Perspectives

Yahoo! India has now introduced Local/Business search in India starting with a few cities (Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi ). It is the usual, Find “what” in “where” local search destination except there are a few cheeky cool things.

Locality pages: for Koramangala, Indiranagar, Bandra West and Andheri West.

Essentialist: On the Koramangala Locality page, I found a couple of interesting questions such as “Are you getting married?” , “Moving to Koramangala?” being asked at me. And on click, it gives an essential list of all businesses you may ever need in the process of getting married (Assuming you already have a girl) or moving. Pretty cool.

Footprints: Assuming you have visited that business, then you could click on a “foot” looking icon and it will bump up a number. Something like digging a web page, I guess. I guess higher the footprint, more the listing will feature in your search, frontpage etc.

If you are business owner of if you know a business, you could add details of it using the “Add a Business”. I did’nt quite find a page/link to do that. But Y! Local did ask me about it when my search query did not yield a result. Such as this

There is a fair amount of Maps integration as well, but is not useful practically yet. You can do stuff like move around the marker of a business to it’s correct location, vote on it, save it etc.

You can also send the listing on SMS, email etc. I also like the UI and the layout, but I also wish the frontpage was a little light and plain. Right now, it has one too many links.

Cheers! to Yahoo! India.

Just showing off a bit because The Hindu still remains my favorite newspaper.

My dad used to be a master of pincodes in Chennai. He has been and around Chennai for such a long time that he can beat the Head Post Master to his Job. Infact, it was one of our favorite time pass activities. I used to get hold of an yearly diary that had Pincodes of Chennai city as an addendum and then I will pick and ask Pincodes of random and weird localities that nobody goes to in Chennai. And he used to be right every time.

Now, You don’t have to live in a city for 30 years to know it’s pincodes. You can leave that job to Yahoo India Maps . The next time you have a pincode with you and you are wondering where that place is, go ask Yahoo India Maps.

For instance, 600001 is Chennai GPO, 560034 is Koramangala, bangalore. Those are my places.
What Pincode are you?

Inspired by Pradeep B V’s comment on my earlier post, I went on to check if Nokia has any (updated) Maps for my Nokia Phone (N73). My phone does not have GPS like the Nokia Navigator, but nevertheless, Maps on mobile (with GPRS for Search) can still come in very handy. Also, my phone came pre packaged with a dumb local application (with maps), but it only used to show the outline of India. Now, I have seen that many times in my sixth class Geography and that level of map is not useful for any god damn thing, let alone Local Search.

So, I started from here , downloaded and installed the “Nokia Maps” application over to my phone and then downloaded and installed a windows only (Infact, you won’t even find the download link on firefox on windows. Visit the link on IE) application over to my PC. And then, after a few glitches, I downloaded the India data pack.

The map data is from Navteq. And we all already know Navteq does not have the best data set for India. For instance, the data pack for China was about 190 MB whereas the India one was 21MB. (India is about a third in size compared to China).

I was checking in and around Bangalore and they have all the major roads named and searchable. But more importantly, because you can download the data pack into your mobile, you don’t need a network connection to search or view the Map. That is cool, because GPRS (or EDGE, 2.5 G) is real slow for Maps. Also, there is no connectivity in places where you generally tend to get lost.

Now, the technology is also different when you compare this with Google Maps Mobile or Yahoo! Go. Nokia Maps is a vector map application. What that means is, the maps are rendered by an engine that understands shapes rather than showing images that have maps pre-rendered (aka raster maps ).

So, the application is smaller, renders what needs to be rendered and ignores layers and shapes when it needs to, It is probably a bit slower because of all the bits it needs to flip/flop before rendering the shape. I may be wrong here, that is just my guess.

I don’t have GPS on my phone. Earlier, I tried to buy a bluetooth GPS receiver that I can hook up with my phone. But the pieces that I tried never worked with my phone and I gave up. So, I couldn’t check if GPS worked well with the application and if the map is, infact, accurate.

Anyway, If you have a Nokia big smart phone, go download the maps. It will come in handy.

Telematics Research Group released a press release a little while ago and they say that the future of Portable Navigational devices look promising. Also, Mobile phone based GPS will become popular than traditional PNDs from makers such as TomTom or Garmin. So, if you are going to buy an in-car navigation system, you may want to hold on. Maps may just be available on your mobile phone.

More here

This is a long pending post.

Search? Making money out of Search? yeah ok. We have a 200 billion dollar company doing that right. Social networking? Facebook is trying out a few things and they are likely to crack it sooner than anybody else.

Now making money out of Maps? Now that is a complicated problem. In my opinion, nobody has quite solved this. Yahoo and Mapquest stick to what are best at. Banner advertising. But with the advent of Mashable maps (Ajaxified maps), you just have one page to do all you want. Real estate is prime and crunching a banner ad there ends up being ugly. I have always disliked the ad at the bottom left corner of Yahoo Maps.

Now, Google has tried a few things too. They have tried to sneak in their adwords in. But then again, 75% of the page is maps and there is only so much you can do with the right pane which is already so full of local results and driving directions instruction set and what not. Plus, it hardly and rarely makes use of the biggest context available. “Geography”. In other words, “location”.

