The Times of India group has launched Wallet365, an online payment system that is almost completely on the lines of PayPal; I say almost, because there is one way in which it differs from PayPal, and that difference could well be its raison d’etre. For Wallet365 lets you make online payments for goods/services that are denominated in Indian rupees (INR), something you can’t do currently with PayPal in India. And this is what makes PayPal practically irrelevant in the Indian context.

For those who are familiar with PayPal, Wallet365 works in exactly the same way. It is being marketed as an ‘E-Wallet’, which enables individuals and businesses to make payments to one another in an easy, secure and affordable manner in real time & completely online. All you need is an email id. Individuals can send/receive money electronically, make online purchases, pay utility bills online or store money electronically for future purchases. Merchant establishments can collect payments safely and securely from online buyers, obviating the need for credit cards. Wallet365 has been launched by Times Money Ltd., a subsidiary of the TOI and the financial backend (payment gateway) is provided by Yes Bank. To facilitate online shopping and paying bills, Wallet365.com has signed-up with over 100 merchants. And it will surely get a huge push from online transactions on Indiatimes.

I have never been a fan of TOI’s online (ad)ventures. They are too diversified (newpapers, media, television, radio, movies etc) to have a particularly coherent vision for their online presence; I think they treat their online ventures as just another sales channel. But with Wallet365, you have to give them the credit of thinking ahead of the industry. For they have correctly diagnosed that the biggest obstacle to Indian ecommerce is people’s unwillingness to use their credit/debit cards online. Since this service takes e-commerce beyond credit cards, customers no longer need to worry about sharing confidential credit card data online. Wallet365 could help to take the fear out of the user’s mind and act as a catalyst in getting many first-timers get initiated into ecommerce. And given their dominant position in Indian media channels, they can get the word out about Wallet365 pretty effectively.

Check out what the IAMAI 2006 report has to say about online payments –“Online bill payment is still in its infancy, but the potential is staggering. According to research, the number of Indians paying bills online is expected to increase from the current 0.3 million in 2005-06 to 1.8 million by 2007-2008. Netizens will increasingly adopt online bill payment for factors such as convenience, control, trust, privacy, and improved record-keeping . ”

It is also worth noting that out of the Rs 600 crore online turnover in 2005 in India, a big majority (almost 75%) is travel related websites i.e. Indian Railways, low cost airlines etc. The contribution of other online merchants establishments in this annual figure is actually quite miniscule. That’s another pointer to the typical Indian aversion to transact online unless there is no other option (as is clearly the case with railways).

Actually, Wallet365 is NOT India’s first online payment solution of this kind. The first to do so was bazzee.com (now eBay India) with its Indianised version of a PayPal kind of payment mechanism called PaisaPay. I would speculate that PaisaPay was also created for similar reasons as Wallet365 i.e. because of PayPal’s inability to honour INR denominated ecommerce transactions. But PaisaPay is just an internal payment mechanism on the Bazzee/eBay website.

The TOI group has an unassailable position amongst media related businesses in India. I think they have made a very smart move by launching Wallet365. But to make this an ecommerce industry standard in India, you need more than just clout or influence; you need to have a consistently focused vision. The diversified nature of their group’s activities may well prove to be the ‘spanner in the works’ for Wallet365.

If you live in Delhi or Bangalore, you should celebrate! For your life just got easier. A Delhi based web startup has built a localized search engine that promises to save your time, money & effort in searching for local facilities. If you are web savvy, you may never again need to pick up your local yellow pages.

OnYoMo is a first-of-its-kind search engine in India. Its mission is to create a practical search solution for some of your daily scenarios. So, if you want to find a shop selling the latest Nokia N91 cellphone in South Delhi, or locate a Cafe Coffee Day outlet in Koramangala that has WI-FI connectivity, OnYoMo is where you should head.

OnYoMo is short for ‘on your move’. Its a startup that is being incubated out of IIT Delhi and has some IIT professors amongst its advisors. Currently in beta, OnYoMo is available for Delhi/NCR & Bangalore; Mumbai is going to be covered pretty soon.

OnYoMo delivers the output of your search query on the website, but using a service called ‘Text-It‘, you can forward the info (free of charge) to a mobile phone. It can also deliver the output to IM clients (though I couldn’t figure out how). Based on algorithm driven search and result retrieval, OnYoMo uses the Eicher City map as the maps database for you to physically locate the searched address.

OnYoMo would probably not be able to rival GoogleMaps; but for an Indian audience, its ability to mashup local maps with search queries is great. It is certainly the best that I have seen on any Indian site. The website has a web2.0ish kind of clean interface; the UI is AJAXified in a GoogleMap like manner.

You can search for restaurants, movies, florists, hotels, bookstores, coffee shops, electronic gadgets etc. And you can filter the search results further to narrow down to what you want; it also allows you to rate the particular product/service.

The ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating‘, so I tried searching for ‘Chinese food‘ in ‘Green Park‘ in ‘Delhi/NCR‘ on the site. The search results are displayed in the images below.

It displayed the contact addresses of a few up market Chinese food joints in and around Green Park in South Delhi. That’s good !

I clicked on the ‘Maps’ icon next to a search result and the Eicher Delhi city map (zoomed in) showed up in a AJAXian pop-up box. That’s great !

Then I clicked the ‘Text-It’ icon and forwarded the query to my mobile number. With the next minute, the result arrived in my mobile messages inbox. And the SMS is free. That’s excellent !

All in all, by Indian standards, this is a ‘killer application’ and should do very well.

While on this, here is my spontaneous, ‘back-of-the-envelope’ feedback to the OnYoMo team.

– While searching through maps, the zoom in/out functionality is still not what I would have liked..

– I’d love to be able to search through a internet enabled cell phone (don’t know if a mobile version is planned)

– You could do with a better recommender system within the search results

– Lastly, OnYoMo doesn’t have a corporate blog. One of the beauties of web2.0 is the constant dialogue between product creators and product users as a means of improving the product. Blogs are an integral part of it. Corporate blogs also add a human face to the company and users like that. I am saying this from personal experience !