Localbeat

1.6.2 released! Expanding to 50 cities..

- Now track city level topic news such as Mumbai Crime, Bangalore Lifestyle 

- 10 new cities added including Madurai, Coimbatore, Vijayawada, Agra, Nashik, Vijayawada, Kochi, Kanpur, Visakhapatnam, Vadodara 

- Fixed few crashes & other bugs!

Should be available on the android market right away. Update has been submitted to the App Store. Get it while its hot!

Rediff LocalNews - Our thoughts.

According to an exclusive from Medianama - Rediff has launched a Local News platform on top of the existing realtime platform. Welcome to the party! We couldn’t be more happier.  So we decided to take it for a spin and here are some thoughts:

Approach & Technology:

First look at the product seems to be indicate that its location key words mapped on to a mapping interface. Every looks fine and dandy on the surface. Here is where the approach fails especially in India.

• Mutliple Locations with the same name. Did you know that there over 15 Jaipurs and 110 Rampurs in India? (not including village names)
• People’s names are places names too.

To elucidate both issues lets take the example of Adyar. Most people tend think of Adyar in Chennai. There is also an Adyar in Karnataka (& 3 others) and people with the name Adyar. Ex: “Adyar K. Laxman”. If you got to the rediff’s local news, all three of the searches point to this page. In such cases the end user has a similar experience to Google News. Also, They seem to use some stemming algorithm which results in really bad results .. Check Thumbe, Karnataka it gives you news stories with the word Thumb :)

At the very least their indexing doesnt seem to work. They have 4 stories for HSR Layout in the last two months. There are over 15+ stories for the same. Proof below.

As you can see, this approach doesnt work and will not for the end user. We have been down this road.

Sources:

One of the issues that Nikhil from Medianama brought up in his article is the number of sources and coverage within India. When Rediff Launched their realtime platform they claimed to index over 35K sources (Number seems too high). In reality, Google News covers about 200+ sources for India which is less then what they cover in Silicon Valley. By our estimates Rediff covers less than 200 sources for India. Does that mean there is a problem in India in terms of sources as Nikhil seems to point out. Yes and No. By our calculations there over 600+ sources and more being added at a good pace. The problem is three fold.

• Being Noticed (The ones that are index by Google News tend to get more traffic & stay on)
• Old technology ( Chandigarh Tribune, by our estimates they havent changed in 10+ yrs), not being social.
• Consistency ( The graveyard of the number sites launched and have died in huge)

If you run a news and can run it consistently with pretty basic tech (aka wordpress) & good quality content, you can sustain. Just check Mylapore Times (a neighborhood newspaper in Chennai).

There are interesting trend lines that have come up in the last 12 months that give us hope.

• A majority of the web sites have redesigned include likes of IANS.
• The vernacular news papers that do a phenomenal job of covering tier 3 to tier 5 cities and towns have launched their english versions. Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujala and others.
• More international publications are making a foray into India.

So coverage is no longer an issue for good number of population thats online. However there is more work to be down.

And Nikhil, there are sources covering Reckong Peo! Hillpost.in & Times of India covers that region. Proof below.

Other Assumptions:

Rediff & Google news both make the assumption that local news is restricted to the neighborhood only (aka Koramangala). We have found that this is simply not the use case. So for instance if you live in Besant Nagar, Chennai you dont care about Adyar or Indiranagar. The user infact cares what happens around a certain radius of where they live and work.

Respect for Copyrights:

The Indian express group clears states that crawlers other than Google, Yahoo & MSN are not supposed to index their sites (which we believe isnt a wise decision but nonetheless respect). Rediff doesnt seem to respect it. They seem to be index ExpressBuzz and other sites in violation of robots.txt.

Conclusions:

We couldnt be more happier for Rediff to enter this space and recognize the value of the local/hyperlocal space. To be honest, there are others who have approached the same space in the offline world (Jagran’s City Plus) and are doing well/expanding. We believe that its a local is a lifestyle experience and this was our learning early on. That would mean that news aggregation in isolation hasn’t worked. The end user still loves packaging (although he/she no longer cares whether its done by an editor or a machine as long as the quality is maintained). And given that its a Lifestyle experience, being on mobile is paramount!

