Its been almost a month I wanted to write about SadakMap.com, a startup website from Pune which gives you a platform to locate your point of interest on the Indian city maps and you can build a discussion about it with people, review those places etc. The website is using Google Maps API to provide an interactive map.
Back in 2006 Google actually made its maps api available for India and Indian cities. Then we saw a revolutionary application called "WikiMapia" where everyone can locate and tag their known places. The application was really cool and innovative and that gave me an idea of creating something like wikimapia
but something specific to India. The idea I had was to provide an interface where people can mark their businesses on the map, enter phone numbers etc., then provide local business search to end user.
So after that thought, I started doing some research and found out about MapMyIndia.com which is still not close to what I had in mind. Because of the lack of time, I kept thinking about implementing it and almost six months after that, I found out about couple of new indian startups JustDial.com, OnYomo.com. (Read my article about Add your Business).
Discovery of those startups slowed down my aggresiveness and just couple months after that I discovered that Google India itself is providing an interface where people can locate their businesses, point of interest etc. on the map. Being such a huge company, Google in India has asked users to fill in data regarding cities. Google has provided GPS kits and all necessary equipments, and has a pilot running in 50 cities. So within few years, Google will have almost all india covered with more detailed maps. Also Google is feeding its maps from Google Earth (Desktop application).
So the point here is, will this startups like SadakMap or JustDial or OnYomo will survive this battle? The key to fight against big companies is uniqueness. And these sites in one way or other lacks this uniqueness.
Lets talk about SadakMap for a second, the basic functionality of this site is to locate a place, give it a title, details and mark it. Now what lacks here is the structured data. They could have broken down the form to have phone number, email address, website etc. But all they have is type, title and details. (Check the image below).
So now because of this non structured data it would be difficult for them to provide an interface where people can search by a particular information. Another thing I noticed is that, once you add the marker, you can not edit it. What if somebody finds out that they have misspelled something? You need to provide an edit functionality to users who created their own places. Other feature of this site is that you can write reviews about a place that you just marked or a place someone else has marked on the map. Well the feature is not unique here as you can find the similar functionality on Google India Maps as well. (Check out the article about Find local restaurants and businesses using Google India Maps
On the plus side, If SadakMap team manages to structure their data, they can sell their database to Yahoo or Microsoft or any other big company. As they grow (I wish them good luck for that), they will surely have huge database with latitude and longiture information.
So the question to my readers, what do you think about these Indian Startups survival?
Wherever on the map your business is located maybe it's time to take a break and go vacation Hawaii. Or maybe Mexico beach vacations are more to your liking. Take some time to relax!
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I am the founder of SadakMap, so first I wish to thank you for writing about us.
Here goes: we launched about a month ago as a beta site and are slowly making our presence felt. Your comments about the data not being structured and the absence of editing capability are sound. We have been feverishly trying to knock off items on our feature list. e.g. we just (about an hour ago) enabled the permalink feature. With this, each and every place/post on SadakMap now gets it own permanent url (e.g. http://www.sadakmap.com/p/Gupte-Hospital/). This was on top of our priority list because it would help us spread across the web quicker as users can now start sending urls to places they like.
The structured data is also a very important feature as you rightly mentioned. So far we have been testing the user's response in order to help us prioritize the next set of features. The structured data has been suggested by some and its on the cards, and so is the Edit, and Search (the last two being the most requested).
We understand that there are inherent disadvantages to structuring the data (one of them being, what if most of the fields are left empty). Its not as free flow as say someone typing in the phone, url, in the Details field and let the system do the work of mining the data. We are still debating the trade-offs.
In the meanwhile do checkout the permalink feature. Add a place and send its permanent url to friends so its a one-click find.
Thanks again for your review - digital bytes like these keeps us going.
Regards,
Unmesh. Founder - SadakMap.com
SpotMeUrl: http://www.sadakmap.com/spotme/unmesh