Chennai: “Local information is very important and the best way to get it is by talking to friends, families, co-workers and people in the neighbourhood. We have built Neighourly to help you do that,” said senior product manager on Google’s Next Billion Users team, Ben Fohner, which launched the Neighbourly app in Chennai today.
Neighbourly is a Q&A app to help users learn more about their neighbourhood by asking people who live nearby through the app. Prior to the launch, the app was first introduced in Mumbai, tested and released in Coimbatore, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Mysore, Vizag and Kochi.
Speaking to News Today ahead of the launch here, Fohner said, “Early learnings and user feedback from the markets led to helpful insights. More cities will be added every day and the app will be available pan India soon.”
Made for India
Fohner said Neighbourly is built for India and will be available just in India right now.
“The product development involved a global team and we did R&D across India through 10,000 users from 11 different neighbourhoods. We concentrated our research in cities like Coimbatore, Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi,” he said.
He said since Neighbourly is a product that was developed by global teams, it is hard to put a figure to the money that has gone into the product.
On a side note, Fohner said that he was impressed with the range of questions people asked in the South through the app, especially in Coimbatore.
He said, “Compared to other Indian cities we tested our products, Coimbatore was different. The people asked advanced questions and the content was civil and structured. Tamil formed an integral part of the questions and answers.”
Business model
Fohner said Google is right now focussed on making product work well and build a good user base. “A total of 1.5 million people have downloaded the app across the cities it is available currently. A lot of people have also joined a waiting list. The upcoming launches will be based on the population density of the regions the waitlisted people are in,” he said.
Future plans
Neighbourly is a part of Google’s Next Billion Users plan to draw in more people to use the Internet.
“Apart from Neighbourly, Google is working on Railwire wifi in India and improving existing products to cater to work well locally,” Fohner said and cited the example of two-wheeler mode on Google maps in India with the largest two-wheeler users in the world.