WatBlog Newsletter Archive: WATBlog Update "Saturday Startup Review I - TravelYaari & Blingbees" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Saturday, January 31, 2009

WATBlog Update "Saturday Startup Review I - TravelYaari & Blingbees" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Saturday Startup Review I - TravelYaari & Blingbees" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Saturday Startup Review I - TravelYaari & Blingbees

Well its saturday again and we are back with our saturday startup reviews. Today we look at two startups which are sort of me too’s but yet in an interesting and growing space.

TravelYaari - We had blogged about the shift from air ticketing to non air ticketing revenues and also the role of bus ticketing and makemytrip’s claim of having the largest bus ticketing inventory. Travelyaari is in the same space.

One sentence description: A bus ticketing portal (As of now they are focused on bus ticketing but they could expand to other travel ticketing)

About Startup: Travelyaari is a bus ticketing portal but they also claim to deploy their own computerized reservation system at the operator’s booking offices and agent network which provides them whole inventory on a “live” time basis. This ensures that 100% of the seats are visible to a user when booking online. This is unlike other similar travel portals who force you to select from the available 2-4 seat "quota" that they have.

About Founders: This startup is founded ex-IIM A folks and the company behind travelyaari is known as Mantis Technologies

Funding Status: : Self funded.

WAT's HOT: The live booking is surely a USP. Also as they are directly connecting with bus operators and agents and providing them a booking client based on the success of their model there could be a revenue opportunity from the operators end as well. On the whole the site has a clean layout and the current focus on bus travel is a good one as non air travel market seems to be on the upswing.

WAT's NOT: Well in its current avatar its pretty much a me too product. The USP is on the back end and not the front end. It claims to of 1000+ bus routes where as Makemytrip recently claimed 5000+ so even size of inventory isn’t the USP. Im not so sure that the live aspect makes that much of a difference to users. Also with standalone players like Redbus already in the market its difficult to say whether travelyaari will scale going ahead.

All in all it seems a me too at this stage though given the nascent stage of the market I wouldn’t write them off as there is a long way to go in this space.

Blingbees - Lifestyle and especially nightlife is a space thats been around for sometime but as seen slow growth. I remember the first site I came across was Bestofbombay.com which still continues to exist though it really hasn’t made any major dents. Blingbees is in this space as well. Lets look at blingbees and what its doing differently.

One sentence description: A nightlife/party news, photos and events social networking portal.

About Startup: Blingbees aims at connecting partygoers with each other as well as to their favorite clubs/bars/lounges/restaurants/events. They do this by covering events and clicking pictures and uploading them to the website. Once an event has been clicked by a Blingbee photographer the event attendee’s can access the same by registering on the site. The site also offers a social calendar that helps you sort photographs by date and venue.

About Founders: This startup is founded by 3 guys whose profiles can be read here and the company behind travelyaari is known as Mayhem Media Pvt Ltd. Ramit Behl one of the founders has had previous experience of working with Merill Lynch and is a Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University graduate.

Funding Status: : Looks Self funded.

WAT's HOT: The focus of the website is quite good as its trying to be the one stop shop for events and parties. Its not trying to be a burrp.com which is good coz burrp already is leaps and bounds ahead in the lifestyle information services space. Blingbees on the other hand can be termed as a magazine for nightlife and parties. They offer prints of photos and also offer venue information and party planning services. On the whole a nicely packaged focused site.

WAT's NOT:There are a couple of things that stand out like a sore thumb. One of them is their design. Im no design guru but I found it very loud and they could tone down the design a bit as it distracts from the content and the readability. Besides for the design the revenue model is a big question mark. Though they already seem to have advertisers like Nikon and Bacardi its still not a scalable model.

All in all it blingbees seems like a nice to have service whose biggest competition I would say would be facebook. Also how many events can their photographer cover. I feel the ugc aspect of facebook’s events and picture upload far outstrips what blingbees can achieve on its own. I think blingbees would be better served to build a community around parties and nightlife and maybe holding branded events could be a better business model.