Mapdoo Taking Off the "BETA" Label!

The Mapdoo tech development team has been hard at work improving the stability and overall performance of the site since we first released Mapdoo (beta) in April 2008. After more than 10 months, we have reached a great number of active users around the world. We're excited to announce that we've taken off the "beta" label last week on the 18/02/2009 and officially named as "Mapdoo Local".

Thanks to the many users who sent their feedback helping us rapidly diagnose and fix issues to make Mapdoo a better local search utility today. We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some useful/interesting features in the near future. We've also started to deliver geo-contextually targeted display ads called "Mapdoo LocalAd". Mapdoo is convinced that success depends on providing ads that actually improve the user experience, while at the same time allowing businesses to reach their target audience. We shall elaborate more about the "LocalAd" in the next posts.

If you are already using Mapdoo, thanks a lot and if you think it is useful please tell your friends about us and join Mapdoo on facebook too. Well if you haven't used Mapdoo for a while, now might be a good time to give it another spin.

Mapdoo+Malaysiakini = 1Map (Collaboration Announcement)

Today, I'm absolutely delighted to announce a collaboration that has been done between Malaysiakini and Mapdoo. The collaboration project named 1Map (1map.malaysiakini.com) will deliver to users Mapdoo's highly localised and geo-based contents with the combination of an intuitive platform and powerful search functions of "on-map" classifieds.

1Map has been officially launched on 5th Jan 2009 and opened for users to list classified ads on-map for free. The collaboration demonstrates Mapdoo's aggressive efforts to create and gather local content and businesses for new distribution platforms and Malaysiakini's drive to leverage its leading edge as the top local online media in Malaysia to provide consumers with excellent user experiences.

Cooperating with Malaysiakini, which is widely recognized as one of the most influencial online companies in the region, allows Mapdoo to show the world the very best of what both companies have to offer - engaging news and location-based information on sophisticated and innovative platforms.

I do want to make sure to thank both Premesh Chandran (CEO, Malaysiakini), and Siva Chandran (Marketing Director, Malaysiakini), and the entire team at Malaysiakini. There's been a lot of hard work and good faith brought to this process over now about a 6-month period of time that we've been working on some very complicated issues that needed significant innovation on both the business and IP front, as well as the technology front.

Thanks to Daryl (COO, Mapdoo) & Rico (CTO, Mapdoo) and the entire Mapdoo team. Everybody worked their socks off to bring this collaboration to bear.

Finally, I hope you enjoy using 1Map.

-say

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Happy New Year & 2009 Predictions

I've read a handful of 2009 predictions lately and thought this analysis done by the Kelsey Group to be pretty interesting.

“The complexities facing the local advertising industry as a result of the challenging global economic situation are likely to accelerate the transition of some local advertising dollars to the Internet, while at the same time making the role of the local media sales representative more important than ever." said Neal Polachek, chief executive officer, The Kelsey Group.

You could read the full article here.

Meanwhile my personal prediction for APAC region in 2009? Guess what.. I'm convinced that we'll see the majority of things happened in 2008 for the local media and commerce industry in US/Europe sweeping across the APAC region in 2009.

• small business front, search will become more widely accepted in key local segments
• percentage of SMBs with websites or personal profile pages will be creeping up
• traditional media will be going through a storm
• declining circulation hit the newspapers hard
• with the emergence of new, highly targeted ad products, we could see advertisers spending much more on marketing than in the past.
• traditional classifieds will be taken a huge hit
• geo targeting will become so widespread
• Greater onlne ad adoption by regional advertisers such as supermarkets, banks, furniture store chains and restaurants

Happy new year to all of our friends, and thanks for your support to Mapdoo. See you in 2009.

Podcast - Interview of Mapdoo CEO, Say Chan on BFM89.9

Hosted by Patrick Michael, the interview on BFM89.9 the business station, was done on 19th Nov 2008. Say Chan basically talked about the overview of Mapdoo, the inspiration of the start-up, the funding, the staffs, the local broadband penetration, the online AdEx, the future plans and the challenges etc.

You can listen to the podcast of the complete interview of Say on BFM here: http://www.bfm.my/Mapdoo-Online-Mapping-Location-Malaysia.html


-mapdoo tech team

Live Interview on BFM 89.9 - 10am Wed, 19/11

Thanks for the invitation from BFM 89.9 and its founder Mr Malek Ali, I'll be having a live interview with the business station on Wed 10am, 19/11 .

