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Apps in COVID-19 Times

What a time to be alive, isn’t it? Remember the time when you were slacking close to 10 hours a day and sometimes even working on the weekends without a day off. You were sick of it. And you were desperate enough for that much-needed break. Well, here’s your chance. We found out a few apps that might keep you occupied in this lockdown period. Assuming that you start your day by doing some chores in the morning like you usually would on a regular working day and then head straight to work. Things are a bit different unless you’re one from the ‘heroes’ category. Thank you for your never-ending patience and support! Coming back, the next step would be for us individuals is most likely an option to work from home.

ZOOM Cloud Meetings

Now, working from home can be fun for some and boring for others. Of course, let’s be honest here, some meetings are boring. You have no idea why you are a part of it. Until the Boss finally asks you for your precious opinion. Well, this app is going to help your Boss out. While you’re at home in your comfort zone, he can schedule a meeting with you and your 100 other colleagues. You just need a computer or a laptop or a smartphone and a decent internet connection for you to join in the meeting. But hold it, if you are thinking where am I gaining at this. Well, you are. You can show your clients your presentations and crack that deal which you have been dying to crack. All this by you sharing your screen with the respective members on the call. So much better than those darkroom PowerPoint presentations, where some are found napping. It is a decent app to catch up with your colleagues too.

Houseparty

Wait a moment. Let me proceed ahead with caution. Houseparty was in the news for all the right reasons, until people claimed that their accounts were hacked. Relax! That was a smear campaign started by somebody. Houseparty will be awarding you 1 million dollars (₹7.6 crores) if you manage to prove that somebody was spreading these rumours. Anyway, you are better off enjoying your quarantine period by spending quality time with your family members at home and for someone not that lucky they can do so by playing different games on this app while they are video chatting. Talk to mutual friends and still stay in touch with everyone. The application is really smart, it will alert your friends whenever you are back online on the app. You can even join them, drop a face mail if they have missed a call or just get in touch with them whenever they are back online. You can have a private party of your own too, by locking the rooms in which you and your friends are. Quite cool. A genius idea that was based on a simple concept. Talk to each other while you are playing with each other. Well, the application has gone viral ever since lockdown came into force. Maybe you too should jump on the Houseparty bandwagon and let yourself loose. Sounds fun? It is!

Bumble

This is no joke, virtual dating is a thing, you guys. If you have been sitting on the fence with dating apps. Now is the time to try them out. Many bored people are going to get on the app looking to have a decent conversation with people who share the same interests. So I popped up to look out for people who were exactly doing the same thing. What do you do when you’re in a lockdown situation? Chat up with strangers, and possibly get to know them better before actually meeting them once the quarantine period ends. And the app that I enjoyed using was Bumble. To start with, Bumble has three options for you to choose from. Whether you want to find dates, or friends to hang out with or expand your business network with like-minded individuals. It is truly your choice. Not that you only have to go looking for dates, there are interesting people out there who you can interact with. Every single person out there is in isolation and there’s no harm in trying your luck with someone special. You never know, the person you meet during your quarantine period might be the one who you could be spending your future with. You never know.

AmpMe

Once you’re done looking out for your future significant others, you might want to try this fun app too. It’s for being a bit romantic when you’re alone. No, not what you are thinking. I have no business looking for other things on this app but this one special feature I like to use. Suppose you have a special friend that stays away who has a similar taste in music. You both cannot listen to the same music together at the same time because we’re all isolating in our own houses. We expect you both too. Well, nobody is stopping you to do the same thing virtually. Yes, you and your special friend can play songs from YouTube, Spotify, and your Music library for free. All of that at the same time. Syncing the audio on both your smartphones. Again, all you both need is a fast internet connection and a good choice of songs. And, of course, you can restrict others from joining your private listening session. Apart from that, it gives you an option to chat while you are enjoying your playlist on YouTube or Spotify or your Music Library. It is a sweet way of enjoying the songs together. Or if you want to create a listening session for your whole group then you can ask other friends to join in. Try it out, you might want to ask your Bumble date to join you there. See, I gave you an idea already to do a fun virtual activity together.

Starmaker

Are you tired of playing Ludo, COD, PUBG and what not? You might want to relax your fingers then. This one will rather test your vocal skills. Ever played an online karaoke game? No? It’s pretty simple. Ask all your friends to sing a chorus of their favourite songs and share them on the group. A fun way of keeping your friends and yourself entertained, no? Well, the Starmaker app does act like a karaoke machine. All you have to do is search for your favourite song and play it. The app will automatically collect lyrics and flash it for you as the regular karaoke machines would do. However, I found its instrumentals to be not as accurate but enough for one to have an enjoyable karaoke session with. And when you are done recording your first single, you will be given points and scores, which to be honest, I had no interest in tracking. All I wanted to do was record the single and share it with my friends. Also, they had a good laugh about it. Go on, try it out.

