http://www.medianama.

com/2011/08/223-10-things-you-should-know-about-the-justdialipo/ Online and telephone business listings company, JustDial has filed its draft red herring prospectus with SEBI for an initial public offering (IPO), in order to raise Rs 360 crore. We culled out 10 things that we think you should know about, from its draft red herring prospectus. A longer, more detailed post will follow soon. 1. JustDial plans to launch a Daily Deals section on its website, leveraging its user base and relationship with SMEs to offer deals and special promotions on products and services. 2. The number of advertiser campaigns on JustDial grew from 40,500 campaigns as of March 31, 2009, to approximately 61,500 campaigns as of March 31, 2010, and approximately 120,200 campaigns as of March 31, 2011. 3. Paid advertisers make payments in advance for campaigns on JustDial, but it still has outstanding receivables Rs 1.09 crore from paid advertisers as of March 31, 2011. While it verifies some of the information of paid advertisers with whom it enters into a contract and its free listings, the company says that it is not able to screen or verify all the information contained in business listings and cannot assure that any business listing is genuine, accurate or updated. 4. As of June 30, 2011, JustDials premium advertisement memberships, which offer priority listings to advertisers represented approximately 16% of its total memberships. 5. The Delhi-NCR region and Mumbai markets contributed approximately 39% of its campaigns and 11 large cities contributed substantially. 6. More than 180 million searches of its database were conducted in fiscal 2011. As of June 30, 2011, it had compiled a database consisting of approximately 6 million business listings across various cities and towns in India, as compared to 4.5 million business listings as of March 31, 2010. As of June 30, 2011 approximately 2.7 million reviews and ratings were published on the JustDial website. 7. The 180 million search queries comprised of 77.2 million Internet searches, 9.6 million mobile Internet searches, 93.9 million voice searches and 19,800 SMS searches. 8.The company is also in the process of developing mobile applications for Android, iPhone and Blackberry. Its mobile platform features location-based search and predictive auto-suggest, available on most versions of its mobile website. 9. JustDial discontinued its print business in fiscal 2011. Excluding the impact of the print business in both fiscal 2011 and 2010, its consolidated total income increased in fiscal 2011 by 58.4% over fiscal 2010.

10. Just Dials group companies, JustDial Global and Just Dial Inc., USA incurred losses during the last three years. While JD Global reported losses of Rs 9.72 crore in FY11 and Rs 4 lakh in FY10, JD Inc USA incurred losses of $28,661 in FY11 and $62,884 in FY10. The company sold its entire shareholding in JD USA, which used to be its U.S. subsidiary, to JD Global, which ceased to be its subsidiary in fiscal 2011. It will receive an annual license fee equal to 1.0% of JD USAs net revenues pursuant to a trademark license agreement between the company and JD USA.

http://www.justdial.com/cms/index.php
JUST DIAL LIMITED Company Profile

JustDial is Indias no.1 local search destination. The company caters to over 57 million unique users. This one of a kind local search service is accessible from approximately 1700 towns and cities in India on Phone (69999999), Web (justdial.com), WAP (m.justdial.com) and SMS (08888888888).

JustDial in India has a strong work force of over 5300 employees and has approximately 1,39,500 customer campaigns. Competitive Strength The company bridges the gap between buyers and sellers by helping buyers find the right providers of products and services while helping sellers improve the efficiency of their marketing channels. Key Highlights The leading local search brand in India Large customer base and nationwide coverage Highly scalable platform Excellent track record in user experience Very high customer satisfaction Modern infrastructure and constantly updated technology Vastly experienced management team Investors The company has raised four rounds of strategic investments from Hong Kong-based SAIF partners; California based venture fund Sequoia Capital, New York based Hedge Fund Tiger Global and California based SAP Ventures. Global Plans JustDial has launched its local search service in North America on the toll free numbers "1-800-justdial" and "1-800-500-0000". The company will next expand into Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong. Going forward the company intends to leverage the Justdial brand and know how for an international franchise.

