Smart people opt for Indian startups to solve this particular problem. Interested in knowing how, then continue to read.

Know thy destination

First thing people would like to know is a destination. Hill stations, Adventures, Beaches, Heritage, Leisure which one to choose. And then a good amount of information about the destination like the weather, places to visit, places to stay etc. One startup has managed to gather all these informations. Infact, I am very impressed with the amount of data they have gathered.

I am not able to mention the link of this startup because of their terms of use! See the screenshot below.

Ok never mind, the startup is mustseeindia. Started by three young founders - Vikas, Sanjay and Karan. They claim to be travelers themselves. Vikas was previously with Trilogy. (Seeing more startups from Trilogy alumnus!)

A quick look at their homepage had a big “Take a tour” button. I was happily expecting some funky flash video or ajaxified walkthrough. To my surprise, the tour page was extremely ordinary, even without any screenshots!  Perhaps, something for them to work upon.

To plan a trip, you need to register and need that annoying beta key. (I am not sure who started that practice, gmail?). But thankfully, for looking at that shared trips and to learn about a particular destination, you don’t require any keys. Since we are not able to get into their site, this part is not comprehensive. But from what we understand, they support planning a trip as a group, uploading snaps, writing reviews about the trip etc. Importantly, the uploaded photos gets stored in their website.

The interface is clean, shows maps occasionally, Pictures can be tagged and filtered in Album view. Some of the destination listings have good amount of information including the entry ticket fee etc. Not to mention, all the destinations have photos pulled from flickr.

So overall a very nice attempt to solve a real problem. Problem related to planning a trip.

But this site as their name suggests is only for India. Also, whenever someone plans a longer trip lasting more than 5 days, they usually cover a number of places. Sharing all their experiences on all these days, require a more advanced UI than this.

This is where another startup from Pune jumps in. It is aptly named entrip. (Where en can stand for anything like english, enlightenment, unless the founders clarifies us what exactly it is for!). You can learn more about the founders here. 

As soon as you login to entrip, the browser automatically scales to full size and the UI shows a friendly message about this action.

Then, you can create a new trip or browse through some of the existing ones.

The UI is very clean and allows you to view the entire trip in a smooth manner. I suggest everyone to try this site out to understand this better.

While adding a marker for a trip, you can import photos from your flickr or point to youtube. This approach is better than hosting all of the photos/videos on their own server. Kudos for making the right move here.

While adding your own photos, you can also look at photos uploaded by others belonging to the same location. Nice use of flickr api.

While importing photos from flickr, the UI was not showing any preview until you click the import button. It shows a boring drop down to choose the album. This could have been made more better. Also, no picasa support yet!

On the right side, you get a tools bar. As shown here on the left, the options are very simple yet useful. For eg, a simple itinerary gets displayed based on the date we choose while adding a destination. Plus, you get the aggregated list of comments as well.

Every trip also has a simple view. This would display the trip in the form of a blog post with the itineraries on the right. The flow is smooth even here.

Finally, you can share your trip with your family and friends.

Now lets talk about some of the problems both these startups might face and how prepared they are for that.

Firstly, we have too many consumers and too few producers problem. This is a typical desi mentality, where in we people do too much research on the internet; But we refuse to share our research with others! Out of these two startups, mustseeindia would get largely affected because of this. This is simply because there is no value-add for someone to share their trip experience and upload their photos in a non-flickr, non-picasa site at all!

I have seen some interesting approach to this problem off late. One good example is restyleme. The idea is very simple, where in you upload your photo and the crowd comments on the different aspects that you may have to improve. But you cannot see any of those comments until you make 20-30 comments yourself. Perhaps, mustseeindia should come up something of this sort, before its late!

Entrip appears to be a little safe here. This is because their core value is not related to displaying information about a destination. But it is more towards sharing the experience during a longer trip, which would attract a very niche loyal crowd unlike mustseeindia.

Secondly, the money making problem. Because mustseeindia has the capability of generating huge traffic, they can enjoy revenue from traditional advertisers, airlines, travel agents, hotel reservations and from a number of other sources. They are in fact a good choice for some Yatra or makemytrip or cleartrip, to have it in their portfolio.

