Multifaceted Web Portals for Diversified Business
By Pankaj Maru
Mumbai, May 9, 2008

The Internet is becoming a virtual home to myriad web-portals that dish out a variety of business services. Apart from the regular websites that are the online avatars of businesses, there are some unique ones too. Let us take a look at some of these that cater to some special needs of the people.

Chennai based Sulekha.com is among the top classifieds and yellow pages web portal of India. What makes this classified portal unique is that it offers an alert mechanism for the users, who post classified ads for any requirements such as any service or goods.

Incase there's no related information or details available for any posted query at any particular point of time, with the alert mechanism, the portal will revert back to the user via sms, email or a mobile call. This feature helps the users and offers better support system.

"We have a 40 person technical staff that develops and maintains the portal. Our portal uses various parameters for matching components of posted queries. Technologies such as Ajax, CSS 2.0, and Silverlight based on Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 remains the core component of our web operations," says S Sreenivasan, vice president of (Product Development) Sulekha.com.

Similarly, Lucknow based AdvertisementIndia.com, an online venture of WYSIWYG Advertising, is an interactive ad web portal. The portal strives to make the tedious task of placing advertisements, simple and easy with a mouse click.

This ad portal claims to offer services of placing advertisements in any newspaper of India. According to the director and creative head of AdvertisementIndia.com, Roopesh Agrawal, "Our web portal allows easy placement of ads in any newspaper in India as well as abroad and also offers free ad designing solutions to the people as per their budgets."

"AdvertisementIndia.com has the easy facility for users, where they fill-up simple forms and specifications of the advertisements along with the name of the newspaper that they want their ad to be published in," explains Gaurav Dhingra, director IT of AdvertismentIndia.com. Dhingra is also the CEO cum Web Strategist of DigitallyDefined, a Delhi based web designing company.

"Following the form submission, the design team works on the ad layout and graphics. The user is charged accordingly. While most newspaper portals restrict the users from placing ads in another daily, our portal doesn't have such restrictions," adds Dhingra.

While the above two portals are commercial in nature, BharatBloodBank.com, BharatEyeBank.org and BharatMatrimony.com developed by Consim Info based in Chennai are unique social websites that aim to help people. Consim Info, also have other commercial portals catering to jobs, real estates, automobiles, and financial services.

"Indians still prefer community based marriages. And so, we decided to take this initiative on a larger scale using the internet that allows the convenience, comfort, and more variety in searching profiles of prospective life partners," says Murugaval Janakiraman, CEO of Consim Info.

Moreover, "In order to meet the needs of different communities, within the Bharatmartimony.com there are sections each catering to a particular community such as Gujarati, Sindhi, Punjabi, Marathi and many more," he adds.

Janakiraman points out that the portal's aim is to offer a real life matching experience. The portal has features like real time horoscope generation, voice based matrimony and authentication of profile's contact number by IVR (interactive voice response) system. In addition, friends and relatives can add references, comments, and recommendations to help the individual's profile for matching.

"With Bharatbloodbank.com, people interested to donate blood as well as people in need for blood can have better access to the database. Also, the site educates readers and users with tips and information about blood donation," suggest Janakiraman.

"Internet is a powerful tool for catering to various social services and it's a means to help needy people. Similarly, Bharateyebank.org is an attempt to serve the society and address the issue of blindness," he concludes.


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