Entrepreneurship

Shopping your favorite brands at your choice and convenience was once a tough task. Hire a taxi or rent one, travel all the way to the mall in huge traffic, look for the brands that you’re willing to shop, choose your favorite one and buy it. After a tiresome shopping, go have a good meal at some nice restaurant enjoying your favorite food, watch a movie and return home hiring a taxi. This is how usually the entire shopping process was for many of us. Though many relished the stereotypical practice, yet with the busy schedules that everyone is indulged into these days, one merely gets time to do all that which was once fun. Time and technology, today’s synonyms, might not or could not, however, bring back the nostalgia, but have certainly delivered the compensation by making everything available in one’s palm.

The increasing momentum of technology has what made everything feasible now at our doorstep and all one has to do is just delight in it. Let’s talk about shopping your favorite brands or hiring a cab or booking a ticket or ordering your favorite food. Wouldn’t that be fascinating to know that everything is now available with just a tap! Absolutely! The internet has connected all of us to get these tasks done at our doorstep. Making the activity simpler, were few startups who took up our daily routines as challenging assignments and started delivering best outputs. And the result, they’re now into serious business expanding their territory across the nation and into the international market earning a place in the billion-dollar club.

These are the Indian Unicorn Startup Companies that have made our life worth living and enjoying the services they render:

Flipkart

Flipkart, headquartered in Bengaluru, is an electronic commerce company founded in 2007. It is India’s biggest online store for mobiles, electronics, home appliances, furniture, fashion(clothes/shoes), accessories, books, jewelry, sporting goods, beauty & personal care and many more. Flipkart brings everything under the single roof with the largest selection from all brands at the lowest price. Acquiring many small hold firms and other startups alike, adding them under its wings, Flipkart is now valued at $11.6 billion.

Ola Cabs

Ola, the Indian online transportation network company, was founded in 2010 and has been competing against Uber in the Indian ride-hailing market. Ola has more than 125 million users and 1-million-plus-driver partners across more than 110 cities in the country. Currently headquartered in Bangalore, the company has been enabling smart transportation across India benefitting the users with its rides and services. Ola has emerged as one of the most successful among the handful of esteemed Indian startups becoming the third-most valuable startup in the country. The company has a valuation of around $7 billion.

Paytm

Paytm, India’s largest m-commerce platform launched in 2010, facilitates in making Instant Digital & Utility Payments, grab latest Entertainment tickets online with great offers and discounts and lets your travel be much easier and fun-filled. In 2015, Paytm became the first Indian company to receive funding from Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, after it raised over $625 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Earlier last year, the digital payments giant had raised $1.4 billion from SoftBank, which valued the company at $7 billion at that time.The mobile wallet service provider has recently reached a valuation of USD 10 billion.

Snapdeal

The Indian e-commerce company started in 2010, had a 70 percent share in the daily deal business by 2011. Snapdeal has received several rounds of funding; it had a valuation of about $6.5 billion during its $200 Mn funding round in February 2016 led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and others.

ShopClues

The online marketplace owned by Clues Network Pvt. Ltd., was established in July 2011. In January 2016, ShopClues raised USD 100 million from Tiger Global Management and joined the Unicorn Club. The e-commerce firm is now valued at $1.1 billion.

Quikr

Quikr, the Indian classified advertising platform, was founded in 2008. Headquartered in Bengaluru, Quikr serves approximately 20 million monthly visitors. The online classifieds portal has thus far raised around $350 million and is among India’s leading internet companies with a valuation of nearly $1.5 billion.

Zomato

Indian restaurant search and discovery service founded in 2008, currently operates in 23 countries, including Australia and United States. According to reports, Zomato has raised close to $225 million in funding during the year 2017. Zomato has raised $150 million from Ant Financial, Alibaba’s payment affiliate, very recently, taking its valuation to $1.1 billion.

Wanna take a ride? What would you do? Take your phone, open the transportation mobile app, one tap and grab a ride. You’ll get the ride in minutes, the driver comes in you just hop in and the driver takes you where you want to go. After a successful ride, pay for the trip easily without the cash or a card in your hand. This is how taking a ride is; as easy as a pie. Now when you have to grab a ride, the real challenge for the online cab aggregators is which ride-hailing platform the rider chooses or prefers. Uber and Lyft both being the capable ride-sharing services it’s always Uber vs Lyft.

Uber and Lyft both based in San Francisco, have been contending with each other in offering ride-sharing services that are cheaper than renting a car. While there are other ride-sharing apps such as Sidecar and Hail-o, it’s always the contenders Uber and Lyft who command the greatest portion of the market. Needless to say, ride sharing has become so popular across the world that several major automakers are either partnering with Uber and Lyft. By this, it can be understood that the ride-hailing market is filled with a canopy of Uber and Lyft.

Launched in June 2012, the on-demand transportation company, Lyft, operates in more than 360 U.S. cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and provides over 1 million rides per day. Founded in 2008, the peer-to-peer ridesharing, food delivery, and transportation network company, Uber, is currently available in 71 countries and has its operations in 633 cities worldwide. Uber and Lyft are available and dominant in US markets and have been engaged in a fierce battle here in the hometown with the two firms now sharing 77% of the US ride-hailing market. However, it’s Uber that has a huge expansion outside the US and has a market share globally.

