Startups from Finland: What-A-Map - Create Social Map Apps For Your Phone

March 17, 2008
Author: Timo Paloheimo
Category: Startups from Finland

What-A-Map logo

What-A-Map is a Finnish startup that wants to help people to find, create and share pedestrian maps and deliver them to your mobile phone. They say their service begins where Google Maps end: they want that users can have very detailed maps of specific places such as shopping malls, museums, amusement parks etc. that they can install on their phones.

What-A-Map is free to use, but the maps “will contain sponsored, targeted but unobtrusive advertisement”. The maps are created on their site whatamap.com and a link of the final map will be sent to the user by SMS. Clicking the link will make the user download and install a Java application with the map.

The maps can be made to incorporate interactive and social features such as seeing where your friends are, chatting with them and sharing photos.

What-A-Map launched into beta in November and is apparently currently fully public. They announced in February that they already had 15000 maps delivered to users.

The company was established 2007 employs 11 people with “experienced veterans
from Nokia and TeliaSonera.” It shows that the company has experienced business people as they really have thought about the business, not just the technology.

[via Arctic Startup]

Tags: , business, Java, Maps, Mobile, Nokia, What-A-Map, whatamap.com