blipstar maps out your stores
When it comes to maps, the techie inside of me still loves Google Maps for its shear interactiveness. It was one of the first to employ draggable maps that would forever banish the use of those pesky arrow buttons. Even though I find that it can be a tad slower to load than Yahoo Maps, my personal choice for maps is still Google Maps.
But what about all those sites that have store locating interfaces? For most, you’re either stuck using web 1.0 style non-draggable interfaces, or, copying the address to Google Maps. Blipster, which just recently launched, aims to bring affordable mapping solutions built on Google Maps to all businesses.
Now that superb services like Google Maps have opened up their APIs, small and agile development teams can compete with the age-old mapping incumbants. Blipstar’s tactic is to penetrate the store locating market with low prices by leveraging Google Maps. In fact, I’m suprised that there aren’t many others doing the same thing–blipstar appears to be the first.
Blipstar allows businesses to enter data manually, or using an Excel sheet in a particular format that blipstar understands. After uploading the location data, blipstar hosts and stores the map data. All the business needs to do is link to their blipstar map page to allow their visitors to search for stores nearby. The style of the store locations page can be changed to suit the business.
When I tried out making my own store locater, blipstar was clearly having some technical issues, as I couldn’t browse to my store locator due to javascript errors. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon. The screenshots I took below are from the demo, which does work.
The interface as it stands is pretty functional for users, allowing them to quickly see different store locations relative to their location on a Google Map. One complaint I have is that when users request directions to a store, the ending address is given in GPS coordinates, which is not so user friendly. Another major concern is that the interface isn’t completely cross browser compliant, as I had to switch from Opera to IE in order for it to work. For high volume business customers, compatibility issues like these aren’t going to fly.
blipstar charges $25 for 25 locations, $50 for up to 60 locations, and $90 for up to 250 locations. Their prices are reasonable for business owners who aren’t technical enough to dabble in APIs and web programming. Overall, blipstar has the right core values–they just need to streamline their interface and work out the technical issues.
August 27th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
[…] Fuente: Shoutblog […]
August 28th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Or if you can just go to google maps and search for your Business, and then click on the “link to this page” and there you have it.
We are 37signals
Cost ? $0 and a few minutes to do a google map search.
August 28th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Alfred, that may be true if you only have a few locations. But, if you have hundreds of stores, you’re going to have do something a little more sophisticated.
August 28th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
James.. you brought up a good point.. in fact they might have already anticipated that adoption from small businesses is going to be tough so they’re smart to launch with the excel uploader.
August 28th, 2006 at 11:47 pm
Alfred Toh: Good point about creating a link to google maps directly, I was going to say something similar.
As for hundreds of stores… Well if thats what they are marketing at its a rather limited market. I would guess that to be successful they would have to target the ‘long tale’ of businesses who might only have a few locations. After all, businesses with hundreds of locations can probably afford to have google maps integrated directly into their site and not rely someone else’s product!
August 29th, 2006 at 6:28 am
I thought Google Maps could only be used non-commercially. Does this violate Google’s ToS?
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August 7th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
There’s a new location search site that just posted a Beta release - ZIPzr (http://www.zipzr.com) has a service called ZIPzr Locator. They too use a simple delimited file upload for the clients location data. However, the geocoding is not based on Google Maps, but their own algorithms.
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