While Google is struggling to roll out its Street View project in India, facing issues with permissions for the service, and now facing a challenge for Google Maps from Survey of India, WoNoBo has been launched today as what appears to be the most impressive and promising product startup I've seen in the seven years that I've been covering this industry in India. WoNoBo (A. N. Virtual World Tech Ltd) is a mapping platform that offers a 3D view of cities, similar to street view, and has been incubated with a $35 million investment over the last few years by BSE listed mapping company GENESYS. The key difference between Street View and WoNoBo is the extensive amount of mark-up that WoNoBo has - there are placeholders to point towards businesses and different types of businesses (theaters, eateries, houses, chemist etc), as well as city guides, stories and walking tours. GENESYS has, since 1995, been working largely in the overseas market as a GIS outsourcing company, working for Bing (Microsoft) & NAVTEQ, mapping UK as a part of their millennium mapping project. GENESYS does work like imagery acquisition, photogammetry, remote sensing, data conversion among other things. GENESYS MD Sajid Malik told MediaNama there's been a shift from B2B to B2C in the GIS industry in the last few years due to churn and uncertainty in the industry, with B2C mapping businesses leading the way. WoNoBo marks GENESYS' entry into the consumer space, and as per its 2011 annual report, much of the business' free cash went into…
