Zomato looks for a wider platter, to reach 22 countries over next 2 years

Zomato is planning to double the countries it is present in to 22 over the next two years as the popular, cash-rich eat-out guide tries to replicate the success of its maiden international foray in the United Arab Emirates, a senior executive said.

"Post our latest round of funding (Rs 227 crore) from Sequoia Capital and Info Edge, we've been following through with our global expansion plans aggressively. Over the next two years, we plan to take Zomato to 22 countries across the Americas, Europe, South East Asia, and Australia," co-founder and chief operating officer Pankaj Chaddah told ET.

The funding is and will be used for setting up offices in the 22 countries, hiring people and teams, etc, the company said separately. Zomato, which offers its services through a website and a mobile app, is currently present in 40 cities, across 11 countries. The cities include four in Brazil — Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Porto Alegre — and Hamilton in New Zealand.

Every month, over 15-million users globally visit the Zomato website to search for places to go out for a meal, get home delivery, catch up at a cafe, or enjoy the local nightlife. The website and app are also more global, being available in languages like Turkish, Portuguese and Bahasa, apart from English.

Zomato's mobile app has also been quite popular with about twomillion downloads in India and around 0.75-million overseas.

The company's plans in Brazil have been fuelled by the football World Cup, which is expected to attract tourists by the millions.

"We're aiming to be the go-to guide for anyone visiting the venues and looking for a place to eat, enjoy the nightlife, or catch a game over drinks. World Cup aside, Brazil has tremendous potential as a market," Chaddah said.

The main challenge to Zomato's global strategy is from identifying and hiring the right people. "We try our best to ensure that people are cultural fits — skill alone does not cut it for us." That apart, the company has to make sure each and every street in the cities that the service has been launched in is covered. "The information needs to be relevant and constantly updated," Chaddah said.

The five-year-old popular restaurant-listing site was the brainchild of two ex-IITians, Deepinder Goyal and Chaddah, who quit the leading consultancy firm Bain& Co, after a year of dabbling with hosting restaurant information on the web.

Having established itself in all the major Indian cities, the company ventured overseas by launching services in the UAE in September 2012. "The response that we received in the UAE market was a catalyst and gave us the confidence that our product could work globally," said Chaddah. Outside of India, Zomato's website gets its maximum traffic in the UAE. Zomato's major source of revenue is based on sellingadvertising space to restaurateurs, which they intend to continue with.

A marked shift towards Internet and mobile platforms across the globe has helped them to significantly widen their user base. The company now plans to increasingly tap into the surging mobile traffic globally and wants to be a mobile-centric company in the future. 

Online shopping grows, with some growing pains

Americans waited until the last minute to buy holiday gifts, but retailers weren't prepared for the spike.

Heavy spending in the final days of the mostly lackluster season sent sales up 3.5 percent between Nov. 1 and Tuesday, according to MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, which tracks payments but doesn't give dollar figures.

Online shopping led the uptick, with spending up 10 percent to $38. 91 billion between Nov. 2 and Sunday, research firm comScore said.

``We always have last-minute Charlies, but this year even people who normally complete shopping earlier completed shopping later,'' said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at market research firm NPD Group.

But the late surge caught companies off guard. UPS and FedEx failed to deliver some packages by Christmas due to a combination of poor weather and overloaded systems, leaving some unhappy holiday shoppers.

Justin Londagin and his wife ordered their 7-year-old son a jersey of Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks from NFL's web site on Dec. 19. They paid $12.95 extra for two-day shipping to get it to their Augusta, Kansas, home before Christmas, but it didn't arrive in time.

``We had to get creative and wrote him a note from Santa to tell him that the jersey fell out of the sleigh and Santa will get it to him as soon as he could,'' he said.

Amazon is offering customers with delayed shipments a refund on their shipping charges and $20 toward a future purchase. And other retailers such as Macy's said they are still looking into the situation.

The last-minute surge this year solidifies the increasing popularity of online shopping, which accounts for about 10 percent of sales during the last three months of the year. But it also underscores the challenges that companies face delivering on the experience, particularly during the holiday shopping season that runs from the beginning of November through December.

