Monday, May 12, 2008

Advantage - India

Indian Internet properties typically lag their American counterparts by a couple of years. It was heartening to see at least some Indian sites actually take the lead and US sites creating clones of an established Indian product.


YourBillBuddy lets you find the best mobile plan across all service providers in your region. You need to upload your mobile bills, they see your usage and tell you the best plan suited for the same. The site has been around for more than 2 years now. Although not a big success yet, it's a pretty useful idea and tends to save you a lot of time and money. Recommendations based on my bills say that I could save 46% on my calls every month by switching providers!! Without switching from Hutch also my potential savings based on their other recommendations are quite significant.


YourBillBuddy recommendations for my mobile bills

Techcrunch reviewed a US clone recently launched that does the same. This is the first time that I noticed a US clone of an Indian website and it did bring a smile to my face. They say "Imitation is the best form of flattery for Internet properties" and the site's creators have reason to be flattered.


One problem I see with the site is that there really is no reason for people to come back to the site after they have optimized their plans once. People have short memories and not many would remember such a service existed 6 months after using it. Perhaps a client on the phone itself which monitored your calls and gave you your best suited plan would be of greater value.


Yahoo Glue was launched on the Yahoo India search pages last week. Glue attempts to create something like a homepage for the query you search for. The page is actually a mashup of search results from a variety of sources. In addition to traditional search results, searches for Angelina Jolie gives you a fact sheet, images of the actress, top music tracks and more. Search for soccer and you get things like a Wikipedia entry and league tables. The product is not really aimed at India or created by an Indian company. I am writing about it here as it has been launched in India first. This to me is Yahoo saying that India is a market which is matured enough to give quality feedback and be the first testing ground for a product which can change the face of search(literally) globally.


Search result for Taj Mahal

Unfortunately, Examples like these are rare and I do not have more to write about. Do let me know if you know of any other sites for India that lead the world in ideas or in technology.

2 comments:

Bipin Preet Singh said...

Hi, postpaid market is pretty small. We have created a tool for prepaid plan comparison at http://www.mobikwik.com/searchPlan.do Ofcourse we offer much more in terms of mobile recharge, bonus packs and so on.

Online Money Earning said...

yeah..Its really informative news man. Thanks for sharing.