Countries are getting lockdown for days and some for months. It is quite a serious situation out there. If you happen to read this, I am sure you come in the privileged lot. Well, hear me out on this. It is our responsibility to win over this situation. How are we going to do that? By staying home, following basic hygiene and keeping yourself fit. When all of this is over, you will come out of this as a more mature person who has seen through a tough period. For now, enjoy these random apps. You might thank yourself later for doing so. Stay safe, everyone!

Lockdown 2.0 : The World Order has Changed – Editors’ Note

The world order has changed, forever. Things will never be the same again, at least for a long time. Those hugs and kisses, those tight handshakes, and international flights. Video meetings, virtual concerts, sanitizers, facemasks and the biggest of all LOCKDOWN which was never thought of or written about. History Repeats itself, from Spanish flu of 1919 to COVID-19 of 2019, one century ago where it unleashed havoc and took away millions of lives around the world. Meanwhile, the Ebola virus came into existence and Swine flu tested us, but our vaccine dropped faster without them earning the destructive tag of a ‘Pandemic’. Today we are sophisticated, technologically advanced but still fighting the same battle and we don’t know who and what we are fighting. Superpowers like the USA, medically advanced countries like Italy and the whole world is stuck together and fighting together without knowing what is coming next.

COVID-19 has got the pollution levels down, accidental deaths down, psychology levels down and along with it took the world economy to shambles. Is it a Bio War or an Experiment gone wrong? Or is it nature’s way of balancing? Whatever it is, it is dangerous and uncertain. So much uncertain that for next issue, whether I will be writing this piece with a percentage of the world population wiped out or rejoicing on the newfound vaccine or picking up pieces of the post COVID era is uncertain. The hardcore optimistic are bewildered at which way things will unfold, all leaders everywhere putting up brave faces and doing their best knowing deep inside that the enemy is hidden and is firing canons through droplets, like a rogue alchemist converting human beings to ticking time bombs ready to explode on each other.

Saving the economy is secondary and human lives are primary. Billionaires, millionaires and everyone in every way are generously donating and doing their best to fight the Coronavirus, and we are all equally vulnerable and at stake is the entire civilization. Staying home has become heroic, work from home is the new normal, and technology is the saviour. Imagine 1919, when the pandemic of Spanish Flu broke, no internet, no Netflix, no broadcasting news, no video call apps, no Zoom or Houseparty or WhatsApp which are all the fabric responsible for keeping us sane and connected now.

They survived, we will too and come out stronger and develop immunity against the flu and most of the materialistic things which this world has to offer. When everything is over, people will realize that life is unpredictable and living your life and making the most of it while you can go outdoors is called living. Rest is a mystery.

Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO of Zomato

EXHIBIT: What’s the story behind the name “Zomato”?
Deepinder: When we started out in 2008 we were called Foodiebay. One of the reasons why we decided to change the name in late 2010 from Foodiebay to Zomato was that we wanted a powerful brand name. After endless debate over several cups of coffee, we came up with the name Zomato. We decided to keep the idea of food at the center and choose a name that is short, easy to remember and makes people think of food. Zomato’s got a zing to it and is originally a play on the word ‘Tomato’. We also wanted to avoid any confusion with “ebay”; we wanted to be sure that we weren’t taking any chances when creating a brand we wanted to take international at the time. Focusing on brand recall and communicating what we stand for is of primary importance to any consumer internet company, and I think we have got most of it right with Zomato.

EXHIBIT: When did you get your first funding? Was it tough to raise fund or a cake walk for Zomato?
DG: Raising funds for a consumer facing product was far from easy back in 2008-10. When we started out, we had initially raised a small sum of money from our family and a couple of friends to ensure we could hit the ground running. However raising the seed round was difficult; we were struggling at the time to find investors who’d write us our first cheque.

We worked at Bain for a year and a half while dedicating weekends to Foodiebay when we started out. By the time we left Bain, we had already launched in 4 cities (NCR, Kolkata, Mumbai& Pune) and had a handful of clients on board. It was getting difficult to manage both and before one could affect the other, we decided to quit and work full-time on Foodiebay; luckily, by then, we had we also had Gunjan on board to work on the tech side of things.In 2010, Sanjeev and his team saw the potential in what we were building and gave us our first cheque of a Million dollars. InfoEdge has been an investor in Zomato ever since, and still owns majority stake in the company.

