An Inspired Launch: Guruji Finance Search; Is News Next?

I quite like Guruji.com’s Finance Search: the search is predictive, the search results page is uncluttered, the interface is smooth (AJAX) and they’ve got additional information like the company’s financial statements. inputs on recent block deals, related companies (competitors), a breakup of major shareholders, company specific news etc. It looks similar to Google Finance, which doesn’t have as much information on Indian companies yet, though they’re now covering more companies than they used to 4-5 months ago. Guruji, at present, has more information.

Guruji has also incorporated a company comparison service, much like Rediff’s MoneyWiz, currently lacks a share price comparison chart (for trends). The next step for Guruji would be to launch a portfolio tracking service…like Google Finance has.

Alongwith the financial information, Guruji is also aggregating news stories related to the company…and if they’re already aggregating company specific news, I wonder why they haven’t launched a news search yet. Of course, having a search is one thing…people using it is quite another.

Note to Guruji: Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Ltd isn’t being aggreagted. Compare this with this.

Sequoia Capital MD Sumir Chadha On The Guruji Investment

We’ve just received a response from Sumir Chadha, MD, Sequoia Capital India, about the prospects of their investment in Guruji.com - Guruji co-founder Gaurav Mishra has left the company and there was word that Sequoia had written off the investment, which Chadha has denied. In an emailed response to MediaNama, he writes:

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“We are very positive on Guruji and invested again in the company in the series B financing round led by Sandstone. If you check out Alexa, you will see that Indian internet users agree with our assessment - traffic for Guruji has been growing very nicely over the past six months — on the back of their launch of India’s first music search product. The company has also seen nice revenue growth in the past few months, and has spent very little of the $8mm series B we raised at the beginning of this year. Their monthly expenses are very modest, and they have built a crack engineering team with lots of IIT Computer Science guys.

We are very optimistic about Guruji’s prospects.”

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Guruji has been searching for the right search to make it big with - they have a web search in 8 languages (7 Indic), City Search, Movie timing search, Music search, and a recently launched Image search. VCCircle had written about a probable investment in Guruji from Sandstone and Sequoia investment last year; in a sense, this confirms it. Any idea of what “nice revenue” means?

Update: Chadha on Guruji revenues - “We don’t disclose revenues for any of our private companies, but I can share with you that they have signed up a lot of top advertisers in India, which you will see in the sponsored links of their search results, and revenues are growing very fast.”

Our earlier story on Guruji here.

Guruji Co-Founder Quits; All’s Well, Says CEO Dod

Gaurav Mishra, COO and Co-founder of search engine Guruji.com has left the company, CEO Anurag Dod confirmed to MediaNama, as did Mishra. Mishra said that he’s left due to personal reasons, and needs to return to the US soon. Dod denied the rumour that Sequoia Capital has written off the Guruji investment, and maintained that they have enough funding, and are going to sail through these troubled times. He reiterated that they’re doing well in terms of revenues, but declined to share specifics, saying that their AdGuru product (an ad network we haven’t heard about before), is doing well. Mishra mentioned that Guruji’s music search has seen great uptake. Note: Updated the AdGuru link, via Alootechie.

Q209 Call: OnMobile Says Deployments Have Slowed; Telisma Vs Nuance; AdRBT

The Content Costs
When asked about the increase in content costs, which we’d pointed out in our analysis of their Q2 earnings, OnMobile Global CEO Arvind Rao said that this is a “fixed monthly fee that we’re paying is to a third party which is giving us some services which are used for launching a new project or a new product that a very large, but will not be rolled out until next quarter. That is a line item, which has no link to our existing revenues. It’s fixed on a monthly basis, based on certain parameters and results that they have to deliver to us.” Our sense (this is not officially confirmed) is that these are payments being made to the content partners that OnMobile has signed up in South India, and it corresponds with two significant deals they’ve struck - for powering the Ringback Tone (RBT) platform for Airtel in South India, and for du in the UAE.

Revenue Split
15-20% from data products
35-40% from voice portals etc
35-40% from RBT etc

AdRBT
Very little on the AdRBT: OnMobile expects to complete the test launch of AdRBT with Vodafone by the end of November and declined to share details of the results in the interim. They’re going slow on AdRBT in order to iron out the bugs, based on usage trends from the pilot. Results are encouraging, says Rao - “the numbers, based on consumer recall, are better than for the Internet.” Mobile Marketing SBU has around 20 odd people, who are working on two very large projects.

Impact of the slowdown?

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SimplyHired Launches India Site

Online Job Search Engine SimpyHired launched its India site today, punctuated by the launch of sites for other countries like UK, Australai and Canada. The site claims to provide access to over 1.5 million jobs from job portals across these four countries. [via release]

This allows users to compare job openings across portals. Note that a few years ago, Info Edge had sent job aggregator Bixee.com a legal notice for indexing job listings from Naukri.com. Bixee was later bought by MIH India, and has since morphed into a vertical search engine. Other job search engines in India include TolMol Jobs, and Recruit.net. Web18 owned In.com also has classifieds search, but has surprisingly opted out of having a job search.

At present, SimplyHired aggregates jobs from a number of job sites - Monster, Naukri, Jobstreet, Naukrihub, Naukri2000, IndiaStudyChannel, 123oye.com, Vyoms.com, FirstSalary.com and CareerBuilder India. Some of these sites, I haven’t even heard of before. Simplyfired SimplyHired essentially lists relevant jobs by recency. I tried a 3 seaches, and scanned quite a few listings - conspicuous by their absense are BCCL owned Timesjobs.com and Consim Info’s ClickJobs.com. Are there no fresh job postings on TimesJobs or ClickJobs to speak of, or is SimplyHired not indexing their results?

