Get local news, deals, events and info with TaazzaGo[Android]

Taazza is a Bangalore based start-up which is bringing all possible location based services under one umbrella. Taazza’s crawler dubbed as Kaapi crawls new sites and indexes them to keep its database growing and to keep information provided to you relevant. TaazzaGo is by far the most magnanimous app idea in the LBS world, especially for India. Does it deliver? Let’s find out.

TaazzaGo has five sections in its neatly designed app which doesn’t run any ads thus saving some screen real estate. News, Places, Deals, Events and Citizen are the five sections under TaazzaGo app. The app starts by registering your location with the in-built GPS. Once done, your current location along with local weather is prominently displayed at the top corner.

News is the regular stream of information which provides local news from various newspapers along with deals (near you) from various deal sites. The keyword here is ‘near you’. TaazzaGo has near you at the core of almost all its service offerings. Integrating the news stream with the deal stream is a neat thought which might as well prove to be sticky. As a deal item after 3 news items stands out and Taazzago has made sure it does stand out by differential icons for deals. Selecting the news items takes you to the actual news item along with a map of the location of the news. For Bangalore news is sourced from DNA, Times of India, Bangalore Mirror and Deccan Herald.

News section provides exhaustive sharing options including SMS.

   

Places is a massive database of places of public interest. From pubs and banks to hospitals and gas stations, Tazza does list an exhaustive list of places. Finding a Gas station near you is a very nifty tool to have in your smartphone. I know you are living in that place for year but you will be amazed to find out new places or the place you never knew existed or the real names of the petrol ‘bunks’.

              

Deals are always local and location based. TaazzaGo would be incomplete without deals. It features deals from Koovs, MyDala, SnapDeal and Upto75. There could be more but these are the ones I found out.

    

Events : here is more to events than movies. TaazzaGo lists events in stage and professional categories along with movies.

Citizen is by far the most ambitious service in TazzaGo. There is a way to report power cuts and pot holes on the app. The reports can be voted up or down. How much of this materializes into actual action? That depends on how Android and the app is embraced. Right now Citizen feature on TaazzaGo is a grey area.

                    

Suggestions

Taazza’s news section delivers in the stream. But when clicked on the individual news item, it takes to the source site. The pages aren’t rendered correctly for a mobile phone. Taazza should be able to render the page for mobile experience just the way apps like Pulse and Summify do.

Taazza’s Citizen section has a lot of potential but people might not know how to use it. Either the section has to made more useful ( I wish I know how) or Taazza should provide a cheat sheet to use the citizen services. Linking the citizen services to the RTI India app/website wouldn’t be a bad idea. I see an update from Taazza that the Citizen data will be used by NGO’s.

With close to 10,000 app installs TaazzaGo is one of the top Android apps in India. It stands in fifth position behind Zomato, BookMyShow and two Indian rail info apps which I find redundant.

TaazzaGo is a must-have app for your Android phone. If you have an iPhone then you are out of luck, but word is, Taazza is working on an iPhone app. So all is not lost.

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