Helping you find your way around town has been the iPhone’s forte for years. In fact, any smartphone armed with the Google Maps for Mobile application can keep you from having to ask someone for directions. But, as high-tech as mapping services have gotten in the past few years, we still rely on hard-copy maps printed on glossy pamphlets to keep our bearings in convention centers and shopping malls. That’s where Micello comes in. Micello today unveiled their indoor mapping iPhone app at DEMO 09. Once launched, the Micello iPhone app will allow users to navigate the last frontier of mapping services – the “indoors.”
“The maps today bring you to the door. We take you inside the place. It’s the last mile, the unchartered territory. We are building the foundation for indoor location based services and creating an eco-system similar to what’s happening in the outdoor space,” said Ankit Agarwal, Founder and CEO of Micello.
Micello’s map database contains floor-plans for venues like resorts, college campuses and stadiums. So far, there are only about 150 indoor maps in the San Francisco Bay Area, but will be expanded to over 5,000 indoor maps across the US by 2010. There’s even a social component to Micello that allows users to interact with each other or geo-locate friends from their Facebook, Twitter and mobile phone contacts lists.
But, what impresses us the most is the way Micello builds their maps. Micello constructs indoor maps from simple images of existing maps. The company claims it can render an indoor map from an image in about four hours. The indoor map can then be matched up to fit inside a larger map, like Google Maps.
Look for Micello’s iPhone app in the coming weeks.
[Via: Ubergizmo]