AskLaila a local search engine in beta appears to be borrowing ideas from burrp! – the company which made it to the global list of Business 2.0’s top 25 Web 2.0 startups. What AskLaila has essentially done is dervied their platfrom from two great and successful concepts – burrp! and JustDial /OnYoMo. The backend is powered by data from local Yellow Pages or some other source and UI / Features are inspired from burrp!
The very first thing I did this morning is I sent an an e-mail to Deap Ubhi of burrp! asking his reactions and he has great admiration for AskLaila’s founders. He later adds,
if we are the company that others feel a need to get inspiration from, we find ourselves in a great position where we are the innovators. As long as we can continue to innovate and stay one step ahead of the competition, we’re happy if people continue to borrow aspects of our model.
The founders of AskLaila seem to have an impeccable track record but I am still reluctant to agree with Deap. I am a great admirer of Dr. John Nash who took some time to propose his Doctoral thesis but was always in quest for an original idea.
To a question if burrp! would diversify on to the YP model, Deap said,
The aim of burrp.com is to become an online place for you to organize your offline lifestyle. Also, we feel we are much stronger when it comes to actually building user-centric social features and focusing more on community rather than having a yellow-pages model.
Needgrub is another startup that is focused only on Hotels and Restaurant reviews and ratings.
Tags: Web 2.0, Web India, Internet India, Local Search Engine
“impeccable track record ” Sure but one of the founding members was @ Microsoft and we all know about Microsoft practices very well 😉
its truely unforunate to see heard mentality startups coming from experienced people like askllila team and its even more confusing to see matrix partners(avnish bajaj talks big ) to fund a company like this .
and then again if corporates like big adda can steal ideas from local and international players y not asklila…… i understand mobile is going to rule media delivery and sharing but just adding sms and claiming innovation is not acceptable
I, on the other hand find askliala to be much different from a burrp or needgrub. These guys only cater to public looking for restaurants/pubs/eating out places. Asklaila, on the other hand has all kinds of listings, plus a nice amount of articles about the city. We have to see how it does, once it expands to other cities.
I am so sure about asklaila. Great startup with lots of info and the startup gusy seems strong. Not sure how different it is from other search engines/ portals or even a yahoo city pages. I like burrp for its user interactiion, but again they have too much going on and more on a overall lifestyle guide. I like Needgrub for the fact its specifically for food and restaurants and I am not contantly distracted with other things. I am there to look for restaurants and nothing else. Its like picking up a restaurants guide. If i am looking for anything and everything about a city, I might as well use a search engine to get what I want. Anyways, goodluck to AskLaila and lets see how that goes.
I dont think there is much common between burrp and asklaila. Atleast the data provided by ask laila is correct unlike burrp which contains a lot of wrong data. There a few other sites which have similar features with few additions…
http://hungryzone.com, restaurant listing and reviews site. The site is simple and it has the most comprehensive list among all other similar sites. The bangalore portal also has online food ordering and i assume food ordering would be coming to other cities soon.
http://zook.in, this is a wap application but the search is good. I have heard they power the just dial search engine.
http://yulop.com, quite a lot of things… online books, local search and many more.. give it a spin, i feel they are into many things.. would be better id they restrict it to few things… however the local search is good…
Asklaila is miles ahead of burrp in the local search market, with the new airtel partnership, and that’s evident from the alexa rankings. But burrp.tv is one thing that I think nobody does as well as them!