Laila gets a six pack

The pressure was too much. Almost anybody who has a Khan in his name and is in forties is doing it. We might not have Khan in our names but some of us are in forties ( not me… ).

So we launched the beta version of our service in six more cities.
1. Ahmedabad
2. Goa
3. Pune
4. Mysore
5. Jaipur
6. Coimbatore

Try out the service in these cities and let us know your feedback. 

Get Street Smart with Asklaila

So we have something which will make you look and feel smart on the street. How many times you land up in cities without knowing where you are and what all you can do in town. Now we have a friend to help you out in asklaila StreetSmart – our smart location aware product which works with or without GPS capability on your mobile. We use cell triangulation techniques to locate you in town (Bangalore and Delhi right now) and make your searches location aware. If you are looking at finding Pizza place close to your hotel and you have no idea which part of the town you are in (not easy for a Delhi guy to write Bommanhalli and Byatarayanapura on a trip to Bangalore anyway), you can just fire Pizza as the query and we will figure out which part of the town you are in and suggest you closest places (yes, our proximity search in action in combination with location awareness).

We do have maps integrated with search to provide you a unique way to explore your city. You can easily look for information, get it on SMS/Email or directly dial the number to reach out to the business. So what are you waiting for? If you have a windows mobile phone, you can get started at http://www.asklaila.com/LailaMobileDemo/. Don’t worry if you don’t have windows mobile or live outside Delhi and Bangalore, we are soon coming on other phones and cities. We can assure you that we will deliver you the goods worth the wait.

Don’t wonder. Ask.

Man is a social animal. Woman, more so.

Life today is no longer a simple sequence of events – more often unknown and unexpected, as it used to be. The modern day ‘metrozen’ leads a life that is planned down to the last second. There are plans made, plans executed, and plans re-planned. Not being prepared for an eventuality is no longer a luxury that can be afforded. It is not just about what one is doing, but also about what the others are, and the desperate attempt to make the best of all worlds. This translates into a task that involves a fair amount of meticulous planning and preparation, which is carried out based on facts that are obtained from ‘reliable’ sources. Aunty next door knows where to get the best veggies, the watchman downstairs will tell you where to take those clothes you want ironed, and chottu upstairs may not be sure about his geography lessons, but will certainly be well informed about what movie to watch – and where. Most of it is second nature to you – you know precisely who to ask what. Indians have, since time immemorial, been brought up on a culture of advice and guidance. There is always someone to turn to when you have a question – a living, breathing someone, who you know has the answer to your question.

Being used to such a mode of modus-operandi, it is not surprising that this wealth of information which resides in the neural nooks and crannies of the social fabric has not been readily available to the seeker. This mega-mass of information is something that seems to have a life of its own. It does not reside anywhere but in the minds of its possessors, and it does not reveal itself, unless you corner it. It is to the task of making this information readily available – as readily as leaning over and tapping your friend over the shoulder to ask a question, that we at Asklaila have committed ourselves to. We ask ourselves the questions you would ask yourself. That way, we are ready with answers, whatever be your question.

Having put together this elusive goodie bag for you, our next task is to make the bag readily available – whenever you need it! After all, what good is a hammer if you don’t have it when the iron is hot and ready to be struck! (Unless you are the violent sort of person that is – in which case you are bound to come up with many more creative uses for the hammer, which we shall not delve into here, for reasons obvious). The utility value of an object – be it anything right from a tangible physical object to a piece of information, is multiplied hundredfold when it is made available at the precise moment of its requirement. Have you not often looked at that nice LCD television on sale, and wished you’d seen that ad in the paper when you were frantically searching for it, instead of now, when you’ve spent all your hard earned money on another model, and you’re accompanying your friend who is triumphantly picking up the piece, grinning at you every five minutes, rubbing it in at every occasion possible?!

Coming back to the point – what we’d like, is for you to get you what you need, when you need it. This has been the primary impetus behind our attempts at ensuring that you can reach us anytime, anywhere. There are multiple access channels that you can reach out to us on – Web, SMS and WAP. Another milestone in our journey has been the team-up with Airtel, to power their local city search experience. Airtel subscribers can now access City search on WAP, SMS, USSD and DTH TV, completely free of cost!. This partnership is no mean event, as it extends the reach of our services to over 70 million Airtel customers! We are proud of this association with the premier mobile services provider of the country – the vision of making available, at zero cost, all information the satisfied customer may require – clear in the minds of both partners. Setting ourselves apart from the traditional breed of “information dealers”, we have instead, chosen to ride the wave of technology – leveraging the best technical solutions available today to bring to you an unmatched consumer experience. As always, the more you familiarize yourself with Laila, the better and brighter are the ideas that you will come up with, in order to help us serve you better. Write to us with any suggestions or queries that you may have, and we will be happy to get back to you.

We are in the business of answers. Ask away!

Forgiving Technology

New city launched – Kolkata and Hyderabad

Folks – We have just launched 2 news cities with tons of data. Kolkata and Hyderabad are the 2 new cities in the block. It is a great milestone to archive, laila is live on 6 cities now.
Both these 2 cities will also have the WAP site and sms search. So laila will give you local information over web and mobile.