Analysts say FedEx and UPS typically work closely with big retailers, trying to get a sense of what the volume of packages will be during peak times like the holiday season. Extra flights, trucks and seasonal workers can be added if the projections are large.

But this year, David Vernon, a senior research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said weather played a role. The early December ice storms in Dallas could have hurt operations, he said, and packages can start to accumulate. And that got compounded this year by a late surge in shipments, he said.

``Clearly, as a group, (they) underestimated the demand for Internet retailing during the holidays,'' Vernon said.

Another problem was the growing popularity of retailers offering free shipping. Amazon, for one, has a two-day free shipping offer that comes with its $79 annual Prime membership. The company said, just in the third week of December, more than 1 million people signed up for the membership.

``Frankly the right hand wasn't talking to the left,'' said Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. ``The marketing teams of a lot of web retailers (offering free shipping) were not talking to the operations and supply chain teams.''

The delayed shipments could be a problem for shippers: ``It is a major problem for UPS and FedEx. The central pillar of their business is a perception of reliability with their customers,'' said Jeremy Robinson-Leon, COO of Group Gordon, a corporate and crisis PR firm. This year's snafus ``just really erodes trust among customers.''

Still, some analysts say people will still buy online. ``Consumers tend to have a short memory, especially if you fast forward to another year,'' said Andrew Lipsman, vice president of industry analysis for comScore.

Australian IT industry facing skills crisis; may generate over 21,000 new jobs

Despite efforts to meet falling demand, the Australian information technology sector is experiencing a costly skills crisis and needs to bridge the gap by hiring IT graduates for major projects.

The IT sector which contributes about AUD 42 billion to the nation's economy every year, is expected to generate over 21,000 new IT jobs in next three years.

The sector has been facing a crisis to meet the growing demand of skills. Australian government at both federal and state level has been spending millions to probe ways to fill thousands of empty jobs.

According to IT workers, government money would be better spent hiring graduates for big projects so they can get valuable on-the-job experience.

"The decline in manufacturing and the end of the mining boom suggests that Australia needs to find its competitive strength," Chris Walton of Professionals Australia, the union representing IT workers, was quoted saying an ABC report.

"And the fact is IT is essential to innovation and productivity," he said.

In a study report earlier this year, Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency (AWPA) also indicated the changes needed to fix the problem.

"Around 45 per cent of small businesses don't yet have an online presence, and in the future that's going to be absolutely critical," study chairwoman Marie Persson said adding, "The whole global economy is happening, but possibly business is not quite realising how quickly."

Walton said that even the companies building an online presence and updating equipment will not hire inexperienced workers.

He urged the federal government to bridge the gap by hiring IT graduates for major projects.

"We've got this vicious cycle where companies only want experienced people, and headhunt from each other, pushing up wage rates, but aren't doing the development of the new graduates," Walton said.

"So we need to break that circuit and the only way we can see is for government, through its procurement, to require grad programs to be part of the procurement tender," he said.

Due to the nature of the IT industry, Australian companies often find the skills they need for a lower price by sending work offshore.

The AWPA acknowledges that it is a risk to local jobs. Persson says state and federal governments are trying to build an IT workforce that can compete on a global scale, but she wants Australia to take some tips from places like the UK.

Overstock.com plans to accept Bitcoin, giving the currency a boost

One of the biggest questions looming over Bitcoin, the digital currency generating attention in the tech business, is when big mainstream merchants will begin accepting it.

Overstock.com, the online discount retailer, has an answer: within the next six months, if all goes as planned.

Patrick Byrne, the company's chief executive, said Overstock planned to let online shoppers pay for goods with Bitcoin by June. The retailer is evaluating the services of several third-party firms that facilitate Bitcoin transactions, with the goal of selecting one by mid-January.

If Overstock follows through on the plan, it will become the most prominent retailer to embrace Bitcoin, an electronic currency that initially gained notoriety as a form of payment for black-market drug and weapons transactions and as a new craze for currency speculators. Bitcoin has captivated the imaginations of many technology entrepreneurs and investors, who see it as a low-cost payment system that could disrupt established players like Visa and MasterCard. But while many of them are forming or funding startups to provide different types of Bitcoin services, not many well-known retailers accept it directly.