Anyways, Welcome to the party Rediff. This space needs more players. We’d be happy to chat. You can reach out to me at [arjunram[at]localbeat[dot]in]

Comparison:

Given that we have critiqued Rediff, and hence it is only fair that we offer our results for the reader to compare and contrast.

News for Adyar (only adyar, chennai)

News for Thumbe. (doesnt include Thumbs)

News for HSR Layout (More news stores than their index)

News for Reckong Peo (We do have results)

Please note that these point to the older interface that is no longer in development. You can get these on the go with our Localbeat apps available on Android & iPhone. More platforms coming soon.

Your privacy & #AddressBookGate

Given all the discussions around privacy and address book violations, we wanted to state our privacy standards unequivocally. We use the address book only for social sharing from within the app, your address book information is NOT sent to our servers.

On Android we ask for explicit permissions to access the address book while on iOS there is not such provision.

While we are on this topic, we also wanted to let you know about privacy concerns around your location. Given that you dont need to register/sign in to use our app, we dont have identity information for all users. We only have this information if you have connected to a social service (aka Twitter/FB). None of identity information is shared with our partners.

We dont need a privacy summit to do the right thing!

Your privacy is paramount to us and we take this opportunity to thank for using the service and trusting us.

If you have any specific questions regarding the same, please reach out to us!

Team Localbeat

Press Coverage of our iOS release & rebranding!

The coverage of our rebranding has been awesome across various media properties. Here is a sample of a few. There are also interviews with our CEO & Technology head. Enjoy!

FoneArena | TaazzaGO location-based app rebranded as Localbeat, now available for iPhone http://bit.ly/yppNuh

BGR India | Android app TaazzaGo rebranded as Localbeat, launches iPhone version  http://bit.ly/yLb4cM

MediaMughals | TaazzaGO rebrands as Localbeat and launches for iPhone http://bit.ly/ywpeeL

ThinkDigit News | Localbeat app brings location-based services for over 40 cities in India Apps http://bit.ly/wZH0Q0

Tech2 | Android app, TaazzaGo rebrands as LocalBeat, launches for iOS  http://bit.ly/AiAlDV

Techcircle.in | Location-based Android App TaazzaGO Rebrands Itself As Localbeat; Available On iOS Platforms  http://bit.ly/yYuofD

Technots | TaazzaGo Relaunches as Localbeat. Debuts An iPhone App; What Next?  http://bit.ly/xlCakE

World of Phones | TaazzaGo rebranded as LocalBeat, Gets launched for iPhone « http://bit.ly/z32HeE

telecomGyaan | TaazzaGO rebrands as Localbeat and launches for iPhone http://bit.ly/yYHQM4 

Appnomy | TaazzaGO rebrands as Localbeat and launches for iPhone | http://bit.ly/zhXCgK 

TaazzaGO rebrands as Localbeat and launches for iPhone

Bangalore / India, 24th January 2012 :  Bangalore based Taazza, the leading location-based service for India, today announced that it is rebranding TaazzaGO as Localbeat and launching on iOS platforms. TaazzaGO is among the top rated applications on Android for India and has successfully remained among the top 10 apps for India as rated by AppBrain all through 2011. The first of its kind application is a GPS-enabled system that allows users to know what’s happening around where they live in terms of news, shopping deals & discounts, events & yellow pages. The service is live in 40 cities and will soon be expanding to top 100 cities in India. 

“We are excited to rebrand as Localbeat as it portrays our application better. Average user spends about 70% of their life around where they live and work; we make their lives better and bring information to their fingertips. We are excited to bring our service to a passionate group of users on the Apple platform” said Arjun Ram, founder and director of Taazza. “The relaunch is a result of learning from our users on the Android platform where we have received over 250 ratings. India is expected to have 450 million smart phones in the next 4 years and we provide a first class service which makes a difference to their lives”, he added.

