Snapdeal, India Post partner to help artisans go online

 Online marketplace Snapdeal has partnered India Post to jointly work on bringing thousands of weavers and artisans from Varanasi through its website. 

Snapdeal has launched a pilot with India Post to set-up facilitation desks at Varanasi post offices to enable local weavers to sell on its platform. 

"This is an endeavour by Snapdeal and India Post to empower local artisans, small and medium entrepreneurs to sustain their livelihood by providing a platform to popularise their indigenous products," Snapdeal CEO and co-founder Kunal Bahl told PTI. 

Through this association, weavers will be able to access the national audience by listing their products on Snapdeal, at negligible cost, he added. 

The post offices will act as a dropping point for sellers, and India Post will deliver the goods to the buyers. 

a"India has a number of unique and highly specialised art forms and weaves. However, with the fast changing fashion trends and readily available products we are losing out on this rich heritage. If we don't act now, soon the rich designs and weaves will be extinct," he said. 

Through this partnership, Snapdeal will take the Banarasi weaves to customers in all corners of the country and extend this platform to include more weavers and artisans of the country, Bahl added. 

Snapdeal will also create an 'India Post' store to feature the associated sellers exclusively. 

Besides, the City-based firm will also share its expertise in fashion and market insights with weavers to help them create designs and products, which will appeal to a variety of customers across the country, he said. 

Previously, India Post had partnered with Snapdeal to reach out to the philatelists to offer stamps priced between Rs 300 and Rs 5,500. 

India Post is world's most widely distributed postal system with over 1.54 lakh post offices all over the country.

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Truecaller to set up R&D centre in India

Phone directory app Truecaller, which has nearly half of its 100 million users in India, will expand its base in the country with a research and development (R&D) centre and more marketing personnel.

Started in 2009 by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam, the Swedish company provides with an application that helps a user search for contact information (based on name, number or address), identify incoming calls, block calls one does not want to receive, and make personal contact suggestions based on time and place.

The free mobile application shows name of the person calling to a user even if the number is not saved in the phone.

"India is a very unique market and when one starts growing in India, one can grow really fast. We have an office in Gurgaon. We will be adding more people in India next year for our marketing team", said Mamedi.

"Right now we have one person in India. We are also planning R&D centres probably in Bangalore or Pune," Mamedi told PTI here.

Truecaller, he says, is installed in around 40% of smartphones in India. The country has over an estimated 115 million smartphone subscribers, behind only China and the US.

The app in most of the phones is pre-installed including Micromax in India. The company currently has 60 employees from nearly 40 nationalities in its head office here.

"Of them four are Indians. Seventy per cent of the staff are programmers, two of them are women from India," he said. Recently Truecaller set up office in Beijing. Next year, it plans to start offices in Dubai, Sao Paulo and in Kenya.

Truecaller also runs another app, Truedialer, which offers users details of a person before the outgoing call is connected.