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The festive season is knocking at our doorsteps and the <keyword id="35621" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="e-commerce">e-commerce</keyword> space is almost done planning about all kinds of deals to lure consumers with. We sure don’t want to miss out on any deal and hence have registered our mobile number on their databases. But have you ever wondered how millions of customers get the alerts within a specific time slots? Sure regular messaging can’t do that. 
 It is done fully via <keyword id="3044201" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="cloud-messaging">cloud messaging</keyword>. Cloud messaging platforms are helping enterprises to stay connected with their customers as surely regular messaging platforms and whatsapp like apps become cluttered when client base increases. Currently there is an immense growth around cloud based SMS/USSD, Voice and Data APIs including IP and IOT messaging. The whole industry is a Rs.1000 crore platform and 30 per cent revenue comes from social media and e-commerce. 
 So how is cloud messaging helping in the e-commerce boom? Let’s hear it from Ravi Sundararajan, COO of <keyword id="755674" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="GupShup">GupShup</keyword>, a leading player in the market with leading companies, e-commerce brands and social media players using their solutions to engage and retain their customers and enjoys 36 per cent share in the market. 
 
1. Acquire: One of the main challenge of e-commerce is to form the customer base. Attracting millions of consumers out there is sure not an easy task. And with India, the main target would be rural India as that consists of a major part of India. By being interactive through API, cloud messaging platforms help e-commerce industry achieve their target reach. They offer various services under SMS, voice and email like Transactional Messaging, Promotional Messaging, 2-way Messaging, 10 Digit Missed Call Number, Toll Free Number, and Call Forwarding etc. The company’s platform enables users to integrate messaging into the business flow; manage customer communications through a single dashboard; and deliver messages on a massive scale. 
 
“We give APIs to our customers. If the message is going to rural India where they don’t know how to answer in web form, it would be a missed call, where they can click on the missed call and IVR comes and they can answer the question. Also via APIs e-commerce players communicate with their consumers in vernacular languages by features like voice embedded instructions,” said Ravi. 
 <keyword id="541988" type="COMPANY" weightage="100" keywordseo="SnapDeal">SnapDeal</keyword> uses GupShup’s solutions to send regular updates and offers to all their existing customers via SMS ensuring consistent delivery within specified time slots. The promotion of their deals via SMS to their opt-in profiles, increased the usage of the discount coupons on their website. This also increased awareness and traffic to SnapDeal’s website thus increasing online sales and customer engagement. 
 
2. Engage: Through innovation and by being programmable, cloud messaging platforms help to engage customers by instantly updating them about all the services, discounts and new deals, not just by simply sending a text message but by sending links, embedded interactive sessions etc. 
 
“Suppose we want to buy a handbag online, we can just send one message and all the information about the sites, their products, price range is available at our fingertips in just one click,” he said. 
 
Through cloud messaging e-commerce sites have also been able to engage better by conducting hassle-free fun contests and also to get valuable feedbacks from the consumers. 
 
GupShup helped Quikr use Missed call and USSD to enable consumers to post and browse classified Ads by various categories instantaneously using their mobile phones. This resulted in increased customer engagement for Quikr through cost-effective mobile engagement using SMS, Data and Voice channels. 
 
3. Retain: It is extremely important for an e-commerce site to retain customers. Time lag associated with regular messaging is one of the biggest enemies of the sector. Cloud messaging not only decreases this, also enables secured transactions through OTP generators via APIs. 
 
Ravi predicted that as mobile market becomes huge, cloud messaging is going to be the number one app wherein we can get all our work done through messages, thus giving us a one-step solution from the headache of managing dozens of apps each with a different purpose. 
(Image credits: carsonmarain.deviantart)

This is how you get SMS alerts of each and every online deal
without any delay!

<a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook</a> is opening its floodgates. 
 
Last year at its F8 conference, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook</a> merely teased the prospect of businesses hopping onto Messenger. This year <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook</a> founder <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Mark+Zuckerberg&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Mark Zuckerberg</a> is likely to announce many more business plans with its 1 billion monthly active users. 
 
Gupshup, an offering by Webaroo is a smart messaging platform that companies like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Ola&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Ola</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=MakeMyTrip&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">MakeMyTrip</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Flipkart&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Flipkart</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Snapdeal&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Snapdeal</a>, Axis Bank, and many more you to send you SMSes. 
 
