Jeetu's shared memory

Fonetwish lets you access Facebook on your Mobile Phone Without Internet or a Data Plan in India for Rs 1 per day, unlimited

Do you have an old mobile phone, like the Nokia 1100, that has no browser and can do little more than make phone calls? Or are you stuck in some remote place where there’s no Internet or no other form of data (EGDE/GPRS/3G) connectivity is available?

Not a problem. You can still use your Facebook account in India by dialing *325# (or *fbk#) from your mobile phone – this service requires no data plan or Internet and it will even work on phones of the Stone Age. Here’s a quick tour:

Use Facebook without the Data Plan

Facebook India has partnered with Fonetwish to bring Facebook on every mobile phone without requiring any apps or even the Internet.

You dial the *325# number, then enter your Facebook username and password and you are in. You can then send number based commands to access various features of Facebook, chat with friends who are online, add new people to your friends list, and more.

I played with the service for some time and it was a nice experience overall. If there were a Unix-like shell interface for Facebook, it would be much similar. Fonetwish says that this service is currently available for Airtel, Aircel, Idea and Tata Docomo users in India.

It may be too much work to read your Facebook news feed stories one by one but this is a good option to quickly update your Facebook status or for chatting with friends who are online. The price is reasonable too – you just have pay a subscription fee of 1.00 per day for unlimited usage.

via Use Facebook on your Mobile Without Internet or a Data Plan.

Today at The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan, took the stage to share a few quick stats on the growth of his online video education platform. For those unfamiliar, Khan Academy is, as John Batelle noted this afternoon, one of Bill Gates’ favorite educators.

It also happens to be one of mine, but I thought you’d probably resonate a bit more with Bill Gates. But Khan Academy is the institution of Salman Khan, who brought the idea of educating young people, self-starters, people who learn at their own pace — online. “Educational”-type YouTube videos have now been around for years, but Khan Academy’s repository is pretty ridiculous. The educational startup now counts over 2,600 videos in its library, with sessions or classes on everything from arithmetic to physics, including 211 practice exercises, to let students watch videos and learn at their own pace.

While Khan is a not-for-profit organization, the Academy has received donations from The Gates Foundation and also won Google’s “Project 10^100″. With the $2 million+ from Google and Gates in pocket, Khan told the crowd at Web 2.0 today that the academy is seeing 39 million pageviews and 3.5 million unique users per month. That 3.5 million unique users is up 309 percent year-over-year.

It looks like all the publicity and traction Khan Academy has been getting of late is really starting to pay off, which is great to see.

Quora has just launched a bundle of interesting initiatives over the past day or so, all signs that the Q&A site is trying to figure itself out.

First of all, the company has begun testing something called “Ask to Answer Suggestions” where users start out with a budget of 500 Quora credits (Quoins?) and can offer to pay other users in credits to answer questions. The price for questions will eventually increase or decrease based on answerer’s zeal for answering questions and level of topic expertise.

From an email sent out to beta testers (because I’m a TechCruncher I’m not in the beta, nor can I see the Quora FAQ, which I’ve included below).

“Since experts only have so much time to answer questions, we are also introducing credits as a bookkeeping mechanism so that incoming requests to a user stay at a manageable level.

How It’ll Work:When you use Ask to Answer, you’ll now see other beta testers suggested based on how likely they are to give you a good answer. With your credits, you can ask these users to answer questions. Note, however, that if you and another user are following each other, you can ask each other for free. The number of credits required to ask someone reflects how responsive she is to Ask to Answer requests; to give responsive users who are willing to provide answers more requests, their prices come down while their ranking in suggestions improves.”

Note, these credits aren’t something that can be exchanged for cash only for answers to questions. Basically as it scales the company is experimenting with incorporating game mechanics into its processes in order to get people to give more answers. The more and more mainstream/non-tech people join, the more likely it is that questions will go un-answered  because the incentive that makes techies answer questions (esteem within our close-knit community) just isn’t there for a wider audience.

Nothing is more depressing than an unanswered question. If Quora power user Semil Shah is currently offering people $100 on Zaarly to answer his Quora question about the most foundational web companies of all time, in-service credits are worth a shot.

In addition and more formerly, the Q&A site has also added the option to include location and employment information in user profiles, letting users broadcast social and business information like where they live, go to school and work. The new profiles also allow for Facebook-style status updates, presumably because people were already using the question functionality to post non-questions.

