GeoComrade

Following up on an earlier post about Rambler Maps I reached out to Dmitry Krasulya, a product manager at Rambler, to get more info on the geo side of the company.

First, a bit of history.

Rambler maps were launched back in 2001 under the name “On The Map” (наКарте) and covered only Moscow, although a low-detail map was available of the entire world. The data was supplied by Geocenter-Consulting, the same company who supplied data to Yandex and Google Maps during that time. Then, in 2006, in partnership with Probkovorot, a real-time traffic data supplier, Rambler offered traffic information for Moscow as well as expanded its coverage to six major Russian cities like St. Petersburg, Voronezh etc. Then, nothing happened…

According to Dmitry the entire project was frozen until 2010 when it was relaunched as Rambler Maps. The latest version was launched in partnership with Pro-Gorod (part of the CdCom group), who is a development partner as well as the geo data supplier.

The company considered a partnership with Google, Yandex and the like on the geo front, but opted to build their own solution due to the data coverage limitations and legal restrictions, which is the case with proprietary mobile solutions. As I noted in this post, Rambler is getting involved with OpenStreetMap and has donated several servers to mirror OSM map requests. Dmitry hinted that a “closer partnership” between Rambler and the OpenStreetMap is possible but would not disclose any details. I bet they are trying to do something similar to MapQuest and Microsoft.

Today, Rambler Maps works exclusively in Russia but plans to expand into Eastern Europe. In Russia, Rambler Maps covers 90K populated areas, out of which 707 are mapped down to the building level. In addition, the geo database also contains 900K kilometers of road and 250K POIs (which the company collects on their own). The monthly audience of Rambler Maps is 385,500 (source TNS – January 2010), which is not as impressive as Yandex’s 9 million, but still a substantial amount, especially considering that the platform just launched. Additional traffic data can be viewed here.

The company is hard at work on expanding the geo-offering and building new solutions, but they have a long way to go. The four years Rambler Maps was in hibernation put it way behind the competition. I doubt that the company will end up competing head-to-head with 2GIS, Google and Yandex Geo but will likely focus on market-specific vertical solutions to augment its media business.

That being said, there is one area where Rambler can take the lead – the adoption of OpenStreetMap. It will be exciting to see Rambler be the first RUNET company to adopt OSM on a massive scale and push “open” just like MapQuest is doing in the States.

To wrap up, since my first post was about the use of Flash in Rambler Maps, I asked Dmitry to comment on the use of Flash on their website:

We chose Flash since it works in all major operating systems [that's right, IPad is not considered a major OS in Russia] and does not require additional support to ensure workability in all browsers. Many think that Flash is evil, but for the majority of users this is not true. However in light of the growing mobile audience, and following the global trend, we plan to replace Flash with JavaScript.

IMO, good response.

AgroAtlas is a new website developed in tandem between Russian scientists and the USDA. As the name suggests, AgroAtlas, is a comprehensive resource for agricultural GIS data, and according to the the official USDA release:

shows the geographic distributions of 100 crops; 640 species of crop diseases, pests, and weeds; and 560 wild crop relatives growing in Russia and neighboring countries. The atlas also includes 200 maps that illustrate the environmental variables that affect crop production in that part of the world.

The website is impressive. There is a ton of data which is broken into three main categories: Crops and Wild Relatives, Harmful Objects and Environment. Then, each category is further subdivided, making it easy to find anything from a potato cultivation area to a map of mean annual air temperature’s standard deviation. To make things even better, each dataset can be downloaded as a GIS layer (RDC, RST formats) or mashed using a downloadable AgroAtlas app. Unfortunately, no web-based visualization tools are available at this point, and the downloadable version of AgroAtlas is Windows-only (major downer).

Another strong point is the website’s English version. I don’t think I have seen a Russian website where the English version was as thorough and complete. I guess this is where the partnership with the USDA really shines through.

AgroAtlas sets the bar pretty high for other Russian GIS websites. As I see it, the next logical step for them would be to integrate with GeoCommons API to make their data truly open and accessible.

More on the release here, here and here.

Following up on his recent interview, Maxim Dubinin (Максим Дубинин) published detailed stats for Russian OSM. As it turns out, Russian OSM community enjoys a healthy growth rate above the world’s average:

Another interesting metric is the user retention which, according to Dubinin, is as high as 83% percent! To clarify, 83% is the number of contributors who edited the map at within last 6 months. This is very impressive, I would be curious to see how this compares to Yandex People’s Map and Google’s Map Maker.

