We all know that India is the land of outsourcing. India has the second largest mobile phone market in the world. Well, unfortunately, Internet usage in India is still not that good. That is why, you will not find too many websites on Indian cities. fullhyd.com is a website about Hyderabad. The other day, the founder of fullhyd.com posted a comment in the entry about Hyderabad of this blog written by my co-blogger Mehdi Hasan and I visited the website. I was impressed with the website fullhyd.com and if you are anyway interested about Hyderabad then I strongly recommend you to visit it.
Kishore Kadiyala is the founder of this website and he gave me an interview for SouthAsiaBiz through email. Here is the interview for the readers:
SouthAsiaBiz: When did you set up the website and why? Tell us something about its background story?
Kishore Kadiyala: fullhyd.com started in 2000, and after surviving the dotcom bust from 2000-2003, started work on a new version aiming to incorporate the best features of the Internet - technology and usability - and to be the most comprehensive local guide anywhere. This aim led us to independently undertake a survey of the city, using several hundred people to get into most nooks and crannies to map out various places, and provide directions to reach places.
This was an unprecedented effort since, unlike US/Europe cities, Hyderabad cannot be mapped using computer algorithms - there can never be a MapQuest for Hyderabad, in terms of technological ability to say give directions between 2 addresses. The city was not built in a planned manner, and so we had to individually visit tens of thousands of places to physically plot them on a map and give closest landmarks and directions.
As a result, the version took 4 years to create - identifying tens of thousands of places in hundreds of categories, classifiying them, finding more information about each place (e. g. room rents for hotels or courses offered for colleges), visiting the places, mapping them, quality control while monitoring hundreds of people doing this work, state-of-the-art technology to put everything together and create an intuitive display, and last but not least, enormous editorial (for example, we have 250 restaurant reviews and 120 cinema hall reviews by professional writers).
I started fullhyd.com with financial support from friends - I am a graduate of IIT Madras and IIM Calcutta, and worked for 2 years for India’s largest private sector bank before starting fullhyd.com.
fullhyd.com aims to be 3 things:
a. a comprehensive and easily searchable, and continuously updated, yellow pages guide to Hyderabad
b. a Hyderabadi community where people rate and review places, discuss various things with each other, blog, buy and sell used items to each other (classifieds), find friends/dates etc.
c. an arts and entertainment guide that lists all events, movies and sales happening in town, providing previews/reviews of all.
SouthAsiaBiz: What is your major source of revenue? How are you doing so far about earning money through the website?
Kishore Kadiyala: Advertising has been the major source so far, and revenues are quickly picking up since we started contextual text ads for about $2 per month. There is a universe of local merchants who cannot take even a classified ad in a daily newspaper, but still can have a small ad budget, and we are catering to those.
We also have other online advertisers, and aim to soon provide services (local info) on mobile phones and add that as a revenue source.
SouthAsiaBiz: How many visitors browse the site on a typical day and what are the services you offer for your visitors?
Kishore Kadiyala: We had 1,20,000 unique visitors in the month of March 2008 (aggregate in the month). We aim to take that to 500,000 by the end of 2008. I have listed services earlier.
SouthAsiaBiz: How many persons are working for the website? Where is your office located?
Kishore Kadiyala: About 10 now, and we work from Masab Tank.
SouthAsiaBiz: Tell us something about life in Hyderabad for young people?
Kishore Kadiyala: That is a very, very broad question :). The first thing that comes to mind these days about Hyderabad is traffic - how much time and effort it takes to get from A to B. Then, how easy it is to get jobs - whether in software companies or call centres. Any youngster who is reasonably fluent in English or has put some effort with computer courses is assured of a job.
There are also a lot of places to go and things to do for youngsters with money - pubs, multiplexes, malls. People are much more liberal than they were even a decade back, thanks to all the party pages in the newspapers and the glorification of hedonism by both the print and the electronic media at the expense of some traditional values.
There are a lot of other things. Perhaps you could read this article we wrote:
http://www.fullhyd.com/articles/3
Kishore Kadiyala: I guess it has mostly to do with the promotion Chandrababu Naidu did in a 9-year stint in office. He brought several world-class academic institutions (ISB, IIIT) that put Hyderabad on the world map, and offered several incentives to the world’s top companies to come here. As the numbers built, they started building faster.
SouthAsiabiz: While browsing your website, I could not find detailed information about Hyderabad (like its history, historical attraction, tourist places, universities etc). Do you have any plan to include this kind of information in near future?
Kishore Kadiyala: I guess you perhaps missed it out. Please click on the tab “Hyderabad 101” on the home page - it has most of what you have spoken about. We have write-ups of about 60 tourist attractions, too - the link is on the home page (http://www.fullhyd.com/search/?type=locations&cat=Attractions). We have listings of all universities, too. We are perhaps the largest education directory for Hyderabad.
http://www.fullhyd.com/home/section/yellowpages
Indian cities, and also get even more professional and systematic by creating
A much bigger team. In the short term, we want to kick off mobile phone services - all of fullhyd.com should be accessible through mobile phones.
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