RoadsofIndia June 6, 2007
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Maps , trackbackOnline maps and navigation has made its way to our favorite subcontinent (finally). RoadsofIndia is a portal that can give you directional information within 23 major Indian cities. Before you get all excited, know that these directions are only limited to preconfigured landmark lists for now. So you can pick a bank or hospital as origin and get directions to a railway station or shopping center. Since I’m a Delhi native, I checked out the list for delhi and it looked pretty loaded… and useful. The site is free
, fyi.
RoadsofIndia has apparently been in existence since 2000, and is run by SatNav Technologies, which was spun off from IT giant Satyam Computer Services Ltd in early 2004. SatNav focuses on GIS products and technologies.
If you have recently checked out Google Maps for indian locations, then you know it’s better than what it was couple years ago. But what is worth noting now is that Yahoo! India Maps shows the additional ability to execute plenty of relevant keyword searches too. Not just “Connaught Place, Delhi” but “New Patel Nagar, New Delhi” showed the exact map location along with landmarks like Delhi Metro stops, ATM’s etc. 
!!. (Okay… Okay… I didn’t search anything but Delhi landmarks. But if you do, let me know the results)
Yahoo! India Maps are much better if you want local maps in India. What I found out was that MSN and Yahoo! India have licenced content from RoadsofIndia. So the credit still goes to SatNav. I guess what NavTeq did for North America, SatNav is positioned to do for India. The day is not far when mobile maps become a reality for the Indian road warriors.
Edit: Geez, it doesn’t take long before someone points out your mistake on a blog post. In less than 12 hours of my posting the info above, I stand corrected. Apparently SatNav is not the company behind Yahoo! India Maps. It’s CE Info Systems Pvt. Ltd. They are a old Indian player in the GIS space, and you can read more about them in my post here.
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Yahoo India maps takes its data from mapmyindia.com ( CE infosystems )