Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Friday, May 19, 2006
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Friday, May 19, 2006 |
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Info-Tech
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Telecommunications Marketing - Strategy Seraja plans mobile alerts on city events Preethi J.
Bangalore , May 18 "Where's the party, yaar?" goes a common refrain by youth. Come 2007, and your mobile would give you the answer. The Bangalore-based Internet firm Seraja plans to introduce mobile alerts of events happening in the city soon. "We began with logging and archiving events. Mobility is the next step in distributing them to people," said Mr Arun Katiyar, CEO, Seraja Technologies. At present, distribution is allowed using e-mail and `permalinks' (URLs that can be easily copied onto blogs/personal Web sites to help visiting surfers link to Seraja).
Paid service
The company will partner with carriers (cellular service providers) soon and will offer the service early next year. Seraja users will receive alerts of events on their mobiles by registering on the Web site. They can also send event alerts to their friends, through SMS, directly from the Web site. This will be a paid service, though, said Mr Katiyar. The mobile service will rake in revenue to the Web site. At present, the Web site is refreshingly devoid of ads, but this would change. "Ads and white label services would be introduced soon," said Mr Katiyar. Seraja's event management engine can be plugged into almost any Web site, blog and search engine. Since this is integrated at the database end, allowing the client's label/name/brand to remain at the forefront, it is termed a `white label' service.
EVENT CRAWLER
Seraja is a web crawler — it rummages around the Internet for events. An event is defined as any occurrence associated with a given time and date. This could be a workshop, concert or alumni meet. Seraja draws this information, and offers a simple format that allows additions, comments and comparisons. It plans to reach out to Internet users in Delhi, Pune, Mumbai and Chandigarh by hiring locals to upload information on events in their cities. At present, the site has 1,500 registered users. The company hopes to reach an event count of one lakh by September, of which 40 per cent would be events occurring in the country. This Web 2.0 firm hosts its servers at Coimbatore and was co-founded by Mr Ramesh Jain, Professor, University of California, Irvine and entrepreneur Mr Rajesh Jain. Mr Jain is the founder of IndiaWorld.co.in, which was sold to Satyam for $115 million.
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