Asklaila is an Indian local search engines integrates local search, classifieds and ecommerce services, enhanced by member blogs, answers, reviews and ratings in marketplaces including: property, cars, home needs, office needs, education and training, lifestyle, movies, gadgets, travel and dining etc.
The company’s founders, Kiran Konduri and Shriram Adukoorie, think there is a gap in the local information space that needs to be filled with correct and serachable information.Konduri is a serial entrepreneur as he set up and sold companies like Zephyr Software (to Infospace for $40 million) and Cogniti Inc. Adukoorie has been a veteran internet professional, and has set up MSN portal in six countries including India and South East Asia as a regional head for the . Both have previously worked at Microsoft and Wipro.
Few years ago, Shriram Adukoorie was desperately trying to find his favourite clothes retailer in Delhi. But his Internet query failed to list any of its outlets in the city. To his surprise, however, the very next day he came across not one, but three outlets, while mall-hopping in Gurgaon. That’s when he knew they had to develop a search engine that specifically catered to what Indians were looking for. Soon, in August 2007, the local search engine Asklaila.com was born—to help people find online what they wanted locally.
They wanted to have some personality to the site because most people go and ask friends and families and they thought they will find it easier to relate with somebody like Laila. They had internal names for their systems and servers. Laila was one of the names and the 22 year old technology guys loved a name like Laila. So Shriram Adukoorie proposed Laila as a name, everybody was up for it.
The company is building local information on food, events, lifestyle and shopping etc from scratch and making it available for search from its own database (instead of the world wide web). The content is supplemented by reviews too.