Byrne's decision to take Bitcoin as a form of payment is driven by philosophical reasons more than business ones. In a lengthy voice mail message explaining his plans, Byrne said "some fraction, tiny now, of the population" currently wanted to transact using a digital currency like Bitcoin.

He appears more intrigued, however, by the idea of supporting a digital currency that is outside the control of any traditional government authority, echoing a libertarian argument that many fans of Bitcoin have made. Byrne finds the limitations of creating bitcoins appealing - there is a finite number of bitcoins that can be made available and they are released at predetermined pace, unlike traditional government currency.

"You want money to be based on something that no government mandarin can wish into existence with the stroke of a pen," he said.

In October, Byrne said that Overstock was thinking about accepting Bitcoin, but that it had suspended its plans because of the regulatory uncertainty around the digital currency. While regulators are still grappling with the implications of digital currency, several federal officials said at a Senate hearing in November that they believed digital currencies could operate within existing laws.

Byrne is a colorful executive who has been known to stake out controversial positions, including against investors he believes manipulated his company's stock. He also has an unconventional resume. Once an aspiring professional boxer, Byrne has a black belt in taekwondo and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford.

One obstacle to mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin may be its wildly fluctuating value, which could scare off consumers. After the value of a single bitcoin surged to $1,137 in late November, the price has fallen to about $759, deflated largely by a crackdown by Chinese authorities on Bitcoin trading.

Byrne said Overstock would insulate itself from such fluctuations by using derivatives to hedge the risk from any bitcoins it holds. Alternately, the retailer may convert its bitcoins to dollars on a nightly basis, he said.

Cheques to be paid in via smartphones in UK?

 

In an innovative move, British banks may soon allow customers to pay cheques into their account by taking photos on their smartphones.

Rather than go to the bank in person, customers will be able to photograph the cheque, and send it electronically.

The government is to launch a consultation on the idea, with a view to making the necessary legal changes, the BBC reported.

The technology will also allow cheques to be cleared in two days, rather than the six it takes at the moment.

Banks say the new transfer method will be more convenient, and more secure.

"Moving into a virtual world will actually create a more secure customer experience than the paper experience," said Antony Jenkins, the chief executive of Barclays.

Such photos would not be stored on the phone itself, so there should be no security risk if a phone was stolen.

Similar technology was introduced in the US nine years ago, following the attack on the World Trade Centre.

A new law known as Check 21 was passed, to enable banks to process cheques electronically, rather than having to transport paper versions across the country.

The UK government believes a change in the law would also promote the continuing use of cheques.

The UK Payments Council was originally planning to abolish all cheque payments by 2018, but was forced to change its mind after public opposition.

"We want to see more innovation so that customers see the benefits of new technologies," said Sajid Javid, the financial secretary to the Treasury.

"We want cheques to have a crucial role in the ongoing success of the UK," he added.

In 2012, 10 per cent of all payments by individuals were made by cheque, and 25 per cent of payments by businesses.

The industry says most younger account-holders already use electronic systems of payment, and rarely use cheques.

However all customers will still be able to pay in cheques by posting them to their bank, or by visiting their bank directly, the report said.

Barclays is planning to launch a pilot programme for paying in cheques via phone from April 2014.

It hopes to launch a service for all its customers later in the year.

"I think people are going into branches less and less, particularly as a result of mobile banking, and that's going to accelerate the process," Jenkins said.

How sites like YouTube are dealing with nasty commenters

Mix blatant bigotry with poor spelling. Add a dash of ALL CAPS. Top it off with a violent threat. And there you have it: A recipe for the worst of online comments, scourge of the internet.

Blame anonymity, blame politicians, blame human nature. But a growing number of websites are reining in the Wild West of online commentary. Companies including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order to restore civil discourse. Some sites, such as Popular Science, are banning comments altogether.

The efforts put sites in a delicate position. User comments add a lively, fresh feel to videos, stories and music. And, of course, the longer visitors stay to read the posts, and the more they come back, the more a site can charge for advertising.

