Neighbourhood apps: The ‘Quora’ for
local queries
PRASHANT PITTI, founder, NearGroup
Most of
us are unaware of who lives in our neighbourhood and in times of need, we
travel long distances without asking our neighbours ... We think these
(neighbourhood apps) could be mother of all apps in the future
NEW DELHI: Eight years in
Indirapuram has made Rajiv Kaura, 47, an expert on the area. He can tell you
who is a good doctor, where to get a new maid and which shops are better.
And for the past few
months he has been giving such advice to hundreds of people in his neighbourhood,
not directly, but on his smartphone, through a neighbourhood network app.
NearGroup, Omni, NearCircles are some options.
“Most of the questions
come from people who are new to the place”, Kaura says, “The issues range from
advice on higher education to civic amenities.”
Shilpa Abhilash, a ward
councillor of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) gets more complaints
through the smartphone than manually. “It is easy because we don’t have to rely
on officials,” she says.
“Most of us are unaware
of who lives in our neighbourhood and in times of need, we travel distances,”
says Prashant Pitti, founder of NearGroup, which has about 20,000 users in the
NCR region.
Pitti ,who is a marathon
runner, got the idea of the app from his troubles in finding a running mate.
The former HSBC executive in the US had Nextdoor, a US-based app launched in
2011 and now a unicorn, to model his idea upon.
Jackson Fernadez,
co-founder of Omni, says, “Lot of valuable information lies in the localities.
It has now become more like a local Quora.” Launched in November 2015, the
application has about 10,000 downloads, mainly from Bangalore. “Indians
generally value a neighbour’s recommendations a lot. There is a very high trust
factor.”
Some of these apps work
similar to dating app Tinder to find people in the user’s locality. Others use
the user’s choice of locality and puts her/him in a group registered from the
same place.
For Suresh Mylavarapu,
the difficulty to connect with the new neighbourhoods overseas, made him
develop Nearcircles. Launched in August 2015 the app has more than 10,000 users
globally. “It is mostly for discussion on local issues,” he says.
Mylavarapu says the
objective is to see these platforms help build offline communities.
However, Ashish Jindal of
CodeYeti solutions, which developed such an application in 2014 thinks they are
extremely difficult to manage. “Most users stalk people, mainly women. Many
female users started complaining,” he says. Unable to raise funding and solve
these complaints, he stopped further development.
Fernadez of Omni agrees
that when more people join it is a challenge to manage the discussions. The app
has a report-abuse option.
NearGroup does multiple
verifications including that of the Facebook account to eliminate fake profiles,
allows anybody to block anybody, and doesn’t allow people to change their
locality for at least for three months. Nearcircles also allows community
managers in each area to watch over the activities on the group.
Source: Hindustan Times dated 15 March, 2016 Page 18
