Loogic English

We recently mentioned some new things happening with Goolzoom that is making for a very interesting project.  The project was developed by Jesus Barrio towards the end of 2006 and presented in January of 2007.  Since then, new improvements have been continuously introduced to provide a very useful tool for professionals that work with maps, such as topography, geology, architecture, … In a few words, we can say that Goolzoom is an enriched version of Google Maps.  What it offers is maps from Google with additional maps added like maps of catrasto, aerial photographs of Sigpac (well known and used in Spain) or general municipal plans of some cities in Spain.

All of this additional geographic information included alongside of Google Maps provides  great value and allows companies, institutions and professionals to use Goolzoom as part of their daily work. It´s a tool that did not exist before and now can help facilitate their work to a large extent. In this situation it is logical that an entrepreneur like Jesus Barrio sees that this project can utilize a premium account business model and that companies are happy to pay 90 Euros a year to Goolzoom for additional services: print maps, obtain a complete report for all that maps of one place, obtain maps in an image format with customizable sizes, navigate in 3D mode, street maps with dual two at a time, and not display advertising.

In just over three months of running the premium version of Goolzoom, there are already 300 users providing a revenue stream greater than a website like this could achieve from advertising.

This is in addition to the personalized services that Jesus Barrio is offering to public institutions with GoolGis which integrates customizable maps that the institutions already have in Google Maps.

Good things seem to be happening at Tagzania Services that recently announced it has received an investment of 465,000 euros from Fondo Elkano XXI pertaining to the Risk Capital Management of the Basque Country (SGECR), as well as releasing the new version of Tagzania.

Tagzania, a web application to label and recommend places, is one of the first Google Map Mashups we saw in Spain and is the visible face of Tagzania Services.

The new version of Tagzania has been programmed using Django (like Festuc) and includes several design changes, much more attractive than the previous version.  In terms of functionality, there are not many new features being introduced, in fact, some features were eliminated to simplify the user interface.  As the site continues to evolve, I believe that future of Tagzania will become a model for aggregating geolocalized information.

Besides their own project, Tagzania Services also provides specialized services to help companies develop geolocalization-based projects including implementations of Google Earth. For example, they have developed 3D models of buildings that can be visualized in Google Earth and also collaborated with the real estate search engine, Nestoria, in all aspects related to their maps.

Some time back, I was informed of the launch of World Taximeter. Now that the Spanish version has been announced, I thought it would be interesting to publish “as it is” the mail I received with information of the project. It’s in the form of an interview but I think it’s a very interesting way to present an idea like this:

Who are we?

Worldtaximeter.com is the result of the work of three people: Jose Lorenzo, Daniel Jimenez and me, Gerardo Robledillo. All three of us are computer engineers and we started off as web programmers. We got to know each other 4 years back, working in the same company.

As good computer engineers, we are folks with restless minds and since the time we know each other, we have been exploring ideas for websites, of what we could do, creating a prototype. In fact, as you might know, I had already launched on my own, a site for language exchanges (place4langs, of which you talked about then).

How the idea of World Taximeter was conceived?

Jose was going to make a trip to New York, and a few days before the trip, he tried to find out on the internet how much the taxi would cost him from the airport to the hotel. Simply to be prepared with the cash and to avoid beind duped. On not finding anything, he had a revelation of the kind “hmm, what a pity, it would be great if something like this existed, …, hey, … just a moment, why shouldn’t we do it? Jose couldn’t believe that such a simple idea still had not been carried out.

So Jose told me about his idea one Friday, and I thought it was brilliant. That weekend, I created the first prototype, that we showed to Dani on Monday. Dani also thought it was great, and between the three of us, we sat down to convert the prototype into something usable. A couple of months later, we launched worldtaximeter.com with 7 cities. Today we have 12, and we are adding more.

What did we use to create it?

We used Ruby on Rails and the API of Google Maps.

We basically used RoR because I am in love with it and created the prototype with Rails. Jose and Dani had never used it, but having heard so much from me about Rails, they decided to try it out.

Plans?

Keep adding more cities, above all, and also add functionalities and improvements in the algorithm for the calculation of prices.

We are also beginning to explore the commercial side of the business, although still very shyly.