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Quick Update: 90di comes up with an update on their blog about the  points discussed by us. Thanks 90di team.

• 90di is a very innovative and very much needed travel guide.
• Quite excellent search for well known places.
• Does not give satisfactory results when your search for lesser known or smaller towns.
• Excellent online interface.

Here goes our second post in the series of start-up reviews and interviews. Today it is the turn of Ninety Degree Internet Software Private Limited which is creating quite a lot of buzz with 90di.com. 90di.com is  WEB 3.0, the intelligent web as they would say. In brief, it is a  travel search from Ninety Degree Internet Software Private Limited . We have gone through the site ourselves and done some test searches ourselves, to see what the fuss was all about. We must say that the site did impress us with its easy-on-the-eye simple user interface and its functionality to a certain extent.Firstly, we would like to acknowledge the fact that this is a novel attempt at having all the possible travel searches under one roof. However, that tag comes with its portion of setbacks.

Before you go on to read our analysis, lets give a peek into how this thing works and when it fails you.

• The first search we did was a simple one -- Mumbai to Cuttack. Cuttack is a well known town situated in Orissa. The results were quite satisfactory. We got good results for direct routes and a list of backup indirect routes.

• The second search we did was a little more difficult one -- Mumbai to Nazira. Some background -- Nazira is a small town in Assam, but still a very important one. ONGC has a very big colony in Nazira. Global giants like Schlumberger and Halliburton have their working bases in Nazira. The results which we got were pretty disappointing. No matching results found. We were hoping that 90di would list out a train to Nizamuddin and then the Dibrugarh Rajdhani Express and then a bus from Dibrugarh to Nazira. But, we were disappointed.

• The third search was a complex one -- Mumbai to Jammu via Lucknow. The intent was to search for break journey results. But we were disappointed when the search was not sorted by relevance. The first few results were direct routes to Jammu, bypassing the ‘via Lucknow’ condition. Probably a bit more work has to done by the 90di team on identifying tags like via and listing the search result according to relevance.

Now lets begin our analysis. Positives first. When it comes to major cities and the related travel information available, 90di.com does a very good job. In addition to the different trains available and their timings it gives you the facility to check the availability of seats. After which you can book your tickets on IRCTC.

So far so good. This feature works great between major towns and cities and to be more specific, for direct routes. If someone wants to travel from Bangalore to Kolkata via Mumbai , the search engine starts to stutter. It gives you information on the direct route first and at the fag end of the list you get to see a very vague set of options that conform to your search criteria. That defeats the purpose of such an offering. It is not always that travelers take direct trains, for a variety of reasons. To them, these results would be disappointing considering the fact that their criteria was given last preference and threw irrelevant data. Google as a search engine prospered only because they believed in placing relevant information at the top of the list, thus achieving their goal of lessening the time spent by the user in getting his information.

The cracks seem to get a lot wider when you search for information between lesser known routes. We admit that a majority of the urban population would be interested in the more popular sectors of travel, but taking only that portion of the population into account would be to miss the whole point of creating such a service. This point becomes more relevant when we consider someone who would need the services of this website, only when he needs to go the lesser known places. His purpose would be defeated in such a scenario.

90di still has a long way to go on a few more things. The fact that 90di gets all its information from online sources keeps the whole 90di team quite busy in checking that whether the information available is the latest one or not. They are doing a commendable job at this one, but still a long way to go. Until and unless they create a very solid offline mode for collecting and validating data, the information provided by 90di cannot be very reliable. It would paint a very sorry picture for 90di if they listed a train timing which was updated a few days ago. We do not intend to question their accountability for the data they provide, but, when we recommend a service to our readers we provide a crystal-clear picture of what they should expect.

One major positive is that, whether or not a route exists between two stations, the search engine recommends the route closest to the one that has been entered. That feature has proven accurate in many cases that we had tested. Overall the intent and package of 90di.com is commendable. Barring the glitches that we had mentioned, it is an extremely useful site. It does have a long way to go before it becomes the one-stop-shop for all travel related searches , but definitely one to be looked-out for.

That being said, we would like you to hear what one of the founders of 90di.com has to say for himself about his pet project and his advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. We got an opportunity to ask him a few questions that might interest you and help you in judging the site yourself. We would like to take this opportunity and thank Kiran for taking time off his busy schedule to help us understand what 90di is all about.

Following is the transcript of our chat with him :

Microreviews: Hi Kiran. Good evening…can we get started?

Kiran: Good evening…yes lets start.

Microreviews: Ok…we have used 90di.com…but lets hear about it in your own words.

Kiran: 90di.com is a vertical search engine. Google and others are horizontal search engines. They give information on almost anything, but not the complete information.Vertical search covers information that is deeply hidden in the Internet and focusing on one particular domain, like travel.

Microreviews: Lets start with the 90di team. I guess you are a group of 3 people. Maybe we could start with a small introduction about your team.

Kiran: Yes, we are three people…Mr. Khushnood Naqvi, Abhinit Kumar and myself. All of us earlier worked at Infosys, Bangalore.

Microreviews: And what background do you all guys have in travel?

Kiran: Khushnood worked for 12 years at Infy and we both worked together for 4 years. None of us were precisely in travel related domain to say. We started discussing the ideas about starting something on our own…

…In US kayak.com was the most popular travel search site. We have Flight and Train modes of travel which covers most part of India.  But no websites used to give the routes which involved mixed-mode routes. And we saw a scope here.

Microreviews: So When did u actually start working on this?

