GeoComrade

The last few months have been pretty busy – it is not surprising that I missed one of the best temporal visualizations i’ve seen in the long time. Today, at Where20, Dian Eisnor from Waze shared this beauty:

One small but very cool detail is the way the direction and time is reflected. As tack moves forward, the plume increases in size following the move direction. Well done Waze.

p.s. detailed blog about where 2.0 is coming up soon.

Following up on an earlier post about Rambler Maps I reached out to Dmitry Krasulya, a product manager at Rambler, to get more info on the geo side of the company.

First, a bit of history.

Rambler maps were launched back in 2001 under the name “On The Map” (наКарте) and covered only Moscow, although a low-detail map was available of the entire world. The data was supplied by Geocenter-Consulting, the same company who supplied data to Yandex and Google Maps during that time. Then, in 2006, in partnership with Probkovorot, a real-time traffic data supplier, Rambler offered traffic information for Moscow as well as expanded its coverage to six major Russian cities like St. Petersburg, Voronezh etc. Then, nothing happened…

According to Dmitry the entire project was frozen until 2010 when it was relaunched as Rambler Maps. The latest version was launched in partnership with Pro-Gorod (part of the CdCom group), who is a development partner as well as the geo data supplier.

The company considered a partnership with Google, Yandex and the like on the geo front, but opted to build their own solution due to the data coverage limitations and legal restrictions, which is the case with proprietary mobile solutions. As I noted in this post, Rambler is getting involved with OpenStreetMap and has donated several servers to mirror OSM map requests. Dmitry hinted that a “closer partnership” between Rambler and the OpenStreetMap is possible but would not disclose any details. I bet they are trying to do something similar to MapQuest and Microsoft.

Today, Rambler Maps works exclusively in Russia but plans to expand into Eastern Europe. In Russia, Rambler Maps covers 90K populated areas, out of which 707 are mapped down to the building level. In addition, the geo database also contains 900K kilometers of road and 250K POIs (which the company collects on their own). The monthly audience of Rambler Maps is 385,500 (source TNS – January 2010), which is not as impressive as Yandex’s 9 million, but still a substantial amount, especially considering that the platform just launched. Additional traffic data can be viewed here.

The company is hard at work on expanding the geo-offering and building new solutions, but they have a long way to go. The four years Rambler Maps was in hibernation put it way behind the competition. I doubt that the company will end up competing head-to-head with 2GIS, Google and Yandex Geo but will likely focus on market-specific vertical solutions to augment its media business.

That being said, there is one area where Rambler can take the lead – the adoption of OpenStreetMap. It will be exciting to see Rambler be the first RUNET company to adopt OSM on a massive scale and push “open” just like MapQuest is doing in the States.

To wrap up, since my first post was about the use of Flash in Rambler Maps, I asked Dmitry to comment on the use of Flash on their website:

We chose Flash since it works in all major operating systems [that's right, IPad is not considered a major OS in Russia] and does not require additional support to ensure workability in all browsers. Many think that Flash is evil, but for the majority of users this is not true. However in light of the growing mobile audience, and following the global trend, we plan to replace Flash with JavaScript.

IMO, good response.

AgroAtlas is a new website developed in tandem between Russian scientists and the USDA. As the name suggests, AgroAtlas, is a comprehensive resource for agricultural GIS data, and according to the the official USDA release:

shows the geographic distributions of 100 crops; 640 species of crop diseases, pests, and weeds; and 560 wild crop relatives growing in Russia and neighboring countries. The atlas also includes 200 maps that illustrate the environmental variables that affect crop production in that part of the world.

The website is impressive. There is a ton of data which is broken into three main categories: Crops and Wild Relatives, Harmful Objects and Environment. Then, each category is further subdivided, making it easy to find anything from a potato cultivation area to a map of mean annual air temperature’s standard deviation. To make things even better, each dataset can be downloaded as a GIS layer (RDC, RST formats) or mashed using a downloadable AgroAtlas app. Unfortunately, no web-based visualization tools are available at this point, and the downloadable version of AgroAtlas is Windows-only (major downer).

