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Dotcoms at your service

Websites offering food, flowers, car rentals, real estate, cinema tickets and more are getting popular with Hyderabadis, finds SYEDA FARIDA

PHOTO: K. MURALI KUMAR

LOG IN Websites in town are the new destinations to order a meal, rent a car, find a florist and more helpful services

Alka Mehta, a housewife in Madhapur, decides to whip up a spread for her visiting in laws--a lavish spread and some flowers. Not making that telephone call to the takeaway joint, this time she does so at the click of a mouse. A few blocks away a few techies decide to order pizza, again online, after a long day.

"The idea of driving through the traffic only to stand in the waiting list to get a table in an upmarket eatery can be tiresome," says Alka. Rahul Agarwal, a party animal, who bought donor passes online for the New Year bash at Hitex recently opines, "I found logging in a user friendly option instead of going to the pubs during rush hours for a few tickets."

A few, read five, years ago the city witnessed a dot com boom and then a greater bubble burst. Almost everyone who had some green bucks and wanted to make some more decided to go the portal and vertical way.

Today a slow and steady website wave is surfacing from the cyber city and this time the players are not looking at bagging eyeballs.

So, jazzy, text heavy flash and streaming media heavy taking-forever-to-download websites make way for simple, uncluttered layouts with locality specific user-friendly ordering wizards for their new search engines. And the USP is definitely utility says the new generation of young professionals- turned-promoters behind these. Want to see a film?

Go and buy those tickets in the multiplex online. And a Hyderabadi biryani or a airport pick up? Again websites come to the rescue.

"Today you cannot purely be a portal. Any successful portal has to value add in terms of service. We facilitate people to look into new property, elevation and design and have been able to close sales assisting customers offline," says B.V.P. Raju, a young industrialist and promoter of www.ghar4u.com. "Today there is greater access to the Internet and connectivity has greatly changed. This is the primary reason for the success of the new websites in the city, he adds. "The concept is pretty much integrating technology and business," says Suresh, an avid user from Mumbai who recently checked commercial and apartment space in the twin cities on the reality portal.

Says promoter and entrepreneur Meena, "When we started www.ordermonger.com about six months ago we thought that service was a cool idea as the core of the website. One way we see sustaining the portal is to keep growing the services."

The portal, started by a group of young IIT alumni, is tied up with car rentals, restaurants and florists with a new addition of dabbawala service to the corporates that has received commendable hits within days of its launch.

Order groceries online

Next on the agenda, "is groceries since nobody has time to stand in queues in supermarkets nor the patience to find a space in parking lot," says Meena.

And this is just the beginning for the Hyderabadi addicted to net junkies who can now get almost all that they want on their laptops, with a little help from the mushrooming broadband providers.

On the anvil are websites on consumer goods, a www.hyderabadnightlife.com, on lines of other international websites on city specific party circuits as existing home pages of city-based pub websites go savvy. Seventymm (www.seventymm.com) , the country's first online movie rental service is soon coming to town for film buffs to lend flicks from.

"There is a large IT savvy and cosmopolitan population in Hyderabad that are early adopters of new concepts today. The city is also known for movie enthusiasm amongst Telugu film buffs," says Subhanker Sarker, COO, Seventymm Private Limited. So next time you want that Salman Khan starrer or a RGV flick, it should be a simpler click away.

* * *

A few helpful URLs to log on to www.ordermonger.com: Offers car rentals, florists and restaurants to order from. Look out for groceries.

www.ghar4u.com: Information on real estate backed up by offline support services to close the deal.

http://www.pvrcinemas. com /pvr/booking/search_ results.asp: Watch what's playing at the screens and book tickets online.

http://www.prasadz. com/ : Show timings, tele booking and corporate booking information for IMAX and other screens.

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