Taking a bite of global social media search pie

SINGAPORE start-up Holatastic Pte Ltd has jumped onto the social media search bandwagon. It claims to be the first in the market to offer social media content search on multiple platforms - iOS, Android and the Web.

Its locally developed offering, Kurrants, was launched in November to enable free searches of hashtags and text in different languages on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. It is expected to include photo and video searches as well as more sites such as Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest later this year.

Kurrants was conceived as a personal project in 2013 by Holatastic's co- founders Ian Poh, Jeff Au and Song Young. They wanted more out of social media search engines to satisfy their appetite for the latest news and updates on their pet topics.

"These days, you can get a pulse on what people are saying about practically anything by plugging into individual social network websites. But it can be a time-consuming, hit-and- miss affair digging for relevant content," said Mr Young, the company's marketing chief.

Also, social media search tools have their limitations, which include the lack of availability on multiple platforms and an inability to process multiple key words, noted Mr Poh, its CEO. He added that traditional search engines do not offer a comprehensive search and aggregation of content from different social media sites.

While Kurrants lets users finetune their search by social media sites, it does not offer a public dashboard like Topsy, which shows the total number of tweets and sentiment score in a specific timeframe. Topsy also enables search results to be filtered by timeframe, links, photos and videos. According to Mr Au, there are plans to allow Kurrants users to further finetune their search results.

Holatastic hopes to generate revenue by identifying trends on what people in specific locations search for, so as to help businesses better target customers.

"If you are a company and want to know what people are saying about your brand, you can engage a social media analytics company. But what about those who are searching for these posts? Finding out what people are searching for is as important as knowing what people are posting," said Mr Poh.

Holatastic is also looking to provide social media content analytics in the future.

The six-person start-up is targeting the US and Singapore markets with plans to tap Indonesia and the Philippines at a later stage.

According to Mr Poh, Holatastic has already garnered interest from fast- moving consumer goods companies, one of which is a local entity that is looking for a better understanding of its customers in the US.

The co-founders, who have ploughed over $20,000 into developing Kurrants, have set themselves some aggressive targets. They aim to raise at least $500,000 in funding this year in order to speed up development and boost marketing efforts to achieve 100,000 downloads of the Kurrants app by the end of this year. So far, there have been under 600 downloads of the Android app. The iOS version was made available only at the end of January.

In addition, they have set their sights on raking in $1.5 million in revenue by the end of 2015.