About the book:
The advent of Internet has been a significant game changer for our generation. Mouse Charmers are a new breed of entrepreneurs in emerging India powered by the Internet and the opportunities that it offers to create new markets and to cater to old markets in new ways. Some of them have already achieved success where they can be called iconic and inspiring while others have powerful ideas that put them on the same path. Anuradha Goyal tells the stories of digital entrepreneurs like Flipkart, Zomato, ImagesBazaar, IndiBlogger how they started out, the innovations and technologies involved, their business models and unique marketing strategies. Inspiring and useful, The Mouse Charmers is an essential guide for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Publisher Random House India
ISBN-10 8184004923
Imprint Random Business
Number of Pages 344 Pages
Publication Year 2014 April
Language English
ISBN-13 9788184004922
Binding Paperback
Anuradha Goyal wears many hats to pursue her three prime passions - innovation, travel and books. She studies business innovation, especially business models and blogs about them. She has earlier co-authored the India Innovates Series published by CII showcasing innovations from across the country. She was a jury member for Economic Times Power of Ideas Contest in 2010. Her papers on business innovation have appeared in various journals and forums. She is one of Indias leading travel bloggers, writing a popular travel blog for a decade now. Her travel story has been published as part of an anthology Celebrating India and her paper on in-city travel appeared in travel journal Earth. Her stories regularly appear in various print and online publications. She has close to 400 book reviews to her credit on her book reviews blog. She is a keen student of Indian art history. She regularly speaks on these topics at various conferences and institutes.In her earlier avatar she worked in the IT industry for over a decade. She studied computer applications for her masters degree and physics for her graduate degree at Panjab University.
Connect with the author:
Website : http://www.anuradhagoyal.com/
My Review:
This book is so much worth every penny spent on it. In a world where we all are netizens more than we are anything else, this book comes as the essential survival guide.
The book profiles the first generation entrepreneurs and their start-ups most of which have now been in the digital space for over a decade, although their relevance (and that of this book) is now more than ever, at a time when e-commerce seems to have finally arrived.
The book is complete in itself: It starts with an introduction to the evolving digital scenario. The author brings to fore how we have evolved from being skeptical of buying even generic products to buying clothes and accessories which are not even standardized.
It also encompasses how creative professions have opened up to limitless opportunities owing to the international exposure and ad-revenue models of websites.
Why it is important for everyone, businessperson or not, to read this book is because this is what the future looks like, and the book traces how all opportunities and breakthroughs of the future will source and emanate from these digital pioneers.
As a result, we have never-heard-of struggles and facts about flipkart, Zomato, Shaadi.com, imagesbazaar, Indiblogger , among many other digital success stories.
The author has been really careful in the selection of the companies. While discussing about content-driven portals, she has chosen Zomato, Games2win, ImagesBazaar and Chai with Lakshmi. These are diverse and representative of all business models in a way that they are all-encompassing. Zomato is at the zenith of all content aggregator portals, and who are we kidding, it has become a favourite go-to portal for the urbane, metropolitan population.
The book is replete with case studies and through research which makes it the most insightful piece of Indian contemporary non-fiction I have read.
While it may seem that it caters to the entrepreneurial-minded, this is not the case. It, in fact caters as much to the layman as to the specialist.
Here's hoping we have many more volumes to the series and a flourishing digital future ahead.
My Judgement:
Online portals acquire a life of their own in this informative book, You'd regret not knowing what the author has to share!
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