Online Vegetable Shopping: Are We Ready For It?

In the year 2006, we reported that Azadpur Mandi, one of the largest fruit and vegetable wholesale market planning to take a plunge into online transaction.When Akrosh Sharma, an IIM-Ahmedabad graduate of the class of 2004 launched his online vegetable store“mandionwheels.com” in 2009, many questioned the sustainability of the idea. But what actually started from a meager investment of Rs. 1 lakh recently crossed Rs 1 crore in sales turnover.

The venture not only grew at the rate of over 30% but also led others to believe in the concept. The result: within a short span of 2 years, a number of websites like FandV.in, sabzi.in, vegoncall.com,belivefresh.com, and freshsubzi.com have cropped up, each creating a distinct place for itself and fulfilling to the modern needs of the people. All these websites, at present, cater to a sub-section of society; those who dwell in metros and who find it difficult to visit the crowded mandis or malls.

Internet penetration is still on the lower side in our country. Moreover, the percentage of population who actually opt to shop online still constitutes a very small percentage out of the total chunk.  As a result, the online vegetable shops do not pose any considerable competition to the vegetable vendors and the wholesale vendors. This has given the online vendors an opportunity to expand their services and create a loyal consumer base for themselves. Some of these sites have actually started to offer value added services in the form of free home delivery, money-back guarantee, call-for-delivery, gift certificates and gift packaging to lure the customers.

The vegetable market is very big in India and there lies plenty of room for these online players to grow and co-exist with the traditional vendors. From offering luxury items to electronic goods, Internet has come up a long way by changing the traditional mindset of the people.

Can day-to-day necessities like vegetables and groceries find same level of acceptance from the people, what do you think?

Google Brings Voice And Image Search To Desktop

In a media event in San Francisco, Amit Singhal Head of Google’s core ranking team announced a range of new updates for Desktop search, Mobile search and Google Instant.

Voice Search on Desktop

A feature that had already been available on mobile devices is now finally available on the desktop, it is now possible to search by voice. This was not entirely surprising since Google had already demonstrated at I/O that by simply adding one line of code, a text field in Chrome couldaccept voice input. Right now it works only on the latest version of Chrome, and would be available on other browsers when they implement the HTML5 speech input API. The problem with most voice recognition services is that they are designed keeping the  American accents in mind, however Google’s voice recognition technology has no problem in recognizing Indian accents. Check out this video.

Image Queries

Like Voice search, search by image was already present on smartphones through Google Goggles. Now this service is available on Google Image search where modern browser users can just drag and drop images in the search field to get further details about the image or even similar images. An alternative way of providing Google the image to be searched for is via URL, uploading an image or right clicking an image on the browser. This is Liz Gannes’ (All Things D) commentary of the Image search demo at the event:

Next demo is of a blurry image of a guy standing on a trail in front of an island in Greece. You can now drag an image from your desktop into the search query box. This returns the name of the island: Nea Kameni. (Whoa, kinda crazy!)

Perhaps taking a cue from the negative feedback Facebook received on enabling face recognition Google has clarified that the search by image feature would not have facial recognition.

Instant Pages

Continuing its obsession with speed, Google introduced Instant Pages which would pre fetch and render pages which are more likely to be clicked in search results in the background. This along with Google Instant would save around three to five seconds of the user’s time on typical searches. Instant pages is available today to those who use developer builds of Chrome and would soon be available to beta users as well. Click here to learn more.

Mobile Search

Two of the three main announcements at this event were bringing something already available on mobile to desktop. This highlights the importance Google gives to mobile search. Mobile search in many ways right now mimics the initial stages of desktop search. Google made quite a few enhancements to its mobile search offering as well, the highlight being local search. Google added features that were already available on Google places to the Google homepage. With this searching nearby places becomes much more faster and easier. When searching for places a map will overlay the results at all times, even when scrolling so that placing coffee shops and ATMs on maps is hassle free.