Another strong point is the website’s English version. I don’t think I have seen a Russian website where the English version was as thorough and complete. I guess this is where the partnership with the USDA really shines through.

AgroAtlas sets the bar pretty high for other Russian GIS websites. As I see it, the next logical step for them would be to integrate with GeoCommons API to make their data truly open and accessible.

More on the release here, here and here.

I have to admit that up until today I haven’t spent much time on Rambler.maps. Somehow I never thought of Rambler as a mapping provider even though they are one of Russia’s biggest media portals and search providers. Either I was wrong in my perception of Rambler, or the company has recently changed its strategy and significantly built up the geo offering.

From first glance the map appears to be feature-complete with local search, traffic information, routing and all other standard map goodies. The full description of Rambler maps calls for a separate post, but for now I want to point out that the user experience and UI are nicely done.

The application feels and works just like any other mapping provider, but there is one big difference – Rambler Maps are implemented in Flash!? Although Flash is a powerful technology (which I am a fan of) it has several large draw-backs: accessibility from mobile devices and its proprietary nature. Also, in geo-applications, Flash is often employed for specific visualization tasks but not as a primary technology across the board… Not to say that the choice of technology is bad, but it is certainly unorthodox. I am curious to talk to someone from Rambler about their technology choice and experience of using Flash on a large scale.

Stay tuned for more updates on Rambler.

Augmented reality is a trendy topic these days, and as it turns out, the trend is making its way to Russia. AR Door is the first Russian company building augmented reality applications and building up the market as a whole. The company got its start in 2009 as a development partner for Total Immersion and Layar but lately have been working on their own projects.

Their latest product is a multifunctional augmented reality guide for Moscow’s eastern administrative district. The app uses a phone’s location to pull in surrounding POI’s, photos and a ton of other information. Then, of course, the data is overlayed on a map or a “real view”. Best of all, the app supports both English and Russian languages and is available for download on the App Store (Android version is coming soon, I hear).

The original announcement is here. For other cool AR Door’s project demos watch their YouTube channel.

Russia’s AR market is still in its early stage which is pretty much true globally. Although AR applications are very cool there hasn’t been mass adoption nor even interesting business models…yet. I’m curious to see whether this will change o

Following up on his recent interview, Maxim Dubinin (Максим Дубинин) published detailed stats for Russian OSM. As it turns out, Russian OSM community enjoys a healthy growth rate above the world’s average:

Another interesting metric is the user retention which, according to Dubinin, is as high as 83% percent! To clarify, 83% is the number of contributors who edited the map at within last 6 months. This is very impressive, I would be curious to see how this compares to Yandex People’s Map and Google’s Map Maker.

Source: Gis Lab Info

This week marked a significant milestone for the Russia’s OSM – the project made its first appearance in the Russian mainstream media! OSM community members Maxim Dubinin (Максим Дубинин) and Vladimir Elistratov (Владимир Елистратов) made an appearance on a popular tech radio show Tochka.

The interview lasted over 40 minutes and revealed a ton of interesting information. Here are few points:

• The best mapped OSM Russian city is Rybinsk
• Russia’s OSM Community has between 4-5 thousand contributors.
• Scanex, Rambler contributed data and hardware to the project.
• Interesting discussion about the legality of mapping military installations.

The full transcript is available here. Something tells me that 2011 will be the year of OpenStreetMap – hope to see Russian OSM members at SOTM.

Ok, so ESRI confirmed that there were indeed 400 million maps created on arcgis.com in October, but I am still not convinced…

It is not that is impossible for ESRI to achieve such growth in one month, it’s that there just isn’t any (publicly accessible) evidence to suggest that the number is anywhere close. To illustrate my point, let’s compare Arcgis.com to another website with massive amounts of user-generated content. Since there is no such website in the GIS space, let’s take Flickr. I know that this is not “apples to apples” comparison, but since we are comparing only the amount of user-generated content it will work.

Here is what we know about Flickr: According to Compete, Flickr enjoyed almost 20 million unique visitors in October who uploaded more than 3000 images per minute. If we do a rough calculation (3000 photos * 1440 minutes * 31 days) we will arrive at 133,920,000 photos for October.

