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From arranging marriages to finding the ‘more-important-than-husband’ maid, these Indian web portals have you covered

India is a diverse country with the number of languages and Gods that could fill a town or maybe a couple of towns in Europe. There are, however, some unique characteristics that can unite all Indians, no matter which part of the country they are, or for that matter, which part of the world.

Tech startups have tapped into the sentiments of India right from religion to the big world of weddings, taking many age-old traditions to the next level — where you can please your grandmother with a quick online prayer or put a smile on your mother’s face by checking out the 500 boys she thinks are the best suited to you and the family.

Here are some things that can only work in India:

The family wedding

Marriage is serious business in India. It not only involves the bride and groom, or the immediate family but also distant relatives and neighbours.

So while earlier, Sunday reading for parents looking for brides or grooms for their children was restricted to a dedicated eight-to-sixteen-page section in any mainstream newspaper, the online boom just exploded the number of options.

Arranged marriages are a very accepted and common way to the altar in India, and with websites such as Shaadi, Bharatmatrimony and Infoedge-backed Jeevansaathi, you can pick and choose a candidate based on their caste, height, colour, or even profession and salary earned.

A multi-billion dollar industry, weddings are a common way of showing the world and their uncles how well-to-do you are. And while dowry is illegal in India, gifting your children with whatever the in-laws want is not.

Ever wondered what your gifting worth would be? Satirical website Dowrycaluclator.com can help you with that. Based on your salary, qualifications and looks, you can get a rough estimate as to how much dowry you can demand from the bride’s family. Just to clarify the website does not promote the concept of dowry, but is intended at poking fun at this practice.

Religion sells

Are your exams close? Is the girl next door still not even looking at you? Or is the boss driving you nuts? Do you need divine intervention? Worry not! A click of a button is all you need to offer prayers and receive or gift ‘Prasad’ or food token that is offered in temples.

Temples and spiritual healing have been synonymous with India, so with the dawn of the digital era, spirituality and religion have also upgraded to levels that can be paid for by Mastercard.

A number of websites including epuja.co.in, onlineprasad or onlinetemple have become increasingly popular. They offer not only prayers at your chosen temple but also astrological readings and live chats with priests. Combo deals and prayers targetted at specific problems including relief from sins of previous birth or for better job prospects are also a hit.

Also Read: Can India build the next Silicon Valley?

Most important member of the house — Domestic Help

Just like the conversation starter for an Englishman is the weather, in India for a majority of women it’s the domestic help. The common joke is that you can survive without your husband but if the maid takes a day off, life seems to come to an end.

Bookmybai.com (bai being the Hindi word for house help) hit the right nerve when it tried to provide a consolidated platform to a highly unorganised sector. It offers reliable and secure services of maids, drivers, cooks and help for the elderly.

The common practice is to find domestic help — part-time or full time — by word-of-mouth, but with the increasingly busy lifestyles and lesser interaction with neighbours, Bookmybai provides the easiest way.

Also Read: Sexy n naughty! Beyond inhibitions emerges India’s online lingerie mkt

Shhhhh….Lingerie

India is the land of the Kamasutra, but God forbid you mention women’s lingerie in public. Women’s lingerie, sensuous wear even regular innerwear is still a secret conveyed in hushed tones. Many women still cringe at the idea of going to a shop and purchasing a bra from a man.

The online sale of intimate wear has enabled women to not only spend time in reviewing the product they want to buy, but also helps them to explore their kinky side in private. The anonymity of the contents of the parcel and a size and style guide to purchase lingerie of the correct size is definitely a key selling point for websites like Zivame, Strapsandstrings, Clovia, and more.

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Former Infosys CFO TV Mohandas Pai, Rajan Pandhare and Debasish Mitter, besides Singapore Angels, also co-invested

i2e1, an Indian startup providing low-cost/free Internet to consumers and actionable analytics to service providers, has bagged US$500,000 in seed funding led by Delhi-based early-stage investment growX ventures.

