india.next*

Have you ever noticed the amount of homogeneity that exists in the roads of the western world? I am pretty familiar with California and spotting a motorbike is as rare as spotting a mosquito. It seems like a vast majority of them are, in fact, on the same type of vehicle ( a car) and hence are most likely to take the same route/direction given two places. And so Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and all of these guys have just one type of route. Fair enough.

Bring India in and the equation changes quite phenomenally. Just like our people, vehicles on our roads are of various types. We have all the kind of Vehicles known to man kind running on our roads and each one of them is as important as the other. I would even think there are more (motor)bikes and scooters than cars on Indian roads.

Now, let me build a hypothesis on top of that previous statement. Arguably, The same person travelling between the same two given places may take a different route depending on the kind of vehicle he is on.

I, for one, prefer the side roads (gallis) and small roads that are less polluted and less crowded over main roads when I am on a motorbike. I am willing to ride a few hundred meters extra if I can skip a few junctions/signals which are a big bottleneck on traffic speeds. But when I am in a car, I would rather stick to the main roads because the condition of side roads are unpredictable. Plus, you never know if that big gravel truck is parked blocking the entire street. But, whenever I take the cycle, I really want to avoid main roads completely if possible, because, they are simply not safe.

There are very many ways to get to a place. Sometimes, you want to take the fastest route, Sometimes the shortest. But the kind of vehicle never used to play a part. But, now it does. At Yahoo! India maps. Search for a route and watch out for buttons on the right pane. Now Obviously, the single Search Box knows about all of this too. So, Type in "bike from anna flyover to parrys, chennai" and you get your (motor)bike directions. Or would you rather prefer a cycle around? Try "Cycle from Domlur bus stand to Yahoo egl Bangalore".

Popularity: 39% [?]

Here in India, we speak several hundred languages amongst the billion of us. Even our Government officially recognizes 23 of them. No single person can possibly learn all Indian Languages in his lifetime and so, most of us make do with a few. Yahoo! India Maps is no exception. After sitting through a lot of language courses, Yahoo! India Maps has now learnt to speak nine languages (Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Kannada & Malayalam) apart from English. Watch out for the "Vernacular" button along with "Map", "Satellite" and "Hybrid" buttons to see an area in it's primary language.

We have covered the major cities and towns and will expand the "Language Map view" to other regions in the time to come. For us in the team, Maps in vernacular languages is magical. Because for once, our Grand-moms and Grand-dads will get to see and understand what we do all day long sitting at Yahoo!.

Popularity: 70% [?]

Coming up with Maps & directions for India is a bigger challenge than you think. Our competitors have set high standards already. I am talking about the road side paan-wallahs, Auto Rickshaw drivers and the likes. And to think that technology can perform better than these guys still sounds ridiculous to me. But then again, we tried. And we now know it can work.

The story: Yahoo India Maps provides location, business, landmark and partial address search along with driving directions at http://in.maps.yahoo.com for India (and the rest of the world). But wait. What is "Yahoo! Next" about it?

At the outset, We just knew location intelligence is a problem that exists in India. For instance, I noticed that people around me were always talking about how to get to places. In Trains, buses, over e-mails, IMs, Phone calls, everywhere. They were always wondering whether they took the correct turn, whether their destination is 2 kms or 3 kms away, whether they were paying extra to their Auto driver. They were also sitting and drawing ugly Map images that are not to scale and passing them as an image attachment over email. No doubt the problem existed and we wanted to solve it.

We also recognized that people here were used to a particular way of asking for directions. And it seems to work really well. For instance, I don't know what that road outside my office is called. I don't need to. I just gotta tell people "Embassy Golf Links, near Dell office" and they already know. Also, I even know of a road close to my home that does not have a name. Either nobody bothered to give it a name or nobody bothered to put a board there that says what the name of the road is. Clearly, we like our buildings and hoardings a lot.

Consider for example a typical (western style) driving directions instruction set that rely only on road names:
1 Straight on a local road eastwards
2 Right onto Infantry Rd, go <100m
3 Right onto Union Rd, go 0.1 km
4 Left onto Raj Bhavan Rd, go 1.5 km.
5 Right onto Local Road, go 0.1 km

Assume I am ever going to drive using these instructions, a number of questions pop up. Local Road? Eastwards? Do I have to go buy a magnetic compass? Can you tell me if the upcoming right is Infantry road or not? Wait a minute. I have never heard of Union Road. Am I in ulsoor or Jaya nagar? There are four roads splitting to the right from Raj Bhavan road. Which one do you mean?

I will probably just ask the next Auto driver on the whereabouts. That is just way much easier.

And so, we came up with something like this:
1 Straight (<100m) on a local road in Shivaji Nagar, Bangalore going toward Infantry Rd
2 1st Right onto Infantry Rd, go <100m
3 1st Right (past Gulshan Marriage Bhawan on the right) onto Union Rd, go 0.1 km
4 1st Left (past Sanchanan Chambers on the left) onto Raj Bhavan Rd, go 1.5 km.
Enter Sivanchetti Gardens.
5 3rd Right onto Dickenson Rd, go 0.1 km
6 2nd Left (past East Parade Church on the left) onto Mahatma Gandhi Rd, go 0.6 km.
Enter Ashok Nagar.

This is what we have come to call "Landmark and turn based driving directions". This is specially interesting to us because it solves a real problem using technology.

There are a few things Indians understand distances with. One of them is distance. The other, you will agree, is auto fare. How many times have you asked "How far is it?" and got "about 30 rupees by auto" as an answer? So, we decided to provide auto fares in appropriate cities where standardized math-computable auto fares exist. I am sure this will also come in handy for those uninitiated travellers who get ripped off by local auto drivers.

There are a bunch of other nifty features hiding beneath this product. For instance, Watch out for the "Send this to your mobile" widget in the instruction set when you search for directions. Maybe, you are interested in the "Share" feature using which you can embed a map in your blog or webpage or even take a snapshot of the map as an image.

There is a lot to write about these but I will keep them for another day. For now, Drive safe and Don't Honk when not necessary.

Popularity: 83% [?]