MapmyIndia

Another Indian startup. I got an invitation to review this website by one of the members of MapmyIndia team. It is a beta service.

 

The landing page shows the Indian map and a search dialogue for finding any location in map – Maps.

Sounded very much alike Live Local Search, to me. You can drag map for viewing locations which are not visible to you. It resembles very much live other popular map services like Google Maps, Live Local and Yahoo Maps but it is different in the way that it gives you more detailed view of India. You can drill down to your local town in the map. I tried searching for my present work location – Udyog Vihar, Gurgaon, Haryana and it provided a very nice map of the location where I could easily trace my way from Udyog Vihar to my residence – Sec 23A, Gurgaon. It was so nice to find a colorful view of my location with very well shown road-ways. I could never get that close view of place in other map services. You can easily see the landmarks around the place. Yes, I know, color scheme really looks weird!

 

Then I tried for searching directions – Directions. When in full zoom and you click on any of the links – From Here or To Here, the dialogue box doesn’t appear to be visible. It is only when you zoom out, you can see the dialogue. The search for path is very much similar to searching the place. You need to enter the source and destination and the roadmap is presented to you. I tried getting details for well searched path – Gurgaon, Haryana to Noida, UP and I got a very much elaborated path which included landmarks that I missed in other map services. Also the path directions are explained to you in left pane which includes the place names as well as the distance of places. It didn’t included the time info as compared to Live Local Search.

 

Another section of website is Local Search which Let us you search for different kind of spots in current map location or other places. Spots may include Adventure Sports, Airports, Banks, Theatres, Institutes and Tourism information. But still the information displayed is very limited as the leading Indian private sector bank – ICICI wasn’t displayed in search results for banks. Definitely it is a very useful section of website which has infinite chances to grow and hence can be very helpful for getting the utile info.

 

Another unique part of website is eLocation. Using eLocation you can search a place using unique IDs or you can let others know about your location by sending them your elocation. You can create your elocation only after signing up for the service which is free. I tried creating a way to CashEdge from the nearest identified location – Maruti Udyog. You can search for the elocation – cashedge for the one created by me. I couldn’t find any way to delete any elocation created by you.

MapmyIndia Forum is going to be the next upcoming feature on the website.

 

Still there are lot of improvements needed which you can easily notice in the UI as well as functionality while using the service. Lot of critical locations are missing from the maps of popular cities. I couldn’t find one of the topmost IT and management college of state -ITM while going through the pathway to my home although I was expecting it to appear. Still there are parts of states which aren’t visible when doing a full zoom (e.g. east Punjab). Although direction box is displayed on the screen and you can enter the text but still it seems to be working in awkward way when you try to select text or going down in drop-box using mouse. It happens to look like one isn’t operating on box but on the map. Lot of improvement is required there. Also browser compatibility is a big issue as lot of features UI work very differently in Firefox as compared to those in IE.

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