Latlong tracks people's requirements with new features

Finding directions or locating places in the bustling city of Bangalore is not easy. Inspired to help the average Bangalorean in the rapidly growing city, 4 former Infosys engineers hit upon a unique solution to this problem. Sudarshan HS, Pavaman Athani, Sairam Rajamani and Rahul RS- combined their expertise in the fields of product development and running it to start an innovative search and directions service in 2008 called Latlong. It is an SMS service, wherein, people can search WHERE a place is and also HOW to get there from any other place in Bangalore.

Latlong / 90088 90088 directions are easy to understand, explained in layman's language with familiar landmarks that virtually makes it impossible to get lost in the city ever again. All that the end user needs is a phone that has the capability to send and receive plain text messages. The SMS platform is easier to use, less time consuming and way cheaper than a GPS navigation service or other such services. The SMS service is available free of charge and all you pay is the standard SMS rate according to your plan. It needs no subscription. The Latlong system is equipped to understand the customers' request and gives them what they want – directions! It can be used to look for restaurants, pharmacies, shopping centres, petrol bunks, ATMs etc., in Bangalore as well as localities and roads.

Latlong also provides information on the approximate auto fare and the distance in kms in the direction search results. Armed with the info Bangaloreans can now check the exact distance travelled as well as confirm if the meter reading is accurate. To overcome hitches presented by miss-spelt place names and sms language, Latlong has been developed to be capable of phonetic matching. In this way the Latlong software will understand and also be able to give results to sms with ‘typo' errors.

Retail businesses can get their business mapped, by sending sms MAPME with name of their business to 9008890088. If the user is not satisfied with the reply sms or if more clarity is needed on the directions he/she can reply ‘NO' to the sms result following which the Onze staff will analyze the results and correct any errors so that the same or similar error is not repeated again.

Continuous update of new/unmapped places is carried out by the Onze team as part of Onze's effort to constantly update new or unmapped places in Bangalore. So if directions for a particular place do not appear the first time a user asks for it, it will appear after a few days as the Onze team will immediately set about mapping and including it in the Latlong maps.

Onze is now looking at expanding Latlong to other cities and we will be launching the service in Chennai soon.

How Latlong works: The user sends an SMS to 90088 90088. The request goes to a server managed by Onze. The server automatically and instantaneously entertains the request from the customer as the information is already preloaded into the server. The service has been tailored to address the unique market requirements of India where people are not used to navigation maps and location based services are yet to catch up. Onze was founded with the aim of building India's best Location Based Service.

Source : Equity Bulls

Keywords