Category — Profiling Indian Startups

(This review is based on interactions I had with the founders of OLX, an international online classifieds and auctions website. OLX is launching the Indian edition of its website and is looking to customize it to the Indian context through reviews/ user feedback received from Indian bloggers)

OLX stands for ‘OnLine Exchange‘ and it is positioned as the ‘next generation online classifieds and auctions website‘. The company has offices in NY and Buenos Aires. It wants to be a significant player in the online ecommerce space in the emerging markets of the world (as is apparent from country specific websites that are launching - India, Mexico, South Africa, New Zealand, Hong Kong etc).

OLX has been co-founded by two successful international tech entrepreneurs, Fabrice Grinda & Alec Oxenford. Between them, they have founded successful web businesses like Zingy.com, the largest mobile Media Company in the Americas and DeRemate.com, a leading online auction site in Latin America. Alec also has an Indian connection, as he was an early stage investor in India’s leading ecommerce site, Bazzee.com (he has since exited from that venture).

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TaaZZa in Hindi (rather Urdu) means ‘fresh’ ; in the context of a news aggregator, it signifies fresh news being streamed to you as and when it happens. But having seen the demo of the yet to be launched website, I think TaaZZa also brings a ‘taaza’ set of design ideas to this domain.

TaaZZa is the brainchild of Arjun Ram, who belongs to Chennai but works in the US. He started working on the project three months ago and seems to have done a great job in the short time. TaaZZa’s tagline is ‘Desh-Videsh-Sandesh’ - I think it’s simple, catchy and appropriate for the target audience.

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The Web2.0 era has spawned a bunch of Indian startups in the consumer internet space, most of them in the mass-market, B2C space. One company that is making the right moves and going places (notwithstanding the naukri.com episode) is Bixee, the Bangalore based website.

Bixee has had two websites for a while: glogblog.com - a community based classifieds site (with a tongue twisting name) and bixee.com - the job aggregator site; while the classifieds site is loosely modeled on Craigslist, the job site is (to my mind) the first Indian aggregator site worth any mention. A few days back, Bixee launched Pixrat, a cool social photo bookmaking tool (somewhat like flikr-delicious hybrid); also around the corner is a real estate site allbhk.com (not yet launched) - I guess its likely to be another aggregator site for properties & real estate.

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