Retail in India is in. Till a few years ago few anticipated that India would turn out to be one of the biggest retail markets in the world. Born on an appetite of conspicuous consumption being the evil one combined with a little seasoning of socialism and the Indian way of life, few anticipated India would in 2007 turn out to be the top country in Global Retail Development Index (GRDI).

From Reliance to Tatas from the entrepreneurial telecom giant Bhartis to the just about any brand in the world, India is the destination and retail in India is hot like never before.

Technology behind the scenes

As retail expands and perhaps gets complicated behind the scenes in order to deliver that immaculate experience to the pampered consumer of today it’s technology that providing the spine to retail. And it’s here that tech giants like IBM amongst others are working on solutions created specially for the Indian retail market and are bullish in a way never seen before. According to IBM “IBM Retail Store Solutions (RSS) is one of IBM’s fastest growing emerging-opportunity businesses”. That investments in retail and investments in technology being used for retail solutions are growing can be gauged by the fact on one end giants like Reliance Retail, Spencers, Hypercity and DLF are going ahead with plans worth an investment of US$ 10 billion to set up retail outlets, on the other hand it’s companies like IBM and other technology providers which are seeing a direct benefit from providing retail solutions to such companies. Consider the case of IBM. It’s high velocity growth in this sector has continued in terms of a high double-digit revenue growth for seven consecutive quarters with revenue growing more than 25%. Read more

The Open Source likes to do it differently even if it’s about the language. They like to call a conference, an un-conference. With all the great innovation they are working on perhaps they deserve this too. This ‘un-conference’ was called Bar Camp Delhi3 sponsored by Impetus Technologies at their campus in Noida. The theme for discussion was “Next Generation Internet: Web 2.0, mobile computing, and other cool stuff”. Attended by than 200 technology experts to learn and share their knowledge with others, from across the country. A variety of organizations such as Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Opera Software also participated in it. People from all walks of life, like technology professionals, startup entrepreneurs, investors, media persons, bloggers etc. attended the Camp. It witnessed some really interesting sessions on emerging and contemporary topics like Mobile Advertising, Desi Social Networking, Amazon Cloud Computing, Agile Estimation, Designing for the mobile web, Sun Startup Essentials Program etc. Read more