Location based services and maps company MapmyIndia has inked a strategic tie-up with iBall to integrate its people locator app Locate to iBall’s Andi Uddaan handset which was released last month.
Positioned as a safety phone for women, Andi Uddaan features a dedicated SOS button on its back, which sets off a loud siren and alerts nearby people with messages and automatically makes calls to five pre-defined emergency contacts.
iBall says its sends an alert message to pre-defined contacts along with the location of the person based on geocodes, however its not clear on how the company is addressing accidental button presses.
As part of the partnership, MapMyIndia says that Locate is powering the SOS feature on Andi Uddaan handset, which sends a MapmyIndia maps link along with the SMS to these pre-defined emergency contacts. It also offers opt-in real time person tracking and geo-fencing which allows users to set a geographical area as a fence & any breach will trigger an alert to the emergency contacts.
At launch, Locate was quite buggy with issues in enabling tracking and check-ins not showing, however it looks like the company has now fixed the bugs and the location tracking works fine when we tried it on Nexus 4 and Samsung Galaxy Y at the time of writing this article. However, it needs to work on compatibility with smaller screen phones, since the font sizes are too small to read in the current avatar on phones like Galaxy Y.
Smart Mirror: MapmyIndia also informed that it recently launched a new device called Smart Mirror, which combines a standard rear view mirror with a touch screen GPS navigator to offer assisted driving experience to users.
It also features an AV input which allows users to hook up their reverse camera. MapmyIndia claims that Smart Mirror will automatically switch to reverse camera view within 3 seconds of putting the reverse gear and switch back to the previous display when the user releases the reverse gear. Besides this, it features a micro SD card slot with support for up to 8 GB microSD cards. The device is priced at Rs 15,990 and is available for purchase from MapmyIndia website.
Other Initiatives
– In December 2013, MapmyIndia had launched a location sharing app Reach Me which allows users to share their location with friends and family. It had also released a local search app Explore.
– MapmyIndia had inked a strategic partnership with Esri India to offer GIS solutions along with rich map data to enterprise and government customers. As part of the partnership, the company had also become the authorized reseller for Esri’s GIS software products in India.
– In November 2013, it launched MapmyIndia Connect which lets users mirror their smartphone or tablet screen (Android and iOS) screen on to a TV or a screen in a car.
– It also released a new version of its maps dubbed version 8.1, which extended Hindi maps to 10 cities and claimed to cover 10.54 million places of interest and over 2 million road kilometers across 600,000 villages in India.
