Anyways the main question here is am I looking at comparing a search engine with an
"answer engine"? This would be unfair to some extent. Also,the question arises for the answer engine that, is that everytime I am "searching" something, am I looking for a an exact "answer"? Sometimes yes and sometimes no.
I listened to the interview of Sameer Sisodia (co-founder Zook) on Kiruba's show, had some good perspectives on the concept of choices and answers. I am intrigued, isn't web 2.0 and the "mobile 2.0" about choices produced by community based knowledge bank rather than anwers provided on the based of yellow page database. I really want to know why is Zook not calling itself mobile based yellow page?
There is another perspective of the market realisation. Given that fact that Indian telecom operators are still offering internet over GPRS and the handsets availble in the market are not that mobile-web user friendly, how much can Zook capitalise in this kind of market with paying hefty amounts of revenue shared with the operators?
I appreciate they have given an SMS based querying capability to the service. But if
the service just returns yellow page results, it's no good.
But Sameer mentioned in his interview that they are trying to build a new community around. It will be interesting to see the commnutiy interplay around Zook.
I suppose with the dimishing returns( not that musch diminished), everybody is trying to get into the mobile webspace including giants like Google,MSN etc.
Congratulations and Good luck to Zook's team for an innovative service, it will be good to see a big sucess in mobile webspace.
Here is the podcast from Kiruba's show for Sameer's interview.
http://www.podtech.net/home/3820/sameer-co-founder-of-zook-on-challenges-of-mobile-search
Blogged with the Flock Browser
1 comment:
Thanks for the mention!
Yes, Zook is not merely a yellow pages service and we encourage users to go ahead and ask any factual information they might want to get on the move - distance between Bangalore and Ooty? Who was the last Mughal emperor? JetLite flights from Hyd to Blore? Dev Anand ringtone?
We also have a different take on how this data will be found - a lot many needs are best served by best-of-breed partners, the web is the source for huge amount of info, and finally, there are quite a few questions only the community can make sense of, or knows the answer to. We do not "own" the data, but merely the responsibility to connect you to the right source of information as best as we can.
Can we beat Google ? Lets say, at the moment, we're just trying to frame the rules of the game :) Yes, mobile search has not quite been figured out by the biggies, and we hope to do a good enough job of it to be the best way to find info on the go.
So far we're limited to users in India (the full experience including reactive responses by SMSes when needed, i.e.) but we will be expanding to other geographies for sure.
Post a Comment