Quora designer Rebecca Cox explained the profile changes in a followup post to the one written yesterday, interestingly enough chalking up the profile changes to scaling issues,

“Quora is growing and the previous profile wasn’t scaling with that growth. We have a lot of systems in place to provide a good environment for everyone to learn and share, but those same systems can be difficult for people new to the site to understand. If you’re new and are reading an answer or receiving a notification that someone edited your question: You want to trust the answer that is given and knowing something about the person who gave it helps inform that; You want to know why an edit happened and you want to know about the person making that change.”

The startup exploded last December and has been rushing to catch up with its success ever since. With these recent steps we’re seeing the beginning of a more quantified user economy emerge, on based on reputation and expertise in providing information. Quora needs some kind of way to identify experts, and is figuring it out through iterating as it goes along.

The Quora Credits FAQ, below (btw, if anyone wants to send me a screencap of their credits budget, my email is really easy to figure out. And while you’re at it …).

Update: And we’ve got a screencap.

1. What are Quora Credits?

To help users get great answers faster, we’re launching Ask to Answer Suggestions, which help you find the people who are most likely to be able to answer your questions. Now instead of only being able to ask people you know or those whose answers you’ve seen, Suggestions identify people who have related expertise to help you. But since experts only have so much time to answer questions, we are also introducing credits as a bookkeeping mechanism so that incoming requests to a user stay at a manageable level.

Everyone starts out with a budget of credits, which can be used to ask other people to answer questions. (For now, only people who are in the private beta will be part of this system). To start, it will cost the same number of credits to ask anyone a question, but prices will change over time to keep the number of requests to a user manageable. Users who are responsive and signal that they enjoy answering questions will see their prices fall, making them affordable to more users, resulting in more requests. Prices increase for users who aren’t answering requests and might prefer fewer requests.

2. How are Quora credits earned?

You can earn more credits in a few ways.

Answering Ask to Answer requests: You’ll receive credits for answering ask-to-answer requests (an amount equal to your price).

Getting upvotes on answers you’ve written: You’ll get credits for any new upvotes (not just from beta users) on any answer or post you’ve written on Quora.

An answer you have solicited (via Ask to Answer request) receives upvotes.

Credits given to you by other users: Users can give credits to each other whenever they want.

Occasional system refreshes: We’ll provide credit refreshes if you go for a while without enough credits to ask the average priced user.

3. How is my price determined?

Credits are a bookkeeping mechanism for Ask to Answer Suggestions to ensure that frequently suggested users don’t get inundated with requests. The prices that are set for each user reflect how responsive a user has been to prior requests and have nothing to do with the quality of potential answers.

Users who are responsive to requests signal that they are willing to provide answers when asked. As a result, their prices come down while their ranking in suggestions improve to make them affordable to more users, resulting in more requests.

On the other hand, prices increase for users who aren’t answering requests and might prefer fewer of them. If you receive numerous requests to answer and do not respond by writing answers, the system increases your price and ranks you lower in suggestions; in essence, it infers that you are too busy to answer or not interested in answering, both of which mean, on average, that we should send fewer requests your way.

Two users with the same price may have different levels of expertise, because their prices reflect similar rates of responding to requests. Conversely, two users with similar levels of expertise may have different prices, based on different response rates.

4. What happens if someone does not respond to my request to answer? Do I get a refund?

If a user who is asked to answer responds with an answer within a week, he or she receives the price paid by the asker. If the user has not answered after a week has elapsed, or clicks to ignore the request during the week, 75% of the price is refunded to the asker; the remaining 25% is still paid to the potential answerer for having received and considered the request.

5. Why are some users free to ask?

If you and another user in the beta are both following each other, you can ask each other questions without having to pay in credits. This is because we assume you are likely to know each other and did not discover each other through Ask to Answer Suggestions.

6. What happens when I interact with users not in the beta?

You can request answers from users who aren’t in the beta by typing their name into the Ask to Answer box. These requests will neither require payment nor show up in your credits pages.

Similarly, people who are not in the beta test may still ask you to answer questions, too. These will work as they did before except they will not trigger notifications and you will not receive credits for answering these unpaid requests. They will not expire and will appear on at the bottom of your Ask to Answer page with old requests you received prior to the beta.

