Bangalore-based Ziva Software, a mobile search start up representing the new age product companies in India, is one such company which is seeing a tremendous increase in the growth of users utilizing its 'Zook' service, India's first mobile fetch engine, launched in March this year.

Taking the service to a next level, Zook will shortly offer youtube and Myspace content on its search for those looking for videos and music. "Our aim is to provide precise and relevant answers to any question. Ziva's goal has been to make the depth and breadth of information available on the world-wide-web and with community members," says Dr. Ajay Sethi, Founder and CEO - Ziva Software.

"Zook answers ANY question that might need answering on the mobile phone, which is with or without GPRS. It can be accessed by sending SMS to 5757 5665 or via mobile browsers (http://zook.in)," says Dr. Sethi.

Zook is presently live with five cellular operators. Idea has added Zook as one of the searches on their portal. "We are getting added as a default search with other operators as well. We will be on their home page and the users can decide whether to search on Google, Yahoo or Zook," he adds.

Zook has the largest index of mobile downloads - ringtones, ringback tones, games, wallpapers, graphics, etc. It can also be used for finding movies and their show times, all kinds of events, coupons and offers/deals, travel information, restaurants and businesses, ATMs, etc. These can be searched across whole of India.

Service spans across India - Ziva offers its Zook service across the country. "We have a nice spread and the traffic is proportional to the number of subscribers. Though Mumbai and Delhi generate good traffic, they actually don't dominate. Of late, we see a lot of traffic from the North East. It has really gone up in the last couple of weeks."

Of all the categories offered under this service, it is noticed that forwards (jokes, festival and new year greetings) and movies are becoming very popular, especially with young adults. Other popular categories include classifieds, deals & coupons and alerts. Around 50 percent of traffic on mobile comes from entertainment-related search. "Our search is well categorized with a lot of matches. The guided search gives various options on top of the page, thus helping the user to click on what he is looking for and download the same," he adds.

"We also have a section called greetings. Here you can select the date of your friend's birthday, select a greeting message and set it. On that particular day, your message will be sent to the person concerned. It is similar to alerts but set by the user themselves," says Dr. Sethi.

Elaborating further, he says, "The first part of our service is the value proposition, where you get answers for your questions. The second part is the Action - ie., once you find what you want, you decide to get to the next level. Here you have the options of subscribing for movie alerts and group SMS forwards. Here the service understands, what you searched for and sends relevant information to all your friends from a single group or a multiple groups."

Response time - If the request goes to community, it will take around five to seven minutes to get a reply otherwise it is immediate. "We want to give the users a complete user experience in terms of downloading the content or getting the information they want. We are into partnerships with various organizations who provide us with relevant content to reply to the questions," says Dr. Sethi.

Cost - "The service is offered free of cost from our end. The respective cellular operators charge Rs..2 to Rs..3 per SMS. Regarding alerts, most of them are free while some of the premium alerts like stocks news etc., are charged," he says.