What do you usually do when you want to dine out at a new restaurant on a Sunday evening? Look up the city yellow pages, ask friends for suggestions, read up local tourist guides or simply start walking on the streets in search of an exotic option. Very soon, you might not need to do any of those, for you now have Burrp, which promises to be India’s best recommendation website for events & hangouts.

Burrp works like a review and recommendation engine for recreational establishments & events in metropolitan India. Its mission is to help you make better choices when it comes to your social activities. It wants to achieve this by creating a vibrant online community of people, who are willing to share their personal opinions to help others. Burrp’s tagline is ‘Let it Out’, and its a call to Indians to share their opinions, reviews and recommendations with the community at large. Burrp’s Mumbai edition was launched about a month back and already has a 1000 registered users (which in my opinion, is a very good start) . The startup is run by these guys and they are angel funded (to the tune of a six figure dollar amount), by two high net worth individuals from the US.

I feel, there are a number of reasons why Burrp can score over competing (offline) resources like newspapers, travel guides etc, in being a better recommender system. Firstly, it harnesses the power of user generated content, to create a easily searchable database of personalized reviews. Secondly, it can offer more graphic content (thru images, multimedia) to bring out a very involving dimension to people personal opinions. So many people these days have camera enabled cellphones; its really easy to take a snap and attach it to your review. And don’t forget, the website can actually become a social networking hub, where you get to meet new people and develope new relationships.

I browsed through the site and found it quite easy to use. It has three top levels sections– restaurants, bars/clubs and cafes. After creating a free account, you can add in an establishment of your choice and write reviews for it. Or you can simply write reviews of places that have been added by other users.

What I like about Burrp is that its revenue model is not dependent solely on internet advertising, which is largely an unproven model in India (as yet). The site plans to generate income from online ticketing for cinema multiplexes and specialty events (college festivals, concerts etc). It is also aiming to charge marketing fees for SMS marketing (charged from advertisers for advertising on SMS sent to cellphones from burrp.com).

Burrp plans to rollout its Delhi & Bangalore editions in the next 45 days. Additional features on the site include a new channel for submitting, checking out and reviewing EVENTS; locality-specific navigation pages (for those who don’t like using search) and textual enquiry using SMS while on the move.

I have some feedback for the Burrp team. I feel that there is an opportunity to make the site’s homepage uncover more content, utilise the available space better and make it look more appealing. The ability to upload a short audio/video file to augment the review could also come in pretty handy. My sense is that we are going to see many new websites being launched in this space in the near future, with functionalities that overlap with Burrp, either partially or completely. Its up to Burrp’s creators to capitalize on their first mover advantage and become the default choice.

Web2.0 is believed to be most relevant to consumer internet applications but it is now percolating down to the enterprise space as well. A Mumbai based software products company called Cynapse, has launched Cyn.in, which is a collaboration cum information management system for small to large businesses. It is a web based service that enables the enterprise to build, collaborate, manage and publish knowledge resources like documents, media and files. Cyn.in works like a hosted/managed service over a monthly subscription model.

Cynapse says that it took them five years to make this system, which is aimed at helping organizations build a central repository of information and files. Teams across geographical locations can work seamlessly together on the same documents or content. The application uses AJAX & Flex extensively, to provide a rich working interface with multimedia capabilities, something that is quite uncommon in contemporary enterprise systems. Their pricing ($30 per user per month) is based on the ‘pay as you use model’ with no additional setup costs. You need a minimum of two users per account and you can scale upto thousands of users.

I was given access to a demo account to see how the system actually works. Customers are provided an independent sub system (or microsites), which has a url like ‘yourcompany.cyn.in’ (it can also be pointed to your own domain). These sub systems (or microsites) are hosted within the cyn.in datacenters and are managed and monitored by them. It works almost like an intranet, with all members of the company on a common integrated platform. The system’s capabilities have been designed, keeping in mind a collaborative working environment.Here are some interesting features that I found –

Webnotes– You can publish your notes/documents in the form of web notes, which can be confined to the system’s users, or they can be published onto your own websites /corporate blogs etc for external viewing.
SlashTags– SlashTags are essentially tags for the webnotes, but they can be used as a directory structure (or a navigation system) for the notes in the system. It works like an organically growing and continuously auto-structuring system.
Full Text Search Engine– you can search the entire system and even inside Word documents & PDF files, and all other common file formats even if they are inside a compressed zip file.
Web based Word Processor– the system contains a browser based word processor (somewhat like a WYSIWYG text editor)
Rich Media– you have the option of inserting audio, video, pictures and Flash presentations within the contents of a web note, or attach them as files.
Versioning– a versioning system for the information allows tracking and quick rollbacks in case of problems.

It is difficult to review a product of this kind, without actually using it, for it has so many new concepts or features. Having said that, some aspects of Cyn.in certainly impress me. It is great to see Indian startups trying to create enterprise level applications, by leveraging the latest web trends. I am quite intrigued by the concept of webnotes with its accompanying Slash Tags, that can function as an organically growing directory structure. This sounds VERY BEWITCHING, though I’d like to see actual user feedback about its utility. And the visual/graphic design of the application look very classy (although it is heavy and slows down the rendering of the HTML interfaces considerably).

On the other hand, there are two aspects of this application that bother me.

– the first is Cynapse’s assertion that they took five years to make this product. Obviously, Web2.0 was not around five years ago. Which means, that the Web2.0 features have been force fitted (midway) into their enterprise application, instead of being built bottoms up. I am not sure how smart a move this is. The most successful Web2.0 systems of the day are being built on an entirely different philosophy. They evolve organically over a period of time, getting hammered into shape by actual feedback from early users, rather than have a ‘big bang launch after a long gestation period’. Would it not be wiser to make lightweight systems, that are quick to adopt and are flexible enough to be modified quickly, should user feedback necessitate that. At a general level, I think it is easier running shorter distances at a stretch (and conserve the energy, needed to recuperate in between) than running a full marathon (and arriving exhausted at the finish line).

– I also feel that Cyn.in’s creators might be pushing a little too hard in terms of innovating on new features. There has to be a demonstrated ROI behind every additional feature that you add to your system. Every new feature makes the system bulkier than without, more difficult to maintain and more confusing than before, leading to dropouts amongst the initial adopters. And that in my opinion, will be the biggest challenge facing the Cyn.in team- convincing first time users to try out the system, adopt it and actually stick to using it.