Digital India programme

What is Digital India? 

• With the launch of Digital India programme, the government is taking a big step forward to transform the country into a digitally empowered knowledge economy.

•  PM is expected to unveil various schemes worth over Rs 1 lakh crore like Digital Locker, e-eduction, e-health, e-sign and national scholarship portal.

•  BharatNet in 11 states and Next Generation Network (NGN), are also a part of Digital India campaign. The programme includes projects that aim to ensure that government services are available to citizens electronically and people get benefit of the latest information and communication technology.

•  The Ministry of Communications and IT is the nodal agency to implement the programme.

Apps for Digital India Digital India Portal, MyGov Mobile App, Swachh Bharat Mission App and Aadhaar Mobile Update App. Vision Of Digital India Digital Infrastructure as a Utility to Every Citizen Governance & Services on Demand Digital Empowerment of Citizens Pillars Of Digital India Broadband Highways Universal Access to Phones Public Internet Access Programme e-Governance - Reforming government through Technology e-Kranti - Electronic delivery of services Information for All Electronics Manufacturing - Target NET ZERO Imports IT for Jobs Early Harvest Programmes Impact of Digital India by 2019 Broadband in 2.5 lakh villages, universal phone connectivity Net Zero Imports by 2020 400,000 Public Internet Access Points Wi-fi in 2.5 lakh schools, all universities; Public wi-fi hotspots for citizens Digital Inclusion: 1.7 Cr trained for IT, Telecom and Electronics Jobs Job creation: Direct 1.7 Cr. and Indirect at least 8.5 Cr. e-Governance & eServices: Across government India to be leader in IT use in services - health, education, banking  Digitally empowered citizens - public cloud, internet access Benefits of Digital Locker Digital Locker facility will help citizens to digitally store their important documents like PAN card, passport, mark sheets and degree certificates.


 Digital Locker will provide secure access to Government issued documents. It uses authenticity services provided by Aadhaar. It is aimed at eliminating the use of physical documents and enables sharing of verified electronic documents across government agencies. Digital Locker provides a dedicated personal storage space in the cloud to citizens, linked to citizens Aadhaar number. Digital Locker will reduce the administrative overhead of government departments and agencies created due to paper work. It will also make it easy for the residents to receive services by saving time and effort as their documents will now be available anytime, anywhere and can be shared electronically. To sign-up for your Digital Locker, one need your Aadhaar number and a Mobile number that is linked to that Aadhaar Number. 


What is National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN)?
 NOFN proposes seven lakh kilometers of optical fibre to be laid to connect 250 gram panchayats in three years. Public Wi-fi spots will be provided around the clusters after that and all villages will be provided with internet connectivity. According to Communications and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, "ten states including Maharashtra, Madhya Prasad, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Haryana and Chhattisgarh, are ready to roll out the NOFN to facilitate Digital India. 
Prasad, early this year, had described Digital India initiative as, "India would become a very powerful digitally connected world. This would lead to a good architecture for electronic delivery of service. The entire contour of India is change. India is sitting at the cusp of a big digital revolution." States like Telangana, Meghalaya, Jharkhand have decided to observe Digital India Week (DIW) from July 1 to July 7. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has also directed all varsities and higher education institutes across the country to observe the Digital India Week.

Brand building essentials for every new startup

1. Story:It’s all about blockbuster storytelling. Give people something they can relate to – something nostalgic, something funny, and/or something simple. The story has to genuinely communicate the reason for both your own and your product’s existence. It must be an authentic, must touch hearts and connect with the audience on a personal level. While a need is fulfilled by a commodity, aspirational value is fulfilled by a brand. The Ghar Ka Khana ad campaign by Fortune Foods was a wonderful example of touching hearts with a story. Moms, the target audience, loved it.

