Manthan

One of my readers (Rajeev) pointed me out to two interesting websites catering to India. The first one ins www.ilaaka.com which is similar to www.zvents.com, catering to events, deals, offers etc for Indian cities. Interesting effort, but lacks user momentum and adoption. Will check back in a few months time to see usage.

The second is a classified search/local search engine called onyomo. Onyomo has a nice AJAX based map for some of the major Indian cities. Searching for cinemas in Bangalore worked nicely with the list of movies playing along with small map of the location. Mapping has a long way to go since there is no “driving direction” option and the individual images take lot of time to load. Onyomo should consider consider using local.live.com API for this ? It will save them on development effort and bandwith. Mapping and driving directions in India is a big challenge not just for start ups like onyomo but even for biggies like Google or MSFT. Searching for other things like cyber cafes didn’t yield any results. These companies are competing directly with the likes of Google/Yahoo and MSN which have set the bar very high for such services. I am still searching for a USP for these website besides the Indian/local flavour.