Laila has a voice now

You have used Asklaila in various ways. We have answered you on web, mobile, SMS, WAP, USSD, twitter, chat and many more mediums. Now we are also available on voice. We got a brand spanking new number.

33-555-555 ( double three triple five triple five )

We are currently live in Bangalore only and many more cities coming soon.You can look for businesses and you can also look for movies running in town.

Check it out….

Asklaila supports Facebook connect and bing maps

You asked for it and we got it…. Lot of users have been asking us to support Facebook connect and maps. We launched both of them today.

You can logon to Asklaila using your Facebook account and publish comments about places you love. The best part is that your comments will be visible to all your friends and they can plan their parties based on your recommendations.

We have also enabled maps using Bing Maps. You can see them while seeing details of a business ( eg. http://www.asklaila.com/listing/Bangalore/HAL+Airport+Road/Zen/VSImNM4O/?showmap=1#listingMapView ).

Check it out and as always let us know your feedback.

So what’s the deal with Thursday

Huh… Just another day. Not anymore. Asklaila has decided to make Thursdays more fun for tweeple and you can even call it Laila day if you wish. The idea is simple. We will post questions on our twitter account ( namma_bangalore ) and pass on some free passes for people to have fun over the weekend. Just put on your thinking and party hats at the same time.

After we decided on Thursdays we had the age old temptation of sounding logical, so here is an intentional feeble attempt.

- Thursdays are considered fasting day by lot of people so thinking about good food is anyway what you will end up doing.
- Thursday is the day when you start dreaming about the weekend seriously.
- In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the character Arthur Dent says “This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays”. A few minutes later the planet Earth is destroyed. ( src – Wikipedia )
- Thursday is one of the seven week days and the probability of choosing it was 1/7 which is pretty good in this uncertain world.
- Everybody keeps thanking God for it’s neighbor Friday. Don’t you think Thursday also deserves some attention. “Aiyo… Pavam Thursday”

So what you need to do is follow us on twitter ( @namma_bangalore ) and wait for Thursday to come. We will ask you some simple questions about your city and we will choose the winner by end of day who will get some goodies from Asklaila.

Ciao!

PS: Here is the list of winners so far.

• @nidhi14jan
• @kiran_bits
• @maximaminima
• @s0h4m
• @madhuprakash
• @zoooni
• @srivastavankit
• @ashwinsid
• @bRahu1

You can follow all the winners at http://twitter.com/#/list/namma_bangalore/contest-winners

Follow laila on Twitter & win exciting prizes!

Ladies and gentlemen, laila has something exciting in store for you! Wanna be a part of it?

Log on to Twitter, follow us at namma_bangalore, and answer some simple questions about your city – on places, events and basic trivia – and you could win fabulous prizes!

One question will be posted on Twitter every day, between Sept 29 & Oct 7 (barring the weekend, i.e. Oct 3 & 4). Answer all 7 correctly and you could win a fabulous gift voucher worth Rs. 750/- from Herbs & Spice! So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and log on to Twitter, and you could be one of the TWO lucky winners!

LBS meets Local Search…. and they lived happily ever after….

Location is an important piece to solve the local search problem. Local search is all about location and asking the user again and again is certainly not the best thing from user perspective. After rolling out our location aware solution for mobile phones ( StreetSmart ), we bring the same service to web using some help from Firefox. Read more about Location Aware Browsing from Firefox at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/.

To use this you just need to have Firefox 3.5 and get started at http://www.asklaila.com/. We will use the firefox service to figure out your location and will provide you results around that area. The accuracy of our results depends on accuracy of location provided by Firefox.

Happy Location Aware Browsing!

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 via twitter

So we are bringing asklaila to all possible mediums and here is one more you can use. You can post all your Bangalore local info questions to us. Our twitter address is http://twitter.com/namma_bangalore and one of our friendly City Jockeys will find you the best answer. Besides that you also get free updates on hot and happening in town. So keep tweeting and keep asking laila. Currently this is on for Bangalore and other cities are coming soon.

