Information Madness

About Us

Results

Forums

RouteGuru - Indian Style Driving Directions

Friday, 15 June 2007 18:47 Hiren Pathak

Indian Roads and street names are not organized the way it is in western countries. Most of the streets normally don't have names and major highways normally have "numbers" but people don't even know that road numbers. When people travel from Ahmedabad to Baroda, they call it "Oh once you go out of the city, take the highway and you will reach to Vadodara!!" Well that highway does have a number. The highway that connects Ahmedabad and Vadodara is National Highway Number 8.

But after these interactive maps by Google and Yahoo, one can easily find the highway number information. Check out my previous article for further information. So the point is, normally when you want to find out the driving directions in India, you ask to a paanwala or a auto rickshaw driver or someone walking down the street. And thats how we understand the directions.

I found out about this RouteGuru.com website while I was reading one of my favorite blog webyantra.net. This new website RouteGuru gives you directions in an Indian Style. You pick the starting address, ending address and hit submit. The directions would be something like

Pass by DELHI STATE COOPERATIVE BANK LIMITED on left
Pass by PETROL PUMP on left
Pass by PO (POST OFFICE) on right

This is really pretty cool. Isn't it the same exact way you get directions from road side auto rickshaw and stranger walking on the street ?

The site is currently in Alpha version and only support Delhi NCR region. They have plans for adding more cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata & Mumbai. If you are looking for these cities, then you can submit your email address and they will notify you once these service is available for your city.

The site is founded by Avinash Agrawal who graduated from IIT Mumbai. Other team members include Sudhir Jangir (Co-CTO), Rajesh Ragavan, Anurakt Jain, Rohit Agrawal (Director, he is the founder and CEO of TechTribe.com) and Rishi Chandra (Director). The site was selected as the first winner of TechTribe's Connect2Develop award in Feb 2007.

The extended team is leveraging their years of collective experience in GIS, Web, and application
domains to collaboratively bring an affordable solution to market.

This is really nice initiative by the team and I wish them good luck for their product.

Tags:

driving

Written By: Hiren Pathak. You can contact him at informationmadness AT gmail DOT COM
Our valuable member Hiren Pathak has been with us since Tuesday, 12 December 2006.