SadakMap – Is their SadakMap right?

Posted on January 5, 2008. Filed under: Indian Startups, Review | Tags: Review, SadakMap |

Off-late unmesh’s team at SadakMap are making a significant progress which has made desistartups to spend a sleepless night in reviewing their product. Before starting with the actual bashings, I am going to list some of the plus points in this product.

• Map! I desperately wanted some map that can tell me something about the place. People like Sulekha and Burrp, didn’t make me happy.
• Cool UI for Review and Adding new place. Hats off to you guys!

Some Screenshots:

• Facebook integration – for some traffic may be.
• SpotMeUrl – Might be used in the future to show some listings near my house. I suppose it should be there in their SadakMap (I mean Road Map :))

Now this review is made with the following things in mind.

• How easy is it to add a listing?
• How easy is it to locate a listing?
• Missing Features

Adding a Listing:

For an Individual:

The other day, I went to a restaurant in Besant Nagar. I ordered couple of items and liked them both. Now, I want to write a review about that. Since I don’t know the exact street, I choose some spot near “Besant Nagar” in the Map, choose the type as “Restaurants” and type something in the details. Thanks to the assistance given in the details section, I give the “Cuisine Type“, “Timings“. I am very sure, everyone else would clear the text and start typing their comment. Ok, the point conveyed here is it is very easy for an Individual to add a place. There is a minor issue here. I cant give a rating at the time of adding. Have to write a review to give my rating. This is fine for now.

For a Small Business Owner:

Again same steps to add my listing to this. I can show my company logo etc, which is really cool.

For an enterprise with many branches:

Now here comes the problem. From your blog, I understand that you are trying to pitch enterprise customers to list their branches. Lets take a company with 50 branches. Where are the tools to upload my information in a excel sheet and your product automatically marking them in the map? You cant expect an enterprise user to sit and mark the places right. So have this feature as your priority. I am sure you can convince more enterprises with such a tool.

Locating a Listing:

Hmm, search feature is completely missing. I can understand that it is a matter of time to get this feature ready. But I can see a significant problem here. Chances are that your search feature may not be ideal unless you build some text analytics code also.

Let me elaborate this a little. I want to search for good bike service shops that is open till 9 pm near my office. Lets assume you have sufficient number of markings. While adding a listing, you are accepting timing as part of the details textbox. Like I mentioned, people have tendency to clear away any default text before typing their own. Which means chances are – the listing may not have timing information at all. Even if it is available, it will be in a form that cannot be easily extracted unless you have some Natural Language Processing (nlp) code. Getting what I mean?

To fix this, you should get each of the information like “Timing”, “Makes”, “Telephone” as a separate text box, that dynamically appears based on the “Listing type”. Once you can get these information separately, it should solve most of the problem!

Missing Features:

• Import/Export
• Editing a previously marked place
• Search functionality
• Community aspects like Rating for an individual, Tags, Emailing a listing, Send by sms
• How about kml exports for viewing with Google Earth?
• Where is the marker for your own startup? I can see the marker of only the founder!

Again these are not quite complex and is a matter of time and money.

Hoping to see an upgraded version of your product. Wishes from our end.

P.S: The easiest way to get more listings is to scrap webpages from other sites like Sulekha, Burrp, … Think about that too.

-Prabhu

Update: Unmesh’s response below.