Map Apps: The Race to Fill in the Blanks

The new cartography

By Peter Burrows

Visitors to the sprawling Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., often grab one of the fold-up maps available at the entrances to the four-story, city-block-size store. Without one, locating a particular genre can be “daunting,” says Darin Sennett, the store’s director of strategic projects. Since April, tech-savvy customers can download a smartphone app instead. Type in the title you’re looking for and check a box to indicate your starting point, and the app displays the quickest route along with turn-by-turn directions. Thanks to the app, “people aren’t using their phones to check Amazon to see if there’s a better deal,” says Sennett. “They’re using them to look at more of our books.”

Just as MapQuest kicked off a rush to provide street-by-street navigation for Web surfers a decade ago, the race is now on to map the Great Indoors. Startups such as Aisle411, Micello, and Meridian, which worked on the Powell’s app, are creating detailed digital portraits of shopping malls, airports, arenas, and other places that were once big blank spots. On Nov. 29, Google introduced maps for more than 20 airports, hundreds of Home Depots, and every Ikea store in the U.S., all of which are now available on the search giant’s Android operating system for smartphones. “This market is getting real,” says Jeff Lewis, co-founder of one-year-old Guidebook, which has created maps for about 900 museums, industry conferences, and other clients.

Indoor mapping enthusiasts envision apps that pull up relevant information on many everyday journeys: to the roulette tables at a casino, to a Psych 101 class on campus, or to the right conference room in a labyrinthine office. In November, Wal-Mart Stores released a trip-planning iPhone app that shows the shortest path to complete your shopping list at select locations. As systems get better at determining where you are, stores will be able to beam discounts to shoppers as they go, perhaps offering 10 percent off pretzels for those who linger in front of the beer case. “Ultimately, you’ll be able to follow your phone to your seat in Madison Square Garden or to find the pair of jeans you’ve been looking for at the Gap in one of our malls,” says John Batistich, director of marketing for the Westfield Group, owner of 124 malls around the world.

At this point, the process for getting a building’s floor plan online is far from elegant. Mapping companies ask venues to send in whatever information they have—architectural drawings, engineering files, photos—and then have programmers create a digital, clickable diagram. The process is very labor-intensive, and generally done only for big, well-trafficked sites like airports. Google hopes to make indoor mapping possible even for smaller locations with a free online tool called Floor Plans, which accepts documents from building owners and generates a map. “We’re just getting started,” says Steve Lee, a director of product management at Google. “Our eventual goal is for any user of Google Maps to be able to go into any public space and be able to find their way around.”

Micello, a Sunnyvale (Calif.) startup, has digitized 8,500 locations, including 100 airports. The results are usually embedded into apps offered by the venues themselves. While its software does much of the work automatically, Micello also ships a building’s documents to “mapping factories” in India, where workers manually finish the job. The startup charges $50 per month per map, or less for companies with more than 25 locations. Since Google’s November announcement, “It seems like every big store, university, business campus, and hospital group is working on a mobile app, and a map is going to be a standard part of that,” says Micello founder Ankit Agarwal.

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