GeoComrade

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.