Chennai start-up takes networking to real world

MUMBAI, INDIA: It's an age of online social networking. From celebrities to unknown citizens, everybody is there online. Facebook, Orkut, MySpace...there is a wide world in the cyberspace that are focused on users’ online activities and interactivity across geographies.

But Chennai-based startup Areapal.com is a different platform evolved with the new idea to offer local information sharing and neighborhood networking to the users based on areas and localities.

Areapal.com was created by a group of five young graduates late in 2008 with the support of several student teams across colleges from south India, who shared the common passion of Internet and Web2.0
technologies. It is aimed at offline or real world activities and information that are useful and beneficial to network users.

According to Areapal’s founder and Web2.0 enthusiast Kaviraj, the existing social network sites available in India are not suitable to us as they were built and designed for people in the Western countries and as per their cultures.

“Since there isn’t any India specific or Indian culture based networking site, our people are compelled to use other networks. So we came up with the idea to help people find friends, local information and news that are useful to them,” said Kaviraj.

“The mix of three elements – 'you, your area and people in your area' gives the essence of our network,” he added.

Moreover, he pointed out that the word “area” is very common and popular among Indians and it is part of one's identity and so the network was named as 'Areapal.com'.

In terms of exceptional features, Areapal.com is only an invitational based network that brings in controlled and selective nature membership, after background information, cross checking and others’ recommendations.

Areapal.com has strong user security policy in place with high content monitoring to deal with any abusive and explicit content. Also the user has dual control for protecting identity with restriction based personal info and picture sharing with others.

Initially, at the beta stage, the network was only for students but later in June this year it was open to general public. Presently, with over 30,000 registered users chiefly from Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai, it’s slowly expanding across other Indian cities including Mumbai and Delhi.

So far, the site has been successful in helping find people and friends from their origin in the present location or areas. Users create area-based groups, where others from same location or place can join to share location information and news and in the process make friends to indulged in offline activities, Kaviraj explained.

He added that the local information and news whether it be reviews of restaurant, lodging and boarding facility, hangouts or job openings at local firms or company, remains very vital in helping people in day-today life rather than just virtual space socializing.

It’s designed and built on Open Source platform and applications such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The site is hosted on three dedicated rented severs based in the US.

Being on the Open Source front, the site welcomes newer and innovative applications for developers. In the next 2-3 weeks, the technical team will launch the downloadable free mobile application of Areapal.com for mobile users, Kaviraj concluded.