Mapme lets you do a lot more than Google Maps

Image by Johan Larsson

For Ben Lang, founder of location mapping startup Mapme, the inspiration to build his product came after he saw a map of tech hotspots in New York City. Ben was eager to map out similar locations in the tech ecosystem of his home country – Israel. He envisaged a future where his product would display everything happening in the community, showing information on investors, accelerators, and co-working spaces.

Ben’s first endeavor was called MappedinIsrael – a substantive list of startups, R&D centers, and other community hotspots neatly sorted according to their specific location in the country. Users could click on the location points to get more information on what they do, and what projects they’re involved in. All information was crowdsourced – Ben encouraged the community to get involved, add locations and details.

“It became pretty big in Israel and lots of people started reaching out and asking whether I could help them create similar maps,” recalls Ben. “That’s how we grew.”

Ben refers to Mapme as a “platform to build sophisticated maps – what we call smart maps.” He says the product is built on top of the Google Maps API and allows you to do a lot more with Google Maps than you could otherwise.

Mapme’s Ben Lang

Mapping yoga classes

Work on Mapme officially started about a year ago, when Ben and two other members in his team started to look at the platform seriously. In the beta stage, which lasted up until a month ago, the team concentrated on sectors like maps of yoga locations and 3D printing startups. Only select people were invited to use the platform, test it out, and add their locations. This grew to about 300 ecosystems before Mapme opened their platform to public use.

Now, anyone can come and create their own map on the site. Ben says it’s a “very quick process,” but he’s quick to drive home the point that they’re concentrating on working with businesses, large organizations, governments, and non-profits mainly.

All information currently present on Mapme remains crowdsourced. Ben admits there is a possibility of users abusing their privileges, such as the infamous case of the Android logo pissing on Apple in Google Maps, but he says that hasn’t happened so far. Furthermore, Mapme can choose to accept or reject any map created on their platform, which adds a further layer of scrutiny to the entire process.

Mapme has raised US$1 million in seed funding so far. It’s currently available on web and mobile web. Ben says they haven’t built an app yet because it’s more focused on B2B.

So why are businesses and large organizations drawn to Mapme? Ben says it’s useful for them to chart what’s happening in their ecosystem. Sometimes they want to be seen as the source of information, as well as to collect data and visualize developments. It can also be used in articles, for example, a recent piece of content about the seven most fabulous offices in Israel had both photos as well as a visual interface.

Addressing the information gap