this point may explain a huge IPO for Reliance Energy , to certain extent it may also explain NEA’s Investment in Novatium ,as Power and PC are infrastructure play . now think of Local Search on these line and i can’t go very far . Reason ?

#1 no doubt that high Mobile penetration and comfortability with SMS is a supporting factor for Mobile based Local search but that advantage has been pretty much levled out as most of the palyer in this space have exploited it . OnYoMo , JustDial,Guruji , Google etc . so you can’t raise $10 Mil based on this fact alone .

#2 Majority of Mobile user are at bottom of Pyramid . that leave us with Youth and Urban population

#3 their strategy of following User Generated Content [UGC] for listing Database put another constraint since its a little hard to create and upload content using mobile , mobile is good for consumption of content , so UGC require a big time evangelism from eary adopters [with time , connectivity and knowlege , may work in bangalore or Gurgaon but in Bhopal or Jaipur .. i doubt ]

#4 since its an open platform so it will always runs a risk of syndicated content masquerading as UGC. in fact initial content in all probability will be syndicated content uploaded by potential beneficiaries .

so taking all this factor in account $10 Million seems a risky proposition . why did these guys put that much money … well we can only speculate .

To began with we need to admit that
A) this is a deadly combo of seasoned founder + Seasoned Investor B) All VC funds are starving for good deals .

so they surely have a plan about how this money will be spent .
It can be used for acquisition of someone like onyomo.com , or making the search voice enable like Tellme [ an indian startup buzzworks might fit there bill ] , making it multilingual , expanding into Location based services like loopt.com

these are several possible course of action which Four Interactive might take . i am sure it will be interesting to watch . my only apprehension is that they don’t resort to Paying user for using their site , which seems to be trend these days . that will be painfull

I wish good luck to these guys .