Bangalore,  September 20 2015:The mobile phone as a platform will continue to spur the growth of internet and reshape marketing strategies., agreed top executives from  Cyber-age companies like Google, Facebook, Snapdeal, Flipkart, InMobi, Fybr, Cisco and BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions. 
They were speaking at the Digital Summit, organized by the students of Indian Insititute pf Management Bangaloere’s one year full-time Executive Post Graduate Programme in Management (EPGP yesterday.
Professor Dinesh Kumar, Chairperson, Executive Post Graduate Programme, IIMB, shared  his learnings when working on a case study on the impact of digital marketing on the box office collections of a Bollywood movie.
Nitin Bawankule, IIMB alumnus and Director, eCommerce, Google, said: “There are over 300 million internet users in India, making us the world's second largest internet population. We are a mobile first nation, where 65% of users access the internet through mobile devices. Over half our searches come from mobile devices, and mobile as a platform will continue to spur the growth of internet. Accorfding to Ericson, there will be over 500 million smartphone users in India by 2020. By 2020, over 600 million Indians will be online, out of which approx. 250 million will be buying online. The online retail market, which was pegged at $ 4.5 billion in 2014, is projected to grow to over $75 billion in 2020.”Exhorting students of marketing and sales to gear up for a challenging time, he said the intelligent leveraging of technology, data and strategy would help them stay on top of their game.
Dr Rathan Kelkar, CEO, Centre for e-Governance, Government of Karnataka, spoke on “transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy”. “My biggest challenge today, in this galaxy of corporate speakers, is to sell government to you and prove that we too do work,” he quipped.
Saurabh Chandra, Head of IT Apps at Flipkart, described digital technology (Mobility, Data & Cloud) mixed with SCM and robotics as the “new cocktail of the season” for VCs and business. “Intelligence, powered by technology, supported by data and strategy and executed speedily, will win the race. I also believe many new gen companies and entrepreneurs will disrupt this space,” he added.
Ranjan Kant, Director of Strategy at Snapdeal, said: “The decade from 2000-2010 will go down as the decade of digital entrepreneurship. The IIMB Digital Summit comes at an interesting halfway juncture, helping us evaluate learnings over the last five years so that we can see how the next five years will shape up.”