We support Bus Day and you can win some goodies too

We are based out of Bangalore and we struggle through the roads everyday. A great initiative by BMTC to increase awareness about public transport and we love it. Feb 4th is being celebrated as Bus Day in Bangalore. We thought we will celebrate the Bus Day with everyone by sharing some goodies.

The process to win goodies is simple. You just need to take a picture of yourself inside the bus and send it to us on our twitter id namma_bangalore. Be creative with your photographs and 20 of you can win goodies from us which will consist of

- DVDs of World Cinema

- 50% off  discount coupon at Potluck

Asklaila on 99-33-555-555 ( double nine double three triple five triple five )

You don’t need internet on your phone to search for local info. SMS search is easy!

We launch our local search service on a long code. Just add our mobile number 99-33-555-555 ( double nine double three triple five triple five ) to your address book. Just SMS the query to us and we will respond to you with results in no time. All the usual SMS search features work like a charm.

Test drive the features at http://www.asklaila.com/LailaMobileDemo/.

Examples Queries
Hungry for Pizza in Koramangala Bangalore?
- just type Pizza,krmngla
Locate a Spa in South extension, Delhi?
- just type spa,south ext
Feel like eating in an open air restaurant in andheri,Mumbai?
- just type openair restaurant,andheri
Find an ATM in nungambakkam, Chennai?
- just type ATM,nungambakkam

We do detect your city from your mobile number so you don’t need to specify the city unless you are trying to find stuff in another city.

Asklaila Street Smart for your Nokia and J2ME phones

Yawn…. Hasn’t this been around for some time on your site. I saw it the day it came up.

OK… Let me accept it. I am a bit lazy who pretends to be busy. I just forgot to write about it on our blog. We bring Asklaila StreetSmart technology to Nokia/Symbian as well as Java/J2ME phones. We have been up and running on Windows Mobile for a long time and now the same technology is also available on more phones. You can find all the local info in the city, see it on maps and also share it with friends and family.

To get started just go to – http://www.asklaila.com/LailaMobileDemo/ and SMS the link to yourself.

We have tested all this on lot of phone models but if it has some issues on your phone, just ping us back.

Laila has a voice now

You have used Asklaila in various ways. We have answered you on web, mobile, SMS, WAP, USSD, twitter, chat and many more mediums. Now we are also available on voice. We got a brand spanking new number.

33-555-555 ( double three triple five triple five )

We are currently live in Bangalore only and many more cities coming soon.You can look for businesses and you can also look for movies running in town.

Check it out….

Asklaila supports Facebook connect and bing maps

You asked for it and we got it…. Lot of users have been asking us to support Facebook connect and maps. We launched both of them today.

You can logon to Asklaila using your Facebook account and publish comments about places you love. The best part is that your comments will be visible to all your friends and they can plan their parties based on your recommendations.

We have also enabled maps using Bing Maps. You can see them while seeing details of a business ( eg. http://www.asklaila.com/listing/Bangalore/HAL+Airport+Road/Zen/VSImNM4O/?showmap=1#listingMapView ).

Check it out and as always let us know your feedback.

So what’s the deal with Thursday

Huh… Just another day. Not anymore. Asklaila has decided to make Thursdays more fun for tweeple and you can even call it Laila day if you wish. The idea is simple. We will post questions on our twitter account ( namma_bangalore ) and pass on some free passes for people to have fun over the weekend. Just put on your thinking and party hats at the same time.

After we decided on Thursdays we had the age old temptation of sounding logical, so here is an intentional feeble attempt.

- Thursdays are considered fasting day by lot of people so thinking about good food is anyway what you will end up doing.
- Thursday is the day when you start dreaming about the weekend seriously.
- In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the character Arthur Dent says “This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays”. A few minutes later the planet Earth is destroyed. ( src – Wikipedia )
- Thursday is one of the seven week days and the probability of choosing it was 1/7 which is pretty good in this uncertain world.
- Everybody keeps thanking God for it’s neighbor Friday. Don’t you think Thursday also deserves some attention. “Aiyo… Pavam Thursday”

So what you need to do is follow us on twitter ( @namma_bangalore ) and wait for Thursday to come. We will ask you some simple questions about your city and we will choose the winner by end of day who will get some goodies from Asklaila.

