We have seen from the way people try to search on 90di, that a lot of our users wanted to simply find out whether there is any direct connectivity between two places by train/flight etc. and to what are various options available to them.

So we just improved our search engine to churn out those search results.

This feature explained by  a few examples:
1) If you want to see all modes of travel between bengalooru to Goa, just type in:

bengalooru to goa

2) If you want to find out direct flights between bangalore Hyderabad:

Bangalore to Hyderabad flights

3) For trains between delhi to mumbai say

nizamuddin to mumbai trains

And as with the route search, you can use the station/airport codes and place names interchangeably.

Would love to hear what you think.

Its HeadStart time again!!

For the uninitiated: HeadStart is an annual event, held at Bangalore, for Startups. Co-located along with the academic conference Compute (which has backings of ACM Bangalore and big sponsors like HP, IBM, Infosys, Rediff etc…)

What happens at HeadStart is that, few of the nominated products are selected for several tracks like Internet, Mobile, Enterprise etc (typically 5 for each of the tracks). People behind the chosen products – individuals or companies are allowed to demonstrate their product to the audience.

The audience has lot of experts(been-there-done-that kind) in every track and also a lot of potential investors (VCs) and of course potential partners in other Startups.

It was our privilege to have been selected for the Internet track in the last event (the inaugural one HeadStart 2008) held at IISc, Bangalore and over there we got a chance to showcase our travel search engine – 90di.com/travel.

Our experience has been that the organizers of HeadStart are a bunch of very dedicated and enthusiastic folks. And they are doing a very nice service to Startups, like ours.

So, Startups looking for opportunities to present their stuff and ideas to a very elite audience. Go for it. Guess, time is there till November end (just a few weeks left) to nominate your product/company.

Picture this scenario, which happens to those of us living in Metros quite often.

You receive a wedding invite form your office colleague, to attend her wedding.
You safely preserve the invite and put reminders to yourself so as not to miss it.

On the evening of the wedding you pull out the invite, and check the venue. It says: A C Convention Hall in Vidyaranyapura. You say to yourself, Oh my God, where is that place?

You are already late for the wedding since its 7 PM and going anywhere in Bangalore takes 1 and half hr on the minimum (provided its on the same part of the town in which you are)

What do you do?

You frantically boot the nearest machine and go to Google maps. Search for Vidyaranyapura. Oh gives you the wrong one, the one you want to go is in the eastern part of town, your colleague had said (this one is in the south). Now you search based on the larger area Doddabommasandra … Got it this time … You then increase the zoom and look out for Vidyaranyapura … got it … then you look for the said landmark … Gosh can’t see it. Lost my place, now I am in Jayanagar… You decrease the zoom … come back to Doddabommasandra … increase the zoom … look for Vidyaranyapura .. got it. Now look for the said landmark, got it … Relief.

After about 12 minutes of frantic searching, you are ready to go. But wait, you need to note it down. You don’t want to struggle with you printer, now. So you just tear a piece of paper from the nearby note book and draw out the layout with some landmarks. Now you are all set. Its 7:18 now and you need to rush …

You drive along thinking to yourself, can there be a better way for finding this info out? …

Well guess what, there already is. Our friends at Onze have done a launch of this smart service for finding city directions in Bangalore:

http://www.latlong.in/

Had you known about it before you went for the wedding, you could have simply done a search like:
Go Vidyaranyapura from Koramangala
(if you happen to live in Koramangla)
And it would have given you the directions from the start to finish in seconds. And with some really good landmarks on the way.

My experience of using it:
I did a couple searches to test it out with even obscure places which I knew, something not-very-popular e.g. Johnson Market. And guess what it gave me excellent directions to that place with some landmarks, which I know are good one over there.

Also to add to the website, there is a SMS option too. You can just send a simple SMS in the form of

GO <destination place> from <starting place>

and it will reply back with the directions.
(The number to send an SMS is there on their website)

Suggest you give LatLong a try. I am sure you will find it quite useful.

And lastly, please give them your invaluable feedback.

If you are using iGoogle, then here is a new widget for you.

We have created the 90di iGoogle widget. Click here to add it to your iGoogle and start using using it!.  Below is the screen shot of 90di widget.

Alternatively, you can click this button to add this widget to your iGoogle.

We love to hear from you regarding this.

Warm Regards,

Kiran