Customized Mobile Maps With Zonear
Many businesses are keen on making tourist and other guides for mobile. Fully customizable, based on peer reviews, suggestions by locals or existing tourist guides - you name it. A new addition to the field is a recently created start-up called Zonear from Tampere, Finland. Rather than bringing an all-encompassing travel guide directly to the consumer, Zonear provides mobile apps with customizable maps for service providers like travel destinations, museums and event organizers. The idea is that for each customer Zonear would create a unique map that would point the end user in the right direction, provide additional information and let them interact with the location or object. The app can be viewed directly from the web or be used offline if it's been downloaded in the browser once. It works across many platforms, can be fully customized for the brand and includes a simple analytics tool. Four years ago another Finnish start-up Whatamap tried to do exactly the same thing, so how is Zonear different?
In very many aspects Zonear really isn't much different. For now it promises a personal consult together with a draft of the map for free. It has not been disclosed yet how Zonear would charge an event organizer or a museum for the final product but one can speculate that it would be a one-off payment for the map plus possible additional charges for updates, analytics and social features. Having to build a map for each new customer cannot be easy to scale so Zonear either needs to automate most of the process or feed on big clients willing to pay a lot for a service like this.
From the end consumer point of view, Zonear is hard to judge so far. For a tourist abroad having to download the page in the browser even once might be costly. However, if the resulting experience is pleasant and unique, it might be worth it. Though one needs to remember that many tech-savvy tourists take care of downloading tourist guides beforehand and might not be interested in the service by the time they reach the location. Events and festivals are probably the most interesting use cases since they often do not have any other solution for navigation than a cumbersome map. However, Zonear would need to get a lot of those festivals or events on board to make up for the effort put into creating a unique map for each one.
Given the increasing number of people using smart phones and the growing appetite for unique information and guidance in a foreign location, this is a good time to launch a service like this. Unfortunately, many businesses are working in the same direction so Zonear's offer needs to be both substantially different and well-implemented. Let's hope the company succeeds in both!
Thanks for writing an article about us! We appreciate the attention.
You raised some good and valid points in the article, so we decided to address some them in our blog:
http://zonear.com/2011/01/article-about-zonear-on-arcticstartup/
Timo many thanks for taking part in the dialogue. Much appreciated!
Hello Anna, Timo and Antti,
It was a pleasure to read this article. I see Zonear is doing a good job!
I just would like to tell you all greetings from Whatamap. We're still around, and still working on custom maps and mapping tools.
From the initial crowd-sourcing of custom/indoor maps, we have moved on to delivering professional tools and applications. We work with industry leading content, tech and marketing organizations in USA, Middle East and Europe. We've not been too active in self-promotion, PR or updating our www, so let me give you a fresh example. For second consecutive year, we deliver the official mobile maps to Mobile World Congress that is to be held February 14-17 in Barcelona, Spain, and are very proud of that!
We've been doing some browser-based things to our clients for a few years. Everybody agrees that the future apps work in the browser. (Four years back the mobile browsers weren't good enough to show maps, and it was the pre-iPhone era; it was a pain to install an app. Easy, not! Luckily the world is different today.)
I have been a lot in California (around 6 months last year) and have learnt much about the US (map) market. Based on my experiences, I would say the indoor/custom positioning and mapping aren't mainstream yet but soon it will be; there is a growing demand for these things. There are so many cool LBS-associated companies out there and they all are looking for a simple solution for custom maps.
I wish all the best to Zonear!
Thanks for your time
Matti, co-founder of Whatamap