Tuesday, October 17, 2000
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Paisapower to raise $3-4 m in second round 

Kavita Nair  
Mumbai: PaisaPower.com, the personal finance site, will be going in for its second round of funding next month. It plans to raise $3-4 million. The company is in the process of finalising the deal and is in talks with a couple of US-based venture capitalists, according to Mr Austin PM, CEO, Paisapower.com. Paisapower will also be launching its voice-based services within the next ten days in Chennai and will later expand its services to Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi.

The company plans to invest in telephone lines and servers in different locations as well as WAP-enabling the site, as part of its eCRM initiatives. The company is looking at international expansion and therefore plans to customise the offerings. Mr Austin said, "the question is to really reach out to the customer. There are 2 million online, but what about the 200 million offline, who have no access to the Internet. This is where the voice enablement comes in. The Internet technology is here to stay and the companies which will survive are those that can leverage the Internet based technology to reach out to the main stream market. This is possible only by innovating at the customer interface end of technology and simplifying the working at their end." Voice enablement of the site entails usage of a telephone. Paisapower has recently entered into an alliance with the Coimbatore-based Sankar Technologies for the use of `Just Vox'. Just Vox combines the power of the Internet with smart proven technologies likeText to Speech (TTS), Conversion and Speech Recognition (ASR).

This is simplified by building technologies into the places where users call in, which allows the users to use any device to call in. The user has to register with the site, after which he is given a number or a virtual pin, which he will use when making the phone call. The user can press the telephone keypad after the prompt or use his voice. The user can also have his customised `My Page' read out on demand.

Through this feature, information on the products offered by Paisapower as well as information on the stock prices and investments, and even the status of the user's loan application or investment portfolio would then just be a phone call away.

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