The best cities all have them. That indispensable website that tells you if Tate’s new exhibit is worth the schlep, and which nearby restaurants have the best chocolate pudding. Locals use them to scour bars, restaurants, venues and events, while tourists use them to gauge the flavour of a particular city.
In India, the booming number of Internet users (estimated at anywhere from 20 million to 40 million) has prompted a few individuals to launch local equivalents, vast digital repositories that attempt to organize and verify this mess of information. Some focus on food, others target female readers, while quite a few attempt to do it all. Here is a breakdown of who does what, and whether they deliver on their promise:
Burrp.com
What it does: Reviews and rates restaurants, bars, bakeries and nightlife venues, with stores, museums, galleries, salons and more on their way.
Click and pick: An extensive database, flashy design and smart searches make these websites handy for planning every minute of your leisure time.
Backstory: Started by California-born Deap Ubhi, who says Burrp was born out of frustration when, on a trip to India, he and his friends had trouble finding things to do.
“Most of the recommendations we got were from concierges and cabbies. It was very hard for us to get a dependable flavour of what was going on in the city,” he says.
Ubhi and his friends began kicking around the idea of a digital database and, in March 2006, Ubhi quit his job at a private equity firm to move to India. About $2 million (around Rs8 crore) in seed money later, Burrp went live in August, and has since expanded to eight cities, with Goa, Jaipur and Chandigarh in the pipeline.
Verdict: Burrp bootstraps each new city website with about 1,000-3,000 listings. After that, the vibrancy of individual websites is determined by user involvement. The clean interface is intuitive and uncluttered, but the search engine yields often perplexing results. A search for “nightclubs” in Colaba brought up reviews for several restaurants and only two clubs. The website works best as a straightforward listings database, with up-to-date addresses and telephone numbers that can be sent to your cellphone.
Asklaila.com
What it does: Acts like a know-it-all friend, answering queries about restaurants, and bars, notaries and dry-cleaners. Has service-y articles that cover lifestyle, shopping and food.
Backstory: A search for a Bengali restaurant in Gurgaon prompted co-founders Shriram Adukoorie and Kiran Konduri to launch asklaila, the online equivalent of a trusted friend.