Frilp to make foray into Southeast Asian market

Looks at a separate version for select communities such as people in a specific residential apartment or companies.

Frilp, an online platform that helps users discover a shop or service through their friends and people they trust in the real world, plans to make a foray into the Southeast Asian market by the end of this year.

The Chennai-based Frilp — short for Friend’s Help — is also looking at a separate version for select communities such as people in a specific residential apartment or companies.

The firm’s proprietary algorithm prepares individual graphs of people looking for help, their profiles, relationships as well as likes and dislikes.

Users can search for a particular business in the existing recommendations or could go for the ‘ask’ option, which allows other users in the circle to respond to the query. If no one responds within a specific period, experts identified by Frilp would chip in.

“Statistically, it takes anywhere between four and seven days from the time someone comes across a business and to take it to action. Alternatively, if the same person asks for the info from a friend, the need to do further due diligence is reduced — primarily because the source is non-anonymous, trustable, and probably shares similar preferences,” Frilp co-founder Senthil Kanthaswamy said.

He also said the venture’s focus was oncutting down on the information noise, and giving a handful of highly relevant and relative results which would help them execute a transaction in the shortest possible time.

In this regard, the firm is also mentored by Stanford University professor Ashish Goel, who earlier worked on Twitter’s search and recommendation system. The company will also be mentored by Google.

Mr. Senthil said the site would rope in select communities free of cost. “We are going about the same way as Facebook, which started up as closed group in Harvard and then opened up to other Universities and public.”

There was lot of demand for discovery services in Southeast Asia such as Dubai, Singapore or Indonesia where Internet penetration was high and the firm would look to make a foray into one of these locations, he added.