Andrei's Blog

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 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!