This mornings paper had Anand Parthasarathy covering the launch of Yahoo! India Maps and Yahoo! India Our City service, it offers map data of Indian cities, as well as Geocoding service for some of our cities (Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhopal, Bubhaneswar,Chandigarh, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Madurai, Mangalore, Mumbai, Mysore, Pune, Shimla, Thiruvananthapuram). Interestingly, Anand Parthasarathy lauds this achievement of India-based engineers instead of observing that offering such a service make a good business sense,
Just eight months after David Filo challenged his India-based engineers to come up with compelling Web applications for the world, the co-founder of the Web’s biggest portal, Yahoo, is back here to announce that two of them have been converted into working solutions. On Wednesday he lanuched Our City , a new Net resource which aggregates city specific information including, news, travel and tourism, weather, local business as well as user contributed blogs, photos and videos, for 20 Indian tier-1 and tier-2 towns.Content in the local language of the region is also linked. (http://in.ourcity.yahoo.com)
The site is linked to the other resource launched here: ‘India Maps’ consolidates satellite imagery and street maps for 170 Indian cities, 4,785 towns and over 2.20 lakh villages — arguably the largest India-specific cartographic service available on the Internet.
The map data have been provided in collaboration with the India-based CE Info Systems — and Yahoo spokespersons were quick to point out that all imagery was compliant with Indian government guidelines. Users could merge street maps with satellite pictures to create hybrid maps of their own. (http://in.maps.yahoo.com/)
Offering local business information merged with maps and search features does brings a tidy chunk of revenue for both provider and the business listed which is a very good thing. And (Yahoo!) members able to write reviews and comment on various services provided by the business add’s spice to the lot. Perhaps very soon we can expect other players (Google , MSN et al) to provide these services for Indian sub-continent.
