Schmap Archive

Last week I reviewed mapping service Schmap. After my review I received an email from CEO Paul Hallett that he was in NYC for the week and this morning we met for a Schmap discussion. Paul provided a variety of updates about Schmap the company and the service which I thought were worth sharing.

Paul has lived in Beijing for the last decade and the 20-person Schmap team is located there. The other co-founder/VP of Marketing of Schmap operates the U.S. headquarters out of North Carolina. The Schmap service is platform agnostic which means it adapts to whatever browser or mobile device you are viewing the site from.

We also discussed Schmap Enable. Schmap Enable is one line of javascript code that you stick on your site and when someone visits via a mobile device, a button is displayed at the top of the page that points to a mobile-friendly map and business details. It’s really pretty slick and could help drive more foot traffic into a store or eatery. If you browse the site via a desktop browser, the button isn’t displayed. The button and the resulting map page can be customized to match your website. Hallett notes that next year they will look into offering some premium services for a small fee.

The majority of our time together was discussing how Schmap can get the word out about Schmap Enable. Currently they are working to interact with more web agencies and web developers since these are the people typically responsible for the websites of most small businesses. I look forward to checking back with Paul early next year to learn about his progress with getting the word out about Schmap Enable and what did/didn’t work from a marketing perspective.

Schmap has been around for a couple of years and provides a variety of pretty neat mapping services. Their main service are travel guides for about 200 cities worldwide. AS you can see from the screenshot below, they locate points of interest on a map and then provide some details on the location as you move around the map. Interesting note, Schmap uses Yahoo Maps for their mapping service.

There’s also a downloadable version of Schmap which allows you to browse the guides locally. The 200 city pack will run you 338 mb in download size. They most recently launched Schmap Enable which allows websites to place mobile-friendly maps on their sites in seconds. The Schmap team tells me a paid premium version of Enable will be available in early 2009.

Schmap also offers a suite of embeddable widgets including a map of all of the NBA/MLB/NFL teams, concert tours (NKOTB!!) and the city guides can be widgetized as well.

Lastly Schmap offers iPhone and Blackberry map versions for on-the-go guide and location browsing.