Whereas for entrip, there is a brand new arena for revenue. For example, lets take Thomas Cook (http://www.thomascook.com). Assume I am genuinely interested in the Thailand package from Thomas Cook. Currently, their site has pdf version for the itinerary. It explains everything from where I will be staying till all the places I am going to visit. This is clearly too old fashioned, isn’t it? If the same itinerary can be displayed in a much interactive manner, using entrip’s UI, won’t that be a nice experience?

Also, the beauty of entrip’s UI is the ability to customize the plan. Lets say, I wanted to cover another country as part of my Thai trip, and the UI automatically adds new hotels, destinations to my itinerary along with an option to pay for the trip using credit card … this is the product any expedia or lastminute would be dreaming about. You have it here guys!

Off late, I received emails from few India based VCs asking for some suggestions. Well, I have two recommendations already over here!

Readers, what do you think about these two startups? Don’t be just consumers. Start contributing some comments.

Prashanth, pointed me to this demo of a product launch from his company (Young and aggressive as they call) in Chennai. You can build mobile websites, using just your Mobile and they claim this is the first in the history of Internet(s).

Why mobile? This is the obvious first question every person would be having.

Why not mobile? Mobiles are becoming powerful enough and more internet friendly thanks to iPhone er, Nokia N95 (Are you Nokia users happy now?). While you might have some difficulties with creating all your website using just your phone, you can use it for quickly editing/adding pages. Perhaps, take a snap and upload it to your own mobi site rather than to flickr.

Having said this, a plain vanilla website builder is not very exciting. MobiSiteGalore does provide tools for tracking visits, click-to-call, online image editor, contact us forms etc, but what seems to be missing is support for automatic mobile site generation from a blog RSS feed or from a set of existing pages, in other words more cool/useful widgets.

Prashanth, has already promised us that all these widgets are in pipeline and should be available pretty soon after the launch.

Overall, this brave move from Akmin is impressive and we are certainly looking for a replacement for Mippin to power our mobile version. What do you think?

By the by, we are happy to have Jai, a known Chennai based hacker to join our team. Hope the readers would have enjoyed, his debut post.

Then Call Graph is for you.
Bangalore based SEDNA Wireless has launched a Skype call record, tag, index, search product. With additional online space for uploading, sharing and transcription (in 12 hours) services. Guess what? all this for `free` in the public beta stage.

Though the product is more of a windows friendly kind but hey the Linux version is also out there, with some glitches though. But the gap is adequately and promptly filled with the customer/user support that Callgraph provides.

I tested out Call graph on a Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) box, the installation went well as a deb package was available. I was able to record (good quality mp3), tag and search through my call records. Call graph (if enabled in the task bar) starts by default on every call and elegantly displays that recording is on, one has a click option to cancel if one wants to.  All this auto recording, update and record format (.wav or .mp3 ) are configurable.

Call graph offers free registration on their site with 1GB free storage space to upload your call records. One can share these records with others on the web by sending out an invitation. A transcription service is also provided to transcribe calls (above 5 minutes and in American English, till now). Transcription follows a three stage automatic process and then a manual verification and correction if required. Transcripts are provided free in the public beta stage.

I hit a block when I tried to update my version to access the upload, share and transcribe service. The Linux version lacks the latest update, thats happened to the windows version. But alas the support comes handy, I added the support on my skype list and ye I got help. I got the required keys and help in email and on skype from the Rajiv @ Callgraph. In no time i was up with my records uploaded, shared.
Though I didn’t try my hand at the transcription part of it but I am quite confident that it will deliver some value, since it goes through a tough 3 stage process and then manual verification.

All said and done, Call Graph is one free and efficient tool to follow up your skype calls. Though there are many others in the market, each with their limitations, expensive, poor quality, etc. Call graph stands at par with the best in terms of quality, service, support and its free (till public beta). Additional storage and custom call transcripts may get charged in future.

FAQ at : http://crims.callgraph.in/faq.php
Call graph’s blog: http://crims.callgraph.in/blog/

1. What Problem are they trying to solve?
2. Is it Really a problem?

Let me try to give some example before moving on.