What websites don't want is the kind of off-putting nastiness that spewed forth under a recent CNN.com article about the Affordable Care Act.

"If it were up to me, you progressive libs destroying this country would be hanging from the gallows for treason. People are awakening though. If I were you, I'd be very afraid," wrote someone using the name "JBlaze."

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has long been home to some of the Internet's most juvenile and grammatically incorrect comments. The site caused a stir last month when it began requiring people to log into Google Plus to write a comment. Besides herding users to Google's unified network, the company says the move is designed to raise the level of discourse in the conversations that play out under YouTube videos.

One such video, a Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial family, met with such a barrage of racist responses on YouTube in May that General Mills shut down comments on it altogether.

"Starting this week, when you're watching a video on YouTube, you'll see comments sorted by people you care about first," wrote YouTube product manager Nundu Janakiram and principal engineer Yonatan Zunger in a blog post announcing the changes. "If you post videos on your channel, you also have more tools to moderate welcome and unwelcome conversations. This way, YouTube comments will become conversations that matter to you."

Anonymity has always been a major appeal of online life. Two decades ago, The New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon with a dog sitting in front of a computer, one paw on the keyboard. The caption read: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." At its best, anonymity allows people to speak freely without repercussions. It allows whistle blowers and protesters to espouse unpopular opinions. At its worst, it allows people to spout off without repercussions. It gives trolls and bullies license to pick arguments, threaten and abuse.

But anonymity has been eroding in recent years. On the internet, many people may know not only your name, but also your latest musings, the songs you've listened to, your job history, who your friends are and even the brand of soap you prefer.

"It's not so much that our offline lives are going online, it's that our offline and online lives are more integrated," says Mark Lashley, a professor of communications at La Salle University in Philadelphia. Facebook, which requires people to use their real names, played a big part in the seismic shift.

"The way the Web was developed, it was unique in that the avatar and the handle were always these things people used to go by. It did develop into a Wild West situation," he says, adding that it's no surprise that Google and other companies are going this route. "As more people go online and we put more of our lives online, we should be held accountable for things we say."

Nearly three-quarters of teens and young adults think people are more likely to use discriminatory language online or in text messages than in face to face conversations, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and MTV. The poll didn't distinguish between anonymous comments and those with real identities attached.

The Huffington Post is also clamping down on vicious comments. In addition to employing 40 human moderators who sift through readers' posts for racism, homophobia, hate speech and the like, the AOL-owned news site is also chipping away at anonymous commenting. Previously, anyone could respond to an article posted on the site by creating an account, without tying it to an email address. This fall, HuffPo began requiring people to verify their identity by connecting their accounts to an email address, but that didn't appear to be enough and the site now also asks commenters to log in using a verified Facebook account.

"We are reaching a place where the internet is growing up," says Jimmy Soni, managing editor of HuffPo. "These changes represent a maturing (online) environment."

Soni says the changes have already made a difference in the quality of the comments. The lack of total anonymity, while not a failsafe method, offers people a "gut check moment," he says. There have been "significantly fewer things that we would not be able to share with our mothers," in the HuffPo comments section since the change, Soni says.

Newspapers are also turning toward regulated comments. Of the largest 137 US newspapers - those with daily circulation above 50,000 - nearly 49% ban anonymous commenting, according to Arthur Santana, assistant communications professor at the University of Houston. Nearly 42% allow anonymity, while 9% do not have comments at all.

Curbing anonymity doesn't always help. Plenty of people are fine attaching their names and Facebook profiles to poorly spelled outbursts that live on long after their fury has passed.

In some cases, sites have gone further. Popular Science, the 141-year-old science and technology magazine, stopped allowing comments of any kind on its news articles in September.

While highlighting responses to articles about climate change and abortion, Popular Science online editor Suzanne LaBarre announced the change and explained in a blog post that comments can be "bad for science."

Because "comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories," wrote LaBarre.

Silicon Valley techies go stylish

The Silicon Valley has had a men's fashion problem dating back to its founders. 