2. Content marketing:Marketing is evolving, just like everything else. Consumers pay little attention to direct advertisement, especially if the ad is not on a full page in a leading newspaper. Brands need to connect with journalists to have their story covered. The story could be an article on the top fashion trends of the season, in which case the writer will mention your brand along with nine others. Or, if your story is actually a blockbuster, then you can enjoy the privilege of some singular publicity for yourself.
   Also, referent power comes into play when a reputable media house covers a brand. Most newspapers print a weekly section covering what is hot in the market;it could be about tech and valuation, or simply what’s trending in men’s watches.

3. Brand association:Connect with brands your target audience relates to. This brings about instant improvementof your brand’s image in the eyes ofyour target audience, and adds credibility to your relatively new brand. It is, however, a strategy that comes with appreciable risks, as your brand’s image can be tarnished if things go wrong with the other brand. A successful example of implementation of this technique is Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker. Previously, they had no presence in India, so building the trust factor was crucial to their success here. They sell their products exclusively on Flipkart, as people trust Flipkart’s policies. This gives a first-time buyer the sense of assurance and confidence needed to place an order.

4. Creative communication:People’s eyes are busy, and they have very short attention spans. How do you grab eyeballs, then? The answer is simple – you can’t; at least not with a ‘start-up’ marketing budget. The only way a new brand can gain attention is by being dangerously creative in its marketing campaign.
   Millennials are more connected than ever; when they like something they share it with hundreds. US-based startup Dollar Shave Club ships men’s shaving razors for a dollar every month. What’s really interesting about this company is how they launched; at 6am California time with about a minute and half long video on Youtube, an incredibly creative one of the Co-founder detailing the reasons for their existence.

5. Influential outreach:It’s about more than just getting actors and sports icons to say something good about your brand; it’s about personalizing your reach. Connect with a local who hasa large social media following, but is living everyday life with a passion for something that fits with your goals. This person could be a photographer with few thousand followers on Instagram, or a fashion blogger, or even a tech blogger. Get 20 of these on board rather than one A-list celebrity. This grounded approach helps reinstate brand’s authenticity. For example, Motorola recently started an influencer program, through which they are reaching out to photographers with a decent social media following. The photographers take shots of one of Motorola’s phones, and post these pictures on their own social media. In return, the photographer gets to keep the phone.

Tools for Creating Perfectly Sized Images for Social Media Sites

If you use social media, you know what a daunting task it can be to properly crop, edit and upload a decent looking photo to your Facebook, Google+ and Twitter accounts. Each site has a different requirement for the size of the image and most of them have multiple images like Facebook with a cover photo and a profile photo.

You can always just upload anything and use the rudimentary cropping tools on that particular site to fit your image into the box, but if you want to create something unique or even halfway professional looking, you have to plan it out a little more. Luckily, there are some online tools that can help you quickly create custom header/profile pics without needing Photoshop.

I’ll break down the list of tools by social media site. There are also a couple of tools that work for multiple social media sites.

All-in-one Image Resizers

AP Social Media Image Maker is a sweetest tool for creating a perfect image for every possible image size for every possible social media site. It’s got everything from Facebook to YouTube to LinkedIn to Tumblr to Google+ and Twitter. Just scroll down and you even get a nice little diagram showing you exactly which picture it’s referring to on the site.

The editing tools on the site are simply awesome and the whole thing is completely free with no logins or anything else required. It is by far the best tool out there because it doesn’t have tons of ads like all the other sites do.

Social Image Resizer tool is a free cool from Internet Marketing Ninjas. Choose your file and click Upload to get started. Then simply click inside the box next to Choose a size and you’ll get a drop down of social media sites.

As you can see, you can quickly pick from different options like Facebook cover photo, Facebook profile pic, Google+ icon, photostrip or cover photo, Twitter icon or header image and a couple of predefined sizes that you could use on other sites too. You can also pick your own size if you need a different size for another site like Medium, etc.

Click Done editing and then click Download to download the image directly or you can type in an email address and have it sent there. Pretty nifty!

