Stealth product
100floors.com - product updates
As you know, we did a quick re-branding of our product from my100floors.com to 100floors.com based on the feedback we got from several of our early adopters as well as for easier brand reach and recall.
With that, we also launched some new product features primarily around SMS and email communication and better user touch points which they think are critical for a better user experience.
So with little drumroll, we launch - Click2SMS and Click2Email for listings. You can use these features to quickly communicate with listing owners and also get rapid responses for your listings on 100floors.
We also offer Click2call - a service using which we can we dial you up along with the listing owner and connect both of you, however at this point this service is available only for premium listings. If you are interested in having click2call integrated with your listing, give us at shout at info@suksh.com or leave a message on our Contact us page.
As always, we would to hear feedback from you, tell us what is working, what is not, and we will continue to work to provide you with better listings from real people.
Now in open beta
Having been through some really long nights (and days!) and we are now ready! (in beta of course).
You can check out www.my100floors.com and go ahead and register, post your property, requirements etc. We would love to hear feedback from all you and how you think we can make my100floors.com much better.
Leave a comment here or write to me at vinodh@suksh.com
Keep watching this space for more feature updates, fixes, value adds, contests etc!
Understanding spatial search
So what is spatial search ?
In today’s context, where the Internet is the starting point for finding any information you need about anything in the world, and of course most of us use Google. The problem with traditional search is that it does not support or have information about the geographical dimension.
Why is spatial search important ?
This becomes extremely important when searching for something like “Guest houses in Bangalore”. Although the geographical location, in this case ‘Bangalore’ can be used as a part of search query term, the search engine does not interpret it as a geographical location. So results for the search query - “Guest houses in Bangalore” will turn up documents with “Guest houses” and “Bangalore” and might not show up results with guest houses koramangala or indiranagar which are localities in Bangalore and also hence very apt results. This is because, the search engine does not have a relationship between these terms.
The other issue with traditional search in entities like homes is that the geographical information of these locations are not known, and hence they cannot be visualized on a map - which would be the most intuitive way to visualize these results.
While planning and architecting my100floors, we understood the need for Spatial search and helping users visualize home searches on maps. Moreover we felt that that searching for properties on maps was the intuitive way to find properties. In fact, we are the first to provide a map based search in India, cracking the problem of non-availability of geo-coded data.
The next post will talk about our implementation of Spatial search in, challenges we faced and a walk through of the user experience.
Suksh - Our story so far
Welcome to Suksh - being the first post on our blog, I thought it would be good for you to get to know 
us better. So here’s our startup story so far.
We are Suksh Technology, incepted in April this year by Shreyans Chopra. Shreyans was previously with Goldman Sachs in the US and decided to come back to India to start this venture. We are angel funded by a realty player from Kolkata.
So what do we plan to do ?
We are focused on the online realty space and think that there are some very interesting opportunities which can be tapped here.
Product line
We plan to launch our first product www.my100floors.com later this year. This product is aimed as an experiment to understand the user trends in India and will also act as a data seed for our bigger product which is currently in Stealth mode and is expected to be launched in Q2, 2009.More on our stealth product later.
My100floors is positioned to be big by reach, quick and easy to operate and being spatial are some key factors which this first portal will be covering at the entry time. My100floors.com may seem to be a me too realty marketplace and search portal targeting buy, sell and rent transactions, but we think that the solution approach would make a difference to the way consumers operate or engage with us.
The stealth product that we are working on will primarily aim to look at this space more holistically and aim to address major pain points which users have while buying, selling or renting homes and provide value added services to consumers in a convenient mode. The other major aspect to this product will be the strong and hard to re-create data models which we will be developing. In fact we have a dedicated market research team which has been collecting some of this data. Algorithms built on this data will give consumers insights into several aspects within the realty space in India and enable them to take data driven decisions.
Team
We have a solid team of people from top companies like Yahoo, Aditi, Adobe, Trilogy, AOL etc. You can find key information about our team here.
What to expect on this blog?
We are primarily looking at this blog to interact with consumers just like you to better understand your needs and at the same time for you to know what we have been upto.
Of course on this blog, we will also cover interesting trends, product ideas, startup tips, events and some other insights into online realty and the internet in general.
So here’s to new beginnings, Cheers!
PS: If you need more information about us, feel free to contact us at info@suksh.com