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

Saturday, November 1, 2008

WATBlog Update "Saturday Startup Review: Nearhop, Paisamatters and Parentree" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Saturday Startup Review: Nearhop, Paisamatters and Parentree" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Saturday Startup Review: Nearhop, Paisamatters and Parentree

Today we have 3 startups for review and though they are all online startups they are targetting diverse audiences via the online medium. Lets have a look at them and check out WAT’s Hot and WAT’s Not!

One sentence description: An Indian travel search engine

About Startup: Nearhop is a travel search cum travel planner engine which provides the following:

1. Computes all the possible ways using bus/ flight/ train with combinations upto 3-hops.
2. Can be used by people to know how to reach a town/village. Right now we have 5000+ places.
3. Database with around 38000 flights/trains/buses and will add more.
4. All city bus/local train routes at one place.
5. Book tickets at service providers site
6. Arrival and departure times of each flight/bus/train in a particular town.
7. Generate routes to near town
8. Can see the paths in google maps.
9. City bus/ local train routes on mobile

About Founder: Venkata Rao Chimata an MTech(CSE) from IIT Kanpur in 2005 who has worked in a startup called Arada systems, Bangalore for a year and in Juniper networks, Bangalore for 2 years. He launched the Nearhop on 8th of August, 2008 and is a solo entrepreneur with no cofounders.

Company Location: The company is located in Hyderabad.

Funding Status: Funded by Friends and Family

WAT’s HOT: The concept is brilliant! The idea of 2 and 3 hops i.e. where you change mode of transportation to get from one place to another and how you can book it in a way that you waste minimum time is great. Infact as the data populates on this site the remote locations or villages this could become a comprehensive travel planning tool within India. As the combination of bus, train and flight helps you search the cheapest as well as the fastest way to get to a destination.

WAT’S NOT: Execution isn’t great! I mean both from a UI perspective and a Usability perspective. The product does well for an alpha level effort but is in no way what I would call ready for release or mass scale adoption. I think the data of bus train and flights for 2 hops or 3 hops can be presented in a much more user friendly manner side by side rather than a listings format. Also the UI is as old as the internet with use of real basic html which makes the site look dated and unfriendly! It is understandable though as this is a one man effort and Techies and designers are two different breeds but users dont care about who is the founder and whether it is one man effort or no all they care about is a great service.

One sentence description: A comparison engine for loans

About Startup: Paisamatters is a comparison engine of home loan products enabling users make an informed decision and select the best suited loan. They soon plan to add comparison of other loan products like loan against property, personal loan and car loan along with existing home loan. It has existing features like emi calculator, a QnA section and a simple to view comparison result.

WAT’s HOT: Well the features like emi calculator and comparison features are useful especially the results UI.
WAT’S NOT: There is nothing unique in their offering at this moment as loanraja, loanwala and apnaloan all offer most of these features

One sentence description: An Indian parenting community

About Startup: Parentree focusses on practical aspects of Indian parenting by enabling parent-to-parent conversations and advice. The information that is exchanged includes parenting tips, reviews of schools and preschools, children’s activities in our cities, fostering intelligence and confidence and creativity in our children, good nutrition, pregnancy, child development, emotional development and behaviour. They also have an editorial team that writes about the latest research regarding children and parenting. Features include Journals (blogs) - any parent can write, Groups - discussions, Reviews - Reviews of products and services for children and Social networking.

About Founders: Sathya Narayanaswamy has worked in various roles in engineering, product management and general management at companies like Lockheed, Lucent, Syntel and multiple Silicon Valley startups.

Co-founder Shobha Durairajan held various engineering positions, for over 10 years, at companies like Lucent, IBM and Lockheed Martin.

Co-founder Gita Dayal started (and currently moderates) an online group for Bangalore parents. She has held various Product Management and other positions, for over 10 years, at companies like eBay, Zaplet, Hewlett Packard and EDS.

Funding Status: Funding from family and friends

WAT’s HOT: Well the parenting content and community space as thus far been dominated by a single player in indiaparenting.com which nodoubt has grown into a great web destination but that still leaves an opportunity for a new approach. Parentree takes the community partcipation approach with the right blend of editorual content and UGC. Also community features like groups, blogs and reviews add to the community participation.

WAT’S NOT: Well its not going to be easy to compete with indiaparenting which is among the top 1000 sites in India and has been around for almost a decade. What Parentree needs to quickly build is user traction and participation which will be tough. Also from a feature standpoint better content display (too little content on homepage) which may prompt the user to sign up faster.

Hope the startups were worth your saturday! If you are a startup and want to be featured on saturday startup review then shoot us a mail on info(at)watblog(dot)com with the subject satuday startup!

Thanks to Anand, Sathya and Venkata for intimating us about their startups.