When it comes to the services, both services use an app that can be downloaded for free for iOS and Android devices. Both the apps, function well and do offer most of the same features on a basic level like requesting ride at GPS location, plugging in your destination address, watching drivers in real time using GPS, see how long your driver takes to arrive, rating the drivers after the completion of trip and above all making payment through pre-selected preferences like credit card/debit card, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, etc.

Apart from the aforementioned basic services, Uber has seven different tiers of services for its riders while Lyft has only three. When it comes to the process of requesting a ride, it’s almost identical, nevertheless, it might differ depending on the locations. In some random locations, Lyft car drivers arrive faster whereas in some locations Uber does. However, the entire process is dependent on the nearest drivers available and it may vary depending on the availability.

When it comes to the pricing, it’s not the same case every time as we know peak hours change everything. While Lyft’s “Prime Time” pricing caps out at three times the normal base rate during peak hours, Uber’s “Surge Pricing,” can reach as high as eight times the base rate. Both the apps estimate the cost of your trip while choosing a ride by entering the destination, but Uber steals the show by showing the price of your ride in real time. On the other hand, Lyft also allows passengers to tip drivers through the app.

Uber has raised about $14 billion in equity and debt financing from more than 70 venture capital firms, private equity funds, and high-net-worth individuals, that made it attain a valuation of $69 billion. Lyft, meanwhile, has raised $4.11 billion in a funding that gave it a valuation of $11.5 billion. Lyft has even expanded into Canada in December 2017 as a competitor to its rival.

Uber is also the largest ride-hailing platform in Australia, apart from other online cab aggregators operating in the country like GoCatch and Taxify. Uber competes with Taxify, Europe’s biggest ride-hailing app, which set up its business in Sydney late last year and expanded to Melbourne earlier in January 2018. The US firm, Uber, which was made legal in Australia in 2015, gave rides to 3.7 million Australians in the three months to December – almost four times the number of passengers it carried in the same period two years earlier. While Lyft provides over 1 million rides per day, Uber, on the other hand, reached the one million miles a day milestone in 2014. However, with a valuation of $68 billion, Uber is the world’s most valuable start-up and the world’s largest rideshare service.

Cryptocurrency – I guess by now many of them must have heard about cryptocurrencies by now as they have become the global phenomenon in the current digital world. However, there might be few who are not aware of what a cryptocurrency is, what it does, its importance and there are many (banks, people, governments, companies) though knowing might not understand its importance. For all those non-savvy people who merely know nothing about cryptocurrency, we bring to you few aspects of what is cryptocurrency, how does it work and why do we use it.

What is cryptocurrency?

A cryptocurrency is a digital or virtual currency designed to work as a medium of exchange. It uses cryptography to secure its transactions as well as to control the creation of new or additional units of a particular cryptocurrency and also to verify the transfer of assets. It is an intangible form of currency, which has no physical attributes other than the computer network or smartphone it sits on, connected to thousands of computers globally.

History

Cryptocurrency has been around for some time in the world, which was born during the World War II. It was during the second world war that the need for secure communication and exchanges was essential. Thus, cryptography was born which is the process of converting legible information into an enigmatic code, transferring messages securely to and from various, unknown sources. Cryptography has since evolved into the digital age with elements of mathematical theory and computer science to now become a path to secured communications, information and money online, infiltrating computers and smartphones on a global scale.

There have been many attempts made to develop digital currency in the early 90s but all of them eventually failed due to several reasons. Systems like Flooz, Beenz, and DigiCash that have emerged on the market but ended up failing inevitably, have utilized a Trusted Third Party approach(proved non-trusted to them), in which the companies behind them verified and facilitated the transactions. The failure of these companies has what resulted in building a digital cash without central entity. In order to ensure a lasting and highly reliable technology, a decentralized control of cryptocurrency was introduced. This decentralized control works through a ledger called blockchain, which inspects and verifies digital currency transactions.

Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, whose identity has yet to be verified, invented “Bitcoin”, the first and still most important cryptocurrency. The mysterious Satoshi never intended to invent a currency, but after witnessing the failed attempts of companies to invent a digital currency, invented Bitcoin in January 2009. It is a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending and is completely decentralized with no server or central authority.

How does it work?

Cryptocurrency works similar to that of a bank credit on a debit card, where a complex system issues currency and records transactions and works behind the scenes to allow people to send and receive currency electronically. However, unlike bank credit, where banks and governments issue the currency and keep ledgers, here in cryptocurrency, an algorithm does. Cryptocurrency is a digital currency where all transactions are recorded in public ledger called a ‘blockchain.’ and uses cryptography. Cryptography is the process of converting legible information into an almost uncrackable code, to track purchases and transfers. The blockchain is the world’s leading software platform for digital assets. It is a ledger of records and the records in the blockchain are called blocks and are connected to the previous block. The whole chain is self-managed, and no one person or organization has control or access to the entire chain.

Why do we use it?

People from all over the world are using cryptocurrency as a safe and secure medium to transit money. Cryptocurrency can be used to send money to anyone anywhere in the world, almost instantly, with no middle hand or excessive fees. Some of the countries like Japan or India has already considered crypto coin as secondary or alternative currency for the transaction. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and worldwide payment system, the first decentralized digital currency. Bitcoin as a system works without a central bank or single administrator. While Bitcoin has dominated attention and its value escalated, more new digital currencies are emerging to challenge its leadership. Alternative cryptocurrencies such as Ripple, Neo and Dash are expected to see higher trading this year.