Very often, we end up finding that one special person we spent hours looking for, just a class, department or a street away. It was this realisation that led Kaviraj and a group of students from Sathyabama University in Chennai to create a neighbourhood networking site called areapal.com.
The site, which was in a Beta testing phase for six months, opened to students in Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad in January 2009.
To start off, a few students were sent invitations to register as members and each of them were in turn allowed to invite 50 others to become members.
Currently, the site boasts of 40,000 registrations from all over South India and is growing to include students from every other metro in the country.
“While there are many popular social networking sites, none of them are India-centric. Nor are they modeled to cater to the needs of Indian users.
“I wanted to create a new way of networking for students, where they can find friends in their immediate neighbourhood or in any other area in the city where they reside,” says 27-year-old Kaviraj, who holds a masters degree in computer science.
Additionally, the site also provides user generated news, events, and marketplace information based on the user’s area.
“We are aiming to build topical, local intelligence that is not available even on a Google search. For instance, if you search for the best restaurant in a particular locality in Bengaluru, you will receive information uploaded by users who live there and know which places are upcoming, which restaurants are peaking and which ones are on the downslide, unlike Google search results which will throw up classified data and outdated customer reviews,” Kaviraj says.
A Web 2.0 enthusiast and an applications and solutions developer, Kaviraj worked in a couple of software firms for a few years but failed to sustain interest.
He then ended up forming a small team of three – Sreekanth, Sankeerth, and Siddharth – who chipped in about Rs 3 lakh to start work on areapal.com.
When they announced intention to kick off areapal.com through a simple wordpress blog, they received a deluge of suggestions from students.
“The money we collected was spent to rent server space from a UK based company; build complex software modules to enable multiple features on our site, such as, Flash, animation and security features,” says Kaviraj.
For this, they took the help of MNC professionals in coding, designing, and building security features and also enlisted the help of 200 other college students.
The students continue contributing to the design, user interface, coding, site performance, servers and hardware as well as help in marketing strategies.
The site has five levels of control options to protect privacy: Level 1 allows you to select only people from your area to view your profile; in Level 2, one can restrict the profile to be viewed by either males or females from a locality.
Level 3 allows one to invite only his college/school students to view the profile while level 4 does not allow strangers to see the profile picture. In level 5, only those who are approved of as friends can view the profile.
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