We all know Twitter. The problem they are solving is - To enable people to quickly tell the world what they are doing. Previously people used to write a big post or email or whatever.

Then Social Networks. They claim to solve a much critical/complex problem! - To enable people to keep in touch with friends, make friends, of course allow advertisers to spam with ads.

The above two are reasonable example for Real problems. Now let us look at few examples for virtual problems. (Problems which only the founders and perhaps their VC’s think exist!)

Most of us use Gmail and Facebook right. Typically you open two tabs in your browser and visit them right. How about viewing all your emails and facebook messages under a single interface? Of course, you can view them in separate css tabs if you wish. The entire UI is AJAXified, oh wait we support only IE and firefox.

I feel this is a classic example for a virtual problem. In fact, there is a US based funded startup that is doing this!

Lets look at another example. So Twitter had several inspiration and we have Kwippy and several others. Each of them had their own way to post messages. A startup thought this to be a problem. So they came up with a common interface to ping all the social networks and it is so easy that even your grandma can easily get started on this.

All you have to do is remember two things,

     1. Valid short codes for each of the network. 

Eg:
Twitter - tt
Facebook - fb

    2. A dead simple syntax.
@[valid short] [s|b|m] [title,^,[*]message]

Eg:

@tt m Desistartups website is *http://www.desistartups.in

The above command means post a micro blog in twitter with the specified text, without shortening the url field.

I hope you have now got an idea of what Virtual problem means right?

Now the question is - Should every startup solve Real problems? Not a necessity. For example, take a typical news website. They don’t solve any real problems. But rather provide useful information.

A number of people including me love startups which have a proper focus; and proceeding on the right track.

End of the day, your startup has to provide some value to the Customer (User), Investor (Stake Holders), Employees (Poor people) and others. Even if one of them is unhappy, things will not be normal.

Now the big question to my readers. What problem is desistartups trying to solve?

Local search engine - Kinda community based

Samfra has been around for quite sometime. They have partnership with Cricbuzz, Max Yellow Pages, and a number of others, so there is no doubt about their dataset.

They have 4 search categories -

1. Local - Typically to find restaurants, shops in certain Indian cities
2. Movies - Movie timings in major cities
3. News - Supposed to be India specific news
4. Videos - Supposed to be india specific videos

Good thing about their local search is its simplicity. Doesn’t have too many options unlike other local search/review startups. Also no registeration is required for adding/editing listings. This is weird. There should be atleast an openid or Google/Yahoo based authentication. IMHO, this section appears to be very minimal and might require some upgrade here.

Next comes the Movies section. I was able to search and retrieve the results of some of the latest movies. But again this section appears incomplete. For eg, “Book Ticket” link doesn’t take you to the direct link. Trailer section is good, but it doesn’t show any “Book this ticket now” link in that page.

Then News and Videos. There are two complaints I have regarding these two sections.

• Not much data. I am not happy with the search result for news.
• Not truely india specific. I can see videos/news not related to india at all.

Perhaps, the crawler/indexer should be refined or enhanced to fix these two problems. IMHO, these two sections are not so impressive at the moment.

Having said this the Search market in India is still very nascent despite a number of players. The potential is definitely there to tap.

Hindi Music Search Engine

I came across phulki via Trak.in. The first appearance was impressive. I searched for Race and got back a good result. I liked the “Add to Player” feature and was about to describe it as the best innovation one could come up with.

Then suddenly something striked to my mind and I took a look at the source. I was shocked to see that all the songs are currently stored in their server (under /media/<site> directory) and the flash player simply streams them. Well, unless or until they have bought the legal rights to stream music, this is a kind of piracy and they are liable for actions anytime.

My advice is why take this tough route? One of the reason I could think of is not all the music selling website would be willing to provide an api/interface to allow direct streaming. But I am sure atleast one or two would definitely agree. The simplicity of your search interface would have been the perfect value add for those websites.

Readers, what do you think about these two startups? Do you want to suggest any other startup related to Search or Music. Let us know through the comments section.