With global players like <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook</a> and Slack already realizing the potential of smart messaging, Business Insider caught up with co-founder and CEO of GupShup to discuss the future of smart messaging in India. 
 
How has the enterprise messaging scenario changed since back in 2010? 
From 2010 to now, our journey reflects how the messaging platform has evolved. In the feature phone world, all messaging was SMS. 
 
We built the largest SMS based messaging platform with over 4 billion messages. That includes messages from e-commerce companies, banks, taxi companies and so on. Most of that volume in India goes through our platform. 
 
Meanwhile, new channels have emerged. 
 
Today there’s <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=WhatsApp&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">WhatsApp</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook</a>, WeChat and Line. Unlike the telco ecosystem that was very location specific, the IT based channels transverse national boundaries. 
 
Where does the bulk of the enterprise messaging platforms lie? 
P2P has moved substantially from SMS to <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=WhatsApp&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">WhatsApp</a>, etc. Enterprise messaging, not so much. That has primarily been via SMS. 
 
Do you see that trend changing anytime soon? 
It’s going to change soon. With the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook</a> F8 conference, that change has already begun. 
 
I can bet at about this time next year, IP based messages will be growing much faster. 
 
How does IP-based messaging get an edge over SMS? 
SMS mechanism in India is totally messed up. It’s messed up at a regulator and operator level alike. 
 
The cost per message on <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook+Messenger&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook Messenger</a> is zero. Also, the sender ID on SMS is not a regular number, so you can’t reply. On <keyword id="790242" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="40" keywordseo="WhatsApp">WhatsApp</keyword> or <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook</a> you can. 
 
Also, these are world-class platforms where developers can build to APIs. 
 
For SMSes, there are complicated rules about who can send messages, what messages they can send. There are penalties if you violate these rules. They can even shut you down, and it’s difficult to argue against that. 
 
SMS has been rendered completely sub-optimal. Messaging can be a lot more. It’s currently only used for one-way broadcasting. It should be a two-way interactive channel. 
 
SMS in India is nowhere close to that. 
 
There’s an alternate view that telemarketers will be even more difficult to control. 
I trust <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=Facebook&amp;sortorder=effectivedate">Facebook</a> and WhatsApp to handle spam better than any regulator anywhere. 
 
Spam is a highly technical issue, and most regulators tend to have a black-or-white point of view. They have a clear and simple rule of what’s spam and what’s not. 
 
The reality is it’s not easy to define spam. If a brand sends me random marketing messages every day, its spam. If I go to that store every weekend, it’s not spam. 
 
You can’t have a one-line rule that defines what’s spam, what’s not. The regulator has no idea whether you’ve been to the store or not. 
 
Image credit: Indiatimes

Flipkart, Snapdeal and Ola SMS
you today. That may change, and soon!

Rohan Shravan was 24 years old when he founded Notion Ink, a <keyword id="138263" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="startup">startup</keyword> that designed India’s first tablet computer Adam. The device was launched five months before Apple placed the first version of the iPad on store shelves. 
 
At its international debut in the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas in January 2010, one of the first to place an order for Adam was an employee at Apple headquarters in Cupertino. However, in the ensuing months as the iPad gained iconic status, Adam dropped by the wayside, felled by the lack of risk capital to grow the business. 
 “When I told venture capitalists that our product will be a challenger to <keyword id="10591" type="CITY" weightage="40" keywordseo="Samsung">Samsung</keyword> and Apple, they laughed at me,” said Shravan, a mechanical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur who initially bootstrapped the firm with personal savings of around Rs 6 lakh. 
 
Shravan’s experience is hardly unique. In the midst of an unprecedented entrepreneurial boom, several of those starting up say there are more hurdles than advantages in the Indian startup sector. Apart from the red tape and the lack of policy support there is also a shortage of true risk capital that can back edgy new ideas. 
 
Customers are unwilling to pay for untested products and many entrepreneurs choose the middle path fearing failure. “I was very aggressive, arrogant and fought like a warrior, the so-called experts advised me to tone down and be nice, which led to our downfall,” said Shravan who trained engineering students to work on Adam as a way to minimise staff costs. “Around 80 per cent of the employees were final year students; they were later snatched by Samsung and Motorola.” 
 