From their inception, tech companies went out of their way to be different - and that meant no more business suits. Thus brilliant innovations took place in the dumpiest of outfits as leather sandals, elastic-waist jeans and old T-shirts became ubiquitous. 

But that's changing as a younger generation of engineers and designers have arrived seeking clothes that coordinate. 

"There's definitely a shift happening here, and the age of the Silicon Valley culture has something to do with it," said image professional Joseph Rosenfeld. 

"As a generation," he said, young professionals "tend to care more about style than engineers of the past." 

The market has responded to this new attitude among the region's rising nerds, geeks and hackers with new online men's stores, personal style consultants and an array of high-end shops at Northern California's biggest mall. They're catering to the emerging members of a creative industry who, nonetheless, are seeking something of a uniform. 

"They'll typically wear designer denim and a great button-up shirt by day, and throw on a sport coat at night to go to a cigar or wine bar," said Westfield Valley Fair mall general manager Matt Ehrie. "Silicon Valley's dressy attire would be casual Friday in most other parts of the country." 

Josh Meyer, 30, a products manager at a leading high-tech firm, recognizes the generation gap. He said higher-level managers who have been in the industry for decades often wear baggy khakis and faded baseball shirts "like they're going to a barbeque," while millennials such as himself like to wear button-up dress shirts "high-quality denim jeans with a roll at the bottom, nice shoes or possibly boots." 

"I can pick out techies just walking down the street by these outfits," he said. 

The focus on men's fashion has emerged in a sector where 3 of 4 workers are males. And it's come late by comparison as women in technology have long faced style challenges. 

Many have worked to strike a casual, professional and creative balance, even as blogs and news stories regularly focus on the image of female high-tech executives - from the extraordinarily stylish Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, featured in last month's Vogue, to Facebook's uber-chic chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. 

Meanwhile, when men are similarly featured attention often shifts to casual attire - from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's famous hoodie to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs' black turtleneck. 

"As much as we want to think there isn't a boys club, the Silicon Valley still feels very much run by men and there's a difference in expectations," says San Mateo-based image consultant Marina Sarmiento Feehan. "Women who rise to the top tend to be judged more, both by men and other women, and in order to succeed they do have to dress better." 

With the nation's highest concentration of high-tech workers, accounting for almost a third of the jobs in the region, demographics show a younger, more affluent population than national averages. Newcomers tend to have the desire and the money to dress well, but they don't always have the time, so the men's fashion industry has responded by streamlining the process. 

Erik Schnakenberg, founder and CEO of a new online men's store, Buck Mason, said his company focuses on "guys who want to look great, who are aware of style, and who are not going to spend their days in Bloomingdale's trying to find the newest piece. Tech guys are at the top of that list." 

Buck Mason client Peter Dering is a firsthand example. When Dering launched his online startup Peek Design, which innovates and builds camera accessories, he worked marathon hours and had no time to shop. Still, he had both a personal and professional interest in looking sharp as he was raising $1.5 million and trying to hire top talent. 

"You've got a lot of folks who think that their style doesn't matter because they sit behind a desk all day, but the fact of the matter is that it does make a difference," said Dering, noting that people who want to be taken seriously should dress appropriately. 

Buck Mason sells American-made clothes in packages of matching neutral outfits, enough to dress a software engineer for a week with no fashion faux pas, and targets it's advertising online. The Silicon Valley is the company's top region for sales, Schnakenberg said. 

Also working to accommodate techies, one of the country's best-performing malls, Westfield Valley Fair, has opened high-end men's stores this year, including Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo, Burberry and Louis Vuitton. The shops are grouped together with a separate outside entrance so shoppers don't have to fight past teens clogging the food court. And until now, such stores were mostly an hour away in San Francisco. 

The change in the Silicon Valley men's fashion culture has made things interesting for image professionals such as Rosenfeld. For 13 years he was mostly a loner advising area professionals, but in recent months competitors have popped up, including ties + tees, a pair of Silicon Valley personal image consultants whose pitch includes, "The 90s called. They want their drab khakis back." 

Still, Rosenfeld welcomes the new focus on fashion. "Birkenstocks with white socks was hideous back then, and it hasn't gotten any better," he said. "It's time to up the ante."