WatBlog Newsletter Archive: WATBlog Update "Saturday Startup Review II - Yoplr.com" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Saturday, January 17, 2009

WATBlog Update "Saturday Startup Review II - Yoplr.com" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Saturday Startup Review II - Yoplr.com" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Saturday Startup Review II - Yoplr.com

The second saturday startup we are reviewing is in the travel planning space. We look at a startup called Yoplr.com. Yoplr is a personalised travel planner and its currently in the beta stage. This startup is started by the same guy Deepankar Biswas who was behind Chittr a microblogging tool that shutdown. We had reviewed chittr here.

yoplr

One sentence description: An online platform for holiday planning

About Startup: Yoplr is a travel planner for holidays which aims at siplifying your search for a holiday destination and ways to get there. Yoplr provides search for various holiday themes and gives the option for the user to demarcate how far off from the city would he/she like to tavel. The revenue model for Yoplr is that via lead generate and revenue share with travel services providers.

About Founders: This startup is founded by 3 co-founders in Deepankar, Raja and Santosh. The company behind Yoplr is Astuon.

Funding Status: : Looks self funded.

WAT's HOT: The execution is A - class as the use of Google maps and the number of holiday destinations in and around bangalore itself is very indepth. Also the way the content is represented is also fantastic with great detail to UI and options to save, email and print one’s itinerary. This tool could be very useful for foreigners travelling to India for a tour as it covers many places that even locals might not know of. So all in all full marks to the team for making a decently comprehensive product even at the closed beta stage.

WAT's NOT: There is not much wrong with the product though one may question the need for such product in standalone mode rather than being a part of an OTA site as the use case for standalone seems to be a tough one as well as the mode and possibility of monetization. Firstly not many families/individuals in India go for holidays that frequently. Even when they do its usually home town or religious places. So this kind of limits the novelty of this product as well as usage to foreigners looking to discover India. Also with regards to monetization being a part of an existing OTA would have really helped.

All in all it seems this has come ahead of its time which just means the gestation period for Yoplr to gain traction and sticky users would be that much more longer. Hope they manage to stick around till that time.