Asklaila for where to vote in BBMP elections

I know that voting is not the most fashionable thing to do in town and the usual excuse is that it is tough to figure out where to go for voting. In partnership with SmartVote we are trying to make it easier for you to get access to this information. Just call up our Voice Search number 080-33-555-555 to check for your name and where you can vote.

Happy Voting!

Asklaila by 2 – We support Earth Hour

I am sure anybody who has stayed in Bangalore understands what “by 2″ is. Be it coffee, be it juice or soups, Bangaloreans love “by 2″. We are also going “by 2″ to extend our support to Earth Hour initiative. We will be shutting down half of our servers during earth hour. I am sure our programmers have written good enough code to still serve your requests fast enough.

More info on earth hour at

http://www.asklaila.com/article/Bangalore/Earth+Hour+2010%3A+Fight+Climate+Change/155218/

More power to tweeple

We love twitter. Don’t you.

It enables us to put a face to millions of customers we have across all mediums and interact with them on a day to day basis. We love answering your queries and we take pride in that we do it across so many mediums. Here is another way to asklaila.

Just send your query to our bangalore twitter id namma_bangalore. We are trialing this in Bangalore and soon coming to other cities. Just check it out.

You just need to send a tweet which starts with “find”. If you are looking to find tunde kabab in Bangalore, just tweet to namma_bangalore – “find tunde kabab, koramangla” and you will see three results in your twitter account.

One thing to remember is that your queries are public as most of the content on twitter. So just make sure that your spouse is not on twitter when you fire “those” queries

Free technical consultancy for Bangalore startups

You must be kidding…… No we are not.

So first of all let me acknowledge the inspiration. It was an article by Ashish of Pluggdin fame on what Indian startup eco system lacks ( http://www.pluggd.in/indian-startup-ecosystem-is-broken-297/ ). As all tweeple do, I also responded with my armchair opinion till it hit me that I can make an effort to solve at least some part of it.

Let us face it. Some of us are more blessed then others for reasons which are sometimes in our control and sometimes not. Some of us might have studied in better colleges, some of us worked in companies where we got an opportunity to solve problems of larger magnitude and complexity but then now it is time for us to share it with a larger set of people. So here is a small FAQ for people who are interested in talking to us.

Q. Are you guys really knowledgeable ?

A. We think we are and we do accept when we are not. Some of us have experience in building large complicated systems and some of us have worked on complicated systems in companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and obviously Asklaila. Anyway we are not too talented on praising ourselves.

Q. Any particular domains where you know more?

A. Internet related domains are something closer to our heart. We are also shameless users of lot of opensource so that is an area where we can help. Few Tech areas where we have better knowledge

- SEO

- SEM

- Performance Optimizations

- Mysql

- Memcached

- Python

- Django
Q. Will this be like a classroom ?

A. The last time I was in classroom ages back, I cursed everyone. Don’t remind me of bad days in life. So this will be more or less focused session on one individual company and one or more specific problem.

Q. What type of companies do you do this for?

A. The companies which bring us Samosas, Dhoklas and Managalore Bhajji besides being a Bangalore based unfunded startup. We have nothing against companies outside Bangalore but nobody wants to eat cold food out here. Nothing against funded startups as well but I am guessing you already are burning cash for such stuff. Anyway write to us even if you are funded or outside Bangalore.

Q. What do you expect in return?

A. I answered that in the last answer. You bring in the snacks to our office and the coffee is on us. We also do not mind twitter/FB/Website mentions if you really gained from our experience.

Q. Will I really benefit from this?

A. I am as clueless about this as you are but I can assure you that we will try to pass on what we know. We can anyway assure you that we will not steal your wallet when you are in our office.
Q. I have read all this and I am still interested in talking to you guys. How do I contact you?

A. You are a brave man or women for sure. Just email us on techfundas at asklaila dot com with a short write upon technical challenges you face.

Asklaila on Reuters

We know that you love to asklaila day in day out. And now we are also available on Reuters India website – http://in.reuters.com/. Just click on the City Search link on Reuters site or directly head to http://reuters.asklaila.com/.
Hope you enjoy us in this avatar and as always please continue to asklaila.

Asklaila arrives in Mumbai !

Yes, now we are multi-city !  Earlier today,we pushed out new version of our service with new data for Mumbai.

We let users scope their searches to almost 650 localities in Mumbai. You could be searching for vada pav in Dadar ,  apparel in Colaba , Outdoor italian  or mobile repair in Andheri West,  with high quality data and very localized search features like localized concept expansion, indian soundex, stemming, local abbreviations to mention a few, we aim to please.

As always – do try it and give us your feedback – we are more than happy to listen

New year, newer Laila!

It has been a great year for Asklaila and the year ahead promises to be even more exciting on the product front for our customers. 

In 2008, we will start rolling out our service on the web in other indian metros. New features, new delivery channels, partnerships are all in the works.

We’ll continue to grow the team to deliver more, faster – looking to hire product managers, SW engineers, UED experts, content managers, district managers to name a few open postions

We’ll continue to focus on quality data -you’ve probably read the post on ‘keep alive’ our effort to keep listings data accurate. Every new city we rollout will have a ‘keep alive’ effort following the launch. 

Wishing you a great year ahead as well !

I hope You’ll continue being a satisfied customer of our service and refer friends to us 

Solving things the smart way…

One of the problem with a pure tech company where people only understand technology is that they think they can solve “world hunger and poverty” with technology and algorithms. But in a real world most problems are not technology solvable nor is technology always optimum.

A classic example is the Russian and American pencil/space pen story. In India especially, you need nifty little solutions that do the job and most times they are non-tech solutions. A classic case is, in India people ask others for directions, which is much more practical than carrying a map and trying to find your route when the city is always crowded and you are stuck in traffic.

One of the core competencies that companies can boast of is of having people who can think of problems in a holistic way, getting the big picture and solving the problem than deciding the methods to solve it beforehand. And for a company like ours working in the Indian domain, it is so very important to solve things the smart way, which works and is optimum.