Facebook Photo Tools

TimelineCoverBanner is a free online tool for quickly creating a cover banner for Facebook. You can use it to create that custom cool-looking Facebook profile that connects your profile pic and your cover photo like the one below:

Want to be cool like that? Well, you’ll need some help getting it all perfectly sized and cropped. That’s what you can use this tool for. It also helps you find background too if you don’t happen to have anything useful yourself. However, if you already have images and just want to get to the editing, you can either use the lite editor or the advanced one. The advanced editor has a ton of features to edit the image, apply effects, add text and lots more. Note that when you download the image, it will not contain any watermark.

Timeline Cover Photo Maker is another free online tool with a good set of editing tools and a range of effects. It also does not add any watermark to your final picture and it doesn’t require you to login or anything like that. Some of the free tools you see online force you to log into your Facebook account so that they can update your cover photo for you, which I’m not a fan of for sure.

Easy Cover Maker doesn’t have any effects or many editing tools, but it does one really cool thing that the other sites don’t: upload a photo, adjust it’s size and position and it will also update the profile pic at the same time. Once you have it where you want it, you can then download the profile pic and cover photo separately and it does the cutting for you.

I actually use this tool the most since you can just use one image and let the tool cut it for you. Make sure you drag one of the corners of the box to expand the image. By default, when it inserts the picture, it fits it into the box even if the resolution is much higher. So to fill up the entire box, you need to drag it out from the corners.

Another cool aspect of the tool is that you can have multiple layers. You can’t add transparency and do all that fancy Photoshop stuff, but at least you can add multiple photos easily.

Twitter Header/Background Tools

With Twitter, you have even more images to worry about. You have your profile pic, then you have a header image and then you have a background you can change too. That can lead to some pretty creative uses of images.

It’s even harder getting all those images to sync in Twitter. Most people don’t bother to try to create one single flowing image, though, as that’s a bit complicated and probably not worth wasting that much time. However, a good header image and a good background can go a long way to making your Twitter profile look  a lot more interesting. Here are some tools you can use.

Header Cover is a fairly simple tool that lets you either start with a blank background or lets you pick from their collection. Using this tool, you have to upload the header image and the profile pic separately. You can’t really adjust the size of the background for some reason, which is kind of annoying. You can adjust the size of the thumbnail pic, however.

Also, you can just upload a background pic and then click Download Pictures. Whatever is in the area covered by the profile pic will automatically be cut into a separate picture for you. If you don’t want that part of the image as the profile pic, then you can click Insert photo as thumbnail and position that over the profile pic section. The main issue is it’s lack of a cropping tool.

Themeleon is a free tool that is officially supported by Twitter. If you go to Design tab on your Twitter settings page, it actually has a link to their site where you can choose from a bunch backgrounds and color palettes. You’ll have to sign in using your Twitter account, but it should be safe since it’s sponsored by Twitter itself.

Free Twitter Designer is a free online tool for creating Twitter backgrounds. The tool I mentioned above is for creating Twitter header images, which is that section that contains your bio info and your profile pic. The background is what is behind all of that. Lots of people use the background area to put in social media info or links, etc.

For Google+ cover images, you can basically use one of the above-mentioned tools as there aren’t really any separate tools online just for Google+. It really doesn’t make sense either since you can already create Google+ cover easily using the same tools. Hopefully, these tools help you create something unique and interesting looking for your social media profiles. Enjoy!

Find LinkedIn Profiles with Google Search

LinkedIn, the largest network of professionals in the world, is also the favorite hunting ground for recruiters and staffing agencies. Whether you are looking for a list of college students who are currently interning at Facebook or a head hunter building a pool of presumptive candidates, LinkedIn will not disappoint.

LinkedIn has a useful search function to help you find potential candidates but do you know that Google search can also help to find people on LinkedIn. Google indexes every public profile of LinkedIn and if you perform people search on LinkedIn via Google, you get a few additional features:

• While LinkedIn will only show 10 results per search query in one page, Google can return up to 100 results in one search results page.
• You can perform date-limited searches in Google and this is helpful when you are only looking for profiles that have been created or updated in a particular date range.
• You can automatically easily save your LinkedIn search results in a spreadsheet using the Google search Scraper for further analysis.