Now let’s look at Arcgis: Compete shows roughly 33K unique visitors for October and the numbers from Alexa are not much different. As I noted earlier, ESRI claims 400,000,000 user-generated maps for this period. This means that every unique visitor had to have created over 12K maps.

Either I am totally off in my calculations or Arcgis.com is 30% larger than Flickr in terms of user-generated content! This is excellent news for map geeks all over the world – making maps is finally more popular than uploading photos.

Let me start by saying that Wherecamp5280 was great! I had high expectations going into it and can honestly say that this year’s conference was a solid step forward. The event was well organized, or more accurately, had just enough structure to make it flow efficiently. Another strong point was the broad range of interesting discussion topics / presentations which made it hard for me to choose between sessions. Here are some of them:

• Usability in GIS applications
• Flash vs. JavaScript in mapping APIs
• SEO your Geo – make your geo data visible to search engines
• Real time data analysis
• The use of OpenStreetMap by large companies (MapQuest, Bing, ESRI etc)
• Google Geo – Maps / Fusion Tables
• Unexpected uses of geo

The UNconference stayed true to its core of fostering two-way discussion which was by far my favorite part. Although this format can sometimes (or most of the time) cause the conversation to diverge from the original subject, it brings up unexpected and very interesting points.

Lastly, what made Wherecamp5280 a success was the people! It was good to catch up with old friends and meet new geo comrades! Huge thanks to Steve Coast, Peter Batty, FortiusOne and everyone else who sponsored or helped with the organization of the conference.

I have written about Yandex on several occasions (here, here, here) but those posts were narrowly focused on specific features / releases – the time has come for a broader look at Yandex Geo.

Yandex is the leading (and the fastest-growing) search engine in Russia and several other eastern European countries. The company is focused on the Russian-speaking audience in countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, but its presence in Russia is by far the strongest. According to Liveinternet, in June 2010 Yandex accounted for 64,6% of Russia’s search traffic, 25,1% in Ukraine, 24,6% in Kazakhstan, and 34,5% in Belarus. As for Yandex Maps, the desktop [browser] version attracts over 9 million monthly users (source TNS – May 2010) with 93% in Russia and 5% in Ukraine, with other countries accounting for less than 1% [correlates to the coverage in those areas, see below]. The mobile version attracts about 1 million monthly visitors with a whopping 52% usage coming from Moscow (40%) and St. Petersburg (12%) (source Gallup). To put those numbers into perspective, Yandex Maps is the biggest mapping service in Runet, and according to Comscore, 40% bigger than Google and 3,5 times bigger than Mail.ru Maps.

Although Yandex Search has expanded globally, its mapping service is still narrowly focused on Russia and Ukraine with 133 and 36 large cities mapped (building-level detail) respectively. Up until recently the company relied heavily on third-party providers for its map data, but in June it acquired one of its biggest data suppliers, GIS-Technologies, to bring the data piece in-house. Right around the same time, the service to collect user generated map data, People’s Map, was launched. This strategy is similar to Google (Map Maker) and MapQuest (OpenStreetMap) where the commercially-supplied map data is intermixed with user-generated content.

In addition to the browser / mobile versions, Yandex Maps is available via the suite of map [free] APIs including JavaScript, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Java, Android, Blackberry, IPhone and a few others. In fact, Maps API celebrated its second birthday just yesterday – the growth is very impressive. The API is implemented on over 50K websites and its cumulative traffic exceeds the one on maps.yandex.ru. Compare that to Google Maps API, which was launched back in 2005 and is actively used on over 350K websites. Keep in mind that Google operates globally where Yandex is focused mainly on Russia and Ukraine. It looks like the market for mapping APIs is a long way from saturation.

I am genuinely impressed with Yandex Maps and the progress they’ve made so far. It is clear that the company sees geo as a long-term opportunity and invests substantially to build out its mapping platform. Obviously they are doing something right to maintain a solid lead over Google in Russia. I am curious to see whether maps will follow Yandex Search to the global market and what that would look like.

p.s. Huge thanks to Anna Lamtyugina for the info!