Vision & Philosophy The company's goal is to create long-term shareholder value by enhancing its position as a leading local search service. The companys philosophy focuses on end user experience through feedback, innovation, teamwork and integrity.

http://www.ciol.com/News/News/Interviews/Just-dial-thats-it/141038/0/
Speaking to CIOL, VVS Mani, CEO and Founder of Just dial, shares the journey so far and the road ahead for the company. Just Dial has become the name for local and instant search. How do you feel about it? Where do you see the company moving two-three years down the line? Today, Justdial is Indias No.1 local search engine, with presence on Phone (69999999), Web (justdial.com), WAP (wap.justdial.com) and SMS (53999) with 175,000 sq. ft office space across India. This is a great feeling indeed. I am very bullish about growing this business at least 50 per cent year-on-year for the next 3-4 years' time in India alone. The company also intends to leverage the brand and know-how for an international franchise. I hope five years down the line, we would have established a global footprint and garnered high brand equity and recognition across the globe. And we can definitely look at the local market then. Could you give an idea of India operation how many companies are listed, what were the numbers like a year ago? We have 4,000 associates in India. For now, Just Dials US operations are also handled out of India. We soon plan to hire up to 1,000 people in the US, mostly in underemployed, rural areas. We have over a 3 million listings today and the numbers hovered a little over 2.6 million until last year. Our database comprises sponsored and non-sponsored clientle and we have more than 125,000 advertisers today. What have been the recent developments in the local team? We have quite a few aces up our sleeve; to mention a few, we have drawn up new services such as Just Dial Genie, a personal assistant that will enable consumers round-the-clock service for a monthly fee. Genie will allow instant call connect to any business establishment, reminder services and the like. We are also working on Justdial Application for mobile phones, which would soon be launched for Nokia phones. This will be followed by subsequent releases for BlackBerry and iPhones. We also have a few other special launches coming forth in the near future. How many cities does Just dial exist in? What are the new geographies slated for expansion, locally and globally? Justdial caters to over 25 million users across 240 cities in the country via a single number 69999999. In India, Justdial receives over 2,50,000 calls everyday and hosts over 2,25,000 visitors to its website. As far as the US operations are concerned, we are present across all the 50 states in USA on a toll free number. We will soon expand our reach to include 1200 cities in India very soon. In the global arena, the days to come will see Just Dial expanding to Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong to fulfill our target of being present in all major English-speaking countries in the next two years. How does Just dial use the technology for business. Could you share about specific softwares or business application? We have been using open source technology since over 3 years now, and it has allowed us to scale

up in a seamless manner, without having to worry about the procuring part of open source. We were also able to introduce best practices from various fields and add value to our search process. On the software side, we have adopted the CLAMP stack, which was a combination of C and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. About 200 servers, connecting 3,500 workstations at Just Dial, are powered by this CLAMP stack today. Just Dial has chosen Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to power its servers, Ubuntu on the desktop front, MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB for database management, and WebHuddle for Web conferencing and video conferencing. http://gaikwad.in/justdial-com-case-study/

Who started it Mani, Founder Sushil raney, Vice President Neha Vaidya, Management Trainee jyoti gandhi, AVP Shyam Khattar, Sr. V.P. Prashant Nagar, Assistant Vice President About them Just Dial an Indian local search destination. The company caters to over 25 million unique users and over 200 million searches in a year. Their search engine covers more than 200 cities in India. Just Dial Service is a quicker guide to get up-to-date purchasing information for any product or service available in your city. One phone call beats a runaround town. Every time, to find anything, call Just Dial Service, the Operator Assisted Telephonic Search Engine. Use it at home, use it at work, it is the complete buying guide. A one-stop shop for anything & everything under the sun. Learn more about them. Read more about the founders. See their linkedin profile. Read about the group (Source) Funding 1. $8.2M from Sequoia Capital. (Source) 2. Refer to the investors of justdial.com (Source) 3. More funding information. Find more information about its founders (Source) Revenue 100 Crore Employees 3800 in 2010

Why they are successful provides fast, comprehensive and detailed information in search engine Valuation Rs521 crore (Source)

http://www.cio.in/ceo-interviews/it-has-helped-just-dial-turnaround-dynamic-businessneeds-considerably-short-spans-ti

