“Cadabra” was the magical name that Jeffrey Preston Bezos, founder of Amazon, initially wanted to give to Amazon in 1994, but was dropped off as it sounded more like “Cadaver“, especially over phone. Even “Relentless” was thought upon to be this site’s name and amazingly you can find this name ending you up at Amazon itself now. Finally ending up with “Amazon“, on the most voluminous river of the world, Jeff Bezos always knew it wouldn’t just be a Book store but the largest name behind E-Commerce.

Jeff’s life always revolved around science and technology. After having graduated with two Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, he worked with Fitel, Banker’s Trust and D.E. Shaw and Co. But this didn’t suffice his intellectual needs, making him leave his well paying job as Vice President at D.E. Shaw and Co. to set a company that originally packing and shipping the online consignments in boxes from his two-car garage.

In the starting days, Jeff had a bell put up in the garage which rang every time a purchase was made using Amazon and all the employees used to gather around the screen to see who the customer was and if he/she was a known one. This served yet another purpose- encouraging employees and filling them with enthusiasm on every sale.

Amazon, launched back in 16 July, 1995 and with its twentieth year now, it’s still running miles ahead other E-Commerce stores with its USP and core competency– cheapest product, that too available online. Amazon.com sold its very first book- Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, by Douglas Hofstadter, in 1995. Success follows innovative ideas developing in the right path and Amazon proved this true within the very first month of launch. In a month’s span, it had its product sold in all 50 states and 45 other countries. And continuing to write history in golden words, it expanded from selling books to being a retailer of every product ranging from diapers to golf carts, within a small time span. To cut costs, Bezos even made the office desks out of cheap doors, which were referred to as Door Desks. They are still made and used all over the world.

One can now buy a kindle, download and e-book and even purchase the couch on which to sit and read the whole day, all with just a click. Yes, you guessed it right, this “one-click purchase” was the innovation brought in by Amazon. And how can one forget the Amazon Web Services (AWS) , the one that allows so many of our favourite firms to rent storage and processing power on “The Cloud” and not pay to build and run their own data centres.

Amazon Prime, launched in 2005, gives the annual subscribers many perks like unlimited Cloud Storage, Amazon Instant videos and many more. Adding to this list, same day delivery has also been started from May 2015 onwards. With its 40 million subscribers which is much more than Netflix’s domestic haul, Amazon remains to be the biggest retail even at the recession times since its inception.

E-reading was seen as a boon with the launch of Kindle in 2007. Maybe I miss the smell of old books a lot and the feel of paperbacks, but then undeniably Kindle revolutionized the reading methodology for the best. Kindle Fire, launched in 2011, gives stiff competition to Apple IPad by being of half the cost of the cheapest iPhone.

In 2000, its website had crashed when it was making $600 million per quarter. So it wasn’t a big loss on the site crash. But when the same happened in 2013, 40 minute crash down made the firm lose $120,000 per minute. This clearly shows the growth rate of Amazon which is much more than the growth rate of Google and eBay.

Amazon changed its logo many times. Current logo of it shows “We’re happy to deliver anything from “A” to “Z”, anywhere”, showing the smile with a dimple end at ‘z’.

Today, Amazon owns many other firms and is even funding a private space travel company known as Blue Origin. The founder and CEO, Bezos is also a donor of $42 million and part of his Texas land for the construction of an underground clock designed to work for 10,000 years and known as “The Clock of The Long Now”.

Hoping to see much more advanced technological Amazon trends with the onset of its 21st year after birth.

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One couldn’t have overlooked the bill-board cold war between Flipkart and Snapdeal. This happened when Flipkart released its new tagline- “Nahi khareeda? #Achhakiya!” The innovative reply of Snapdeal came as a virtual slap to Flipkart which stated- “Achha kiya bata diya. #Yahansekhareedo“

With the increasing rise in businesses, rival brands are fighting to get a better consumer market. To meet this, the most creative way the brands are taking cover under is- the blunt cold advertisement wars.

Flipkart, India’s highest grossing E-Commerce site does everything that Amazon does to get more consumer highlights while Snapdeal, the second most grossing E-Commerce site in India, isn’t following anyone else’s built up path. Instead it’s making a new road to success. Coming up with a retorting reply to an advertisement just by playing with words intelligently, is what Snapdeal has recently left its mark upon.

But no, this is definitely not the first time such cold wars are dominating the ad world. History is repeating but under different brand covers every time.

Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz had an amazing ad fight to look over at. Back in 2013, Benz released an ad featuring a chicken and put forth the question: “What does chicken and Mercedes-Benz have in common?” simultaneously giving the answer as “Stability at all times” Jaguar didn’t let go off this opportunity, instead used this in their favour and came up with an ad with a similar chicken being eaten up by a wild Jaguar with the slogan “We prefer cat-like reflexes” And Oh Boy! This didn’t end here; Benz won the war back by a photo post on FB which featured a Mercedes just about to hit a jaguar on the road and reading the caption “Because cat-like reflexes aren’t fast enough-The PRE-SAFE brake“

Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the biggest rivals of soft drink industry, can’t let this topic end without their discussion. Unlabeled Pepsi and coke drinks’ stalls were put up in many places in USA by Pepsi and more than 50% found Pepsi better in this “Pepsi Challenge” of 1975. But recent data stating the Biggest Beverage declares the real winner as Coca-Cola, making Pepsi an unsung warrior now.

Another bill-board war which got eye-balls was between Jet Airways’ “We’ve changed” and Kingfisher’s whip to it by “We made them change“. But the final twist was added by GoAir’s– “We’ve not changed. We are still the smartest way to fly” taking the winning trophy with them.