The app surfaces content around where the user is at any given moment and provides the ability to drill down into the content that the user is looking for. The app also allows reporting issues in the neighbourhood & lets NGOs use this data to make the locality better. There are over 10 partners who use the location based marketing platform and are seeing much higher conversion rates on the platform. This release also adds a few more partners.

“We have actively listened to our user feedback and have increased the content on the platform drastically. The application has been rebuilt ground up and is aesthetically redone. Our previous release was already rated among top 40 beautiful apps on the Android platform. This release takes it to the next level.” said Rajat Upadhyaya, Technology Head at Taazza.

The app is expected to reach over 100K downloads in the next couple of months and more partnerships in the next couple of weeks. The app is also an easy way for the NRI community to keep track of what’s happening back home at a local level.

The application “Localbeat for India” is currently available on Android Market and Apple iTunes Stores in all countries for FREE.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii03fcgsJ8M

Localbeat for iOS: http://www.localbeat.in

Localbeat for Android: http://android.localbeat.in

About Taazza

Taazza is the leading enabler of location-based services in India. Taazza’s technology includes an industry-leading LBS platform, APIs, a local search engine and content indexing. For more information, go to http://www.taazza.com .

For Further enquires please contact Daisy Rai, PR & Marketing Specialist at daisy.rai@taazza.com

Localbeat for iPhone!

We are thrilled to open up iOS release to early users for testing before we push the app to the app store. No matter where you live you can keep track of whats going on with your neighborhood (Looking at you NRI’s).

Incredibly excited to show you what we built. Loads more content, redesigned ground up. If things go well, we are looking to release it to app store early next week.

Please send us your device id (UDID) and we will add you on in the next 48 hours.

You can send your device id to support@taazza.com or DM us on twitter or leave your id on FB.

Spread the word!

TaazzaGO - Winner of Asia’s Top 50 Apps - 2011

Look for us bottom row 6th from the left. Thx to @gamiki for the picture.

Asia’s Top 50 Apps is Asia’s pioneering award that recognizes innovation in the web and mobile application space. This award aims to increase the awareness for developers involved in building applications that changes the way people go about their daily lives.

This year’s Asia Top 50 Apps with over 160 nominations, more than 25000 votes in Facebook “Likes” and Google “+1″ and participation from over 10 countries, e27 together with SingTel Innovation Exchange (SiX).  

TaazzaGO is thrilled to chosen among the top 50 apps in Asia. e27.sg has been organizing Asia’s top 50 apps successfully every year for the last 3 years. and we are thrilled to be in such good company. Whats even sweeter - we beat other well established location based services. Its a vindication of our offering in this competitive marketplace.  

Congratulations to fellow Indian companies (Suruk/Plan Hound/lovelogger) who made the list.

User’s rejoice - More content.

As part of our server improvements, we have made it much more easier to add more content. So starting today you will more more news sources flow into the app. You will not have to download anything in addition. Its part of the changes on the server. Will annouce more shortly.

Thanks for your patience and let us know how you are enjoying the new content.

Cheers!

Server Upgrade & Issues

While most of you use the app and look forward to upgrades on the client, a lot of work goes on the server to get the service to you. Here is quick snap shot of our stack

Over the last weekend we upgraded our server to handle more requests & information as we expand our sources. This week we had a few hickups that we noticed - a couple of simple coding errors at our end caused information to be aggregated slowly and delivered late to you.  These have been fixed. We are upgrading our internal status dashboard to catch these issues faster.

Our apologies for the issue & thanks for your patience. You can expect a detailed post on our tech stack from Rajat Upadhyaya, (@u_rajat) our technology head.

Android 2.3.X Issues

A few users have reported crashes on Android 2.3.X  - specifically while interacting with other applications. A point release wasnt on the agenda, but given the list of issues that have been mentioned - we are working on a point release 1.5.1 - which should be available soon. This should also fix a number of UI related issues.

Thanks for your patience & support.