M aking travel plans but wondering where to leave your pet? Looking for a playdate for your furry friend, but can’t find one around home?
There’s help. If humans have Tinder and Aisle coming to their rescue, there is a multitude of apps and websites for pets.
Be it finding a playdate or mate for your pet, finding a pet to adopt, putting one up for adoption, finding a vet in your area, a pet product or even a pet hotel or grooming centre, these portals address a wide variety of needs.
Take, for instance, PetsApp. Developed by Chennai-based Sujata Kukreja and Akhil Nath, the app is a curated directory listing for pets, with a chat-enabled adoption forum, lost-and-found service with a GPS tracker, pet book, grooming services and a feature to set up playdates.
According to Akhil, the idea came about when they needed to find a playdate for their pet Beagle, Mofie. “We’d moved with Mofie from our family home in ECR, where we had a total of seven dogs, to an apartment. He seemed lonely and we wanted to find him a buddy. To our surprise, it wasn’t as simple. PetsApp is our way to bridge such a gap and facilitate easier pet socialisation,” he says.
Apart from the listings that the app offers, it also has a pet shop segment, which facilitates sale of pet products by acting as an aggregator for retailers. The app, which is currently on Android in its Beta version, will be officially released in the first week of December.
With a pan India presence, the app lets users put up pets for adoption or adopt them through a chat-based facility. “Some of our future plans include a pet ambulance; there’s a dearth of these in the city. We also plan to introduce an ‘Ask your vet’ service, a vaccination tracker and deals of the week on unique pet products,” says Akhil.
Another one-stop destination for pet needs is Timeforpet, a Bangalore-based website that allows one to post free pet-related advertisements on the portal.
It also has an array of products and accessories, apart from providing veterinarian advice and a list of reputed veterinary clinics across the city.
For pet parents who’d love to travel with their furry friends, there is CollarFolk, a platform that helps users plan pet-friendly vacations with a list of pet-friendly hotels, resorts and home stays across the country. Then, there’s Dog Sitter that helps pet owners find a sitter when they’re away.
The genesis for these apps and portals is usually the developer’s own need to find a pet or pet service. For instance, Abhinav Tyagi, founder of Petdom, was looking to bring home a dog, and found that there was an utter lack of information.
“At the time, the only information was on social media groups; there was no platform with data on pets available for adoption, background information, and whether it was suited for apartment living,” he says. This drove him to look for like-minded people, and they eventually set up Petdom, now available as an app on Android and iOS. Headquartered in Delhi, the app and website have a presence across the country.
It was a similar premise that led 17-year-old Sirish Singaram to set up Cotingo, a website that acts as a one-stop destination for pet needs, such as finding trainers, caretakers, animals up for adoption, pet hospitals, veterinarians and pet products, across the country. The Chennai-based student says that an app will follow soon, but he is currently focussing on the website, which has been gaining a lot of traction since its launch earlier this month. “I usually work on it for a few hours after school. But, I also have a team working on the website for me, since I don’t have enough time to do the coding myself,” says Sirish, who has had a fascination for technology since he was five and has been developing websites from an early age.
The idea for Cotingo, he says, came about when, “I watched a television programme that wed dogs. I thought pet dating was an interesting concept, and it eventually snowballed into Cotingo. I am currently working on developing wearable technology for dogs — something like Fitbit — to let the owner track the animal’s activity levels, location and sleep and behavioural patterns. In a couple of months we will also launch a smart collar for pets.”
