GeoComrade

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.

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

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.

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

I’ve seen a number of cool custom maps but the map of Kerch, a tiny city in eastern Crimea, has got to be one of the better ones. If you’ve ever wondered what a Farmville-style map of a city would look like, wonder no more.

The cool base map aside, the application has a ton of useful features and interesting UI solutions. You can add points, events, perform a fully-featured spatial search, comment on places and more. As for UI, I really like the extended functionality of the navigator control and the list of POIs across the bottom of the screen. All in all, it is a great project.

Having been to Kerch several times times I can attest that the map makes the city look at lot more interesting.

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.

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.