New Delhi, November 12, 2008: asklaila, India's first local information service, today announced a strategic partnership with India's largest private telecom service provider, Airtel, to power all of its city search services. The partnership enables Airtel customers to get up-to-date information about their city, free of cost, through asklaila’s extensive city information database. The asklaila-powered 'Airtel City Search' will reach more than 30 million users across the six cities where asklaila is available, including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Bangalore.
Airtel is the first telecom company in the world to deploy a multi-mode, multi-platform local search service; the service is available across 3 screens – the mobile (Airtel’s mobile service),the PC (Airtel's broadband service) and TV (Airtel DTH); and within the mobile service, across 4 modes – SMS, USSD, Airtel Live and WAP.
Airtel's dominance in the mobile market is of special significance in this deployment since local search is a natural application on the mobile platform besides communication and entertainment. The search service will be supported by targeted, relevant advertising, based on the users' intent identified through the search query. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel added, "It is Airtel and asklaila’s joint belief that a non-intrusive, intent-driven advertising model, with the consumer in mind, is the way forward on the mobile platform. This partnership has the potential to revolutionize the market dynamics in mobile advertising."
Kiran Konduri, co-founder, asklaila said, "We have seen tremendous growth in the usage of our service and having telecom leader Airtel as our partner will help us reach many more users, besides giving a significant fillip to mobile advertising and the use of mobile devices to search for city information."
The multi-mode mobile version of Airtel city search, powered by asklaila, effectively addresses two major challenges–providing accurate, credible and actionable local information; and ground-up mobile-specific enhancements to leverage the advantage of multiple mobile modes. This partnership will enable users’ to access the service from any device starting from an entry level Rs. 2K handset to a high-end, feature rich Rs. 40K+ smart phone. The user experience is designed to be consistent and simple across all 4 modes, giving the user freedom to select an appropriate mode based on need and context.
asklaila's service will be tightly integrated with key Airtel mobile modes such as:
Asklaila – Airtel City Search features an industry-first built for mobile search technology that takes the onus of understanding what users mean and providing relevant local information, instead of guiding them to enter keywords in specific ways.
About Four Interactive
www.asklaila.com is the service of Four Interactive Pvt. Ltd., headquartered in Bangalore, India. Four Interactive is focused on building easy to use services that are at the intersection of the mobile, content and the online world for Indian consumers. The company's mission is to connect consumers with local businesses. Four Interactive is co-founded by Shriram Adukoorie, who was previously country manager for MSN South Asia, and successful serial entrepreneur Kiran Konduri, who has co-founded and managed two startups Zephyr Software and Cogniti. More information on Four Interactive is available at http://www.fourint.com
About Bharti Airtel Limited
Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is India's leading integrated telecom services provider with an aggregate of around 82.6 million customers as of end of October 2008, consisting of 80.19 million mobile customers. Bharti Airtel Limited has been voted as India's most innovative company, in a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal.
Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business units - Mobile services, Telemedia services and Enterprise services. The mobile business provides mobile & fixed wireless services using GSM technology across 23 telecom circles. The Telemedia business provides broadband & telephone services in 95 cities, DTH services and is foraying into the IPTV segment. The Enterprise business provides end-to-end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national & international long distance services to carriers. All these services are provided under the Airtel brand. Airtel's high-speed optic fibre network currently spans over 83,000 kms covering all the major cities in the country. The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe. For more information, visit www.bhartiairtel.in