losses. Bankruptcy is pretty common in this business. Every time I talk to my father about a new cheap travel scheme, he only asks me to wait for their imminent demise.
We've been in this business for quite some while to understand how this stuff works. If you wish to understand how sustainable cab business work, have a talk with the office cab drivers. You will get a peek into the life of people who sleep for barely 5 hrs/day and drive 300Km/day to make a living on 12000 rupees a month. All while charging a good deal to travel agencies.
Autos are going to make a killing. If you are thinking you are going to invest your way in to this market, then you are going to be in for a surprise.
There is a saying in my native tongue(urdu): "If you wish to destroy a person's life, get him to start a travel business'.
The Math is correct. Those are the current prices. You are saying that Olacab like companies are able to afford to have low prices because they have investor money to operate at a loss. That may be true too. Yes, it will be interesting to see who can hold on for longer.
We have a reached a stage where rickshaws and cabs are competing for the same market segment, within the city.
I have seen at least 3-4 cycles of travel companies going bankrupt in as little as the last decade. The general attitude is that they think once they acquire monopoly by offering cheaper fares, then they can charge what ever they feel like.
But the story always is every time they get close to even say 5-10% of the market share some launches a competing service. By then you have lost too much money to make any thing meaningful out of it.
>>We have a reached a stage where rickshaws and cabs are competing for the same market segment, within the city.
If money isn't a concern for you, then that is true. But for anything less than 40 km of travel or a 4 hour hire, Autos will win by a big margin.
I've noticed a few things that seem to differentiate autos and taxis. Perhaps I'm overestimating their importance, and these are definitely just anecdotes and not data, but these might be worth considering:
- Relationships. Almost everyone I know who has stayed in one city/area for more than 4-5 years has the phone numbers of a few auto drivers they trust. These are the first who are likely to get a call when they have time and need to make a quick trip to a friends house or the grocery store. OTOH, while The same goes for cabs, they tend to have the numbers of a local cab company, not the driver. The cab company gets a call only for longer trips; typically the ones that lead out of town.
- Trust. Ties in with above, people are wary of unknown auto/cab drivers. I know a lot of people >40 tend to prefer calling someone they know rather than flagging down an unknown auto/cab, more so late at night.
- Roads and weather. I know a few places where driving in a car is almost impossible. The roads are just too narrow to allow it. Perhaps not a large market for cabs but one heavily trafficked by autos.
- Regional culture variations. Bangaloreans in my circles tend to prefer autos, while Mumbaikars prefer cabs. Delhi folks almost always prefer to drive.
My point being I'd love to see companies like this adapt to these variations. I'd personally prefer to call an auto guy I know who works with this service, and then fall back to someone else if he's busy. Or bump me to a cab company if the distance is too far. Perhaps give my family a way to track me on pickup and drop if I'm heading in to the shadier parts of town.
almost, but the driver mentality is different, due to difference in traffic structures. The Tuk Tuk is on the peppy side of things. The Autorickshaw[different from just 'Rickshaw'] is more enclosed, personal ride most of the time.
