GeoComrade

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!

I am a big fan of temporal map visualizations, and today I came across this beauty:

It is amazing to see how the map of Europe has changed over the last thousand years and even in my own lifetime! The freaky part is that the majority of border changes were accompanied by wars, genocide, displacement of people and other nasty stuff. In that context, the map is quite scary and what’s worse, there is no reason to expect that there won’t be any border changes in the future. The only hope is that those changes will be more peaceful than what happened between 4:40-5:01.

p.s. looks like Russia is shrinking

In an effort to make traffic maps more social, Yandex added an ability to append real time messages directly on to the mobile traffic map. So if you are stuck in traffic with nothing to do you can at least share your frustration with other drivers.

Frustrated by notorious traffic, the service was immediately embraced by Moscow drivers who used it to call out to Moscow’s mayor Sergey Sobyanin: Sobyanin Help! On the second day after the release the service counted several hundreds of those messages. If this becomes a long-term trend, Yandex might need to add a an extra “Blame the mayor” button to simplify the whole process.

Geogeeks rejoice – the second annual WhereCamp5280 is less than three weeks away! Same as last year, the conference is FREE to attend but you need to book a ticket. The conference will be held on the 19th of November at the University of Colorado Denver in downtown Denver.

I really enjoyed the event last year, and as James Fee noted, the quality and focus of presentations were excellent, not to mention the after party. That being said, this time around Steve Coast is organizing things – you can be sure that he is going to take it one step further. And yes, the after party is also happening!

One more thing, FortiusOne (the awesome company I work for) is sponsoring the event along with MapQuest, Google, ESRI, Waze and many others. See you at Wherecamp5280.

Photo: Robotbrainz