RSS
Email
SMS
Google Launches MapMaker In India.. Will Crowdsourcing Strategy Work?
(Rate this article)
Loading ...Email It!
Google has launched its Map Maker services in india which allows users to add or edit geographical features such as roads, businesses, parks, schools, apartment buildings and localities among others in the existing maps. There has always been WikiMapia which follows the crowdsourcing model of street level mapping and there have been quite a few Indian startups as well like routeguru, sadakmap and mapmyindia all trying to do different things around maps and directions. There is also news that Reliance ADAG group will be launching Big Maps another mapping product sooner rather than later. Reliance has also invested in a social network in the US which specializes in Location based aggregation services.
Google Mapmaker as a product was developed completely in India and the creator of the same Lalitesh Katragadda, Software Engineer at Google India had this to say, “Google Map Maker solves an inherent need especially for countries such as ours where maps data is sparse. This product embodies our passion to empower people everywhere, to share knowledge of the places they know best by creating maps.”
According to Wikipedia Crowdsourcing is taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. The Google MapMaker is such a product that would rely on the wisdom of the crowds for information on roads, landmarks, locations etc. Question to be asked is that will this work in India? MapmyIndia does a great job of sending surveyors and collecting data which it then uses on the MapmyIndia site though an expensive but its surely an accurate path to creating information.
Much like the wikipedia which has accuracy issues every now and then its possible that something like local information submitted by users on a map would have its set of errors. Well knowing this fully well Lalitesh Katragadda had this to say “We are looking at creating a balance between accuracy and depth of data,”
Well accuracy will be a tough thing to maintain in such a crowdsourcing model also what will be interesting to see if they integrate this with services like gmail as many mails which go to and fro would have local addresses in them and there could be a way to prompt the user to mark these places on the map at that very instant.
Loading ...
Hello, Rajiv!
What do you think, is it same situation, as it was with Google Base “Craigslist & Ebay killer”, Knol “Wikipedia & About.com killer”, Google Checkout “Paypal killer”?
@samlowry: Yup I would think so..
We launched sadakMap a year ago with a similar mission (lack of geo-tagged places in developing countries like India). Good validation from Google
There is greater opportunity in this space and we are happily exploring it.