This entry is being reposted from my personal blog.

(This review is based on interactions I had with the founders of OLX, an international online classifieds and auctions website. OLX is launching the Indian edition of its website and is looking to customize it to the Indian context through reviews/ user feedback received from Indian bloggers)

OLX stands for ‘OnLine Exchange‘ and it is positioned as the ‘next generation online classifieds and auctions website‘. The company has offices in NY and Buenos Aires. It wants to be a significant player in the online ecommerce space in the emerging markets of the world (as is apparent from country specific websites that are launching – India, Mexico, South Africa, New Zealand, Hong Kong etc).

OLX has been co-founded by two successful international tech entrepreneurs, Fabrice Grinda & Alec Oxenford. Between them, they have founded successful web businesses like Zingy.com, the largest mobile Media Company in the Americas and DeRemate.com, a leading online auction site in Latin America. Alec also has an Indian connection, as he was an early stage investor in India’s leading ecommerce site, Bazzee.com (he has since exited from that venture).

The Indian online classifieds space is characterized by a bunch of mediocre, look-alike websites, none of which have critical mass and hence there is no default choice. Clearly, some innovation is needed to jazz up this moribund space. So when I became aware of an international website, promoted by successful serial (ecommerce) entrepreneurs, launching a ‘next generation’ classifieds website in India, I decided to check them out.

I was intrigued by the term ‘next generation…’, so that was my first query to Alex. His answer indicated that OLX plans to differentiate itself from its competitors through a slew of innovative features (which have never before been attempted in the classifieds space). Here’s a sampler from that list

– a city, neighborhood and zip code database to cover the entire country
– a distance field showing postings within a certain range of your zip code
– ability to post items in virtual worlds (e.g. SecondLife)(sounds interesting)
– mobile version of the site
– ability to post listings and view the site in any language in any country

OLX’s website allows classified listings for jobs, housing, goods and services, personals, events and community, plus a wide variety of discussion forums. The site is completely free to use. OLX’s eventual business model will be based on revenues generated through (non-intrusive) contextual internet advertising, once the site gains traction and has a dedicated user base.

Having gone through their site (currently in beta), here are a few spontaneous suggestions from my side

– The categorization structure on their current site may need to be better aligned to the Indian context; one of the reasons why the Craigslist website is a non-starter in India is the sheer lack of relevance of their categorization structure to an Indian audience
– It makes sense to do a 80:20 analysis of Indian cities and concentrate only on top 10-15 cities (at least initially) rather than spreading out all across (since top 10 cities contribute to 85% of online traffic)

On the whole, OLX believes that it has the wherewithal to stand out from the rest of the crowd through a combination of a much better product backed up by smart viral marketing, keyword advertising, affiliate management, word of mouth, partnerships with newspapers and portals, effective PR and mobile distribution.

What I liked about OLX is the confidence they have in their product. I am also impressed with the gameplan they have in getting the word out about their product (this review is proof of that). These are novel developments in the Indian consumer internet space and Indian website creators could possibly take a leaf out of their proactive approach.

So my seat belts are fastened in anticipation of OLX’s zoooooooming launch. I wish them a happy landing in the Indian internet space.

This entry is being reposted from my personal blog.


TaaZZa in Hindi (rather Urdu) means ‘fresh’ ; in the context of a news aggregator, it signifies fresh news being streamed to you as and when it happens. But having seen the demo of the yet to be launched website, I think TaaZZa also brings a ‘taaza’ set of design ideas to this domain.

TaaZZa is the brainchild of Arjun Ram, who belongs to Chennai but works in the US. He started working on the project three months ago and seems to have done a great job in the short time. TaaZZa’s tagline is ‘Desh-Videsh-Sandesh’ – I think it’s simple, catchy and appropriate for the target audience.

What I liked about TaaZZa is the fact that while, technically it seems to be standing on the solid foundation of some of the best of web2.0 technologies (Ruby-on-Rails & AJAX), it also clearly stands apart from other Indian news aggregators in terms of its user interface design. The UI is a pleasing departure from the usual clutter that characterise other Indian news portals liked Samachar, JustSamachar or Rediff Newshound.

TaaZZa and its recipe of serving fresh news to its readers spawns three distinct dimensions – topics, people and places ; The topics (or news items) are basically pulled via RSS readers from mainstream news providers like GoogleNews, Yahoo etc ; the people dimension is actuated through the use of tags (autogenerated and not user specified – hey !! thats awesome !!) and the places dimension is effected through GoogleMaps (with its ability to zoom down into the geography of your choice). The demo that I witnessed was still in beta and hence, not fully functional; yet the intial preview was quite stunning. I haven’t seen anything remotely close to this in any other Indian news site currently.

(On a different note, what strikes me as simply mindboggling is the sheer speed with which you can develope a full blown application using Web2.0 frameworks like ROR & AJAX. Its not just about the backend but also the ability to integrate GoogleMaps, Flikr, Tag Clouds et al into the UI. Why, TaaZZa’s example could possibly serve as a poster for rapid developement using Web2.0 frameworks)

Not just this, users also have the ability to ‘digg’ into the stories , pretty much similar to how the original site works . While this is a cool feature to have, it may be a overkill for the currently immature Indian online news consumers. I think it may make sense to uncover some of these higher order features in a staggered manner, once a critical mass of readers get glued to the site.

Something like TaaZZa has to ride on the viral marketing wave to be commercially successful. The netizens of the web2.0 era have shown a preponderance to react favourably to those applications that stand apart in terms of their design paradigm. In this relation, (I think) Arjun could possibly consider some cool interactive paradigm like NewsMaps (or something else) just to add the ‘WOW factor‘ to his application. This need not necessarily be the default for the application but as a possible alternative to the main interface.

My query to Arjun about the intended business model behind TaaZZa did not give me a very convincing answer (yet). Maybe thats to be expected since thats how most community based web 2.0 business ideas work. Whats important is to get something out on the web, something that stands apart from the crowd, get people to use it, build a community around it ….once that happens the money will flow in. Either through internet advertising or a cash buyout from a predatory big brother in the same industry.

All in all, TaaZZa may just be the fresh (taazza) breath of air, the doctor ordered to spice up the bland ‘online news’ domain in India.