The local search engine market is booming. One such website TOLMOLBOL that caters to local search engine and more presented at Proto.in that took place over last weekend. We Caught up with Anand Morzaria, the ringmaster for TOMOLBOL and got an insight from him on his portal .

Q1) what was the rational Behind Tolmolbol?

We built tolmolbol because we found it extremely difficult to use the internet to find information about our cities. Be it a hospital, a restaurant, a dance school or any other business, using a search engine to find information about peer-reviewed service providers proved futile. We built our portal to help millions of other Indians like us who faced the same problem every single day. On tolmolbol, people all across India can find and locate dependable local businesses from over 500 different service categories. Apart from reviewing businesses, members can ask questions, share tips and experiences, meet interesting people via a full-fledged social network, communicate upcoming events and also place free classified ads. Our goal is to make getting to know your neighbourhood not just easy, but a whole lot of fun.

Q2) what is your current User Base?

We don’t release numbers around our user base. However, I can touch upon the three types of users we have. The first segment is the registered user base. Almost all of them are returning users and these users review and share their experiences on the site as well as use the social network to invite and stay in touch with their friends. Another segment of users includes those who are quite happy to use tolmolbol as a local search tool or to just download free SMSes of businesses and events. The last segment of users constitutes those who stumble upon our site when executing a search query on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Most of these users continue to stay on the site and view at least a dozen odd pages in every visit. Some of these users then either become registered users or return back to tolmolbol for their next search. Although we haven’t spent a single rupee on marketing, we are seeing a significant month-on-month growth in all the three types of users.

Q3) How do you’ll plan to use mobile technology to your benefit?

There are three types of mobile or phone related services we plan on deploying for our users. The first is a mobile-based search that leverages a member’s online social network to provide the most relevant mobile-based search result. For example, if a member is searching for pubs in an area, we can potentially leverage the likes and dislikes of the member’s friends and recommend the best results for that member. Since screen real estate is limited on a mobile device, it really does not help a user if one were to dump search results of all possible pubs in an area. The second mobile related feature we will roll out is in the area of local deals through mobile coupons. Lastly, we also hope to offer a free telephone assistance service for your neighbourhood. But this is more of a long-term plan.

Q4) could you share your revenue model with us?

Our revenue model is similar to the proven Yellow Pages model. Along with providing regular search results, we will show clearly demarcated sponsored listings a la Google. Apart from that, we monetize leads whenever prospective customers want to contact a specific business. Apart from developing micro-sites for businesses, we plan on allowing businesses to directly answer questions that customers may have with regard to making a purchase for e.g., buying a car, a bike, a mobile phone, etc. Needless to say, we charge the businesses for the various tools we offer them.

Q5) who do you consider as competition? and what sets you’ll apart?

We do have competitors across specific verticals, for eg. local search (JustDial), classifieds (Sulekha), question and answers (Yahoo Answers & rediff), events, reviews (mouthshut) and a local social network (let’s not get started here!). But what sets us apart is our integration of these various features for all Indian cities. Rather than requiring you to make an investment across different portals for consuming different kinds of information about your locality, tolmolbol provides a single platform for all its members to get to know their neighbourhoods.

For example, apart from simply searching for a local business, you can use tolmolbol to leverage the knowledge of your local social network and of your community. If you have a question, you could post a query on our city specific forum named Bol and the community will guide you with answers. In addition to posting free classified ads, you could use tolmolbol to communicate or discover events in your city. Lastly, we will continue to build and deploy innovative features that haven’t been done before. Local maps that display the location of businesses is just one example of the kind of features we are working on. A combination of all these factors is what really sets us apart.

Q6) Have you’ll received funding? Could you disclose the details for the same?

Tolmolbol.com is entirely self-funded by Pennywise Solutions, the parent company we co-founded four years ago. Pennywise is a web-application development and search marketing company.

Q7) what is your take on Local search in India? Do you see a growth and what do you think will be the contributors to this growth?

Local search in India is a huge market simply because of the pain-point that consumers experience when trying to locate dependable businesses in their vicinity. On the other hand, a vast majority of businesses in our country lack any form of online presence. Since these brick and mortar businesses are more than receptive to any medium that helps them get new leads or prospective customers, local search and other related offerings will experience significant growth. Furthermore, with the kind of demographics India has, we expect that mainstream internet usage will also start to rise rapidly. Therefore, companies offering solutions that combine the right mix of online and mobile based offerings will be well-positioned to serve the market.

Q8) what are your future plans?
 
I would say the opportunities are quite large. On the features side, there are lots of interesting features coming up. One of the features that’s been generating a lot of excitement from our private beta users is the maps feature that is set to roll out shortly. We will also continue to scale up the information on service providers and make the site more useful and fun. Additionally, we plan on building tools for our business customers on top of the tolmolbol platform. In the longer term, we hope to deploy tolmolbol across geographies where there is a business case as well as a market need.

Tolmolbol  can be considered as an interesting name, and are doing a decent job. In case of local search JUSTDIAL has been in the forth run leaving behind most other portals in that vertical. Burrp that was not mentioned as a Competition above surely seems to have similar features, though Tolmolbol’s mobile feature as compared to Burrp is more attractive, the same cannot be said about Tolmolbol’s look and UI.

We will be soon doing a Local Search engine shoot out, so keep a eye out.
 

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