Sequoia Capital has invested $8.2mn (Rs. 40 crores) in Justdial, the local search engine firm. This is JustDial’s third round of funding – JustDial earlier raised funding from
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Burrp has launched small business service enabling business owners to respond to users reviews as well as manage their business pages by adding photos, videos, events, deals and announcements. Somewhat on the lines of Google’s freshly launched Business center dashboard, Burrp will
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asklaila has launched chat bots for Yahoo messenger and GTalk enabling users to conduct search for local businesses as well as movies and events on their IM client.
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Sulekha has revamped it’s yellowpages service and apart from sprucing up the entire UI, Sulekha has partnered with companies like NeedGrub, HungryZone and Foodiebay for restaurant reviews; burrp for events and TravelGuru for hotel reviews. First thing first – the new interface is a bold move, given that
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Navteq has launched location based advertising (termed LocationPoint™) in European market that offers advertisers a unique distribution channel to push their ads based on customer’s location. Navteq LocationPoint is platform independent and can be utilized
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Local search market in India is hot and Y! India has now announced investment of 30% stake in Call Ezee, a directory search service. Call Ezee is a telephone directory search service currently covering 14 cities across India and will use the funding to increase the coverage of their offering. ..the partnership provides Yahoo Inc the...
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NCRHunt is a NCR based local search player and provides listings from various categories including hotels,pubs,restaurants,travel agents,retail shops,sports,doctors,automobiles etc. NCRhunt caters to lifestyle segment in
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AskLaila has partnered with Airtel for free local search on mobile, Airtel Live and DTH (which was part of Airtel’s DTH launch). The service is currently available in
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Reliance has launched ‘Quick Search’ on it’s RIM Web, a local search service powered by OnYoMo. The service is
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Locomi, Bangalore based local search player seems to put it’s bet solely on Facebook for user traction. The site now redirects to it’s
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Google failed to implement Click-to-call in India (advertisers weren’t pleased with the quality of service), and now askLaila is testing the service in it’s portal. The current testing is being done for restaurant query, Bangalore and is being tested upon one of the founder’s owned
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Local search stats from Comscore
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Google expanded it’s toll-free local search to Delhi region a few days back and as expected (and discussed), the company is planning to integrate voice recognition (in local languages) in it’s toll-free search. ..is in the process of automating the voice search service
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MSN India has partnered with AskLaila and MSN’s India site is hosting the asklaila portal as a microsite (city section) : http://msn.asklaila.com Unlike the regular partnerships (which is API based) , this is a pure microsite deal which is surely a big win for asklaila. Infact, the microsite looks more of asklaila and less of MSN...
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Google introduced toll free local search service for Hyderabad in April and has now launched the service in Delhi (via). If you are from Delhi/Hyderabad, do give this service a try (dial 1-800-41-999-999). Google ’s local search product does suffer from lack of depth in data, which also forced them to get into crowdsourcing for...
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Sulekha has expanded it’s local search service to 20 tier 2 cities including Jalandhar, Kanpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Madurai, Nagpur, Surat, Trichy, Trivandrum, Vadodara etc. Sulekha has an interesting challenge with it’s ’search’ positioning – it is still perceived as a content + classified portal and even the city pages, look so damn cluttered to not...
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MetroMela has launched sms service enabling users to search via sms as well as receive deal alerts. MetroMe’la’s claimed difference is that they take care of common spelling mistakes in queries and can handle complex queries too , i.e. not just store names or category names, but more generic words. Using sms alert service, you can...
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MetroMela (read our review) has tied up with Google for content partnership – Google’s local search will feature MetroMela’s reviews, photos, business contact details and category information. Google has also partnered with Burrp, MyHotelVideo and TripAdvisor for displaying reviews from their site. Google’s local strategy is quite interesting
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asklaila has launched the mobile version of their local search product and the service can be accessed via sms as well as wap. To use the sms product, send your query to 58989, one can also set default city (so that you don’t have to add city name in the query text again and again)...
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Yahoo India has launched the local search engine (public beta launch) and as before, I won’t do a review (as I work for Y!). So, here is the link: http://local.yahoo.in and here is the plug: If you are reviewing/blogging about y! local, please linkback and I will feature the most informative-and-candid review here. The local search is...
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