The war has never been all about Bill boards and tweets, but a subtle mockery to content too, such that by The Hindu which never leaves behind any shimmering opportunity to let Times of India know that it “also has 1,2,4,5,6,7.. pages” because “Government Malfunctions matter more than Wardrobe Malfunctions“

The clash of the titans still continues to be fought in the most innovative ways for the audience to not merely look at the products but be the consumers too. Brands continue to give each other big burns and I am very much enjoying it, aren’t you?

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While surfing for a birthday dress for me from e-commerce sites, my friend received an email from American Swan, a fashion e-commerce site, to remind her of the abandoned product that was lying in the cart since half an hour. And guess what, on seeing that dress again and finding that still better than the others, she bought that and closed all other tabs.

Companies earlier just used to target and market their products on the digital platform. They have always worked their best to woo the consumers using social media promotions, advertisements, e-mail marketing, SMS marketing, ad campaigns, colourful bright posters and many other ways. But this doesn’t seem enough as 98% first time visitors to an e-commerce site leave without buying anything. Consumers may analyse everything but may forget about the product or may not consider the brand good enough or may not like the deals being offered. To not let the consumer go away without buying, these sites are now-a-days taking a step forward towards re-targeting and re-marketing. Even you must have noticed some ads following you once clicked because of the cookie it had stored in your browser with the click.

Now what is re-targeting and re-marketing? Re-targeting includes focused ads for the consumers who had once shown interest in a specific product via search or site visit while re-marketing is using email and SMS to bring back a consumer to complete an abandoned purchase in a shopping cart. Sites feel the need to chase the consumer mostly for consumer accession. They consider the consumer as an asset which cannot be let go off so easily. It is similar to the shopkeeper trying to persuade you to buy his product even after you’ve rejected it once. He may then show you its better benefits and even lower down his deal to end you up with product. Same is the strategy being followed through the digital platform. Consumers are chased not only for acquisition but also to create better brand awareness and retain consumers for a longer time.

The initiatives which could be seen on a rising bar are of a creative spectrum from discounts on next purchase to registration/birthday/anniversary incentives. Amongst the online retailers, sending information about offers and share social media feature works the best while for offline retailers, not only information offers but also reward points and discount on next purchase work to give appreciative results.

According to Octane Marketing, 45% of the consumers readily buy using e-mail offers till the time they are not bombarded with multiple untargeted mails. Firms like Lenskart.com saw 25-30% rise in their summer festival campaign which was again a re-targeting initiative, Bewakoof.com increased its purchases by 2-3% via SMS and e-mail marketing, similar results were observed by American Swan and so many other e-commerce sites. Maximum benefit is drawn within an hour’s time of re-targeting and re-marketing and the buyer conversion rate could then be increased by 5-25%.

So the next time you are being re-targeted and re-marketed, try understanding the marketing strategy of the firm and don’t be fooled like my friend to buy a dress being sold at Rs. 3000 at myntra.com but bought at Rs. 3700 from American Swan, just because it re-targeted you.

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Few years back, when Facebook was one among those who were growing at a tremendous pace, started facing the problem to manage the data that was multiplying at a high rate and could have become a reason for the slowdown of Facebook. However, no consultancy had any solution to this as Facebook was the only one of its kinds. There being a requirement for database management software to engine that underpinned storing and searching through all the messages in your Facebook inbox, which is a tall order considering how many millions of messages the company has to deal with everyday; Facebook came up with its own solution-CASSANDRA, designed in 2008.

Cassandra worked great and turned out to be of great help. But Facebook not being a data software developer instead a social network and advertising company could only take Cassandra up to a place where all their problems set sorted.

Cassandra was then released as an open source, via the Apache Software Foundation (a non-profit that manages open source software projects), which then came up as a great help to Apple and Wikimedia too besides other smaller firms.

Now, those who are using Cassandra and are in a need of change for the betterment, keep uploading software updates to the same while Facebook doesn’t invest on Cassandra anymore, could still enjoy the benefits of a better software without even letting its own secrets out.

There are similar stories happening all around even today. Many big techs are releasing open source codes to the world every day, including Google, LinkedIn, and now Apple with the Swift programming language. Google has released over 20 million lines of code and over 900 projects including android, chromium, ganeti, ZXing and many more. Apache Hadoop, the buzzed-about big data software framework, is also an open source project which was parented by Yahoo and is now becoming a foundational technology for the era of big data. Hadoop was designed to handle the masses of data stored in the sort of distributed computing systems pioneered by large internet companies and now found in wider corporate use. And this doesn’t end here. More to this, we have many big techies as hosts to new coding too, welcoming the start-ups to let them be their hosting sites. Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects.

With more and more softwares being open sourced, start-ups are getting an added advantage to give a boost to their ideas. “Open Source” software broke on to the tech scene with the rise of the Linux operating system 15 years ago. Red Hat, which grew by selling maintenance and support to companies that used Linux, is now worth nearly $14 billion. Cloudera, a big data startup, built its software on the open source Apache Hadoop, raised $1 billion. DataStax, a startup with a commercial product built up on the basics of Cassandra, took a big funding amount too late last year. All of the successful entrants (Red Hat, Cloudera, DataStax, Hortonworks, etc) have followed the same playbook.

In 2014, venture capitalists made 37 investments in open source-based start-ups. Now, investors are lining up to have another go, as a new breed of open source companies report rising revenues and plan initial public offerings. And this time, they think they have better ways of turning the popularity of open source into profits.

Conclusion being made here is simple. If you are one of those developers who likes enhancing already existing softwares, why not check this option out for a start-up! Good Luck.

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