Kiran: We agreed upon this and we both quit Infy and started Ninety Degree Internet Software Private Limited. We started our company in mid May 2007. And our initial version was up in September 2007.

Microreviews: Wow…but how did you formulate the  travel logic so easily…that too within 4 months flat?

Kiran: (smiles)

Microreviews: We mean…what logic did you use?

Kiran: The logic was not travel specific. It was a routing algorithm which we came up with. And, since we all were from technical background, we didn’t face much problem in this area (development).

Microreviews: You must be Comp Sc grads we are assuming…from which college?

Kiran: Khushnood holds a Bachelors of  Technology degree in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering from IIT Kharagpur. I am a MCA graduate from Mangalore university. Abhinit Kumar holds a Bachelors degree in Information Technology from Delhi University.

Microreviews: Okay, great…and is the algorithm pretty complex?

Kiran: Algorithm is not hi-fi, but definitely a complex bit of code, which needs to be refined now and then.

Microreviews: That was the algorithm part…which you had to develop…probably that must have been the easier part. We guess the difficult part would have been to get so much of travel database built.

Kiran: The information was freely available on the Internet. We developed some crawlers to get that information.

Microreviews: And we heard that the Indian railways API is very costly…have you used it?

Kiran: No we have not used their APIs.

Microreviews: Wow…that means you built some great crawlers.

Kiran: You may say that…(smiles)

Microreviews: How do you show up the railway data then…to what granularity do you plan to go? Like how are you parsing the response?

Kiran: It is similar to how we interpret the data manually, i.e, using our browsers. The crawlers are kind of good enough to change the way they look for the data in a given web page.

Microreviews: Okay…something like web page scrapping.

Kiran: Yes.

Microreviews: So how do your crawlers know that which of the train schedule is the latest one? Are you caching and on availability you are making the request?

Kiran: Schedules…it is challenge to keep it updated…definitely, we do a lot of caching.

Microreviews: So how difficult is it for only 3 of you to maintain and update so much of data?

Kiran: Actually it is not that much difficult. Within one day we can update all the data.And it is a parallel and ongoing activity for us.

Microreviews : We have checked your search quiet a bit…. there is still some work…on rural India. Are you taking that up sometime in the future.

Kiran: We want to become the Google for travel search in India. Hopefully we will cover all the travel related information for any place in India. We are working towards that.

Microreviews: But we see one roadblock here…your data is totally dependent on what is available on the internet.

Kiran: Since we are in Internet space, yes our current source is the Internet. But we are also looking at user driven data also.

Microreviews: Could our elaborate a more on that…and how you intend to collect that data?

Kiran: One can avail our services only if he/she uses Internet. So, if some information is not available, they can share the info with us…simple, which many are doing already..

Microreviews: Okay.

Kiran: A social touch…(smiles).

Microreviews: So what is the next thing we are going to see from your team?

Kiran: We are planning to integrate with small and medium travel agents. We are parallely working on some consulting also. But, 90di.com will be our child.

Microreviews: But kiran…time and again one doubt comes up to us that which of the data is credible and which is not? Did you have any good user feedbacks till now?

Kiran: I guess you are referring to the user driven data. Well, we do get lots of  feedbacks. Good and Bad. Bad helps us to improve. Good keeps us going.

Microreviews: So what is the accountability quotient for the data which you provide online?

Kiran: Since we show the data from other sources -- Railways, Airlines, bus providers, we can’t guarantee 100%. But we do try to keep it up to date and correct.

Microreviews: So what is the next thing we are going to see from your team? Even if it is outside 90di.com.

Kiran: As you are aware, we have recently launched a twitter statistics on India, http://www.90di.com/twitter/ which is becoming popular.

Microreviews: Yes,we have seen that.

Kiran: We are planning to do something in that area. Also as I said earlier, we are planning couple of things to the small and medium travel agnets. We already have a online travel agnets directory, which many don’t know -- 90di.com/travelagent/

Microreviews: Okay…on to the business model…what is the revenue source? We do not really see much.

Kiran: We are self funded. The revenue model is through referrals.

Microreviews: Referrals…can u elaborate a bit?

Kiran: We send highly qualified leads to the airlines and bus provider/booking sites. When a user searches on 90di.com, the book link takes them directly to the actual provider’s booking page.

Microreviews: Okay…and are you taking up any work outside your products like in service industry…and the prospects for a job at your place? For others…is that an option?

Kiran: (smiles)  Good question. The answer is “Yes, but not now”.

Microreviews: And your marketing is completely social media based we guess?

Kiran : We are focusing on print media as well. Have been covered by few leading news papers like The Hindu. Some links are available at http://90di.com/travel/getBuzzPage

Microreviews: What are the average hit counts you get in a day?

Kiran : We get couple of thousand searches daily. We started some kind of marketing very recently. Since last 3-4 months, the traffic is increasing rapidly on month by month basis.

Microreviews: Thats great to hear. And do you have a small message for the people starting up?

Kiran: We have lot of messages to say by our learning in these 2 years. Be focused on your product, be ready to accept  lots of criticism. Better to be self-funded rather than VC-funded.

Microreviews: Well said…

Kiran: “Remember that things take much longer than you plan for”

Microreviews: Thanks a lot for your time…you were brilliant. We shall publish this tomorrow on our collaborative blog.

Kiran: Very kind of you. Looking forward to that.

Microreviews: Yeah…will keep taking updates from you on 90di and more.

That concludes our preliminary analysis of www.90di.com. We will keep you updated on further improvements and updates that may be of importance and use to you.

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