Former Infosys CFO TV Mohandas Pai, Rajan Pandhare and Debasish Mitter, besides Singapore Angels also co-invested.

The funds will be used to ramp up i2e1’s operations, analytics platform and team

Founded in early this year and incubated at IIT Delhi, i2e1 is a smart data management platform that aims to leverage low-cost technology solutions combined with the power of Big Data and Machine Learning systems to offer affordable/free Wi-Fi and Internet to customers. It thus helps brands and merchants increase revenue and profitability.

The startup also claims to help reduce the cost of network delivery through cloud-based, remotely-manageable plug-and-play devices.

Also Read: Logistics continue to dominate Indian VC space as BlackBuck raises US$25M

Also Read: India’s NDTV enters online wedding space, raises funding from US investor

The firm claims its services are live across India with over 100 paying clients that include retail outlets, Internet service providers and companies in the hospitality industry. The startup plans to expand to over 5,000 locations over next year.

“At i2e1, we are challenging ourselves to create a model which will bridge the information gap for at least 500 million people over the next 5-7 years. While there are many application-level platforms, network-level platforms are still unexplored despite having the potential to transform multiple business models,” said Co-founder Satyam Darmora.

Post-investment, growX MD and CEO Sheetal Bahl will be joining the Board of i2e1.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Zomato, a restaurant finding and food-delivery app, today said it has added an in-app chat feature that will let customers talk to the Zomato team. This essentially means customers do not have to get on annoying phone calls trying to figure out where their food order vanished.

Zomato started its online ordering feature almost seven months back, as rivals like FoodPanda, Swiggy, and TinyOwl started tempting customers with in-app orders. In India, this is an especially helpful feature, because of high call-drop rates and patchy coverage even in bustling metros. But while ordering online has become the norm, India’s traffic snarls and other logistics issues often mean irate customers have to eventually pick up the phone to follow up on their orders.

Zomato is now upping the ante with the chat feature, which is currently in a beta stage. When Tech in Asia tried it out, response came within seconds.

“With this update, we’ve focused on improving and simplifying the communication flow between users and Zomato during the order process. We aim to simplify the online ordering process and give users the option of a faster, more efficient, and reliable way of getting food delivered,” said Tanmay Saksena, Zomato’s global head of online business ordering.

The feature is now available in India and the UAE, where customers can track their orders, get information on promos, cancel orders and check for money matters like refunds.

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According to a report, Thailand’s Don Mueang International Airport is top followed by Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in the US

For many tourists, Wi-Fi in airports is a necessity. The thought of landing in a foreign country with no means of contacting anyone is unnerving, to say the least.

Wi-Fi provides them with the means to reach out to their family and friends quickly without having to install a separate SIM card, which can be difficult to acquire if you are arriving in the wee hours of the morning.

Most airports have implemented this feature, but are they all of good quality?

Rotten WiFi, a Wi-Fi and 3G/4G ratings crowdsourcing platform owned by UK-based telecom solutions provider TelcoQ, has released a report of the world’s Top 20 Wi-Fi-enabled airports of 2015 ranked by connection speed.

Asian airports are clearly leading the way, taking up 12 spots on the list including the top spot, which went to Thailand’s Don Mueang International Airport (DMK). US airports also fared pretty well, taking up five spots, with US’s Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport (LIT) in Arkansas taking second place.

Also Read: This IoT device can turn your regular speakers into WiFi-enabled ones

Surprisingly, despite being touted as a highly-developed continent, Europe’s airports’ Wi-Fi capabilities were clearly wanting. The only European country that cracked the Top 10 was Estonia’s Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport (TLL), with an average speed of 23.96 Mbps, while the rest — Germany’s Munich (MUC) and Frankfurt (FRA) airports barely made it to the list, taking up the 18th and 19th spots.

Singapore’s Changi International Airport (SIN) was also surprisingly low on the list — at Number 13, despite being rated as the top airport of 2015.

Here is the full report.