You will also find events and movies running near you place in asklaila.

Do try these 2 new cities and let us know if you find any issues.

AskLaila on Mobile

Folks – We just launched AskLaila on Mobile. The next time when you are on road/move and looking for any local information, phone number of any establishment, use laila to find that into using your mobile. This is how you can do it -

1. Compose an SMS of your query like movie theater, nehru place
2. Send the sms to 58989
3. You will get a sms back with the result in some time and then use it to get the landmark or phone number or even the address of your search.

(this service is available on Vodafone, Reliance)

What else, if you have a mobile phone with wifi or gprs connection then you can hit m.asklaila.com to access the WAP site.

You can get a glimps of the service using a demo here , http://www.asklaila.com/LailaMobileDemo/.

try some of the queries on WAP,

Pediatricians, gk2
beauty parlours, kmngla
movie theatres, Nehru place
tennis coach, dadar
guitar classes, indrangr
24 hr pharmacy, mount rd
home delivery biriyani, arpt rd
maruthi car service, goregaon west
nokiya phone repair, andheri
notary, gurgaon
ladies tailor, south mumbai
pot pourri, cp

I feel excited about the service and is going to make life easy for people who are not infront of the comp and need local information instantly.

-Sumeet

Now plan out what you can do in the time you save

Search is a intriguing subject. You try to make computers do a job which humans do best. Ability to marry a user intention to appropriate search result is a one line problem but millions of lines of code and uncountable number of pizzas, cokes(pepsis too), nightouts and hard work by lots of engineers across the globe has gone in to solve this.

The various steps involved in an entire search experience are

1. A stimulant which caused the desire to search. The stimulant might be not knowing where Baluchistan is in  a conversation with a friend or you just got a call from your wife to book an appointment with a dentist.
2. Next step is to search for an appropriate tool to perform the search. This tool might be internet based technology, friends or books. Lot of us have already a clear algorithm in our mind on what source to use base don the context and in some cases we might end up using multiple tools also.
3. People who start using internet based technology have another important problem in hand. They need to figure out the keywords which they can use on search engines and effectively you have to do a search before search!
4. Once they are done with the keyword selection it is time to fire it to an engine and iterate till you get the desired result.
5. And now comes the fullfillment which might be reading up a webpage or calling up the doctor to fix an appointment.

So all this story was just to explain you the brand new features on our site which enable you to compress Step 3 and 4.

We have enabled a feature called auto suggest which keeps thinking as you type your query and keeps suggesting you options based on your selected city to ease your job and save some time on typing also.
Besides that we also have search suggestions to help you iterare better.

So happy searching and feedback most welcome.

What kept us busy!!

Past couple of weeks we were busy with many new small small changes to the UX (User eXperience). Finally we have the launched the new changes.

Home page have been changed and things are more visible. Like all the channels ( wine & dine, lifestyle, local services, shopping) are more visible with tabbed structure.

New thing which we added was events. It involved a great lot of things, other then the UI. Events are collected from different sources and then changed to the datatype we wanted. We have categorized them into the following -

• Conferences, Conventions
• Learning, Education
• Art, Antiques, Crafts
• Sales, Retail, Open Houses
• Performing Arts, Theater, Dance, Drama
• Music, Concerts
• Religion, Spirituality
• Family Fun, Kids
• Animals, Pets
• Books, Poetry, Literature
• Business, Finance, Investing
• Charities, Fund Raisers
• Clubs, Associations
• Community, Neighborhood
• Festivals, Fairs, Parades
• Food, Cuisine, Wine
• Movies, Film
• Museums, Zoos, Attractions
• Nightlife, Parties
• Other
• Outdoors, Recreation
• Property, Furnishing, Furniture
• Schools, Colleges and Alumni
• Science
• Sports
• Technology
• Travel, Tours

and events for a month in advance can be seen. Well if you ask me then my favorite will be Nightlife, Parties and Technology. You can also send the event details to your friends and family over email and sms.

Yes these are some of the things that have kept us busy. Stay tuned, we will be updating some new and cool things this week.

Technorati Profile

Evangelism v/s Marketing

If you walk into our office and wait for an hour, you are sure to hear atleast one Apple v/s Microsoft argument. So what’s with all the “Apple users being snobs” and Microsoft users really not caring much for usability, so on and so forth slogans on the internet? What is the actual deal?

I think it boils down to Evangelism v/s Marketing. Apple has the free power of evangelists, a quick example is our office where I started with a mac a year back and in a small team we have a total of 4 macs now and close to 6 iphones. On the other hand the rest of the folks are separated in Linux and a majority in Windows. So Microsoft does good marketing, which is why the product sells.

While the Apple slogan goes “Catch them young” and offers student discounts and pretty much makes them apple users for live, Windows would target our fathers who would rather use something which is tried, tested and has created brand awareness.

So in the long run, what would be the obvious choice? Evangelism or Marketing? If you think its only Marketing, think again. Wikipedia is a brilliant Evangelistic success model. To pick that special restaurant for your date would you trust a billboard or ask your friend laila? I think the trick lies in building a great product that you believe in and if its a great product for people around you too, then you just need to market enough to spread the word around.

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