AskLaila local search service now available on Airtel Mobile, DTH, AirtelLive.com

Local search engine AskLaila.com has partnered with Airtel to make its services available for Airtel subscribers who will be able to search for local listings via mobile (SMS/WAP), DTH or internet (AirtelLive.com) across 400 different categories in six cities in India. Incidentally, Airtel mobile already has a partnership with Google for local search.

“It’s a consumer service whereby AskLaila.com has mapped local business listings in six cities -- Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore. We will be expanding our local search to 13 cities by 2008-end,” Sanjay Gupta, CMO, Bharti Airtel, has said.

The revenue model for local search, according to Airtel, will be twofold. One from listings -- paid listings will be sprinkled with stardust on the screen. The other model is through lead generation -- Airtel-AskLaila will charge the advertiser a fixed fee per lead generated through local search. [Source: Economic Times ]

According to AskLaila, Airtel mobile subscribers can get information about local listings by sending an SMS with the relevant text (for example, ‘locate pizza gurgaon’) to 54321. The local search service would also be available on USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), an instant messaging type phone service which is believed to be faster than simple SMS or GPRS. This is accessible under Airtel Live USSD portal by dialling *321#.

Kiran Konduri, co-founder, AskLaila, has 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.”