7. How does giving credits work?

You can give credits you have earned at any time to anyone else in the beta. The only restriction is that the amount you have available for gifting is your current balance minus 500 credits. This is to prevent users from creating many accounts and accumulating a huge amount of credits by transferring them to a single account.

8. What happens if I run out of credits?

If you do not have enough credits to ask someone to answer, you will not be able to do so. Periodically, users who have fewer than 100 credits will receive a refresh to top them up to 100. For example, if you had 0 credits left before the refresh, you would have 100 after the refresh. If you had 60 left before the refresh, you would also have 100 after the refresh.

9. What are the terms of the private beta?

As this is a beta, you can expect the features to evolve and change just like the rest of the site, potentially faster as we get your feedback. If we decide to roll out Ask to Answer Suggestions more broadly, we will cancel the beta credits and issue entirely new credits to all Quora users. We will issue the new credits to beta testers in proportion to the number of beta credits you have at the end of the beta period.

10. I have feedback, questions or bugs to report. What should I do?

Please email feedback@quora.com with “BETA” in the subject and describe what happened in details so we can help investigate.

11. Why is Quora introducing credits?

Our goal is to help make each question page on Quora a valuable, reusable resource. One part of getting more great answers is helping users find experts who can contribute to each page. We decided to focus now on Ask to Answer suggestions because it is an opportunity to discover great contributors who otherwise might be unknown to you, and also to find out where your expertise is sought. We’ve found that people generally like helping each other, and new Ask to Answer Suggestions are designed to make that easier.

In making suggestions prominent in the Quora interface, we have to be considerate of how available users are for answering questions on Quora. Credits allow us to calibrate how many requests a user might get, so that nobody is overwhelmed. Automatically setting the price of asking a user based on that user’s past responsiveness keeps the system flexible and dynamic while removing a complex decision. In developing credits, we’ve thought carefully about the economics — both at the level of each user, and of the system as a whole. Price movements and rewards are designed to help the system quickly reach a sustainable equilibrium, and to make using credits intuitive and fun.

As with all theory, we need to see how our ideas work in the wild, and that’s where this beta comes in. We welcome your questions as you use the features, and your feedback about how things can be improved. We have numerous ideas for how we might iterate on the product and look forward to continuing to improve Quora with you.

[crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/quora" name="Quora"]

Today quite a variety of entrepreneurs presented their business ideas at my Online Strategy Roundtables. Several times I brought up how precious our time is and we need to treat it as such. So many people become enamored with technology and the building of the product before they ever think to validate that this is a business service or product that a customer wants to pay for.

I’ve seen too many entrepreneurs wasting precious years of their lives, and I sincerely try to discourage anyone from wasting his or her time on an idea that does not have legs based on concrete customer feedback. One of the entrepreneurs said he thinks of me as the Simon Cowell for entrepreneurs after listening to some recordings of previous roundtables. I think my advice is only valuable if I’m being honest and direct. Plus, I don’t want to waste my precious time either!

Sponsor

Sramana Mitra is a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley. She has founded three companies and writes a business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy. She has a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Entrepreneur Journeys, Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, Positioning: How To Test, Validate, and Bring Your Idea To Market and her latest volume Innovation: Need Of The Hour, as well as Vision India 2020, are all available from Amazon. Mitra is also a columnist for Forbes and runs the 1M/1M initiative.

Dawson Fercho started off by introducing Temetic Research, an software services company that offers advanced tools based on digital sociology that can offer a deeper understanding of social media buzz (beyond just words) than social listening and monitoring products currently do. Launched in January, they already have half a dozen communications firms who deal in brand awareness and management on board as clients. They offer a base analysis report as a service, and they hope those who like the report will become clients of either the software products or of their ongoing service.

Dawson asked if he should position his business as being similar to social monitoring to help potential clients fit them into a category. He tells me there are several metrics that his technology is able to track because of the algorithmic sophistication that others cannot, so my advice is to lead with those metrics to differentiate. He needs to ask customers if they are interested in measuring X, Y, and Z to validate that these metrics are indeed of interest to them.

Dawson said all of their money is going into development, and my advice is to ramp up the base analysis service to help fund their development and continue to bootstrap. I also suggested he explore partnering with SaaS PR businesses like Vocus PR who I think will find this technology intriguing. I asked him to check out my case study on Vocus PR.

