Brief

Webaroo offers free mobile Internet

Rakesh Mathur and Beerud Sheth, Co-founders of Webaroo

Searching for information while you are on the move is expensive, slow or simply not possible. Imagine the comfort of accessing the Web free of cost when you are out on the field without going online. Puzzling as it may sound, a software service called Webaroo enables users to search the Web without logging on—and the service is free.

Says Rakesh Mathur, CEO and Founder, Webaroo, “We plan to take the Web offline with this new software service. Webaroo offers customers a fast, free and ubiquitous Web searching experience on mobile devices such as notebooks and handhelds without an Internet connection.”

Webaroo offers 20 Web packs, each of which is about 250 MB. Since the Web hops around with you when you are on the move, the founders thought that it is a kangaroo-like Web, thus the name Webaroo.

“Users need to log-on to our Website and download the software. It selects pages with the highest content value for users to obtain relevant results. Webaroo features Web packs on a variety of subjects such as news and sports. These packs contain thousands of relevant pages identified by the company’s algorithm. Users can then select and download their favourite Web sites to save and search later,” says Beerud Sheth, CTO and Co-founder of the company.

Ask Mathur the rationale of this service when technologies like Wi-Fi are available and he answers by giving an instant demo to time the results of the search between his Blackberry and the Webaroo service. “Wi-Fi is a shared resource. As the load increases, the speed decreases. Besides, it’s costly,” Mathur says.

The company has tied up with Acer to bundle Webaroo software on its laptop PCs worldwide. Further, Webaroo has dedicated a Web pack for Wikipedia for making searches simple and fast.

The company has ensured that these Web packs do not pose storage problems on handhelds and notebooks. “The Web pages are optimised to provide most value in the smallest storage size. Webaroo selects pages with high quality, broad coverage and small size,” Sheth added. As the user updates the Web pages, the old ones expire automatically.

These two IIT engineers who founded the company reason that an average user who searches for information online does not go beyond the fifth page. “Webaroo gives the user fewer yet most relevant search results with great speed,” Mathur explains.

Besides, the service can be customised. A user can add his favourite Web sites and specify areas of interest, and Webaroo will automatically download those pages when online.

The company is located at the IIT Mumbai incubator, the Society for Innovation & Entrepreneurship. SINE is a business incubator where ideas from IIT Mumbai students, professors and alumni can be developed and commercialised.

But what about revenue? Webaroo will earn its money mainly through advertisers. The revenue model offers advertisers the ability to reach prospective customers on their notebooks and mobile phones when they are not online. The pages, though accessed offline, have all the graphics intact and hence would also have advertiser details.

“Webaroo is an ad-supported free service, and revenues are earned through contextual advertisers. The aim is to delight the user and drive as many downloads as possible,” Mathur said. The advertisements appear to the user as they are even when he is offline.

With hot-spots yet to become common in India, and with users wanting to avoid paying connectivity charges, Webaroo could be the viable option that many were looking for.

— Shivika Sood