Micello is mapping the great indoors. The only way to chart new territory, they've found, is to start making maps detailing the innards of manmade buildings and complexes. Unlike the mapmakers of yore, who toiled for years perfecting maps of oceans, continents, and mountain ranges, today's mapmakers have found their outdoor frontiers taken away from them by satellite imaging.
Demo's biggest stars of all time13 hot products from DEMOfall '09 And this is where Micello comes in. This way, if you're stranded in an airport and craving a cup of coffee or are at a university looking for a particular lecture hall, you'll be able to look up your location on Micello and find out where you need to walk. The company's goal is to become the Google Maps of indoor spaces as its staff of six people is doggedly mapping large public indoor spaces in the United States such as shopping malls, airports and universities. The maps the company is developing even include a search engine, so you can type "coffee" into a box and have the map point out all the locations in your vicinity that sell coffee. You said today that you're making about 10 maps a day.
In this Q&A with Micello founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal, we discuss his company's passion for mapping, the use of crowdsourcing to make maps and where he plans to take Micello in the future. How many people do you have working on these maps nationwide? In all it takes someone about four hours to get one map done and each person would do around three or four maps a day. Have six people total, three people in design work and three people doing data collection using our tools. We're primarily mapping the [San Francisco-Oakland] Bay Area to start with and our initial focus has been on Bay Area colleges and shopping malls. We get the floor plan of a particular place, whether it's from someone going and taking a picture of it or the building itself gives it to us.
Where do you get your data for building these maps? We then convert the floor plan to a geo-coded, dynamic, personalizable interactive map, so that when you go to a shopping mall, the floor plan on the Micello map will interact with you. That's a somewhat basic version of the interactivity we'll be shooting for in the future. You saw in our demonstration today that we typed 'shoes' into the search engine and it found all the stores in the mall that sold shoes. In the next generation of search we're planning on making it really smart so it can get information on specific brands and models if you type them into the search engine.
For the time being we are designing the indoor maps ourselves. How does crowdsourcing play into your strategy of building these maps? Crowdsourcing comes in for updating information on the maps we've built. People can submit content describing who happens to be coming to give a lecture at a particular hall on campus, for instance, or Macy's can let people know that they're having a two-hour sale some afternoon by flagging it on the map. So people can share stories about what's happening in different locations on the maps. Looking to the future, how do you plan to monetize this application?
In the short term we plan to monetize this application through premium content. We have a short-term and a long-term focus. So to use the Macy's example again, so you want to promote a two-hour sale, you could pay to have information on it pushed out to all Micello users in the area whose profiles show they'd be interested in shopping at Macy's. In the long term we see ourselves as becoming the go-to company for designing interactive indoor maps.