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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 

Few months back we started the keep alive process with laila’s data. Results?  SFSG (So Far So Good).

Well the journey  started few days back, when all of us realized that its important for us to keep laila’s data updated. There are so many new shops/merchants opening up on a weekly basis, some shut down or an address changes. We started with setting up a team and collecting information from various media. We also benchmarked the data quality to the previous data updated. After changing few process we noticed that the data quality has gone higher then the previous benchmark. This gave us enough confidence that we can build this team and they will do a great job. Now the results part, laila has been new data on a weekly basis and this process has been running since couple of months.

On an average we update more then 2k data on a weekly basis. This is a huge number to be updated on a weekly basis and will be a continuous process. I will post some new listing on Laila.
Stay tuned!!!!

We moved to new office @ Indiranagar .

The best part about our office is that it’s in center of Indiranagar and you will find many shopping store and food joints.

Well the new office address is –

Four Interactive Pvt Ltd
#1132,4th Floor,100ft Road
Indiranagar,Bangalore - 560 038
Landmark - Beside Little Italy