Seven Across

The Economic Times printed a piece in today’s papers about AskLaila’s partnership with Airtel for local search services on mobile phones, SMS, WAP, and DTH. Here is an excerpt from the the press release:

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:

·         SMS: Airtel users can text the keyword to get accurate city information. For example, ‘locate pizza gurgaon’ and SMS it to 54321 to get relevant local information free of cost.

·         USSD: USSD is a faster channel than the text-messaging platform and GPRS. This is an instant messaging type phone service and can be used in even basic phone models. The USSD portal can be accessed by dialing *321# and Airtel City Search can be directly accessed by dialing *321*99#

·         Airtel Live: Airtel City Search is integrated on deck on Airtel Live and is available under services for you.

·         WAP: The service can also be accessed by any GPRS enabled phone from any operator at www.airtelcitysearch.com

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.

·         proximity search – Results include not only the searched-for locality but also the locality nearby.

·         syntax-free search option – ‘Haircut Lajpat Nagar’ and ‘Lajpat Nagar Haircut’ will give the same results

·         support for Indian SMS lexicon (ex. nr – Near, Nxt – Next, CCD – Café Coffee Day)

·         address compression that enables users to see more results in less SMSs

·         understands locality short forms (GK – Greater Kailash)

·         enables users to choose the level of details they want to see

·         landmark information that provides last mile locators 

·         allows attribute-tagged search like ‘24 hours pharmacy’, ‘Roof top restaurant’

·         Hyperlinks to help navigate quicker within result sets