Local search maybe getting too hot
On a hot day 18 months ago, serial technology entrepreneur Kiran Konduri found himself in Delhi looking for the contact details of Cotton World, a specialty garment retailer. After a frantic net search, he hit upon not one, but two of its outlets in Gurgaon. “They were right there, but there was nowhere for me to find their addresses.
This prompted me to set up asklaila.com and actually build a data repository from the ground up,” he explains. Asklaila.com, which recently closed $10 million (Rs 40 crore) in funding from the California-based VC firm Lightspeed Ventures, was the result of this fruitless search by Konduri, and co-founder Sriram Adukoorie. So, surfers can now look for not just their favourite Italian restaurant, but specify a location (say M.G. Road in Bangalore) as well as other search parameters (valet parking and outdoor seating). “We have started with Bangalore, but want to expand into the large metros,” says Konduri.
However, his is hardly the first engine to take a crack at this Indian market opportunity. Other sites such as Burrp.com, based out of Mumbai and Guruji.com, funded by Sequoia Capital, have also tried their hand at this market. “There are over 50 million web pages housed in India and there wasn’t a single service to tap their content,” says Anurag Dod, who co-founded Guruji.com with his IIT classmate Gaurav Mishra.
That’s not all. Justdial.com has got funding from SAIF Partners to expand the reach of what is basically an online yellow pages beyond the four or five metros. Its competitors are already ahead in this race; Burrp.com is present in five cities, while Guruji allows browsers to search in five different languages.
Critics say that there may already be too many players in this market and that too much funding is going around. “There are already five or six players in this market and each will have to look at a niche to differentiate itself, or else, the me-too syndrome will quickly set in,” says Alok Mittal, Managing Director, Canaan Partners India, and onetime dotcom entrepreneur (jobsahead. com)