LinkedIn Scraper with Google Search

OK, let’s take a look at how we can search LinkedIn profiles with the help of Google. Say you are trying to find people for senior position who are based in New York area. Here’s how we’ll construct the Google search query.

1. Show LinkedIn profiles but exclude internal LinkedIn search pages:

site:linkedin.com/in/ OR site:linkedin.com/pub/ -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir"

2. Find LinkedIn profiles of people who have senior positions:

"head | vp | vice-president | senior | director" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir"

3. Find matching LinkedIn profiles who are based in NY (wild card search)

"Location * New York" "head | vp | senior | director" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -intitle:profiles -inurl:"/dir

You can further refine search results by adding the domain (like Sales & Marketing) or even the company name to limit your search to executives of a particular organization.

Find LinkedIn Profiles by Post Code

Google search supports number ranges meaning you can search pages that contain numbers within a specific range. For instance, if you say “apples 1900..2000″ on Google, it will show matching pages that contain any number before 1900 and 2000.

We can extend the same trick to perform LinkedIn people search on Google. To give you an example, the pin code of Delhi is something like 110049. So if you are looking for web developers in the Delhi area on LinkedIn, you search query would be something like:

"web developer" 110001..110099 site:linkedin.com/in

One more thing. A search query like site:linkedin.com will perform a global search. However, you can use country specific sub-domains in LinkedIn to only show candidates from a particular country. For instance, site:uk.linkedin.com/in web-developer will find LinkedIn profiles from UK while site:ca.linkedin.com/inwill only look for candidates that have set thir region as Canada.

7 traits to look for in B2B content marketers

Is content marketing a secret marketing weapon today? Not really. It is the backbone of most of the marketing communication. It is the gasoline of your social media efforts. It’s an opportunity for businesses to create the image of being a knowledge partner. It is a way to earn the respect and trust of the potential buyers.

Demand Metric states that 90% of organizations now market with content. According to Marketo, organizations with over 1,000 employees have a budget of $1,057,300 and those with fewer than 1,000 employees set aside $335,200 for content marketing.

Here is something that can make your search simple. Look for these traits in your B2B content marketers –

#1: They are Process Oriented

“Perfection has to do with the end product, but excellence has to do with the process.” – Jerry Moran

I am yet to see a successful content marketer who is not process-oriented. A non-documented content strategy is a non-existent strategy. Good content marketers will start with strategy definition and ensure that it is well documented and has the buy-in of the stakeholders.

Secondly, content writing is not something which you can decide to do in the morning and then execute by evening. Content marketing is an integral part of the overall marketing plan and therefore needs to be well thought-out and well-planned. For example, if the marketing focus for the month for an organization is on the outreach to a particular audience, content marketing needs to adapt to that. That’s where planning plays a big role. The content marketers have a well-defined plan in place, well in advance. It is part of their editorial calendar.

#2: They are skillful writers

“You don’t write because you want to say something….you write because you have something to say” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Good content writers live by this mantra. They don’t write for the sake of writing. They write insightful, entertaining, and useful content. Their words and style are their most cherished assets. Their writing serves the reader. They put their content in context, with the use of solid data, research and facts. Their content has logic and structure, which serves to clear the confusion from readers’ minds. Even if the business is complex, good writers make it simple and easy to understand.

#3: They are great at managing internal subject matter experts

“With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others-or, in a word, partnership.” – Paul Farmer

Many times, B2B marketers need to work in industries like technology, manufacturing or engineering. These industries have complex products and difficult concepts. Writing a compelling piece of content which appeals to the desired target audience in such cases is a difficult task – it involves extensive research, discussions with SMEs and getting their buy-in. Good content marketers not only need to possess the knack of working with multiple such stakeholders aka SMEs, but also need to understand how to optimally use their time.

Here is what has worked best for me personally. Based on social listening, I identify the theme or topic for the content. Then I do my research, and finalize a list of keywords that need to be used. Based on the keywords, I prepare a set of questions for the SMEs. Once this is done, I meet the SMEs for 20-30 minutes to get answers to my questions. The SMEs have abundant knowledge. The real trick is in capturing this knowledge and presenting it in a publishable and promotable format.

