www.tolmolbol.com

Today's post is going to talk about this cool website that my friends have launched. Its called tolmolbol. You can click on that to see the website.

So, before we go into what the website is all about - lets talk about the people. My batchmates from BITS Pilani who had this entrepreneurial urge to do it really big embarked on this great journey of running a software services firm. They quit their jobs in Morgan Stanley and the biggest of names in the IT Sector and made a bold start. They did extremely well for themselves. In fact, I hadnt met them for more than 4 years and I had the opportunity to meet them yesterday. I was totally amazed. I was telling them that I wouldnt have done this. You can read more about the people on the ABOUT page of the website.

Anyway, the new venture called tolmolbol.com is based on the WEB 2.0 concept. This website is getting to be what every other information exchange wants to be in the next stage of their business. In the business of providing content to the visitors, it has become imperative that the Googles and the Yahoos in the various locations they are present, to focus on the needs of specific segments of people. In a study that we made on campus about Google and the future of the search industry, we found out from a lot of secondary data that the next step is to get more local. Something like the yellow pages. People now have graduated to a level where they are looking for just the right information. And this is not about some news item or some research report. Its more about information within a city for movies, restaurants, theatre, transport etc. TolMolBol is trying to exactly achieve that purpose.

I have registered under their Hyderabad users community. There are so many other cities under which one can register. Not just the metros and the next best ones. There are so many tier-2 and tier-3 cities on the site. The primary motive is to get net savvy people from all these cities to contribute and make information about their city available to other visitors. The concept of GLOCAL kicks in here. Even though this might sound a bit cliched and common to a lot of people in the West, it plays a key role in a country like India where there is a lack of quality information. And this site is trying to achieve that purpose by giving the members the choice to comment and make stuff about their city popular.

And yesterday, my friends who have also conceptualised the website walked me through certain aspects of the site that I hadnt spent time on. The restaurant search was one. So when you type "coffee" in the search tab and then "banjara hills" in the location tab, it shows you the list of all 24 Hr Coffee shops in that area. that was actually awesome. i mean for people like us in ISB who keep fishing for restaurants and other places ti spend the weekends, this is actually cool. Further more, you can SMS the details of that particular place or whatever new item that was to your mobile phone. So you neednt necessarily go back and visit the website to know the address of the place or whatever. You get the details on your phone and you can just zip off to that place.

And again, any community based portal work only because of the members within the community. so, we go back to Metcalfe's Law that states - if there are n people in the network, and the the value of the network for every individual is proportional to the number of other users, then the total value of the network is proportional to N-Square minus N. Well, this is MBA funda, but basically this states that the power of the network is what helps the network run. Very simply said, if I were the only person who bought a cell-phone, then what use do i get from it? I maximize my utility only when others buy it. Thats the bottomline.

In conclusion - please visit this website and contribute to your community.