ikman.lk: Your Local Swedish/South Asian Classifieds
ikman and it’s Pakistani counterpart.
This new site ikman.lk has been growing quite fast, advertising heavily online and now on TV and radio. It’s also pretty good, a simple site with more than the critical mass of classifieds to become a market leader. So who are they? It says copyright Saltside, so I looked that up. It’s a Swedish/Dubai company now launching the same classifieds system in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
They are spending heavy on TV and radio ads, which I guess you have to do to get growth. That’s what anything.lk did. The difference is that ikman doesn’t seem to be selling anything yet, though lots of people are selling stuff through it.
What is happening is that they’re getting a market leader position in online classifieds (which Wijeya’s HitAds has basically ceded by being paid/sucking on the web). With that position there’s a lot they can do, and they obviously have a lot of capital behind them, set on locking down the South Asian market.
Not to quote Ice Cube, but the Sri Lankan police are hardly beloved. A 
I just gave a talk at the University Of Sri Jayawardenapura along with Reeza Zarook of Anything.lk and Rohan Jayaweera of Google. These are my notes: Devin Jayasundara asked me for a subject for this talk and I told him Internet property. But I talked to my fiancé Shru and she had a better idea. Startups aren’t about creating property at all, not really. They’re about creating territory, about creating land.
I haven’t been blogging much, I know. It’s partly because we’ve been doing a lot of work on YAMU, especially shipping 1.0.1 of the Android app today. It’s on the 
I met an old-timer who said they used to drop acid and sleep atop Sigiriya, but the place has taken on a more commercial and quasi-spiritual role now. It was built by a king as a sort of retreat and used as a monastery. Now it’s a prime tourist and cultural destination. Hence it’s a bit odd to see a Japanese beer commercial shot up there. There’s a bunch of people eating, um, deep fried cream filled coconuts and then drinking some bracing beer. I hear the whole thing cost Rs. 25,000 (I’m presuming they used stock images).
I think you mean Ikman and its BANGLADESHI counterpart….
Again! You wrote about it before I did. Whenever I think of writing about it you do it before I do :-)
Wanni
You should also checkout geolanka.com that shows all the classifieds on a local map..pretty awesome =) It shows ads even from hitads and maybe ikman.lk as well…I think it needs some improvements..but good enough for now.
I checked out GeoLanka. Cool idea, but the way it loads data gives me a headache
Correction: Whenever I think of writing about something you do it before I do :-)
Why do we need so many website for classifieds?? What the fcuk do we Sri Lankans have to sell anyway???
We are not sophisticated enough to even have a yard sale or neighborhood flea market.
Bloddy nonsense!!!
You can get an Italian work permit/visa for 1.8million LKR, from SANSEEVAN in Jaffna. How does he get it? Connections in Italy?
http://ikman.lk/italian-work-permit-offered-jaffna
It’s a fascinating glimpse into what sort of things people want to sell. Pigeons, mobiles, dog kennels etc. .. :)
And from here you can get that 1.8 mill as a loan
http://ikman.lk/loan-offered-jaffna
B. gons SOUNDS very sophisticated.
Aiyo! I miss Dodo.
Maybe Dodo got impeached?
Have to agree with B.gonis. I also have never seen or even heard of a yard sale here. We also don’t have farmers markets. I don’t know whether we can call the irida pola a farmer’s market. I don’ think so. How many of you have used internet classifieds to sell stuff here. I don’t think anybody uses the internet. Maybe 1%. But 99% don’t.
sun computer house is a digital products free delivery service
in sri lanka ,we have kingston pen drives ,kingston micro sd cards
,digital camera memory cards ,huawei unloked dongles etc
I also saw Ikman ads on the tv during swarnawahini news. Seems like they are well loaded. It will be good to have a option like that.
Maybe you haven’t but many Sri Lankan have been using the Internet for a long time to sell and buy stuff. We have a online fashion store called http://www.colombotraders.com through which we sell ladies handbags, purses, imitation jewelry etc. Even today I delivered a order to a lady in Colombo 15.
Way back around 2002/2003 suntel started wow.lk which became very popular as a classified site for selling mobile phones, and new and used pc accessories. I know lot of people who posted ads for mobile phones, bikes, IT goods and sold them through wow.lk and who still do sales on other sites like ikman.lk and the dozen other free sl classified sites.
[...] internet and other media. I rightly guessed that there should be a bigger hand behind the site and Indi had unearthed who are behind it. We are yet to learn what the business model of the site is. At the moment it is 100% [...]