Hoopz Hopes to Revolutionize Information Delivery to Mobile Devices

While lazing on his couch one day, Akash Sureka was browsing through news on his smartphone. Moving from one site to another in search of specific information, he realized a niggling problem. Akash wasn't happy with the way search boxes were functioning. Having been in the mobility space for close to a decade with biggies like Nokia and Motorola, Akash dug deeper into the problem and found that he might have a solution.

Hoopz roughly translates to collecting scattered information and presenting it in a common place. With an aim to eliminate search boxes completely, Akash founded Hoopz Planet Info. Perhaps ahead of its time, Hoopz are the inventors of the unique next generation "Auto Search". Akash touts the technology to be the next wave of search transition for this decade, after Google eliminated web directory a decade ago with it search box. Hoopz has a patent-pending disruptive contextual auto search or auto web discovery (also called as predictive search) technology for deployment on mobile/tablet/netbook. This can deliver contextual search results from across web in real time on these devices, based on keywords of any content or application augmented with location and other parameters. Explaining his innovation in simpler terms, Akash says, "Hoopz has invented a first of its kind user experience on devices keeping the small screens in mind, to enable real time predictive search solution for end users."

Hoopz intends to make the mobile devices more intelligent and for this, it is seeking the support of all the Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEMs) in do so. Started with an initial investment of INR 5 crores, Hoopz today has offices in Pune, India and in Seoul, South Korea. Hoopz has a team strength of 39 across its offices and at this point is working aggressively to get its technology completely ready so that the rollout can happen as soon as the OEMs give a green signal. "The solution will benefit them with new revenue streams and unique experiences delivered to their end device users. We are targeting more than 100 million devices worldwide in 2013 alone," informs Akash.

Revenue generation for Hoopz will be driven by paid content, m-commerce, apps, web purchases, downloads from end users which gets discovered by Hoopz technology and digital marketing. At this point, the challenge to Akash’s mind is the delivery of right and relevant information to end users at any point of time and any place in the world. "There is a huge amount of data and information out there. Filtering that and delivering the right information is critical. Training the end user about the ease of information discovery in real time on their devices is also a challenge," says Akash.

The success for Hoopz lies in the fact that OEMs will have to move with them once that happens, the user adoption will come. To show for what they're building, they have an app which was recently launched- Easy Search. The search aggregator and allows you to search data of your interest augmented with your location over the entire web and online information quickly as opposed to limited results by regular search engine. And this Easy Search is a small part of the bigger picture. The road ahead is steep and ambitious but then, Rome wasn’t built in a day.