Mumbai firm beats Google to Street View

A little known Mumbai-based mapping technology company has beaten Google to the Street View!

Even as the global search major struggles with Indian authorities for permissions to take images of Indian city streets, the company has done just about everything Google had set out to do, and possibly more for the top 54 Indian cities.

The firm, Genesys International, established by brothers Sohel and Sajid Malik in 1995, has captured numerous images of almost every street in these cities, and fused the images together to create 360-degree panoramic views of the streets, almost on the same lines that Google had done in many other parts of the world.

The company yesterday launched the service under the brand Wonobo ( http://wonobo.com ). The site however was hit with latency with many complaints pouring online about the slow download speed. However, according to the company, the speed would improve in a day or so as they got everything in place.

So how come the company was able to steal a march over Google, which had bogged down under government regulations?

According to Sajid Malik, who spoke to The Times of India, one advantage Genesys had was in having worked with the government for many years for their mapping services.

He said for street view, the government, including the defence ministry and the Survey of India, threw a lot of regulations at them but they fulfilled the requirements, including not taking pictures in sensitive areas.

Wonobo's website is the fruition of the combined efforts of the Ministry of Tourism and Genesys International which provides a location-based service that offers walkthroughs of streets across 54 Indian cities.

Walking Tours, a unique offering allows users to navigate their way through various cities.

The website also supports user generated content (UGC) offering unique social media capabilities and supports online communities which users can create. It may be pointed out that the tourism ministry is the first in the world to launch a service of the kind.

The website would doubtless prove to be a boon to tourists in India, with the Walking Tours platform empowering people to effectively plan their tour. The tourism ministry had set the target of having one Walking Tour of each state within two years and had successfully accomplished it.

The new service, to be available initially for the roads of 5 major Indian cities, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Coastal Goa and Ahmedabad, would soon be expanded to the top 54 cities within a few weeks. The facility offers mapped panoramic imagery of thousands of square kilometres and around 10 million places of interest across the country.