No.	Airport	Country	Avg. download speed, Mbps	Avg. upload speed, Mbps	Avg. clients’ satisfaction rank (1-10)
1	Don Mueang International Airport (DMK)	Thailand	42.22	42.28	8
2	Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport (LIT)	USA	36.23	24.01	8.5
3	Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA)	Malaysia	34.54	4.05	6
4	Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport (CHA)	USA	34.19	32.72	8
5	Chiang Mai International Airport	Thailand	32.80	7.59	7
6	Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH)	USA	32.70	13.39	6.67
7	Hat Yai International Airport (HDY)	Thailand	32.08	27.18	8
8	Chiang Rai International Airport (CEI)	Thailand	29.05	13.64	7
9	Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)	Thailand	27.11	16.37	6.43
10	Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport (TLL)	Estonia	23.96	18.77	8
11	Phuket International Airport (HKT)	Thailand	20.11	13.87	7
12	Samui International Airport (USM)	Thailand	18.87	5.44	7
13	Singapore Changi International Airport (SIN)	Singapore	18.30	21.95	10
14	John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)	USA	17.96	6.44	6
15	Ngurah Rai International Airport (DPS)	Indonesia	16.01	18.50	6
16	Kaohsiung International Airport (KHH)	Taiwan	15.55	3.99	6
17	Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (BJC)	USA	15.11	5.18	7
18	Munich Airport (MUC)	Germany	14.08	11.62	6.5
19	Frankfurt Airport (FRA)	Germany	13.75	30.40	6.75
20	Taipei Songshan Airport (TSA)	Taiwan	13.18	9.17	6

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Custom-fit skirt ordering platform Rita and Phill is giving women in the western world access to bespoke fashion at affordable prices

While bespoke fashion has been waning for years in Hong Kong, it’s alive and well in Ho Chi Minh City. Entrepreneur Linh Thai wants to bring the aging trade online so women in developed markets can order handcrafted garments from Vietnam without paying as much as they would at home.

“We are bringing this industry online and to a market that’s never had the service. It’s hard to convince Asians that we’re not just your Auntie on the street corner. But it’s an easier sell to the US and UK market because bespoke there is so much more expensive,” she says.

Focussed only on skirts, Rita and Phill wants to solve the problem of having a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear.

How does it work? The user chooses a skirt design, then enters in three basic measurements (waist, hips, thighs) and those numbers get plugged into a design system along with their height. The skirts then get hand-cut and stitched at Rita and Phill’s in-house studio.

The vision is to give women access to custom patterns for any body type at a reasonable price point. According to Thai, a skirt on Rita and Phil averages about US$150 and is made from cotton blend materials.

“We’re based out of Vietnam, we have in-house production and our staff are highly skilled — our cost structure is lower than most companies based in developed countries. Because we sell directly to customers, we’re able to cut out the middleman and keep the costs down,” says Thai and notes that while other countries focus on mass production, Vietnam is still dedicated to bespoke.

“We use techniques that are essentially really old school, classic techniques that have been completely obliterated by the mass production industry because they’re trying to cut costs.”

To put things into perspective, Linh pits Vietnam against other Asian manufacturing hubs. “If you want 10,000 items made, you go to China. If you want t-shirts and knitwear, go to Bangladesh. But if you want couture, you go to Vietnam,” she says.

Backed by an all-woman team, Rita and Phil is also kept in the family with Thai’s mother and sister pitching in as Office Manager and Marketing Manager respectively.

Thai was previously a Director at DFJ VinaCapital, one of Vietnam’s largest venture capital firms. After getting married in 2012, she came up with the idea to give brides a way to mix and match elements to create a custom-fit dream dress.

Thai says in our interview that she’s pivoted through many startup ideas in the past few years.

Starting off with wedding dresses, she then switched to ready-to-wear under the Stitch Appeal moniker with new products added every couple months.

By 2015, the startup had an entire fashion line under the rationale that no one would want to go into a brick-and-mortar store that sells only one item. But as the idea wasn’t thoroughly tested, Thai says she felt at the time they were losing focus. Eventually, she pared back to only skirts.

