Metromela is a city centric website for helping users find information, share reviews and get deals. This has been rolled out for 7 cities in South & West India – Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Mysore, Vizag and Cochin. Its founders are a bunch of seasoned professionals, that includes Satheesh Andra, a Venture Partner at DFJ (Draper Fisher Jurvetson). In fact as the about section (board members) indicates, the website is his brainchild. The company is based out of Hyderabad and has offices in Chennai, Bangalore & Pune.

Metromela is currently focusing on three sections– Shopping, Food & Entertainment, Health & Wellness and Family & Kids. It gives out related vendor listings and reviews written about those vendors. The site believes that this approach is a counter-weight to the typical approach of yellow pages, which offers lots of info but no way of drilling down into the relevant ones. They also collect deals, offers & discounts and aggregate it on the site. Users can suggest a vendor to be added, send notification about a deal in their neighbourhood or write their own reviews. There also is a rewards program for users to incentive their motivation (this sounds like a smart approach). The monetization is planned through charging vendors/retailers to reach out to the site’s users and generate leads from them. (the hot deals section contains sponsored links on the right).

This space has lots of competing websites with partial or complete overlap. In response to my question about their competitive advantage, Barkha Shah (MetroMela’s content head) indicated that their’s is the only website where you get an aggregation of expert reviews/guides, user/community review and deals. Their focus is far more wide spread than just shopping, food & entertainment which is where most of the other city-based sites are focused on.

I was alerted to this piece of news today morning about DesiMartini, an Indian social networking site getting acquired by HT Media. The acquisition figure (rumored to be 10m USD) is eyepopping to say the least but frankly, it is not entirely unbelievable. The price one pays for a product depends largely on how badly you want it, rather than a valuation of its intrinsic worth. DesiMartini is a fairly listless website, with no noteworthy traction, notwithstanding the big advertising money it must have spent for its ad campaign on national television, yet a firmly-dug in media house like HT finds merit in the acquisition. Off course they know what is best for them, but if they payed anything evenly remotely close to that figure, they MUST BE PRETTY DESPERATE..Any which way, congrats to the DM team for pulling this off.

This is possibly the second noteworthy acquisition in the Indian Web 2.0 space, the first one being Bixee’s acquisition by MIH. And it shows that there is some value that is indeed being created by Web 2.0 startups in India, however unoriginal and ‘me-too‘ it is. That value may be miniscule compared to overseas examples, or to its possible potential, but still it is not entirely insignificant. This must surely be good news for Indian Web 2.0 wannabes.

Incidentally, I had earlier pointed towards the likelihood of SNS sites getting acquired by Indian media companies in this blog post some six months back. For established media houses, social networking is something that they cannot ignore. So its basically a ‘buy, however small’ V/S ‘build from scratch’ decision for them. And thats why the acquisition route makes perfect sense for them, even for websites that are not going anywhere in their current avatar.

What do you think?

Update: As is evident in the comments (and from other discussions on the web), there seems to be a general sense of disbelief about the acquisition and the price itself…makes me doubt the 10M price…sure 10M is a WHOLE LOT of money, for something like DM….