Burrp…a social recommender website for events & hangouts

What do you usually do when you want to dine out at a new restaurant on a Sunday evening? Look up the city yellow pages, ask friends for suggestions, read up local tourist guides or simply start walking on the streets in search of an exotic option. Very soon, you might not need to do any of those, for you now have Burrp, which promises to be India’s best recommendation website for events & hangouts.

Burrp works like a review and recommendation engine for recreational establishments & events in metropolitan India. Its mission is to help you make better choices when it comes to your social activities. It wants to achieve this by creating a vibrant online community of people, who are willing to share their personal opinions to help others. Burrp’s tagline is ‘Let it Out’, and its a call to Indians to share their opinions, reviews and recommendations with the community at large. Burrp’s Mumbai edition was launched about a month back and already has a 1000 registered users (which in my opinion, is a very good start) . The startup is run by these guys and they are angel funded (to the tune of a six figure dollar amount), by two high net worth individuals from the US.

I feel, there are a number of reasons why Burrp can score over competing (offline) resources like newspapers, travel guides etc, in being a better recommender system. Firstly, it harnesses the power of user generated content, to create a easily searchable database of personalized reviews. Secondly, it can offer more graphic content (thru images, multimedia) to bring out a very involving dimension to people personal opinions. So many people these days have camera enabled cellphones; its really easy to take a snap and attach it to your review. And don’t forget, the website can actually become a social networking hub, where you get to meet new people and develope new relationships.

I browsed through the site and found it quite easy to use. It has three top levels sections– restaurants, bars/clubs and cafes. After creating a free account, you can add in an establishment of your choice and write reviews for it. Or you can simply write reviews of places that have been added by other users.

What I like about Burrp is that its revenue model is not dependent solely on internet advertising, which is largely an unproven model in India (as yet). The site plans to generate income from online ticketing for cinema multiplexes and specialty events (college festivals, concerts etc). It is also aiming to charge marketing fees for SMS marketing (charged from advertisers for advertising on SMS sent to cellphones from burrp.com).

Burrp plans to rollout its Delhi & Bangalore editions in the next 45 days. Additional features on the site include a new channel for submitting, checking out and reviewing EVENTS; locality-specific navigation pages (for those who don’t like using search) and textual enquiry using SMS while on the move.

I have some feedback for the Burrp team. I feel that there is an opportunity to make the site’s homepage uncover more content, utilise the available space better and make it look more appealing. The ability to upload a short audio/video file to augment the review could also come in pretty handy. My sense is that we are going to see many new websites being launched in this space in the near future, with functionalities that overlap with Burrp, either partially or completely. Its up to Burrp’s creators to capitalize on their first mover advantage and become the default choice.