“You have so many ideas when you first start and it’s always so tempting to go off your theories. You’re supposed to test and fail fast. Being based in Vietnam, it was hard to get true customer feedback from the US, so we essentially went off our own theories,” she said.

Her advice to new entrepreneurs in the testing stages? “You need critical mass of people asking for something specific before you make a decision. I would say it would be 200 – 300 people in a similar demographic. Now, focussing on one product will truly help us to define it.”

Rita and Phill is currently running an Indiegogo campaign and they’re 42 per cent of the way to their US$10,000 goal. Support them here. 

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Lisa Enckell gives Bernard Leong her impressions on various countries across Asia — including the impact WeChat is making in Silicon Valley

Analyse Asia is a weekly podcast hosted by Bernard Leong and features guests from across Asia’s vibrant tech community. e27 will republish the series covering a range of companies, topics and news analysis. To follow Bernard, and Analyse Asia, check him out on Twitter and Facebook.

Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time stamps included):

• Career of Lisa Enckell (@enckelli, LinkedIn)
  • How she got started in the area of marketing and product strategy [1:02]
  • Her previous role as VP Marketing in Wrapp [2:50]
  • The culture differences between San Francisco and Sweden [4:20]
  • Career lessons learned from being a theatre producer, to a journalist, to the role of VP for marketing for Wrapp [5:42]
  • How one operates in an executive role while operating with founders of a startup as the company scales [7:07]
  • Advice for marketing for early stage startups? [8:46]
  • The important metrics in marketing for a startup [10:17]

Also Read: [Podcast] Is Indonesia becoming a one-trick pony?

• Approach
  

• What is the motivation behind Approach? [11:30]
• The idea is to spend five years living for six months in each of the 10 countries which both your husband Andreas and you view to have the biggest economic impact in the next 20-30 years, how do you select the 10 countries? [12:35]
• Of the 10 countries, China, India, Indonesia and Japan are in Asia, what are the interesting parts of these countries that have caught your interest? [13:54]
• Observations about Asia
  • From your travels in Indonesia and China, what are your first impressions of the startup community? [15:10]
  • What are the interesting innovations you have observed from Asia? For example, mobile platforms beyond operating systems such as WeChat? [16:28]
  • What is her impression of Indonesia as they have stayed there for a couple of months? [17:36]
  • Does the startup ecosystem in Indonesia compare to those from US and Europe? [19:06]
  • What are the differences from the perspective of:
    • Cultural: Founder attitudes and team structures, Talent flow from Europe to Asia [21:01]
    • Infrastructure: What are the challenges you see in startups in these places such as transportation, payments, logistics and mobile broadband? [21:55]
  • You have selected Singapore as the base for Approach, what is the reason behind the choice? [24:30]
  • What are the things you want to achieve with Approach with reference to Asia?[25:56]
• Women in leadership: What is your advice for both men and women on gender diversity and across all industry? [27:10]

 Photo Credit: Ryan McGuire

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Ever wondered what an industrial 3D printer looks like? You know, the ones that are used to make airplane parts? Well, here you go

3D printing corporation Stratasys announced yesterday a partnership with the STEM Inc. unit of Science Centre Singapore to run programmes aimed at educating primary, secondary and junior college students about the technology.

STEM Inc. works to bring applied learning practices to schools and the programme integrates working professionals so kids can learn from their expertise.

The programmes are in cooperation with four primary and secondary schools as well as a host of junior colleges that participated in the pilot programme held earlier in 2015.

The pilot programme was a two-day workshop that let students design and build their own 3D products in a ‘competition’ setting.

For example, primary school students were asked to build boats, secondary school students designed glider airplanes and the junior-college participants built the plastic connectors to design bridges.

One goal is to show them to think of organic engineering designs. For example, using curvatures to create something akin to a gramophone.

According to Chief Executive of Science Center Singapore Lim Tit Meng, 3D technology has seen dramatic improvements recently and it is time to implement the technology into a student’s view of engineering.