Next, Griffin Boyce presented PsycView, a software to help eliminate the distance between doctors and patients. Griffin discussed how this software can help doctors manage patients over great distances, and also how patients can use it to get treatment from rural and frontier areas. Griffin is trying to do too many things at once with his business and is going in too many directions. He spoke about having an iPhone application to serve people living in frontier areas, but the iPhone is not widely used in such places. He said he thinks addicts are a strong segment to target, but I don’t think people in the depths of addiction will be checking their phones for solutions.

I think there could be something interesting in Griffin’s pool of ideas, but he needs to do a lot more focused work to figure out what it is. I told him it’s like an uncut diamond that still needs to be shaped and pared down to get to the gem. He needs to focus his software on doing one thing really well – zero in on one idea, a specific disease or whatever. Spraying and praying does not work. I suggest using the Clarify Your Story framework to focus.

Gustavo Hernando was up next to present daFoodie, a website that allows diners in Orlando to share photos of their plate of food at a restaurant to help others decide where to eat. He sees the sharing of such photos as a growing trend and does not plan to include ratings or reviews.

I’m very concerned that there is no reasonable way to make money doing this. I question how many people base their dining decision on photos alone rather than reviews. Perhaps he could partner with some other review sites, but what will keep them from doing this themselves? I hate to discourage any entrepreneur, but Gustavo may be better off using his considerable skills elsewhere. It is very expensive to go to market in this area; OpenTable has spent a ton of money. I hope Gustavo will find an opportunity that will monetize better for him.

Then we had Rudy Santamaria who has designed a line of kids clothing called Look Mommy! Clothing. These clothes convey positive images depicting what a child would like to be when he or she grows up. He has sold 750 of these shirts by hand in the past six months, validating that this is something parents are interested in buying for their child. If he would like this business to scale, the next step is to figure out how to sell these shirts without Rudy being physically involved in the process. Since baseball player and rock star shirts are his best selling, I suggest he start exploring what the best channels are for each category and remain very focused on each niche. Personally, I’m aware of a high level effort to interest young girls in science, so I suggested he do a Look Mommy, I’m A Scientist design for girls and target the organizations that are leading this movement.

Up last was Matt Walters for Sports Spray, a line of water resistant spray products to help amateur and professional athletes excel. His product line includes a stick spray (to enhance grip), slip spray (for under padding and blisters), no sweat spray (antiperspirant for hands or feet), more sweat spray (enhances workout and weight loss), and shoe spray (to keep from slipping). He is ready to go to market but is wondering if he should lead with a product whose competition retailers would already be familiar with or should he introduce the slip spray product, which is totally unique.

I suggest he start with the new, more differentiated product, the slip spray, and manufacture that first. He should focus all the branding around this new product and getting it reviewed by bloggers and social media influencers interested in sports. We discussed very targeted advertising to coaches since he believes it is a cost-effective and reasonably priced channel. I suggested he validates that the demand for this product exists by selling online before chasing retailers to get broader distribution.

I started doing my free Online Strategy Roundtables for entrepreneurs in the fall of 2008. These roundtables are the cornerstone programming of a global initiative that I have started called One Million by One Million (1M/1M). Its mission is to help a million entrepreneurs globally to reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs. In 1M/1M, I teach the EJ Methodology which is based on my Entrepreneur Journeys research, and emphasize bootstrapping, idea validation, and crisp positioning as some of the core principles of building strong fundamentals in early stage ventures.

In addition, we are offering entrepreneurs access to investors and customers through our substantial channels. Our newly launched 1M/1M Incubation Radar series this week profiles La Grande Dame, and you can also read about several other 1M/1M entrepreneurs on my Forbes column, These Companies Are Built To Enjoy.

You can find the recording of this roundtable session here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. You can register for the next roundtable here.

Discuss

A recent Comscore report about the state of the search engines in India states the obvious – Google is an undisputed leader in the space with close to 88.4% market share. The remaining dozen is shared by big names like Yahoo and Microsoft along with local search engines like Guruji, AskLaila and JustDial.

So statistically speaking, despite remaining in the space for close to 3-4 years and in spite of having offered more local search services, the Indian companies have hardly given Google a fight. Is that how we need to interpret the results and will the Indian search engines will ever be able to catch up?

To answer the questions, we need to relook at the definition of “search” in the first place. ‘Search’ did not essentially start with Google. While we search for ‘How to lose weight‘ on Google today, it was basically done with library books. While we might use Burrp to look for the daily events in our city today, we used the newspapers earlier. So, while Comscore reports the online market share of the various search engines in India, it is inconsequential until we realize what the core business model of each of the various engines is.