EXHIBIT: Zomato has travelled a long way since its inception in 2008. What made you come up with the idea? What’s biggest leap of Zomato since then?
DG: At Zomato, we started out will collecting menus for restaurants around Gurgaon and put up these scanned menus on the office intranet. When we starting see a lot of traction there, Pankaj and I then went on to build this database and soon we had gone live with menus for 1,200 restaurants in Delhi NCR in July 2008, which expanded to 2,000 restaurants by the end of that year. We have now grown our footprint from having presence in 4 cities in India in 2008, to listing over I million restaurants in over 10,000 cities, across 23 countries.

We have come a long way since we started out 8 years ago and as a technology company we need to constantly build further from where we started. We started out primarily as a restaurant search and discovery service on web, and what we’re building today is 100x more complex. Over the past few years, we’ve been extremely focused on building products for our users, and restaurant partners – to help make dining experiences unthinkably easy.

We have diversified our product offering beyond just search and discovery to adding a social layer, then expanding into adjacencies such as online food delivery, table reservations, white label apps for restaurants, Zomato for business – a marketing tool for restaurant owners, and now our own point of sales system for restaurants.On the business front – we have had a very successful launch of our food delivery business in India and the UAE over the last year. We operationally broke-even in our businesses in India, the Middle East (UAE, Lebanon and Qatar) and Southeast Asia (Philippines and Indonesia) earlier this Feb. If the revenue growth continues as we expect it to, we aim to operationally break-even as a global business by Dec 2016.

EXHIBIT: What is your opinion about the future of the Food-tech industry in India?
DG: For the past two years, the food tech space has seen a lot of activity from both entrepreneurs and investors. We’ve seen a conscious effort and the biggest strides along three fronts.One – rising digital adoption amongst restaurants to help them create great dining experiences. From cloud based POS systems which help restaurants with inventory and menu management, better customer insights to using digital platforms to communicate and reach out to their potential customers, the most successful restaurateurs are able use a suite of tools available to them to enhance customer experience around great food. We’ve also seen dark/cloud kitchens grow in the recent past and the sector today has the capability and infrastructure to see more of such scalable concepts grow.

Two – building stronger communication channels between restaurants and users. Convenience services such as online ordering and table reservation have made the whole ordering in or dining out experience as seamless as possible for both – the users, as well as the restaurants.While we’ve seen a lot of food-tech start-ups mushroom and help grow the market overall over the last couple of years, it is now also great to see an increasing effort on getting the business fundamentals right with more companies and investors largely focused on building the food-tech space in India for the longer term.

The focus on digitisation of discovery, communication, delivery, reservation and restaurant operations overall will help in creating greater dining experiences for users. We will also see convergence of these business models in different forms to provide greater value to both merchants as well as the users in the near future.With more and more players entering the market, what will set one apart from the other is the overall customer experience and unit economics. All metrics of customer adoption of a product, the frequency of use and the end conversion will be driven by the quality of service a product offers. In any business, you are only as good as your customers think you are.

EXHIBIT: What’s the most common trend among Zomato users?
DG: We get most of our traffic when users are looking to make a decision about ordering food or eating out, i.e. just before lunch and dinner hours. I think a common trend among most Zomato users is that they are extremely passionate about food, and they like the discovery aspect the product allows for by providing them all the information they need to be able to make an educated choice on where to eat or what to order.

EXHIBIT: Blend of technology and food – that’s Zomato in a single phrase. How do you justify this?
DG: Well, that’s rather self-explanatory, isn’t it?

EXHIBIT: Tell us some unknown facts about yourself.
DG: My first startup back in 2005, was an online food delivery website called Foodlet. It was probably the first online food delivery business in India.

EXHIBIT: Tell us about some inspirational books that you have read and would recommend.
DG: The last book that I read and was inspired by was Leading by Sir Alex Ferguson. The other two books that stuck a chord with me at different points of my entrepreneurial journey were Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz. On a personal note though, I enjoy collecting the Classics for my home library.

EXHIBIT: Inspirational tips to the startup founders who are trying to come up with innovative ideas like yours.
DG: I think when you start building something for the right reasons – you have identified a gap that you want to bridge, or have identified an even more efficient way of doing something that already exists; if you can do this with focus, on the right foundation, and can build a good team around your idea that shares your vision – that’s half the battle won.

The modern customers and businesses rely heavily on the internet to find products and services they need, and people will love a service if it makes their lives simpler. Multiple players will definitely continue to emerge because of the massive potential and reach of the internet. However, what’s going to set a particular player apart is not just a unique product and service offering, but also a real and sustainable business model built around sound unit economics.

EXHIBIT: Talking of India, and adjacencies – how big do you think is the food delivery market?
DG: While the food delivery market in India is huge (between the organized and unorganized segment it has been pegged between $1.4B – $2B), the online food delivery segment still has a lot of room to grow. The normal human behaviour for ordering food is still to pick up the phone and call. So our largest competitor in this segment is still the phone.