“Partnering with an industry leader such as Stratasys enables students to gain early access to this new cutting edge technology and to equip themselves with better skills, so as to contribute to real-world STEM industries in the future,” said Lim in an official statement.

Also Read: Infographic: Singapore third in study of countries with top public Wi-Fi

But, nobody at the event saw 3D printing as a disruptive force, rather one that can be used jointly

“People always ask, ‘when is this going to replace everything we know?’ [Stratasys’] response is that is never going to happen. We see a future where additive manufacturing and traditional manufacturing can co-exist,” said Ido Eylon, Stratasys General Manager for Southern Asia and Pacific at a press conference.

Stratasys is a major 3D printing corporation and has been working in the industry for over 25 years. Some of the implementations of Stratasys products include, building tools to help in factories, creating objects for cars and even creating products that are used in airplanes.

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Two years ago, Ankur Gupta and his friends were looking for a place to party in Delhi. After scouring the internet for half an hour, they finally found two options. But there was a problem – there were no good dining places nearby. It was a toss-up between fun and food. Ouch.

That, in some ways, was the Eureka moment for Ankur, Abhishek Goel, and Siddharth Kumar, friends for over seven years and engineering college graduates all. They ended up launching StrollUp, a Delhi-based startup that helps create local outings through its app.

“After doing some market research, we saw that a lot of people struggle with the questions, ‘What to do?’ and ‘Where to go?’ So we created a product that would answer these,” Abhishek, a 25-year-old IIT-Delhi graduate, told Tech in Asia.

The other two co-founders, Ankur and Siddharth, studied computer science at another prestigious college, DCE. Ankur has previously worked with Amazon Appstore.

Their app, StrollUp, finally got off the ground in July this year. It is available in Delhi-NCR and Bangalore and offers a choice of events, movies, food and drink, fun, and sightseeing. The target age group is 18 to 35 in tier one cities.

Taking you places

StrollUp’s list of 1,500 places in Delhi might surprise even long-time residents of the Indian capital. It also has 1,000 options for Bangalore. Besides, it curates 100 plus events to attend every week in each city.

So, for instance, if someone wants to go out for five to six hours in Delhi, StrollUp suggests a plan at the popular Mystery Rooms in Rajouri Garden. Other places listed are Kitty Su and FlyBoy. In Bangalore, No Limmits, Laser Castle, and Snow City figure on its roster.

“There may be a lot of things to do in a place like Delhi, but people search on multiple websites and spend around one hour planning an outing. We are giving great experiences by helping them create these local outings in just two taps,” says Abhishek.

But the events and outings segment already has players like TimesCity, Zomato, BookMyShow, and Thrillophilia. So how does StrollUp plan to steal the thunder?

“These are different versions of a listing platform. But we provide an outing itinerary based on four basic parameters: when, where, with whom, and your mood.” The app’s decision-making algorithm then comes up with suggestions.

It’s clearly an idea whose time has come. “We have reached 5,000 downloads, and are growing 50 percent month-on-month. Currently, 70 percent of our users plan every week and 20,000 people read our blog every month,” Abhishek says.

And what is their immediate target? More than 50,000 downloads in six months.

How the app makes money

Abhishek says the total available market in the top eight tier one cities of India is around 36 million people, of which 26 million are serviceable. A person spends about INR 2,300 (US$35) per month on going out locally, which means a total of US$11 billion in annual spending on local outings alone. “This is a market waiting to be captured.”

The app charges around 10 percent commission from a venue on the basis of a user’s bill. They also plan to take a monthly subscription fee from places that want to promote themselves in their sponsored itineraries.

StrollUp is now looking to raise a seed round. “We will use the funding amount to expand our team and for marketing in Delhi and Bangalore,” says Abhishek.

And wait, they have more up their sleeve.

The StrollUp founders say an outing often starts with a discussion between friends. Everyone gives an opinion, and the group decides a place. Then they have to coordinate to get everyone at the desired place, and finally they share pictures and split expenses. “We intend to replicate this exact user behaviour in our app and make the planning of an outing very natural.”

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