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Yahoo Maps Get Aggressive: Adds Driving Directions & Community Search!
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Yahoo India has launched a couple of new features to its online mapping product Yahoo Maps. The first of these features is driving directions which is suppose to aid commuter. The following are the features:
* Calculation of distance & time, even Auto Rickshaw fares!
* Indication of landmarks and localities along the route
* Ability to search for places of interest such as ATMs, Petrol Pumps, Restuarants, Hotels, etc
* Understands queries in conversational style
* Provision for concise direction, with ability to SMS to one’s mobile phone
Besides for the above features Yahoo has also added community search which allows users can search for directions between 179 cities, 4767 towns, and 226114 villages. Users can also search for about 3 million points of interest marked by other Internet users from around the web.
Just a couple of days back we blogged about Mapmyindia tying up with General motors to distribute its Navigator device which helps drivers with driving directions led maps. As travel becomes more convenient and cheap in India with low cost airlines, faster and better trains and 1 lakh cars like the Tata’s Nano, Maps that provide local information and direction will surely be in demand.
MapmyIndia the funded mapping startup has done a great job by being focussed on this niche and also being bold enough to go offline with an actual product i.e. the navigator that increase offline usage of maps which would further positively impact its online usage. Though steeply priced at Rs.22000 Mapmyindia is being smart by distributing it through tieups like the one they had with GM.
Mapping is sure to be a highly competitive segment in the future with all the big three Yahoo, MSN and Google having their own products nationally and globally. Yahoo’s recent feature addition can be termed as a clear signal of its aggressive in its intent.
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Rajiv,
It is interesting you mention Yahoo! and MapmyIndia in the same post, as driving the Indian navigation industry today. MapmyIndia and Yahoo! are great partners in fact - MapmyIndia supplies map data to Yahoo! for its India products (check out the copyright to CE Info Systems, MapmyIndia’s parent company, on the bottom left section of Yahoo! India Maps portal).
Yes i know about that. But as a user these sites become destination sites to check on a particular location especially when you are travelling to a city first time. For example i am travelling to chennai and wanted to know the distance between kilpauk and mahabalipuram and i went to mapmyindia as i knew about the brand. But there will be many users who will use yahoo maps. These are potential customers that mapmyindia is loosing by providing maps to yahoo. Yahoo in turn is increasing its brand value in the eyes of users. In my eyes Mapmyindia and yahoo are competitors even though mapmyindia’s parent co powers the maps at yahoo (which btw might be a very big mistake for just a few $ in the long run)
Today its only CE Infosystems which has PAN India data and the major source of their revenue. If they refuse to share this with others especially big giants like Yahoo, this will force players like Yahoo to create PAN India data (that too with consumer product focus which CE Info. lacks even now). Google seems to be already doing that. NavTech and TeleAtlas too are coming to India soon. Therefore, it was a very wise decision to share the data with Yahoo.
Their business focus is only overlapped a bit by Yahoo kind of companies and hence its not the greed for few $ but the whole business.