StartupDunia

Yesterday, I got an invite from a friend to vote on a poll he had created on Tezaa. Before I write anything further, I need to warn you: Tezaa is addictive. Dont be fooled - the simple, crisp looking website will have you hooked in no time.

So, What is Tezaa ?

Tezaa is an online community that is driven by polls. Any member can create, modify and participate in a poll. It aggregates public perception and opinions allowing everyone to benefit from information sharing.
How can Tezaa benefit me?
Tezaa can help you make better choices by knowing what your peers think.

Tezaa is an opinion engine (as they like to called). Cant decide which digital camera to buy ? Cant decide which restaurant is better ? Go ahead, create a poll on Tezaa,seek out the community’s opinions and decide based on the poll results. Simple, but very effective and powerful.

Tezaa is the brainchild of Shalin Jain, the founder of TenMiles Corp., a Chennai based software company. The site recently hit a milestone - they now have over 35000 opinions, 1500 members and 2800 polls in less than five months. Amazing statistics considering that they launched only in June this year.

As you land on Tezaa, you are presented with the popular polls currently posted on the site. You can browse through the polls, vote for them and even create a new poll anonymously. You can search to see if a poll already exists that would facilitate your decision making process. Of course, at times, you may have an open-ended question. No worries, Tezaa has it covered. Tezaa offers a section called ‘Open Questions‘ where you can post the open-ended question and the user community will suggest options for poll.
You can create a poll, customize it and add it to your website or your blog.

The site has a very clean and Web2.0′ish user interface. It makes excellent use of AJAX and has a refreshing design and layout. Every aspect seems to be well thought and implemented - from signing up to creating a poll, it takes less than a few minutes. Based on the design, AJAXian features and user interface, Tezaa can be easily labelled as the poster-child for India-Web2.0.

However, for the very same reason, they’re likely to face some of the same challenges that other web 2.0 companies face.
Is there a viable business model around Tezaa ?

Can they monetize somehow on the ‘collective wisdom’ ?

Here’s what the Tezaa community has to say about Tezaa’s revenue model:
http://www.tezaa.com/view/What_is_the_revenue_model_of_tezaa
In terms of features, here’s what the user community is requesting:
http://www.tezaa.com/view/What_does_Tezaa_need

The concept of collective wisdom can be applied and would be helpful to the end user only if all the polls that are created are subjective and not objective;if there’s a decision to be made.
To illustrate, the following polls titled ‘how old are you‘ and ‘What happens after you die‘ sound intriguing; others ‘favorite cartoon character‘, ‘best song in Julluni Oru Kadhal‘ offer entertainment value only. It is polls like these: ‘Which motorbike to buy‘ & ‘Best CBSE school in Chennai‘ that are of value to the user community.
However, based on my own experience on the site, I can say that chances are you will definitely browse through the intriguing-entertaining ones (and most likely will even vote for a few). It is very similar to the Orkut phenomenon — you keep clicking through profiles of other users - I guess social aspects of the human psyche are to blame ?

Tezaa is a user generated content driven site. The user community is what keeps Tezaa going. The site needs to build up on this intial momentum and keep the buzz going about itself.

Overall, I think Tezaa is fun, entertaining, helpful, powerful and definitely addictive. It has all the right mix of ingredients and very likely to become the next rage for Indians.

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