Time to chat with Laila

We have been trying to bring Laila to life on various mediums. We have already covered Web (Website, Widgets, Search Bar), Mobile (SMS, WAP, USSD) and TV in lot of it’s forms. Now Laila is coming over to you on favourite messengers/Chat Clients.

Yahoo Messenger
Add asklaila@yahoo.com to your friend list on your messenger and just get started. More details from Yahoo on how to add a friend are available at http://help.yahoo.com/l/ca/yahoo/pager/use/use-03.html.

Gtalk/Gmail
Add asklaila@bot.im as your friend list and get started. More details on how to add friends can be found at http://www.google.com/talk/start.html.

Few things you need to remember when you chat with Laila
- Start with a “hi” or “hello” just to break the ice.
- You can always type “help” for getting help from Laila.
- Laila needs to know your city. Just type “select ”. Eg. “select Mumbai”
- The format of the query is simple – query, location. Just to explain with few examples – “pizza, bandra”
- If you thought Laila knows only about business, you were wrong. You can also ask Laila about movies and events. Eg. “painting exhibition, jayanagar” or “Dev D, Noida”
- Getting more results is as simple as typing “m”
- You can always click on the URL to see more details about on our site
- All (almost) girls love gentle language, just be kind.

Why Asklaila?

Actually why the name asklaila?
No one amongst us knew that this one question would need so much explanation, even after 2 years of starting up.
When we started up we knew that our business will be all about local information, and how well and efficiently we expose that information to the seekers. So there we were – working non-stop, defining the product and the usability, features and security, scalability and performance, uptime and scalability and all that jazz. And of course, a name!

The developers (4 in number then) were least concerned with the name, but the CXOs won’t let us rest without coming up with some. And then they would choose the best of the lot. Amogh had a natural instinct of coming up with the weirdest names and he came up with a list of names, which he thought were suitable for our baby. His list reads: searchwala.com, merafind.com, sahihey.com, sefigo.com(SEarchFIndGo), jstfnd.com and some others. Birla congratulated Amogh for his creativity for SEFIGO.com and topped him by suggesting sahibatao.com.

Some other names were toyed with in the meanwhile, 58989.com being the one which was closest to become the ONE name everyone agreed upon. Why 58989? Because that would be the sms shortcode for using our local search service. And we could not violently react against the bland website name 58989.com, naturally, who can hate a number? We actually got mockups from UI guys, and got our logo made for 58989.com. I thank the chinese guy who had blocked the actual domain 58989.com, and never replied to Sukrit’s emails for buying the domain.

In the meanwhile, our three CXOs were slowly nourishing their loves for 3 different website names. Kiran would not let go of totallocal.com. It was the exact name our website was all about! It was short, it was easy to remember, contained the word ‘local’, had an easy spelling and a host of other advantages. Birla was specially fond of SeFiGo.com(SEarchFIndGO), it was short too, but not too easy to remember, contained both words ‘search’ and ‘find’ (although partially). But we had to convince him that you don’t want your customer to GO after they search and find. You don’t want a negative connotation in your brand name, do you?

Shriram had come up with ‘asklaila.com‘ in the same time, which was the naturally the most controversial one
Q) Why Asklaila?
A) When you want to know about a good bengali restaurant, how do you find it? Find a good beauty parlour? Search for an electrician? Which is the best gym in my locality? Naturally, you ask a friend. We wanted our service to become that one friend, who knows everything about your city, gives the best suggestions, is up-to-date, is omnipresent and is very reliable. And it doesn’t hurt if the friend is female, and has an enigmatic name The name sounds Indian, and would be good enough to take us international. asklaila.com would have an awesome recall value. People could love it or hate it, but won’t forget it!  Laila would replace the friend whom one could just call or dial for local information.

So Kiran organized a poll for the best name amongst five.  He eliminated Birla by not even having sefigo.com in the poll, smart move. To please Shriram he included only one of his own horses (totallocal.com) in the race and three of Shriram’s (asklaila.com, lailaknows.com, lailasays.com) and one neutral (4india.com, didn’t know how that cropped up). Even though he voted thrice, and we heard later that the booth was captured, in the end laila prevailed.