GeoComrade

Russia’s biggest social network Vkontakte (translated “In Contact”) added check-in capabilities to its mobile clients. The new “Places” feature makes it easy to discover trendy places, see where your friends are and append location to your status updates. The core functionality is very similar to Foursquare and Gowalla. Once checked in, your location is appended to all status updates and your friends know where you are.

I wasn’t able to test the application live since Vkontakte does not have a Places database for the US. As of right now, only Russia and Ukraine are supported. Here are some screenshots:

The release announcement is here, log-in required.

Vkontakte is often claimed to be a Facebook clone for its similar design, functionality and business model. It is indeed very similar, and therefore it is interesting to see Vkontakte release the location feature before Facebook. I wonder if Facebook’s recent investor and Vkontakte’s board member Yuri Milner had to do anything with this.

On the heels of GeoMixer, Yandex rolls out its own version of a fire-tracking application. In addition to the fire location data, which is the same in both applications, Yandex has added a ton of user-generated content including photos, videos, tweets and blog posts. The images coming from the affected areas are truly stunning and add a whole new meaning to the map.

Photo: Юрий Мельников

With at least 212,506 acres burning nationwide and new fires popping up each hour, it is safe to say that Russia is on fire. You know it is bad when the wall of fire is clearly visible on a satellite image. To make sense of the disaster, GeoMixer released a nifty app that tracks fires in real time. GeoMixer injects data from various sources and displays hot-bed locations over the latest satellite imagery mixed with current temperatures and wind directions.

Check it out.

p.s. The application is beautifully implemented but there is one huge downside – you can’t embed a map without a valid API key for which you have to sign up for an account…

Crowed-sourced maps are all the rage these days, but back in 2006 it was only OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia (at least, they were the most-known). Unlike OpenStreetMap which has been getting a ton of publicity, Wikimapia is flying under the radar. Several weeks ago I had a chance to chat with Wikimapia founders Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev to get an update on the project’s status.

For those not familiar with the project – Wikimapia is a wiki for maps. As with any other wiki, Wikimapia allows users to annotate features on the map, add points of interest and more. When compared to OpenStreetMap, the main difference is that Wikimapia users are not limited in what they can add to the map. In addition, all user-contributed features are presented as clickable overlays and not “baked” into the actual map tiles. Another more subtle difference is in the ownership of the contributed data: Wikimapia’s data is exclusively captured (traced) from Google Maps and therefore owned by Google and its data providers (personal observation).

The project was launched in 2006 and, as Wikipedia states, has over has over 11M places and well over 600K registered users. According to Saveliev, the website gets close to 1M unique visitors per day. I wasn’t able to confirm those numbers on Compete, Alexa or Quntcast. In any case, enough of Wikimapia’s visitors click on AdSense ads to support a staff of eight full-time employees, including two founders, and make the company profitable.

Contrary to some rumors, Koriakine and Saveliev never raised outside capital and were able to bootstrap their way to profitability. As of right now 100% of company’s revenue is derived from advertisement, but Wikimapia plans to develop additional revenue streams and products in the near future.

I was surprised to learn that despite the surge of location technologies, Wikimapia hasn’t seen much M&A interest. Part of the reason might be Wikimapia’s reliance on Google. In addition to the data ownership issues mentioned above, Wikimapia’s technology is tightly coupled with Google Maps API making it difficult for non-Google-centric companies to take over. Another reason might be that simply not enough people outside Russia (and India) know about the project.

Although Koriakine and Saveliev are not opposed to the idea of selling Wikimapia, they are not actively pursuing it. Instead, they are focusing most of their attention on growing the business. The environment today is a lot different from what it was back in 2006, and the company has to face pressure from Google, Yandex and OpenStreetMap. So far, Koriakine and Saveliev have been able to build a successful business, and it will be interesting to see how they address the challenges ahead. One thing is certain, we’ll be hearing more about Wikimapia in the future.

About a month ago I sent three packages to a friend in Russia, two of which have not yet showed up. As it turns out, I can’t to track packages once they cross into the motherland (unless you use courier service) and can only hope they arrive at some point in the future. Not only does the Russian Post not know the location of my packages, but they can’t locate their delivery trucks either. As a piece of good news, the latter is about to change.

Back in May 2007, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree officially providing open access to the civilian navigation signals of the GLONASS GPS. Last week, almost exactly three years later, Navigation Information Systems (NIS) won the contract to outfit Russian Post vehicle fleet with GLONASS GPS navigation terminals. This marks an important milestone for the industry as it is the first Federal contract of its kind.

Photo: diecast43

The contract amount hasn’t been officially confirmed, but it is believed to be around $17M (530M Rubles). Over the next two years, NIS will install GPS terminals on 10,000 trucks and deploy 300 control stations in 84 post office branches. The integration is expected to start within the next few weeks.

The Russian Post is expecting to increase the efficiency of it’s fleet and reach up to 20% savings within the first year. The system is expected to pay for itself within the first 20 months, saving about $12M (388M Rubles) annually. More on this here, here and here.