In recent years, several ventures including short messaging service GupShup, personalised news service Frrole and language keypad maker Luna Ergonomics have altered business models when faced with regulatory hurdles or the fear of rejection from investors and customers. 
 This at a time when many global technology companies including WhatsApp, <keyword id="6354576" type="CITY" weightage="40" keywordseo="Facebook">Facebook</keyword>, caller identification service Truecaller, home rental marketplace Airbnb, and question and answer site Quora count India as one of their fastest growing markets. 
 
Nearly 40 million of WhatsApp’s global user base of 450 million is in India. “India is our largest market with about 30 million users and continues to demonstrate great opportunities for us,” said Nami Zarringhalam, cofounder of Sweden’s Truecaller. When Amarpreet Kalkat started his company Frrole in 2011, he wanted to build a product that was tailored to a user’s area of interest. 
 
“I believed it could rival Google News,” said the 35-year-old entrepreneur. Eight months later, Kalkat started looking for funds and he had to answer the dreaded question, over and over again: “How do you make money?” Two years of running the company without external funding almost made him bankrupt. Kalkat was forced to start a new by changing his model to an enterprise product. 
 
At about the same time when Frrole was launched in Silicon Valley, a text and photo sharing app called Snapchat was born. It received $60 million (Rs 361 crore) in initial funding and was handling 150 million photos every day. 
 
Last year, the company rejected a $3 billion (Rs 18,000 crore) buyout deal from Facebook. “There is a very high chance that Frrole would still have been a social newspaper, if we were based in Silicon Valley,” said Kalkat whose company now has a dozen of enterprise customers. 
 
Parag Dhol, managing director at Inventus Capital Partners, said he has some sympathy with the entrepreneurs’ point of view. “But let me throw the question back at them—let us find at least one product from India where there are at least 100 million users,” said the investor who has backed firms such as Savaari Car Rentals, online bus ticketing site redBus and technology company TELibrahma. 
 
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Angel investor Sharad Sharma, who pushed Kalkat to alter his business model, is of the view that in Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can afford to not have a paying business. “Because they have the confidence that they will get bought over, here there is no such scene. It’s all about viability of the business,” said Sharma who participated in a $245,000 angel (Rs 1.4 crore) funding round in Frrole this April. 
India has a far worse ratio of venture capital exits as compared to Israel and the US, according to data compiled by think tank iSpirt and investment bank Signal Hill. Few large companies are interested in buying out startups or using their products, impeding growth of local companies. 
 
“We had all the ingredients to become a large global company,” says Abhijit Bhattacharjee, 43-year-old founder of Luna Ergonomics, the maker of the Indian language keypad Panini. 
 
Named after an ancient Sanskrit grammarian, the technology makes it possible to type quickly and easily in all Indian languages on the mobile phone. The company which has received patents for its Korean language interface did not find takers amongst Indian telecom companies. 
 
“Supporting Indian scripts on digital devices does not suit the strengths and roadmaps of these companies,” said Bhattacharjee, whose company last released an Urdu keypad for iOS, Android, and PC in 2013. “Which large enterprise buys cutting edge technology from startups? When there are not early customers, how can you expect to have $1 billion companies?” asked Ashish Gupta, a senior managing director at Helion Venture Partners that backed group text messaging service GupShup. 
 
The Mumbai-based firm was launched just six months after microblogging site Twitter was launched in the US in July 2006. Within a year of inception the service had racked up 15 million users. 
 GupShup was a free, social, short messaging service that allowed users to communicate and connect with family, <keyword id="343" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="40" keywordseo="Friends">friends</keyword> and followers using ordinary mobile handsets. But the telecom ecosystem and policies were a problem. 
 
“The regulations did not allow advertising. The operators kept the short messaging service rates high,” said Beerud Sheth, cofounder of Webaroo maker of GupShup product. The company had to shift focus from retail consumers and instead offer the messaging platform for enterprises. 
 
“They (government) should invest money in big ideas. They need to stop protecting big industries and start encouraging disruption and risk taking,” said Rahul Sood, partner at Microsoft Ventures and a technology entrepreneur, who sold the luxury computer business VodooPC to Hewlett Packard in 2006. 
 
Compare this to China, where the startup ecosystem is accelerating faster than anywhere in the world. There are around 1300 incubators and accelerators across the country compared with about 35 active accelerators in India. Shravan of Notion Ink has not lost hope yet. 
 
The entrepreneur is placing another bet. This time a personal computing robot called EVE, which he thinks will disrupt the market and will be in the market by 2017. “I will be jealous of my kids, they will be enjoying the rewards our hard work and same is true for the next generation of entrepreneurs,” he said.

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