Happy New Year 2019

Happy New Year to everyone.
Last year saw a lot of changes in the Indian product space. If you have been following the news sites, you will know about many of them.

Some big highlights from the e-commerce space

•  We had the Walmart-Flipkart deal, which also has people saying that this was a bad buy.

• The government has finally tightened norms on various practices followed by e-commerce firms.
• Multi-billion dollar valued Ola has actually invested in another mobility startup Vogo. This is surprising considering that Ola is actually large enough and capable enough to launch their own business unit in this space.
• And the online delivery space has seen a lot of action from investors, which included Swiggy's $1 billion funding.

Accordingly, hiring in the technology industry has also picked up, with a lot of movement at both senior and junior levels. Bangalore remains a perennial favorite, but Pune, Hyderabad and Gurgaon are not far behind when it comes to people's preferences.

In addition, the B2B software space has finally matured, with a lot of new firms focusing only on the cloud based services, for all departments in an enterprise, from finance to sales to marketing to HR and customer service. It is not difficult to find many new ventures or existing firms that have done well in this space. And I cannot recall many firms that are still doing packaged on-premise software for clients.

The consumer internet space has also exploded, there are a lot of exciting new ventures. These startups are exploring business models, technologies (IoT, Blockchain, Gaming, Reality TV) delivery mechanisms (app only) without losing the focus from a scalable revenue model. India has become an exciting destination for new ventures and finally there is some focus on innovation as well, rather than the traditional IT outsourcing (which has also matured significantly).

Here's hoping for a fantastic 2019!!