Microsoft has launched listings and street maps for India, powered by the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform, and with map data from Navteq and the Goverment of India.
In India, the service has street level data for 9 cities, business listings across 29 cities and highway networks to 20,000 cities and towns. Try out the internet version at http://maps.live.co.in and mobile version at http://m.live.co.in
It’s important to note that while, last year, Microsoft had signed “multi-year deal” with Navteq, Navteq itself was acquired by Nokia. This puts Nokia and Microsoft in an interesting competitive situation – since Nokia has its own plans for Navteq, particularly around local information, perhaps extending to location based services. Navteq had launched Maps for India last year.
I tried out the map service online, and was quite impressed with the driving directions, and the integration of the directions with the map. However, do remember that in India, directions are largely based on landmarks, rather than street names. Microsoft would do well to add landmarks to the directions.
Two other GIS companies that offer driving directions in India – Yahoo India (maps powered by MapMyIndia), which also has Maps in local languages. The other is RouteGuru which provides directions both online and via SMS for Delhi, and also SMS’ the approximate auto rickshaw fare. Google also has a Maps service live both online and on mobile in India, with data collected from users.
So a large number of players in the maps space…but is there sufficient demand for all of them?
Note: Live Search Maps covers the following cities
– Addresses, roads, localities, landmarks, & places of interest across 9 Indian cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur.
– Business listings across 29 Indian cities: Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Agra, Allahabad, Amritsar, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Cochin, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Kanpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Mangalore, Nagpur, Nasik, Patiala, Patna, Rajkot, Surat, Vadodara and Vishakapatnam.
Update: Pluggd.in had apparently reported this launch last month.
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4 Comments until now.
When I was new in Delhi, I used routeguru and mapmyindia’s directions as guidelines for my travels within Delhi. I think they were very helpful. It will be good to have more players so that overall out is improved.
Jeet: which did you find more useful? I think one of RouteGuru’s challenges is that they really need to expand beyond Delhi/NCR. They’ve been Delhi/NCR focused for a long time now
@ Jeet: Thank you for your testimonial.
@ Nikhil: Good writeup. Thank you for mentioning RouteGuru. Clarification on our expansion plans: We intend to expand only after establishing a business model in Delhi. Delhi is a sizeable market to create a template model. We are also discussing funding in order to speed up the process of validations and expansion. As we are talking to only a couple of selected investors at a time, funding will take time to arrive. But we do believe in ’slow and steady wins the race’. :) Therefore, if needed, we are prepared to break-even and scale slowly on our own steam. Summary: Our priorities are (1) stable revenue from Delhi/NCR (2) expansion to other cities. Thank you again.
@Nikhil: When I was REALLY new to Delhi, I couldn’t even recognize the landmarks, so RouteGuru was not very helpful, but within a month or so, it became useful.
Hey, can I get a mail when someone posts a response to my post..