You could follow the BFM live feed here: http://www.bfm.my/assets/media/bfmfeed.html

Meanwhile there will be some major announcements in the coming weeks as Mapdoo sets to partner with a leading online media to provide yet another useful online utility for users. Please stay tuned.

Mapdoo Featured on Google Maps Mania Blog... Again!

Thanks a lot to Keir Clarke and Mapdoo once again featured on the Google Maps Mania blog. GMM first mentioned Mapdoo back in May 2008 with a very brief intro. This time around in Sept 2008, Keir obviously has better grasp of what Mapdoo possesses as he spotted our own Malaysia geocoder and numerous Malaysia businesses listed on the map. Many thanks to our users too that contributed thousands of both commercial and leisure listings.

You could read the full article here...

Explore Malaysia 3D Earth with Mapdoo!

Good news.. we could now announce the latest feature we've developed after the major server upgrading works were carried out last week. You could now explore Malaysia with the exciting 3D earth experience on Mapdoo. The combination of the Mapdoo local search and the flying experience with 3D earth without leaving your browser is truly awesome. In short, now you have the option to display the information in 3D, Map, Satellite & Hybrid.

All you need is to download and run the google earth plug-in installer to start flying. However please note the plug-in is only meant for Windows and doesn't support Mac & Linux currently.

The whole process is pretty straight forward as illustrated below:

1. Logon to Mapdoo; click the "Earth" button located on the top-right corner of the map window:


2. You'll be prompted to get the google earth plug-in now; click the blue button and move on:


3. Save the google earth plug-in installer into your disk:


4. Run the installer and it should take several minutes:

5. Restart the browser; logon to Mapdoo and click the earth button. The globe could be seen now:


6. You can now start to search around and enjoy the 3D earth on Mapdoo!





Meanwhile we are working on some noticeable bugs albeit they are minor ones that you should be able to find out once you have tried this feature. We hope you enjoy this!

-mapdoo tech team

Sorry Desmond.. No Breakfast on 29/7 & 30/7

First of all, I would like to apology for the Mapdoo outage between 29/07 & 30/07 as we've carried out some major upgrade works during the said period. I hope the improvement especially the faster loading speed of pages are noticeable by now. The objectives are plain simple as we strive each day to enhance your local search & mapping experience with Mapdoo.

While we were offline, i managed to read a few emails from the users concerning about the outage and this message from a user named Desmond certainly stood out! It reads as below:

***

"i was disappointed when i logged in to mapdoo today, and to my dismay find the site is under maintenance......its like i missed my morning breakfast....hope you get back on track soon, mapdoo....WE NEED YOU !!!!! -Desmond"

***

Sorry to have made you starving Desmond... Haha! I'll be glad to buy you 2 breakfasts to thank you for your support!

cheers..

Thank you... David!

It is not uncommon that we usually received lots of emails about technical issues. However we've got something different few days back from a user named David. It was certainly a timely boast to spur us on and we certainly appreciate the encouraging words written by David as below:

***

"I just found out that you guys are malaysian. Great work. I've been using mapdoo for more than a year and only realized your HQ is just down the street in where I work (puchong). Well done and keep it up. "

***

By the way, Mapdoo beta has just been released for 3 months... but David has been using it for more than a year... interesting :) Perhaps it is a hint from David that we should upgrade Mapdoo server asap. No matter what, with the rapidly increasing users each day, upgrading plans are in place to ensure/enhance the browsing/mapping experience for all users.

Thank you David!

Drag & Zooo~oom

Hi Folks...

Just a little heads up about a tiny but useful feature that has been integrated recently: The little square button sitting nicely on top left corner on the map could be used to drag and zoom, giving you quicker control of the zoom level at the area you desired. Here is the step-by-step guide (well.. there are only 2 steps needed though)...

Firstly, click on the yellow square button on the top left map corner and then drag a rectangle on the area you wanted to zoom in:

Secondly, you will be brought to where you wanted to be... done:

Other than that, Mapdoo tech team strives each day developing features to help users mapping with fun. There are some features that we believe you might have noticed hence we are saving spaces on the blog. Again, we always welcome any feedback from the users hence please leave us your comments or write to us at info[at]mapdoo.com if you have any idea.