Let’s hope this is the first step to enabling package tracking.

Update: All packages have arrived even without GPS!

With over $15MM in annual revenue, it is safe to say that 2GIS (Double GIS) is well on their to figuring out Russia’s local market. Chances are, you’ve never heard of them (nor did I until few months ago) since the company operates exclusively in Russia and Ukraine, but in those markets 2GIS puts up a fierce competition to Yandex and Google. To put things into perspective, Google’s revenue in Russia for 2009 was about $34MM whereas 2GIS brought $16MM in the same period.

Since company’s inception back in 1999, the business model evolved from a traditional GIS and mapping company into a full-fledged local business directory. Today the company maintains business directories for 57 cities and employs a staff of nearly a thousand people. In addition to business listings, transit routes and schedules and a ton of other locally-relevant info, 2GIS captures and maintains the map of every city it works in. As it turns out, aside from the large cities, Russia is poorly mapped. Since 2GIS can’t rely on Navteq or TeleAtlas to provide the data, they have to capture the whole thing themselves and they are good at it. For comparison, here is what the city of Tomsk looks like in Google, Yandex and 2GIS.

Even though 2GIS has one of the best map stacks around (for Russia), they don’t monetize it directly (licensing etc) and derive almost 100% of the revenue through advertisement. The local directories the company produces are completely free and can be installed locally or accessed online or by mobile. Advertisers, on the other hand, pay to make their business listings more prominent. There are about 10,000 of them paying an average $200 on a monthly basis.

Both Yandex and Google are very aggressive in the space and make significant investment in acquiring map data through local partners and crowd-sourcing. It will be interesting to see what 2GIS does to scale across hundreds of cities and step up the competition with the big guys. In the meantime, they are adding ten more cities this year and making the platform available on Android, IPhone and Symbian OSs. I am sure that we’ll be hearing a lot more about 2GIS in the future.

BTW, the company is still private and has grown the entire time.

If you follow the mapping space, chances are high you’ve heard about Google Maps Mania – a popular blog featuring mapping applications developed using Google Maps API. As it turns out there is a similar resource for Russian mash-ups. Developed and maintained by Abava, Google Maps Mania.RU lists a ton of excellent Google Maps implementations like this one, this one and this one. Be sure to check them out.

Screenshot above from oldmos.ru, a resource for geo-tagged historical photos of Moscow.

Public transportation is very popular in Russia, but there is one huge problem: it isn’t very reliable. More accurately, you never for sure whether or when your bus is going to show up. This week the city of Novosibirsk rolled out a city-wide transit tracking system which solves that exact problem. From now on, anyone can check the location of city’s buses, trolleys and route taxis in real time.

Implemented using Google Maps and Russia’s GLONASS, the application allows you to select a bus route and see all vehicles currently on the road. You can drill down to each vehicle to see its schedule and exact location. The application works on both desktop and mobile browsers.

In addition to solving the problem of tracking, applications like this might create new revenue opportunities (advertisement, data licensing) for municipalities, increase the efficiency of the system and, as a side benefit, decrease the number of freezing Russians. I would love to see the Novosibirsk government partner with Waze and OpenStreetMap on the data front.

Just over a month ago Russian search engine giant Yandex started crowd sourcing (People’s Map – Народная Карта) their map data, and things seem to be going well. In the first 24 hours after the public release users have added close to twenty thousand city boundaries, seventeen thousand buildings and thirty five thousand km of roads and much more. The growth didn’t stop there. In today’s blog post Yandex says that they now have several cities that are mapped with detail down to the building level.

Interesting enough, the news from Yandex comes at the same time as the announcement from Google to hire 300 people to correct the mistakes of their crowd-sourced map. According to Peter Batty, the correction project will cost Google about $8.5MM in labor costs alone. With scale Yandex will likely run into a similar issue with data quality, so it will be interesting to see how they address them.

In the mean time, Yandex outlined the development road map for the immediate future which includes things like arrows for street traffic flow, ability to zoom beyond the resolution limit of aerial photos, management dashboard for user’s objects and more.

If you are a productivity junky then Epythia might be a perfect tool for you. The service lets you associate tasks with specific locations and then sends alerts once you are there. Although the idea is not exactly new (see David Allen’s Getting Things Done), the location-based notifications set it apart from the competition. Here is how it works. Say you want to buy some milk next time you are at a grocery store. You create a task on Epythia and associate it with a specific store or a general group of grocery stores and go about your day. Epythia monitors your location (via smartphone) and notifies you once you are at, or near the store and reminds you that you want to buy milk.

The startup itself is in the very early stages, and as far as I know the business model is not yet defined. That said, the team is hard at work getting the project off the ground and testing the concept. Currently Epythia is self-funded, but I’ve heard rumors about outside funding.

Personally I think this is a great concept, and I would love to see Epythia succeed. I know I’ll use it!