Yahoo then tried the branding with the “See these business locations on the map” bottom bar. Now it is quite static with no intelligence. And like I argued earlier, and only slightly makes use of the fact there is a location context. Plus, It suits only those business that have a wide (nation wide) presence. In other words, businesses that are chains. It simply refuses to cater to the needs of the long tail.

Also, Maps is a very unique service. Most online services and properties tries to keep the person online. It works by the charm of referrals. But maps works the other way around. The user actually wants to get offline. He wants to get off the internet and get going somewhere. Most Ad models and networks are not best suited for this. They all work in a “Click here to go to the site” way when I want to get off my chair.

A real long time ago ( a year or two ago) Google was trying to sneak in a few sponsored listings as markers on the map. In a given map view, you will find (different looking) markers strewn all over the place. Once clicked, it will tell you about a restaurant or a book store with the phone number etc. Somehow, that has disappeared. Mostly because they didnt find enough interest in the advertising community.

Most recently, I came across Lat49 which is trying to do the same thing. They have tied up with a bunch of map services and hacks (on top of Gmaps and Yahoo maps etc). As an advertiser, you gotta go and buy rights for an area (location context) and place your ad. Everytime anyone see that particular area on any of those Mapping partners, your ad will be displayed.

I think this is the way it needs to proceed. Because fundamentally, the context is location. Not keywords, not your IP, Not the referral page. It is like you are driving to that coffee shop you love the most, but the book store exists on the way. Whether you like it or not. From such a perspective, these ads stop looking like ads anymore. Right?

Now the real challenge is to generate interest in those physical businesses. They need to educated that it is possible to promote their physical store just as well and easy as their online store. It is even possible to advertise on the internet even if you are not online. And that Advertising on Maps is the way to go about it.

What do you think?

This is a big surprise for me. The 2007 zeitgeist list for India (Fast rising queries) has just one English word which is not already a Google product in the top five:

01. Orkut
02. YouTube
03. Gmail
04. Map
05. Google

And what it is? “Map”!? So, what does this tell you? Maybe there is a big market for “Maps” and my gut feel has been wrong all along..hmm..But I still cant believe it is map. Not facebook. not iphone. Not javascript. But map. Not “Google maps”, Not “Yahoo Maps”, but “Map”. Interesting.

If you are curious..the six to ten are these. Not sure how zapak managed to jump in there:

06. Indian Railways
07. Yahoo Mail
08. Technology
09. Yahoo
10. Zapak

Google Local India Sticker
Originally uploaded by shivku.

I was at a watch repair shop at BDA, Complex in Bangalore and I was surprised to see a Google marker stuck on one of the side walls of the small shop. On Closer analysis, It revealed itself as a “Google India Local Maps” sticker that Google possibly has shipped it over to these guys.

So, did the shop owner marked himself on the map (Using My maps) and got the sticker shipped? Very unlikely. I dont think he has used email, let alone maps online. I also tried searching for “Clock repair” and could not find anything useful. Infact, I could not find “BDA complex” in Koramangala, Let alone the “clock work shop” inside it.

So, that just means someone came over and distributed these stickers? That is cheap.

Having said that, the idea rocks. First, They have gone really local. This is as random a shop as it can get. Not the kinds you will find even on yellow pages. Second, this is free physical contextual advertising. Not many people are online in India yet, and not many non-internet ( Newspapers or TV) ads are contextual. Now, things in the physical world that you can relate to on the internet which is (also) contextual, well..that is a killer combo. Precisely what made me come back home and search for “clock works” near my house in Google maps.

So, You all have heard about this wonderful little company called Mapunity trying to take on the daring problem of Traffic information services which nobody thought was possible to solve in India? If you havent, visit, their Bangalore, Hyderabad and recently, Chennai Traffic information services. Chennai traffic is still in Beta and was released sometime last week. If you are from Chennai and if you find something glaringly wrong (with respect to traffic, that is), make sure you let the guys know.

BTIS has also put out a little mashup with Yahoo India Maps, for Bangalore. If you ever thought the basic maps of BTIS wasnt enough, then you know where to go.

So, the online maps battle is not being fought just between Google and Mapquest. We also have Ask Maps on the hood. (along with MSN and yahoo! and a bunch of others). It surely does not win over the other map services yet, but they seem to be the only ones so far to have “Walking directions“. Although (what they have implemented is) no “rocket science” technology wise, We still have to cheer them for first to market.

Walking directions are significantly different from (GMaps’s) “Avoid highways”, when properly implemented.

• Walking doesn’t (Infact, shouldnt) need to take care of One ways.
• Walking should strictly be the shortest. It needs to avoid every other consideration, how wide the road is, speed limits, How many lanes etc.
• It needs to take care of which side of the road to walk and Zebra/pedestrian crossings and subways. I dont think zebra crossings is an easily available information and don’t think Ask considers it. For instance, that is not how I cross over from Yahoo’s one building to another.
• What about (underground) subways? What if the subways have many exits? What about stairs along bridges and ramps? I can just climb up the stairs right? Again, Lack of data.
• How can you possibly walk 115 miles? I mean, not unless you are Forrest Gump mindlessly running around. Features need to make (human) sense.

This is a spectacular feature that has been in my mind for a long time. It is nice to see Ask making it happen, but needs to improve. This along with “Cycling” and “public transportation” and a combination of the three should be fantastic.

What do you think?