Tolmolbol.com - Get Local, Be Vocal

The recently happened Proto.in conference has helped a lot of new startups to launch their products. One such is Pennywise solutions Limited, started by a group of BITSians. It’s very special to me, because its VP Mr. Pavan Pochu is very close to me. I have seen the company through its different phases. Only few have the guts to quit their jobs in MNC’s like Morgan Stanley, CTS and etc.., to take up the challenges of a startup. Pennywise has launched a community based neighborhood portal, Tolmolbol.com.

The hottest trend in internet now is friendship networking and community based sites. The tech savvy users now have graduated from the level of using generic terms in search engines to being specific about what they want. They demand more and more specific and local information. This trend has opened up the gates for local search engines. Tolmolbol is a Web 2.0 product positioned as your neighborhood site and it makes use of the community model.

What you can do @ Tolmolbol?

• Find what is so great and not so great about local Businesses and Services in your city (Like restaurants, shops, theatres)
• Know the opinion of others from the reviews
• Bookmark the reviews you like, for future reference
• Know what is cooking in your city from the Events section
• Search and Post Classifieds
• Post and get answers for your questions
• And also it adds up as friendship networking site to stay connected with your buddies
  

Things I like Tolmolbol to do

• Maps, Businesses and services listing accompanied by maps of the locality, like what you have in yelp.com. Google Earth even pops up yelp review from its site for local business
• A two column one instead of the three column design they have now, which makes it look a bit congested. And it looks like they wanted to have as many things as possible in a single page.
  

Its success depends on how far it can tap in to community model. Most of the net users are just consumers of information; people become lazy when it comes to contributing to the community.

I wish Tolmolbol won’t end up as Desi Yelp. Most Indian sites which tried to replicate the US success stories have become mere Desi clones. They try to differentiate themselves from yelp, with lot more options (Like Classifieds and Events).

It’s in Beta stage now, and it is looking for your feedbacks and comments to improve. I wish all success to the Tolmolbol team.

Update 1: Tolmolbol team informed me that they are working on maps. Let’s wait and watch as it would be really challenging, since Google Maps for Local business is not available for India and there is no proper maps for most of the Indian cities, like US or other countries.