The Hindu Business Line : SMS-based guide to city facilities

With New Year round the corner, your cell-phone could soon come in handy to bail you out with precise directions and details of facilities that you might be looking for.

A new SMS-based service to be launched shortly promises to deliver location-specific information in all major cities to GPRS cell phone users.

Initiated in one of the incubation centres at IIT Delhi, Onyomo would provide details such as guiding consumers to destinations, be it the nearest coffee shop in a particular area, or an ATM, a hotel, a pub, restaurant or a chemist's shop.

"Currently available by logging on to the Web site, it will be soon extended over SMS as more people start using GPRS mobiles. Also, apart from contact details, as more people start rating some of the services offered and share their experiences, it will make users and business and services that we offer more interactive," said Mr Shailesh Mehta, CEO of Onyomo.

Onyomo, operated by 10 people comprising a mix of graduates from the IITs and other colleges, launched the service a month back in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai.

With an encouraging response of around 5,000 hits a day from these cities, the company is planning a national rollout by extending its services in other major cities across the country.

such as Pune, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Chandigarh in the first week of January.

For this, the company would soon be launching a national helpline to which consumers can message their queries.

It would also offer its own messenger service - a Web-based interface known as Onyomo Buddy that, apart from regular searches, would also give information on weather, songs, movies, jokes, etc.

The company plans to offer new features through which any particular piece of information that a user might wants to store for future reference can be transferred from the Internet and saved as a message on the cell-phone.

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