Source: Gis Lab Info

This week marked a significant milestone for the Russia’s OSM – the project made its first appearance in the Russian mainstream media! OSM community members Maxim Dubinin (Максим Дубинин) and Vladimir Elistratov (Владимир Елистратов) made an appearance on a popular tech radio show Tochka.

The interview lasted over 40 minutes and revealed a ton of interesting information. Here are few points:

• The best mapped OSM Russian city is Rybinsk
• Russia’s OSM Community has between 4-5 thousand contributors.
• Scanex, Rambler contributed data and hardware to the project.
• Interesting discussion about the legality of mapping military installations.

The full transcript is available here. Something tells me that 2011 will be the year of OpenStreetMap – hope to see Russian OSM members at SOTM.

I have written about Yandex on several occasions (here, here, here) but those posts were narrowly focused on specific features / releases – the time has come for a broader look at Yandex Geo.

Yandex is the leading (and the fastest-growing) search engine in Russia and several other eastern European countries. The company is focused on the Russian-speaking audience in countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, but its presence in Russia is by far the strongest. According to Liveinternet, in June 2010 Yandex accounted for 64,6% of Russia’s search traffic, 25,1% in Ukraine, 24,6% in Kazakhstan, and 34,5% in Belarus. As for Yandex Maps, the desktop [browser] version attracts over 9 million monthly users (source TNS – May 2010) with 93% in Russia and 5% in Ukraine, with other countries accounting for less than 1% [correlates to the coverage in those areas, see below]. The mobile version attracts about 1 million monthly visitors with a whopping 52% usage coming from Moscow (40%) and St. Petersburg (12%) (source Gallup). To put those numbers into perspective, Yandex Maps is the biggest mapping service in Runet, and according to Comscore, 40% bigger than Google and 3,5 times bigger than Mail.ru Maps.

Although Yandex Search has expanded globally, its mapping service is still narrowly focused on Russia and Ukraine with 133 and 36 large cities mapped (building-level detail) respectively. Up until recently the company relied heavily on third-party providers for its map data, but in June it acquired one of its biggest data suppliers, GIS-Technologies, to bring the data piece in-house. Right around the same time, the service to collect user generated map data, People’s Map, was launched. This strategy is similar to Google (Map Maker) and MapQuest (OpenStreetMap) where the commercially-supplied map data is intermixed with user-generated content.

In addition to the browser / mobile versions, Yandex Maps is available via the suite of map [free] APIs including JavaScript, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Java, Android, Blackberry, IPhone and a few others. In fact, Maps API celebrated its second birthday just yesterday – the growth is very impressive. The API is implemented on over 50K websites and its cumulative traffic exceeds the one on maps.yandex.ru. Compare that to Google Maps API, which was launched back in 2005 and is actively used on over 350K websites. Keep in mind that Google operates globally where Yandex is focused mainly on Russia and Ukraine. It looks like the market for mapping APIs is a long way from saturation.

I am genuinely impressed with Yandex Maps and the progress they’ve made so far. It is clear that the company sees geo as a long-term opportunity and invests substantially to build out its mapping platform. Obviously they are doing something right to maintain a solid lead over Google in Russia. I am curious to see whether maps will follow Yandex Search to the global market and what that would look like.

p.s. Huge thanks to Anna Lamtyugina for the info!

In an effort to make traffic maps more social, Yandex added an ability to append real time messages directly on to the mobile traffic map. So if you are stuck in traffic with nothing to do you can at least share your frustration with other drivers.

Frustrated by notorious traffic, the service was immediately embraced by Moscow drivers who used it to call out to Moscow’s mayor Sergey Sobyanin: Sobyanin Help! On the second day after the release the service counted several hundreds of those messages. If this becomes a long-term trend, Yandex might need to add a an extra “Blame the mayor” button to simplify the whole process.

Russia’s biggest social network Vkontakte (translated “In Contact”) added check-in capabilities to its mobile clients. The new “Places” feature makes it easy to discover trendy places, see where your friends are and append location to your status updates. The core functionality is very similar to Foursquare and Gowalla. Once checked in, your location is appended to all status updates and your friends know where you are.

I wasn’t able to test the application live since Vkontakte does not have a Places database for the US. As of right now, only Russia and Ukraine are supported. Here are some screenshots:

The release announcement is here, log-in required.

Vkontakte is often claimed to be a Facebook clone for its similar design, functionality and business model. It is indeed very similar, and therefore it is interesting to see Vkontakte release the location feature before Facebook. I wonder if Facebook’s recent investor and Vkontakte’s board member Yuri Milner had to do anything with this.

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.