Ideas|Products|Startups|VCs

Travelomy is a next-generation travel guide that packs features based on rich content, geo-location and social media in a way that provides practical, useful information to a traveller.

Travelomy is product developed by Ciafo, which is a technology startup based out of Bangalore,  Co-founded by Gurjit Sidhu and Amarpreet Kalkat in April 2010. Both Sidhu and Kalkat have spent the last 10 years building internet products at some of the most admired companies, earlier having graduated from IIM Calcutta and IIM Kozhikode

Travelomy has rich content (currently delivered through 6000+ photos and videos) virtually brings places alive for the traveller even before getting there, geo-location coordinates for all places (currently ~5000) and the user himself ensure that he always knows what exactly is around him, and what is the best way to reach there.

The social media integration enables the traveller to seek and share latest information over the social streams, thereby making sure that he is never out of touch with his social graph.  For the more outdoorsy or adventurous traveller, Travelomy provides activities, where rich information like dynamic route maps, itinerary, gear, tools, expertise level is put together for things like trekking, biking, rock climbing, river rafting etc.

South Asia is the first step for Travelomy and an opportunity to validate its unique concept; it would gradually be expanding globally over the next few quarters.

How Travelomy is different:

While online travel guides have existed for long, Travelomy aims to challenge the status-quo by virtue of the way it leverages web 2.0 technologies to provide simlified travel information. It focuses on four key aspects – rich content, geo-location, social media and activities; and uses them effectively to build a truly valuable information source for the user.

Travelomy also differentiates itself in the way it collects and presents information. Almost all of the content on Travelomy is crowdsourced in a wiki format and can be updated by any user who is signed-in.

Travelomy competes with prominent players like MustseeIndia, TripAdvisor, WikiTravel, LonelyPlanet.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Have you ever imagined web apps being delivered over voice? Majority of us would have thought its not feasible but a hyderabad based startup KooKoo has done it. KooKoo acts as an interface between your applications and the telephony world, thus creating another form of delivery channel for your web application.

KooKoo is the simplest and easiest way to build telecom applications IVRs, office PBX and outbound campaigns. KooKoo just performs telephony functions. It does not know anything about your application and it does not store your data. KooKoo is an interface between your web application and the caller. It takes phone commands from you and executes them on your behalf to the caller.The best way to think of KooKoo is as just another web page in your application. Only difference is, the web page is accessible from the phone rather than the browser

Kookoo can be a boon to Indian e-commerce space as majority of the customers would prefer telephones to interact with you rather than website.

So how does it work –

1.) Customer will call a specific telephone number and enter a pin.

2.) KooKoo will answer the call and will also make a HTTP call to your application.

3.) Your application will get the request and respond back to the request with an XML. The XML sent back by the server is then parsed by KooKoo.

4.) Based on the XML response, appropriate message is played back by KooKoo for the end user.

KooKoo support multiple languages like Java, PHP etc., allows you to send SMS and also supports payment processing.

KooKoo offers a free trial with a shared port.  As part of the free trial usage account, you will get a default phone number used by all the KooKoo free applications. Also, your application will get a pin number using which you can access your application.

Paid category pricing starts from Rs 2000 per port, KooKoo also offers a shared port model where the pricing is 1/4th of the original price.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Gurgaon based personal finance startup iTrust Financial Advisors has been acquired by Karvy Private Wealth, the deal details has not been disclosed. Karvy has bought all the assets and operations of iTrust which mainly operated in NCR, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

iTrust was founded in mid 2006 by Dhruv Agarwala and Kartik Varma both Haravard Business School Graduate. iTrust raised investment in 2007 from Angel investors and have 150+ workforce Pan India.

iTrust works on both online and offline model, engages with users in their home loan, personal loan, mutual funds and other financial product execution. They charge fees from product manufacturing firms by selling their products and also on commission basis from end customers for processing their loan documents.

On iTrust platform a user can create and track financial planning, iTrust also has immense information on loans, life insurance, health insurance and user can gain information on the processes, can analyze/compare various financial products from manufacturers.

With this acquisition, Karvy will grow its wealth management and financial planning business. This will also enable the company to enter tax preparation and filing service thereby becoming one of the largest non banking wealth management businesses.

Lets have a look at monthly traction at iTrust -

-Hitesh, vcBYtes.com

Most of the people find it difficult to maintain medical records and doesn’t find them when its needed the most , Healthizen is here to solve this problem This portal allows user  to upload their medical details – from their weight and height, doctor prescriptions, lab tests results, details of surgeries undergone, X-Ray, MRI scan, ECG and other reports.

Details on the portal are accessible anytime, anywhere and user need not carry their files and records of medical history every time they  visit a doctor.

Healthizen is a pune based startup founded by Anand Anupam, an IIT-IIM graduate. Healthizen mission is to have centralized information platform and reduce the information asymmetry in the health care space and develop the system by placing patients at the center of the ecosystem.

Ina addition to providing a ready-to-use platform for online storage, this portal has also a panel having doctors and health experts, who help the users with general health tips as well as second opinion whenever required.

Healthizen has a big shopping section where a user can find health related products like health food, specialized health accessories, portable testing equipments etc.

Lets have a look at the monthly traction at Healthizen:

Its a decent statistics to begin with, check out Healthizen and share your views.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Cyocs enables you to create your own classified site to meet your needs, Its totally free to create a classified site and it will be a sub-site of Cyocs and other users can post in the classified site.

Cyocs has pretty simple registration process, User interface is highly intuitive. User can create a classified site and can invite other members to use it and also members can access any classified site by searching, and can post it. There is no restriction on number of classified sites a user can join, but user can post only in those classified sites which user has joined. To know how many sites user has joined, user can click ‘Manage’ tab in the dashboard.

Cyocs also provides editable templates to users to speed up the site creation process, template auto fills the needed data.

Like other classified sites, CYOCS intent to monetize from advertisements and primarily through Google Ad-sense. It encourages Ad revenue sharing from the classified site owner,

Subsite Owners can earn revenue using their Google Adsense account. Subsite owners must have a valid adsense account; and they must provide your Adsense Id to Cyocs so that ads shall be served in the Cyocs sites you have created. Cyocs will allocate a certain number of ad slots for the subsite owners in the sites they create. Not all ad spaces/slots available will be provided to subsite owner. Cyocs reserves some slots for itself and some slots will be allocated for subsite Owner.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com