India’s fastest growing information network, Banyantree Infomedia has proudly launched Extra-Prepare, a vertical educational directory. Extra-Prepare offers in-depth listings across 8 cities, making it a one-stop information node for all learning needs of people of all ages. It is a focussed portal that enlists information about educational and extracurricular needs. This means that it not only looks to help parents search for tuition or day care classes but also helps youngsters and adults alike through enlisting hobby classes, dance or martial art centres. At a time where the market is flooded with similar functioning yellow pages, the key differentiating factor between extra-prepare and other generic yellow pages remains to be its superior information coverage. For example parents searching for a school can now look beyond, with the help of the advanced search and look for specific facilities like transportation, canteen, CCTV camera, student teacher ratio or the type of education offered.

"Talking exclusively to Sanjay Virmani (Managing Partner), we found out his thoughts and reasons to launch a vertical educational portal in an already competitive local-search market. Sanjay says “I am a father of a 12 and 8 years old and I am not relatively new to Bangalore, but yes, I still find it hard to locate a decent tuition or a hobby centre for my kids. It is not that search engines fail to locate a few, but I am clueless about the kind and range of services one has to offer. All I get to know is the address and the phone number, which in many cases is invalid. This issue is addressed by the dynamic updating technique which allows service providers to manually update changes in information at any given time. There is also a internal auditing system in place to periodically check the authenticity of information published. Talking about the service providers, there are quite a many amazing career coaches, play houses or dance institutes which have never got noticed because of possible budget limitations. The need to create Extra-Prepare has stemmed up this from this very gap of communication or available information between parents and service providers.”

For starters, the service of Extra-Prepare is centred on the cities of Mumbai, Delhi Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. It covers listings of services like Schools, Preschools, and classes for dance, music, hobbies, martial arts, fitness and vocals. . Now at a time when local search has emerged as the strongest online trend, Sanjay looks to stay ahead by adding and believing “to know the people, be the people”.