For example, thanks to the extensive TV promotion, more people should be aware of JustDial’s telephone search than the search through its website. A lot of search happens on Guruji over the mobile, which possibly is not tracked. If ‘online search’ was the segment Comscore tracked, then their report make sense. If ’search’ as an activity was tracked, then in all probability the results do not reveal the real picture.

All this is not to say that the Indian search engines have been given a raw deal. My point is simply that search as an activity is not confined to the online space alone in India and so while the reports do give an idea of the emerging players in the industry, it does not necessarily mean Company A is definitely bigger than Company B because of the higher market share.

Having said that, it is also important to see how well are Indian companies placed in tackling the Google threat in the online space. It is important to note that Google is bigger than the rest of the search engines, not because of a superior search algorithm, but because of a superior brand positioning. Indian local search engines like Onyomo, AskLaila all have pretty similar offering (movies, shopping, restaurants,etc.).

Assuming movie search contributes a significant volume of searches on these websites, how are the websites going to cope if Google decides to integrate Google Movies into their search results? Would these services remain relevant if Google were to similarly launch services for local restaurants, music, etc. assuming they are not available already?

There comes an important factor in countering Google. Let’s face it – Google cannot be broken by one big Indian search giant, but hundreds of small search engines focusing on only aspect of search – like JustDial for telephone based search, Burrp for events, etc. That will help each of these search engines carve a niche search audience and can stand the Google threat as an authority in the space.

An alternative to this strategy would be aggressive advertising to create an alternate search engine brand. But then, despite a $100 million promo budget, Bing was only able to garner a 10% odd market share!

Related Posts

• Recap 2008: Local Search Space
• Google increases India focus launches Labs and Local Search
• AskLaila where is Majnu? – One more local search site?
• Guruji – Search and Win! Innovative, but will it retain users?
• The Great Indian Search Engine update

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Last week I was at an interesting round-table organized by Welingkar’s Education on “Seeding Entrepreneurial Startups & Social Businesses in B School Campuses”. They had put together an interesting group together there were VCs, University Professors, Consultants, Entrepreneurs, Startups, representatives from IITs, IIMs, representatives from TiE & students pretty much the entire eco system was present in one room. The discussion and part interesting, part practical and part academic which was kind of expected given the room was full of people trying to figure out how we can teach MBA students to become entrepreneurs and now to ignite the passion etc. etc. Facebook, Google, Yahoo and a lot of other major companies came about as campus startups.

Folks from IIT and IIM very cheering up the fact they they now have 4-5 startups coming up every year to which i brought my point. Do you really think we should be happy with 4-5 startups coming from the Dozen IIT and IIMs and the thousands of MBA schools in the country ? NO WAY

According to me if we really have to be serious about startup space in India we need to have at-least a 1000 startups over the next 5 years. Here is the math if we have to aim for 200 startups a year for the next 5 years and these 200 startups are coming say from the
5 Metros Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai @ 30 per year
5 Cities Kolkatta, Chandigarh, Indore-Bhopal, Jaipur, Ahmedabad doing 10 each year.
Other cities too can contribute say total 5-10 per year

Now based on established startup funding models it is clear that most western startups operate at a $25k to $50k seed funding level and therefore it is fair to assume that a typical seed round in India can easily be in the 10 Lakhs $20k range. Which make a total funding requirement over 5 years of 1000×10 Lakhs = 100 Crs. approx $20 million.

That’s not such a big sum in the funding world however the challenge is how to actively manage, guide and mentor these 1000 startups and what kind of an organization is actually equipped to do so. My answer is simple what about the local entrepreneurs. If corporate funding is able to combine with local ‘Angels’/ Entrepreneurs say 50:50 where 5 lakhs comes from central fund and 5 lakhs comes from a local angel who is the lead on the startup and takes active personal interest in developing the idea and mentor the startups. The startup get the advantage of personalized mentoring as well as access to the larger network of contacts and knowledge which can help take them to the next level

At the same time I may be totally wrong too maybe India just needs a 100 high quality startups ?? which much higher funding ?

While I am still working to develop this idea further taking inputs from friends, incubators and investors across the globe would be happy to get your ideas and how we can get to 1000 startups in India ?