As of now, our online food delivery business is growing at a healthy 30% month-on-month, we recently crossed 33,000 orders a day across India and UAE – and this is with only 2.5% of our active user base searching for restaurants having placed orders online.

Porsche 911 Carrera S | Review | Beauty and the Beast

When you wake up on a Sunday and you have the red hot Porsche Carrera S waiting in the lobby all tanked up, you realise that Life is Good. I could barely finish my breakfast because Saurabh and Harman from my team were all geared up 45 mins in advance of the time we had decided to shoot. Excitement level? Checked! This normally does not happen but when you have the Porsche 911 Carrera, things change.

As we zeroed upon the drive, first we thought of hitting the Pune expressway but we realised that a car which demands a cheque value north of ₹2 crores will most likely be bought by an enthusiast living in the metro cities. For example, in Mumbai, the chances are that you are living between Andheri and Marine Drive. So, I thought why not do a reality check and experience it on the practical front rather than just taking it out on the straights?

Coming to the 911 Carrera S, it’s a 2 door meant for 2 people with two more seats at the back. Practically impossible for an adult to sit, but should be enough for an overtly active skinny 8-year old. But then again if you plan on owning a sports car and that too the ultimate 911, you will mostly have luxury Sedans and SUVs already lying in your garage. So, our backup car or the tracking car was my BMW X5 which was trailing us all the time.

Making your way inside the car, note that you do not have any back problems to slide into the almost ground touching seats, but then that’s a sports car we are talking about. So make sure that even before you earn the money, burn calories too. And as soon as you turn the ignition knob the engine cranks up whose sound can cure you of all your Mental Illness, Schizophrenia, Depression and maybe even the deadly Dengue or viral fever. The moment I took it out of my apartment complex and right over a road bump, it narrowly scraped the bottom and then I realised you have to be super careful as it hurts. If anything it’s exactly like a stone touching the Porsche 911 in your possession. But when you’re out on the roads, all you will get is everyone’s attention (envious) who have been ogling at it either directly or slyly.

Everything inside is top-notch with the usual boot in the front and the engine at the rear. Quite typical of the 911. I wanted to take a peek at the engine but sadly you cannot do that. Copyrights Issue. The overall design from the outside to inside is something which looks like a Picasso painting translated on the roads. Thus, we started driving to Mumbai’s famous, Gateway of India and I thought when you have a car like this, the seat next to you should also be occupied by a beautiful woman, so I dialled Chetna Pande’s number just to check if we can pick her up on the way and in return promised her a nice lunch at Pizza by the Bay in Marine Drive. It took me 15 seconds to convince her and she promptly said that she will be down and ready to go in 15 minutes (it’s unusual of a girl as gorgeous and beautiful as her to get ready so quickly). BUT, she made me take an oath to allow her to drive the 911 Carrera S for 5 minutes and I had to grudgingly agree. For a minute, I am thinking to myself that it’s a bad bargain.

And when we finally met, the first thing Chetna did was that she connected her phone to the Bluetooth and the Bose speakers were extremely capable of a sound blast, but she lowered the volume as the Bose speakers couldn’t compete with the sound of the twin-turbo flat-six engine’s tune. It also has Apple CarPlay, navigation system which is on point and an easy operating user interface. However, these things don’t matter because you would rather not take it to an unknown place but use it to take it out on known roads and drive and come back home and maybe book an Uber for work or take the other cars lying in your garage. As I said earlier, the 911 attracts attention, we had paparazzi shooting us at Worli Sea Link. The Carrera S was getting attention from everywhere, people from tall vogues to runners were all looking at her – I mean the car. And the moment we pulled over at Pizza by the Bay, there were 10 valets who all came running towards the car and as I stepped out, I asked, “Can any of you drive this?” The answer was obvious, “Yes, sir!” As the car stood there craving all attention. That’s the point of me saying, this is exactly why you drive the 911 and come back home or take a backup car or get an Uber because giving it to any valet is a seriously tough decision just like choosing the girl you want to marry. Well, quite literally.

Now I had to live up to my promise and so I had to hand over the keys to Chetna and this was going to be her first sports car experience. As we swapped seats and drove away, she was all smiles, but those 5 minutes were the toughest 5 minutes of my life. That’s when I understood, why cars will always be a Man’s First Love (in any case, a petrolhead’s first love). And, specifically, for me, Ladies and Gentlemen, it was the 8th generation Carrera S with a new 8-speed dual-clutch PDK gearbox with a top speed of 308 km/h that is also capable of flying to 100 km/h in 3.7 seconds, is a perfect example of Beauty and the Beast. Therefore, I rest my case.

Specifications:

Engine: 3.0-litre, twin-turbo, flat six

Power: 450 hp

Torque: 530 Nm

Transmission: 8-speed DCT (PDK)