 "Mapme lets you do a lot more than Google Maps")
For Ben Lang, founder of location mapping start-up 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 endeavour was called MappedinIsrael – a substantive list of start-ups, R&D centres, 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.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.
