A webless social network

 A.A.K. | MUMBAI

INDIA may be home to software giants, like Wipro or Infosys, which have thrived by harnessing the internet's potential, but few of the country's 1.2 billion people have so far embraced the web. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India reported that at the end of March the country had just 8.8m broadband connections. By contrast, it boasts some 812m mobile subscribers. According to Gartner, a market-research outfit, in 2013 Indians will send almost 192 billion text messages.

With 57m registered users, Just Dial is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Indians' love of texting. Set up in 1996 as a sort of phone-based yellow pages, it initially offered a fixed-line voice-based service dispensing information about the nearest coffee shop, electrician, tarot-card reader, hospital, or whatever else the caller happened to be looking for. Many users preferred it to the clunky, state-published phone directories. Cost was limited since all queries were handled in a single call, by a human assistant. “We would read out information which they would then write down on a piece of paper,” recalls V.S.S. Mani, the company's founder.

Then, in 2002, India discovered mobile phones. Soon, the cheapest handsets cost as little as 900 rupees ($18), with call rates as low as 1 rupee per minute. The pieces of paper were replaced by a text message. Today, 95% of Just Dial's callers ask for the response to be texted to them; this is done within a minute of their call.

Just Dial has become more than just a talking yellow pages. In many ways it is more akin to Places, a mobile app for Android and Apple's iPhone which tracks the user’s location and directs him to whatever it is he needs. Just Dial informs the caller about the nearest desired merchant, as well as several alternatives. The operator also offers to connect the caller directly, at no extra charge, to one of the company's "preferred vendors", a ruse reminiscent of Google's sponsored links. These pay Just Dial from a few thousand to several hundred thousand rupees a month to get talk-time with punters. (No pay per dial just yet, then.)

It is easy to create a user profile based on his search history and, just as in the online world, companies are willing to pay for such information. On occasions, after the caller hangs up, he may be assailed by up to four phone calls from competing vendors. This can be irksome, but many customers find it handy. (When your correspondent was stranded on a Mumbai motorway during a torrential downpour, a call from a nearby towing service came as a relief.) Of course, it means Just Dial needs to share the caller's phone number with participating businesses. Some see this as an invasion of privacy. Unsurprisingly, Mr Mani assures that Just Dial never misuses information entrusted to it by users. “The numbers we share are only to help the caller make an informed decision."

Just Dial has borrowed other ideas from the social media, too. It has its own recommendation service: before hanging up, each caller is asked to rate the last vendor discovered through Just Dial on a scale of one to five. The database now comprises more than 2.5m ratings. Another feature, called "tag friends", allows people to tag up to 25 mobile numbers whose owners also use Just Dial. Next time a user is looking for a nearby restaurant, say, the operator may warn him that the closest one has been rated poorly by his pals, whereas one just a few street down got the thumbs-up. Mr Mani also has plans to introduce a service which will alert the customer of the top deals in his area, like Groupon, which pioneered online vouchers. 

The challenge now is scaling up. Earlier this month Just Dial attracted $10m from private-equity firms SAP Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Vibhor Mehra, a partner at SAIF Capital, another private-equity outfit which has held a minority stake in Just Dial since 2006, says that the company may file for an initial public offering later this year. 

That would be a milestone in Just Dial's chequered history. Mr Mani first came up with the idea of phone-based search in 1989. It flopped, largely because of inadequate infrastructure: back then, Mumbai had only 600,000 telephone lines. The company took another hit during the dot com craze in the early 2000s. Its nascent web portal, justdial.com, failed to attract traffic and had to be shut down. (Today it is back up, with 325,000 visits a day.)

Having survived these growing pains, Just Dial now boasts more than 5m corporate listings accessible in 2,000 Indian towns and cities. But Mr Mani's ambitions extend beyond India. He wants to expand across the English-speaking world. He began last year in America, with a toll free number, 1-800-JUSTDIAL. His dream of becoming the world's leading local-search service while staying largely offline might yet prove less outlandish than it seems.