Ciao!

PS: Here is the list of winners so far.

• @nidhi14jan
• @kiran_bits
• @maximaminima
• @s0h4m
• @madhuprakash
• @zoooni
• @srivastavankit
• @ashwinsid
• @bRahu1

You can follow all the winners at http://twitter.com/#/list/namma_bangalore/contest-winners

Follow laila on Twitter & win exciting prizes!

Ladies and gentlemen, laila has something exciting in store for you! Wanna be a part of it?

Log on to Twitter, follow us at namma_bangalore, and answer some simple questions about your city – on places, events and basic trivia – and you could win fabulous prizes!

One question will be posted on Twitter every day, between Sept 29 & Oct 7 (barring the weekend, i.e. Oct 3 & 4). Answer all 7 correctly and you could win a fabulous gift voucher worth Rs. 750/- from Herbs & Spice! So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and log on to Twitter, and you could be one of the TWO lucky winners!

LBS meets Local Search…. and they lived happily ever after….

Location is an important piece to solve the local search problem. Local search is all about location and asking the user again and again is certainly not the best thing from user perspective. After rolling out our location aware solution for mobile phones ( StreetSmart ), we bring the same service to web using some help from Firefox. Read more about Location Aware Browsing from Firefox at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/.

To use this you just need to have Firefox 3.5 and get started at http://www.asklaila.com/. We will use the firefox service to figure out your location and will provide you results around that area. The accuracy of our results depends on accuracy of location provided by Firefox.

Happy Location Aware Browsing!

Free technical consultancy for Bangalore startups

You must be kidding…… No we are not.

So first of all let me acknowledge the inspiration. It was an article by Ashish of Pluggdin fame on what Indian startup eco system lacks ( http://www.pluggd.in/indian-startup-ecosystem-is-broken-297/ ). As all tweeple do, I also responded with my armchair opinion till it hit me that I can make an effort to solve at least some part of it.

Let us face it. Some of us are more blessed then others for reasons which are sometimes in our control and sometimes not. Some of us might have studied in better colleges, some of us worked in companies where we got an opportunity to solve problems of larger magnitude and complexity but then now it is time for us to share it with a larger set of people. So here is a small FAQ for people who are interested in talking to us.

Q. Are you guys really knowledgeable ?

A. We think we are and we do accept when we are not. Some of us have experience in building large complicated systems and some of us have worked on complicated systems in companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and obviously Asklaila. Anyway we are not too talented on praising ourselves.

Q. Any particular domains where you know more?

A. Internet related domains are something closer to our heart. We are also shameless users of lot of opensource so that is an area where we can help. Few Tech areas where we have better knowledge

- SEO

- SEM

- Performance Optimizations

- Mysql

- Memcached

- Python

- Django
Q. Will this be like a classroom ?

A. The last time I was in classroom ages back, I cursed everyone. Don’t remind me of bad days in life. So this will be more or less focused session on one individual company and one or more specific problem.

Q. What type of companies do you do this for?

A. The companies which bring us Samosas, Dhoklas and Managalore Bhajji besides being a Bangalore based unfunded startup. We have nothing against companies outside Bangalore but nobody wants to eat cold food out here. Nothing against funded startups as well but I am guessing you already are burning cash for such stuff. Anyway write to us even if you are funded or outside Bangalore.

Q. What do you expect in return?

A. I answered that in the last answer. You bring in the snacks to our office and the coffee is on us. We also do not mind twitter/FB/Website mentions if you really gained from our experience.

Q. Will I really benefit from this?

A. I am as clueless about this as you are but I can assure you that we will try to pass on what we know. We can anyway assure you that we will not steal your wallet when you are in our office.
Q. I have read all this and I am still interested in talking to you guys. How do I contact you?

A. You are a brave man or women for sure. Just email us on techfundas at asklaila dot com with a short write upon technical challenges you face.

Asklaila on Reuters

We know that you love to asklaila day in day out. And now we are also available on Reuters India website – http://in.reuters.com/. Just click on the City Search link on Reuters site or directly head to http://reuters.asklaila.com/.
Hope you enjoy us in this avatar and as always please continue to asklaila.