GeoComrade

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!

The concept behind Russian mobile social network Vstrecher (“meeting” in Russian with a funky ‘er’ ending) is quite simple: share your location, current status and upcoming plans with friends, and discover new places along the way. The application uses a phone’s GPS (tower triangulation or manual location update) to determine user’s location and alerts friends using group text messaging service. When running on a background, Vstrecher updates your location automatically and sends updates as you go.

Currently the application works only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but they have plans to expand to the rest of Russia in the near future. The application itself is free, but you pay about $0.08 to update your status via SMS. Interestingly enough, there isn’t a version for IPhone or Android. Instead Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Motorola handsets are supported. I assume that this has to do with the low penetration of smartphones in Russia (thoughts?).

The company was founded in 2008 by Sergey Denisyuk as a side project, but it quickly grew into a full time job. Today Vstreher generates revenue through the sales of its white-label platform. In parallel to Vstrecher, Sergey founded a mobile coupon company Topskidka which recently generated its first ad revenue. Although both projects are currently self-funded, Sergey plans to raise funding and will be presenting at The VC Trip To Russia later this month.

Accel Partners, DFJ and August Capital are among 20 or so venture capital firms taking the trip to Russia this month to learn about the Russian market and local technology companies. The VC Trip To Russia will take place in Moscow on May 25 -27, 2010. At least one location company, Vstrecher, will be presenting at the event (more on them soon).

It is worth it to point out that The VC Trip To Russia is organized by the state-owned Rusnano – a $5 bln. fund headed by the Russian privatization chief Anatoly Chubais.

Startups all around the world are staking their territory in the location land rush, and Moscow-based POIdo is no exception. Launched in March 2010 by serial entrepreneur Nick Mikhailovsky, POIdo is Russia’s first location-based advertisement (LBA) platform.

POIdo makes it possible for developers to monetize mobile and browser-based applications and enables advertisers to geo-target ads. This sounds very similar to other LBA platforms, but what makes POIdo different is its approach to targeting. In addition to the user’s location, the system takes into account their behavior in the context of the application in which the ad is shown. Just like AdWords, POIdo employs the bidding model in which advertisers compete for visibility in a specific location. Today advertisers are charged on CPA (cost-per-action) basis, but other models are coming soon.

According to Nick, the company has over 20 commercial customers and over 1,000 paid POIs in the Moscow area. On a daily basis POIdo serves between 50,000 and 100,000 ad-impressions across their publisher network. This is a good start considering that the company was launched only couple of months ago.

Personally, I think this is a tough model that requires a large distribution in order to attract a critical mass of advertisers. On the other hand, companies like Placecast were able to make this model work in the US. Besides, the the timing for LBA platforms could not be better. I will be curious to see how POIdo does in the Russian market and whether they move fast enough to create a market for themselves before Yandex moves in.