Accel which was earlier Erasmic Ventures in India has closed a $60M Venture Fund to invest in seed and early stage opportunities in India.

The fund is looking at sectors as divers as  Technology, Technology-enabled Services, Internet, Mobile, Media, Life Sciences, Consumer Products and Services, and other high-growth sectors of the Indian economy

Seed and early stage markets continue to be under served in India, attracting less than 5% of the total Venture capital funds and given the dearth of funds at this critical stage of funding Accel’s new fund in these times of slowdown comes as a boon for startup founders. The other funds dealing in startup and seed stage funding are seedfund, Indian Angel Network and Mumbai angels.

Accel also participates in second round of funding for startups it seeds invests in and the latest example of that was Myntra which raised 5 million recently. At TIE ISB Connect Gagan Kumar one of the Managing Partners in Accel Ventures stated that they even do sub 100,000 $ deals but prefer to continue investing more money as the startup grows.

Related Posts

• Myntra.com gets Seed Funding from Erasmic Venture Fund
• Accel Partners & Erasmic Ventures Merge To Launch Accel India Venture – Seed/Early Stage Venture Firm
• Funding Updates : Seedfund considering investment in Mudranik, UniApply
• Infibeam Acquires Picsquare – An Interview with Manish Agarwal Of Picsquare
• WATShow.com – Our Video Show

  WATJob.com – Our Job Site

  WATGame.com – Our Gaming Blog

  WATSearch – Our Search Engine

Wonder which Indian cities are the most startup friendly? Which city offers facilities, manpower, infrastructure, environment etc to startup folks, so as to enable them to kickstart their ventures? While this is by no means a scientific poll, the Tata – NEN hottest startup awards (which incidentally has completed its public voting phase) offers valuable insights on this question. Check out the Indian startup map – this shows the various Indian cities from which the Tata-NEN awards have got their nominations.

Bangalore – 48
Delhi – 34
Mumbai – 36
Chennai – 24
Hyderabad – 14
Pune – 9
Ahmedabad – 5

The interactive map is housed on the Tata-NEN page on Livemint. Check it out here…

Notwithstanding the somewhat controversial way in which voting and nominations for the awards have progressed, I think the above data is a reasonable representation of the city-wise representation of Indian startups. Although I am surprised by the omission of cities like Kolkatta, Trivandrum etc. Surely we should have seen a few nominations from those places.

Question to readers – In your opinion, is this map/data a true representation of where Indian startups are coming up? Which cities are under or over represented? And can you think of reasons why this may have happened?

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Web Startup News

Mouthshut.com the website which is a platform and community for feedback and rantings as well as ratings for brands/products/services has now launched another platform for employee’s to express their anger or their love for their employers/companies. Mouthshut has launched a new platform – Employers.

According to mouthshut this new platform would provide:

1) Feedback to jobseekers looking for a prospective employers

2) Feedback to companies on their brand image among current/ex employee’s

Why this might work much better now?

This might work because of the slowdown companies might be hiving people off which will cause a sense of frustration among quite a few who need a platform to express themselves. Just recently cleartrip.com layed off 42 people and im sure such a platform would have been interesting to those people.

PS: We had done a WATShow with Faisal Farooqui the Founder of mouthshut.com and asked him whether his business was all about pulling down companies and negative feedback. Check his answer at WATShow.

Mobile Startup News

Zook the mobile search startup by Ziva Software has introduced a new feature called zook alerts (its like google alerts for mobile) which allows users to setups specific alerts for stuff like lets say you want to keep a track of which movie is going to come next in a specific theatre. Zook Alerts are available for a number of different categories – deals/coupons, movie show times, events, weather, traffic updates, cricket news/scores, etc.

Zook was recently in the news for tying up with retail deals aggregator open2save and now it has launched zook alerts for deals as well which could possibly be their most used information services going forward. Zook was also one of the first companies to be showcased at proto.in

Related Posts

• Open2Save & Zook Tie Up To Power Best Deals On Mobiles
• Faisal Farooqui, CEO of Mouthshut.com, talks exclusively to WATShow on Their Branding Efforts, Funding and Start Up Advises (via WATShow.com)
• Indian blog Mutiny, Taking the Print route
• Five Industry Players Answer WATBlog On Where Mobile Search Is Headed In India?
• Educomp wins 100 Crore Project to Impart Computer Education in Karnataka