Sajith PaiSajith Pai
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Why Did Amazon Launch a Physical Bookstore?

November 21, 2015 By Sajith Pai in Book Discovery No Comments Tags: Amazon, Book Discovery, Onlie Retail

Amazon Books store in Seattle

Earlier this month, Amazon’s opening of a physical store created a fair bit of buzz online. Most observers found it puzzling. Why, after disrupting and demolishing the physical bookstore – as evidenced by the closing of Borders, and crippling of Barnes & Noble – would Amazon want to launch a physical bookstore themselves?

Now, Amazon is an extraordinary company, and its founder Jeff Bezos, is known for thinking really long-term …

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Thoughts on Content, Curation and the Bundle

November 2, 2015 By Sajith Pai in News Media 1 Comment Tags: Content, Curation, Unbundling

Historically, all content was created for a bundle.

The bundle, as seen for magazines and newspapers, was designed keeping in mind, a dual-revenue stream, one, albeit larger from ads and the other from readers. In the case of newspapers, the bundle also presumed some degree of exclusivity of readership (read monopoly) and thereby the need to cater to a wide range of customers.

Thanks to the high profitability that these …

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Edge Use Cases & New Product Ideas

October 31, 2015 By Sajith Pai in News Media No Comments Tags: Edge Use Cases, New Product Ideas, Twitter

I have a colleague who uses twitter in the most peculiar way. He only tweets @-replies to brands with whom he has a service grouse, in an attempt to get them to respond faster. He has pioneered an interesting use case for twitter as a ‘public’ email service.

Twitter as a 'Public' Email Service

Twitter as a ‘Public’ Email Service

This is not something that could have been visualized by anyone at twitter when it was …

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A Review of ‘Pandeymonium’

October 25, 2015 By Sajith Pai in Book Reviews No Comments Tags: Advertising, Book Review

Indian advertising is badly in need of well-written books (or memoirs) by industry leaders, sharing their account of the evolution of the industry and sharing insights into advertising & marketing.

Pandeymonium, by Piyush Pandey, is not that book.

It will probably do ok in sales. Piyush Pandey is a well-known figure, possibly the best-known figure in Indian advertising, and there should be enough curiosity about the book to …

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On Bootcamps

October 22, 2015 By Sajith Pai in Higher Education No Comments Tags: Bootcamps, Vocational Education

A few months back The New York Times wrote about a waiter who became a data scientist, upping his earnings from $20,000 to well over $100,000. There are other examples in the story too, such as the barista who became a coding instructor, and the English major who became an appmaker. The transformations were courtesy coding bootcamps or immersion programs. These are institutions such as Hackreactor or General Assembly…

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Media Content Distribution via APIs

October 9, 2015 By Sajith Pai in News Media No Comments Tags: APIs, Content, Discovery

One little-known fact about Silicon Valley darlings Uber and Airbnb (and many others) for lay folks is how little of the underlying tech platform they directly control, and how much is really hacked together cleverly using public APIs (application programme interface).

Uber uses Google Maps, Twilio (SMS notifications), SendGrid (e-mails), and Braintree (payments) to make the magic happen. Airbnb, too, uses SendGrid, Twilio, and Braintree.

Hacking (or cobbling) together the …

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Software needs to eat guns

October 3, 2015 By Sajith Pai in Miscellany No Comments Tags: Guns, Technology

Written a day after the Umpqua Community College shootings.

From whatever I have read about the U.S., there is virtually zero chance of rewriting the 2nd amendment.

We know Mike Bloomberg has plans. Sure Bloomberg is worth $37b and if he goes all out, it may make some impact. But I am really sceptical. Many Americans love their guns, and attitudes are unlikely to change soon. So what should …

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Why Don’t Indian VCs Write?

September 29, 2015 By Sajith Pai in Fitness 1 Comment Tags: Content Marketing, Startups, Venture Capital

Sometime in 2013, I restarted my dormant twitter account, treating it akin to a RSS reader, curating a mix of interesting people to follow and learn from. Some of these were writers, some politicians; others included philosophers, flaneurs and a few executives. Consistently I began to find that the most interesting tweets were from (Valley) VCs – Marc Andreessen, Benedict Evans, Paul Graham, Chris Sacca, Fred Wilson (NYC though) etc. …

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Understanding LinkedIn / A Rebuttal to Monday Note

September 24, 2015 By Sajith Pai in News Media No Comments Tags: Content, LinkedIn, Strategy

I love Monday Note. It is one of my favourite media + tech blogs (along with Benedict Evans and Stratechery). I like it so much that I even adopted the wordpress theme that they use, for this blog. Imagine my disappointment then, when I came across their recent article on Monday Note – lamenting LinkedIn’s failure to become a publishing major domo. The article clearly missed a few …

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A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes – Part II

September 19, 2015 By Sajith Pai in Higher Education No Comments Tags: Higher Education, Online / Digital, Startups, Universities

In a previous post A Listing of EdTech Investment Themes I laid out EdTech investment themes into three buckets

  • Lifelong education
  • Unbundling of the university
  • Rethinking existing education business models in light of tech and mobile

In the post, I had shared that I would go into greater detail on bucket #3 in a future post, as to which of the various business models and processes could be rethought, and …

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