The timing: perhaps this is an opportune time to launch a job search - we’ve been hearing about people being asked to leave, and at times, salaries delayed or not paid in full. Tough times for job seekers, and companies as well.

Google Rolls Out Search In 3 Indian Languages - Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali; Rediff Language Search In Beta

Google has rolled out search in three Indian languages - Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali.

With Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu having been launched earlier, this means that Google now allows users to search in 8 major Indian languages. We had earlier written about the launch of Google News in Tamil, and also about the company integrating Google News in Hindi with English, for users accessing the service from India. Note in the image below that Google’s Indic Language Search uses transliteration and suggests words being searched.

While Google remains the dominant search engine in India, Internet usage in India has largely been limited to English speaking and bilingual users. Depending on which market research report you read, Internet users in India range from 35 million to 45 million, but broadband connectivity is abysmally low at around 4.5 million connections.

Rediff’s Language Search
Rediff’s Language Search, which they first mentioned in an earnings release last year, is also live, in beta, here. They’re currently offering search in the same languages as Google - in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati, Bengali and Kannada, though I quite like the fact that they’ve got a single, integrated search bar for languages, unlike in case of Google, where I’m not sure of how one will discover the language page.

Rediff’s Language search also uses transliteration, probably powered by Quillpad. Rediff had acquired a minority stake in Bangalore based Tachyon, which has developed Quillpad. Rediff’s language search is in Beta, and you can give them feedback here. We’ve written earlier about the number of search products that Rediff is working on, and I wonder how they’ll integrate all the alternatives in their homepage.

How Important Is Indic Language Search?
Industry insiders in the Indic language space whom we’ve spoken to, expectedly, believe that next phase of growth is going to be driven by Indic languages, but no one can really tell when that will happen. Search is expected to play a critical role in this growth, enabling content discovery; content drives usage. As far as we know, Indic language search is being provided by: Google, Rediff, Webdunia, Guruji, and Raftaar.

Of course, what eventually matters is the accuracy of the search, as much as the number of languages you cover: search becomes even more critical for content discovery when you’re faced with a problem unique to India - of having 22 official languages.

Important: One key problem that we’ve been told about is of sites not using Unicode fonts for Indic language content - many publications going online tend to use government supported CDAC fonts, which have issues with indexing, and do not render unless installed separately. So if you’re planning an Indic language site - use Unicode.

Note: If we’ve missed any Indic language search engines, please do let us know in the comments. We’ll update accordingly.

Related:
– Google News And Indic Language Initiatives; Launches News In Tamil
– Rediff.com’s Search For Search: Video, Buses, Local Language, SMS
– Chandamama Launches Hindi, Tamil And Telugu Portals; Archives Inaccessible
– Guruji Now Launches Music Search; What’s Next?

Voice Search Engine Ubona Gets Funding From Capital18; Thoughts On Voice Search

Update: Sarbvir Singh, MD of Capital18 has informed MediaNama that Capital18 does only VC and PE investments - the private treaty deals handled by Synergy18; (and this is a Capital18 investment, not a Synergy18 deal). Singh appears extremely bullish on Ubona as a white labeled solutions provider - with deals on revenue sharing basis. He said that the company will be rolling out solutions for 4-5 “Large National Brands” in the next few months.

Original story: Voice is the flavour of the season in India. After OnMobile acquired French Speech Recognition company Telisma, Ubona, a voice search company has received an undisclosed Series A round of investment from Capital18, the investment arm of the Network18 Group. Ubona apparently has developed a patent-pending set of speech recognition systems, tailored to the Indian context - languages, accents and dictions.

At present, Ubona has a Foodie Hotline for Bangalore, and I just tried it out, from Delhi, by dialing 080-40700000

Hey, it’s McDonalds, not…
Maybe it’s my sleepy 8:00am voice, but I just tried a voice search for McDonalds, and the speech recognition offered me the following choices - Monark, Inox, Mughals, Shinoi Foods, before finally getting it right. McDonalds is present in multiple locations, so this was a trick question, and I was interested in finding out how Ubona deals with that problem. They offered the following choices - Kormangala, Cunningham Road, Old Madras Road, Brigade Road, with an option to list more. On choosing Koramangala, they connected me to McDonalds, after which I hung up, since I don’t think they’ll deliver from Kormangala to Delhi. I’d also requested an SMS, which they sent across, with details for 7 McDonalds in Bangalore

How Local Search is monetized
The revenue model is around lead generation - in case of Ubona, they’d probably be paid for every call that they connect to a restaurant. I’d spoken to a JustDial client last year, and he’d told me that every time his information his given to a potential customer, he pays Rs. 70, and for this, he received the customers name, phone/mobile number and email address, if disclosed, by SMS and Email. The information is sent out almost immediately. The service can also be monetized by playing an advertisement before allowing the user to search for information. A premium service (charged according to minutes of use) is also an option, but unlikely to be very successful on a mass scale, given that free services already exist.

Automated vs Manual
Manual services are likely to be far more accurate, but scalability is an issue. For every additional line, you’ll have to add another call center executive, and users might have to wait for their turn. So scaling adds to employee costs. An automated system is more expensive to develop and difficult to refine - different accents, dialects, languages, particularly in a country like India where dialects can change from town to town.

More on Synergy with Network18, Competition and Context (more…)