-Mapdoo tech team

More features update - MapdooID, URL & Category Panel

Here are some quick updates on the latest stuffs that the Mapdoo tech team had integrated into the system.

• MapdooID is the term to be used effective from now on due to some complex issues arose with the deployment of the term MapID previously used by Mapdoo. Thanks a lot to some of you and especially Raja. Thomas, Angel and Dennis for your kind suggestions in this matter.

• MapdooID is linkable now! As you might have noticed inside the info window once you've created the placemark of your location; there is a URL link shown below the MapdooID that you could copy and send it over to friends through emails, blogs, forums or IM easily. That will direct them directly to the placemark you've just created or any placemark that you wanted to refer to them easily. In fact the MapdooID URL is standardised into the form of http://mapdoo.com/?id=xxxxxxxxx hence you can refer the places easily into the URL format or you can shout around about your places and let your friends do the rest to key in the MapdooID into the search box.

• Category Panel has added extra categories for your selection! Majority of the categories or types of your placemark you entered to create the placemark will be shown on the map when users select the desired types to be viewed on the map.

Rest assured that we'll do our best to make the Mapdoo interface as easy and as intuitive as it could be. Meanwhile thanks a lot for visiting Mapdoo and please help to spread the words about us. Mapdoo is a community website hence please help our tools and services improve with more users participation.

Again we would like to listen to comments hence you are always welcome to leave your feedback.

-Mapdoo Tech Team

Mapdoo featured on GMM blog!

Google Maps Mania blog has mentioned about Mapdoo last week!

We're proud to tell you that we are the first in Malaysia to be featured at the Google Maps Mania blog's entry. It is a very respectable blog that meant to be the "press release" for all the interesting Google maps mashup around the globe. Well.. that only featured a single line of "Malaysia - Mapdoo lets you create your own maps"... it meant a lot to us and spurs us on for more great things to come. Thanks again for your support!!

You can read the full article here.

Feature Upgrade - Info Window Editor

I'll make a quick update on behalf of Rico regarding some feature upgrades. You might have already seen this if you have logged onto Mapdoo and created the MapIDs for the past few days.


You should notice we've plugged in a text editor and you can now make use of the editor:

1. To make hyperlink to your website/blog/forum etc.
2. To put on the photos with hyperlink.
3. To arrange or edit the font.

You could also see we've added a few columns for extra info on "address", "country" & more importantly "type". These info are optional for you to fill-in but i urge you to do so as it will definitely enable Mapdoo to further fine-tuning the search engine and enhance the searching experience for the users.

Nonetheless the upgrades have been plotted with the objective of achieving "more info without sacrifice the easiness" in creating the MapID. I hope this upgrade is particularly useful for the business professionals to better arrange the corporate info within the info window. Meanwhile the users with leisure usage could somehow utilise this to link to blogs or photos.

By the way... please do NOT visit the "Famous Mapdoo Curry House" as the screen cropped picture suggested... I bet you knew it is non-existence :)

Little green* leaflet

Some of you might have got it from the pc fair... and some of you might have refused to take it even seeing our ladies tried their best with the sexiest cutest sweetest smile... :)

PC Fair - Thank You People!!

The crowd i've seen during the pc fair was HUGE.. the long hours of leaflets distribution, explanations and showcasing have taken it's toll on the team. Nonetheless everyone in the team has been feeling so excited to have met so many of you and particularly thrilled to have received numerous encouraging comments. So people... thanks a lot to have visited Mapdoo and please help to spread the words about Mapdoo in your website, blog or forum. Meanwhile please continue to visit Mapdoo and feedback. I could assure you there are many more exciting features to be improved/introduced gradually. Stay tuned...

I thought i should post a few nice photos taken during the pc fair since i suddenly (or i knew it long ago) found that the Mapdoo blog is a bit dull.. :) Finally, a big thank you to our lovely ladies Cammy, Khow Yee, Audrey and Andrea that worked "tirelessly" (wait... but they told me they're like having a broken leg... :)

I hope you enjoy the Mapdoo beta!


Or... you could find more photos here at Mapdoo's page @ facebook