Andrei's Blog

On the heels of GeoMixer, Yandex rolls out its own version of a fire-tracking application. In addition to the fire location data, which is the same in both applications, Yandex has added a ton of user-generated content including photos, videos, tweets and blog posts. The images coming from the affected areas are truly stunning and add a whole new meaning to the map.

Photo: Юрий Мельников

With at least 212,506 acres burning nationwide and new fires popping up each hour, it is safe to say that Russia is on fire. You know it is bad when the wall of fire is clearly visible on a satellite image. To make sense of the disaster, GeoMixer released a nifty app that tracks fires in real time. GeoMixer injects data from various sources and displays hot-bed locations over the latest satellite imagery mixed with current temperatures and wind directions.

Check it out.

p.s. The application is beautifully implemented but there is one huge downside – you can’t embed a map without a valid API key for which you have to sign up for an account…

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.

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.

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.