Mamata Banerjee’s hot election streak just got hotter — Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia as consultant is the Trinamul war room’s latest catch.

Stanford graduate Sabeer, once the poster boy of web-based communication, visited Trinamul Bhavan on the sidelines of a private visit to the city on Sunday to help Mamata’s call for change chime — or maybe click — louder in the run-up to a landmark election.

“The people here want something new…. a change. I came here to share my ideas,” Sabeer said at the Trinamul headquarters, but clarified that he was not joining the party.

His advice to Trinamul? Harness the power of mobile telephony and reach out to every voter in every city, town and village.

Trinamul leaders said Sabeer, who has dabbled with Internet-based voice communication since making an estimated $400 million by selling Hotmail to Microsoft in 1997, had agreed to visit the city a second time to help the party take its e-campaign forward.

“We are the first to approach someone like him. We are very happy to have him guide us,” party leader Partha Chatterjee, said.

A Trinamul team, headed by Abhishek Banerjee, had been trying to get Sabeer on board for nearly three months. “One of the suggestions he made was that the core website aitmc.org be expanded to include personalised mail ids, streaming and other innovative ways to communicate messages to large numbers,” said Banerjee.

The tie-up with Sabeer is Trinamul’s second e-coup of the poll season after snapping up two outgoing IIM Calcutta students for its Y-connect strategy team.

Metro had reported on March 9 how Hariharan Sriram, 24, and Mansha Tandon, 27, had opted for a two-month political internship with the party despite having jobs lined up with multinational FMCG companies.

Trinamul leaders informed Sabeer during Sunday’s interaction that they had been “working on the website for nearly a year” and collected the email IDs of around 80,000 people till now to convey Mamata’s message directly to them.

Sabeer suggested that the party should also consider using the grassroots penetration of mobile telephony to its advantage.

“He said that even a farmer in a remote corner of the state has a cellphone. Why not use that? We loved the idea,” said a senior Trinamul leader.

The party has decided to acquire a dedicated number for bulk text messaging that can also receive replies.

“People can express their views by texting back to the same number. This way, we will also have a database of cellphone users like the one we have for email users,” the Trinamul leader said.

This, he insisted, was just one of the many ideas in the pipeline.

Sabeer said there was no reason why communication tech tools that had worked elsewhere in the world wouldn’t work in Bengal.

“Today, information is in the hands of the people. They can express themselves through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. The power of information and the Internet has literally changed the world. Mobile penetration has shifted power to the hands of the common man,” said Sabeer.

Mamata is said to be keen to have Sabeer advice the party — and the new government, if Trinamul does oust the Left Front — on e-communication even after the elections.

She is yet to meet Sabeer, though she did interact with his in-laws last December, a source said.

Sabeer, an ardent cricket fan and keen golfer, is presently working with the Haryana government to build Nano City, a tech hub on the lines of Silicon Valley in the US.

Whether Mamata would want such a hub in Bengal to be named Nano is anyone’s guess.