Full Interview with V.S.S. Mani

CIO: CIO: JustDial's unique business model has been very successful in India. How has IT contributed? V.S.S. Mani: V.S.S. Mani: IT has helped us turnaround dynamic business needs in considerably short spans of time or time-to-market. Being a consumer-centric business, the requirements and the challenges we face are multi-fold; its like playing chess with over a million people at the same time. Its a mind game and you always need to try to come up with something better. Even with dynamic needs, we have been able to stay ahead because we are on an in-house built Open-source platform. For us, being able to adapt to changes, improving search accuracy based on user feedback, and incorporating new search logic have been some of the biggest gains from IT. IT has also been able to streamline all corporate processes, end-to-end, from marketing to finance. This, in itself, is an important step because for an organization like ours, there is a lot of subjectivity involved. Thats because our offerings or what we sell dont relate to a physical, tangible product. So, without a proper process in the backend, it would be almost impossible to achieve regulated process flow.
Go to Questions

CIO: Can you take us through the story behind JustDial? V.S.S. Mani: After failing in the first attempt that lasted barely two-and-a-half years, JustDial continued to remain a dream and obsession from 1992-96. The idea would not crystallize due to a lack of financial resources and the right ecosystem. But finally, JustDial was started in a small 300 sq.ft. garage office in 1996. It's been a wonderful journey from a three-member start up to a 4,500-member corporation. Revenues grew from Rs 85 lakh in March 1997 to Rs 200 crore in March 2011; from one city to covering almost every city and town in India. We have grown from a few thousand users to 57 million unique users. Our daily average user strength is above 6 lakh today and our Web usage is neck-to-neck with the voice service. When we started, only a handful of people believed in us, but we had the last laugh.
Go to Questions

CIO: What are the biggest challenges in your industry? V.S.S. Mani: In terms of challenges, reducing the time-to-market is an extremely crucial issue for the players within the industry. Besides, in our industry, it is not possible to rely on tried-and-tested formulas. We just have to give several factors due weightage and make sure that as a trend evolves we understand it and react to it. That's why I feel that time-to-respond is a decisive element.

Go to Questions

CIO: Has IT helped you stay ahead of competition? V.S.S. Mani: Certainly. We have been able to scale up seamlessly because of IT. It has been one of the key factors of our growth. We grew from a small team to 4,500. That wouldnt have been possible without everyone in the setup being tied to the umbilical cord of IT. The sheer task of standardizing processes across such a volatile workforce would have been a daunting task without IT. IT has also helped in price modeling and discovering ways to make profits. Because of our open architecture, we were able to introduce best practices from various fields and add value to our search process. This approach allowed us to extract more information and give refined search results to our end users.
Go to Questions

CIO: Can you highlight some of your key IT initiatives? V.S.S. Mani: IT is the backbone of our entire setup. Nothing in the organizationbarring some ancillary activities like HR and regulatory financecan function without IT. We do a lot of regression-oriented data analysis which helps us clean data which in turn makes the entire search process learning-oriented. We dont try to formulate rules; rules formulate themselves based on usage. Also, Open Source helped us extract better performance from search systems and applications. It has also freed us from vendor lock-in, and enabled the organization to choose hardware platforms that deliver flexibility and high performance.
Go to Questions

CIO: What, in your opinion, is the role of a CIO? V.S.S. Mani: The position of CIOs in organizations like ours is challenging and daunting due to the myriad business and technical responsibilities assigned to them. They are responsible for ensuring that their firms IT investments are continually aligned with their strategic business objectives, while also planning and maintaining an IT infrastructure that will meet their firms current and future needs. Id say that for a services-based organization, the value of an enterprise lies in the knowledge of the individuals delivering those services. They are also the ones standing on the profit generation pedestal.
Go to Questions

CIO: What do you think of technologies like cloud computing, social media and BI? V.S.S. Mani: We are interested and excited about all these emerging technologies but we always believe in being judicious when it comes to their application. We use cloud computing only for internal development because ours is a very transaction-oriented

system and cloud is not the best way to take it forth. Social media and business intelligence are definitely important. We are focusing a lot on user reviews and ratings. In fact, today, JustDial has more user reviews and ratings than all other websites put together in India. And to make it better we are also incorporating features like Tag Your Friend whereby before visiting a place, for example, users can actually see how their friends rate that place and accordingly take a decision. So we are bringing the user communitys contribution or social contribution to this aspect. At JustDial, we do not believe in blindly following trends. We ensure that we understand how it fits into our scheme of things and how it best serves our requirements. We dont do something simply because its trendy, we take up only those initiatives that best help us serve the needs of our target.