Airtel-Asklaila To Power Multi-Mode City Search

Airtel, to power all of its city search services with asklaila, local information service. Asklaila announced a strategic partnership Airtel which enables Airtel customers to get up-to-date information about their city, free of cost, through asklaila’s extensive city information database. The asklaila-powered ‘Airtel city search’ will reach more than 30 million users across the six cities where asklaila is available, including Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Bangalore.

Airtel to deploy a multi-mode, multi-platform local search service; the service is available across 3 screens – the mobile (Airtel’s mobile service), the PC (Airtel’s broadband service) and the TV (Airtel DTH); and within the mobile service, across 4 modes – SMS, USSD, WAP and Airtel Live.

Airtel’s dominance in the mobile market is of special significance in this deployment since local information search is a natural application in the mobile platform besides communication and entertainment. The mobile-based local information search will be supported by targeted, relevant advertising, based on the users’ intent identified through the search query. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Services, Bharti Airtel added, “It is Airtel and asklaila’s joint belief that a non-intrusive, intent-driven advertising model, with the consumer in mind, is the way forward on the mobile platform. This partnership has the potential to revolutionize the market dynamics in mobile advertising.”

Kiran Konduri, co-founder, asklaila said, “We have seen tremendous growth in the usage of our service and having telecom leader Airtel as our partner will help us reach many more users, besides giving a significant fillip to mobile advertising and the use of mobile devices to search for city information.”

The multi-mode mobile version of Airtel city search, powered by asklaila, effectively addresses two major challenges - providing accurate, credible and actionable local information; and ground-up mobile-specific enhancements to leverage the advantage of multiple mobile modes. This partnership will enable users’ phones across price ranges – from an entry level Rs. 2,000 handset to a high-end, feature rich Rs. 35,000 mobile phone. The user experience is consistent and simple across all 4 modes, giving the user freedom to select an appropriate mode based on need and context.

Asklaila’s service will be tightly integrated with key Airtel mobile modes such as:

Airtel users can text the keyword to get accurate city information. For example, ‘locate pizza gurgaon’ and SMS it to 54321 to get relevant local information free of cost. USSD is a faster channel than the text-messaging platform and GPRS. This is an instant messaging type phone service and can be used in even basic phone models. Local search will be integrated in the Airtel service menu, under the Airtel Live brand.A special, mobile-friendly user interface powers the asklaila WAP portal that is available through any Airtel GPRS-enabled handset