#4: They are awesome storytellers

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” – Hannah Arendt

Marketing is noisy and the Internet is full of content. How do you make your content stand out from the clutter? Storytelling is the answer. Today, nobody wants to see your company brochure presented in the form of a blog article. Your product or service CANNOT be the hero of your story. The buyer/ reader needs to be the hero. The best content captures the attention of the readers, resonates with them, answers their questions, and gets them engaged enough with the content to share it.

#5: They provide answers to questions

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” ― Dr. Seuss

Nobody is interested in your product or services. People want answers to their questions. They want solutions to their problems. This is reflected now in search patterns as well – earlier, people used to search for keywords, now they search for answers. If your content provides answers to their questions, chances are that the search engines will rank your content higher and more importantly, people will appreciate and read your content. It will create you an image as a knowledge partner and expert in the field, whom they can go to for solutions to their problems.

#6: They understand social media

“Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.” ― Anton Chekhov

There are 700+ social networks and each social platform is different. While all the social platforms follow the underlying philosophy of two-way communication and interaction, there is a lot of difference in the way each platform works – Facebook is more visual, Twitter is 140 characters and has got immediacy associated with it, LinkedIn is more professional, Pinterest is highly creative and so on. The best content marketers understand the nuances of each platform, and instead of using the same content on all the platforms, they tailor-make the content based on the network they are going to promote it on. They repurpose the content based on their understanding of the platforms. For example, they might convert a blog post into an infographic for publishing on Pinterest, or they might include some tweetable stats in the blog post to make it easy to share on Twitter.

#7: They are tech-savvy and leverage various tools

“It’s not that we use technology, we live technology.” ― Godfrey Reggio

Godfrey Reggio has put it very aptly. We live in a hyper-connected technological world, and marketers can’t afford to keep themselves away from technology. By tech-savvy, I mean using technology tools and mobile apps to make themselves more effective and productive. There are many apps that help in finding, and curating content, getting ideas for content topics, promoting the content and so on. Here is a brilliant image which every content marketer should make the desktop default wallpaper

Amazon most visited e-commerce site.

As ecommerce players battle it out for buyers’ attention, Amazon India has caught up with Flipkart and overtaken Snapdeal in terms of monthly unique visitors in May. According to data from Internet analytics firm comScoreData, Amazon India had 23.6 million unique visitors in May, edging past Flipkart narrowly.

While Flipkart saw 23.5 million unique visitors, Snapdeal had 17.9 million in May this year. An annual comparison shows that Amazon has seen over a 142 per cent jump in the number of unique visitors since May 2014 while for Flipkart, it’s nearly 80 per cent surge. For the same period, Snapdeal saw a 90 per cent rise in unique visitors, the data revealed.

Interestingly, last year in May, Flipkart was leading by a mile, with more than 13 million unique visitors while both Amazon and Snapdeal were in a tight race with close to 10 million unique visitors to their sites. When contacted, Amazon India declined to comment though it said the repeat rate of customers was “healthy”.

According to PTI, industry experts caution that unique visitors are just another metric for ecommerce companies, and the ‘loyalty and stickiness’ of customers are a more reliable measure to go by. Another popular parameter ecommerce companies quote is the gross merchandise value (GMV) to indicate the total sales value reflecting the volume of their business, Singhal said.

Currently, Flipkart, the country’s highest valued ecommerce company, has said it expects its GMV to touch Rs 76,000 crore in a year. Earlier, the company had said it expects to reach a GMV of USD 8 billion (over Rs 50,000 crore) by December. Snapdeal is also reported to be targeting GMV sales of USD 10 billion (about Rs 63,000 crore) by the end of calendar year.

While Amazon India does not share details of its sales, it’s offering more than 25 million products for sale through its online marketplace. It reportedly crossed USD 1 billion (Rs 6,300 crore) in sales in September last year while Flipkart reported a GMV of USD 3 billion for FY15. Snapdeal reportedly crossed the USD 3.5 billion mark by May.