We heard you and upon your request have now set out to make available all the functions on the Pune Transit site over SMS.

The first one in this series is a SMS you can send to find out which PMPML bus routes connect different places in the city. e.g. send the following message to 09220092200

pmt Kondhwa to Baner

and we will send you the following response (we show you connecting routes if no direct routes are found)

Take [101] and transfer at M G Stand to [114A] or Take any of [101,19] and transfer at Sarasbag to [228]

Best of all, its FREE to use and you only pay local SMS charges as per your plan.

Get ready for yet another cool app from SadakMap. Here’s our attempt at demystifying the transit system in your city. Load the timetables/schedules of the transit system(s) in your city, use crowd-sourcing to help plot the stops and you will be on your way.

We have done so for Pune using the PMPML’s transit data. The results can be seen at:

http://punetransit.sadakmap.com

The Pune Transit site aims to bring to Pune’s citizens information about transit options available in the city. It starts by attempting to demystify PMPML, Pune’s public bus transport.

Bus Routes: Display all routes, find routes passing through a stop, find route by route-number; view route on a map; rate/give-feedback for a route, etc.

Map Route Finder: An interactive route finder where you simply select the time you wish to travel, click on the map to indicate your origin and destination and we will find you routes along with the timings.

Volunteer: The site can only be useful if the bus routes and stops/stations are kept upto date. We have started off by plotting and loading a majority of the information, but we sure can use some help from dedicated volunteers to help keep the data current. So signup to be a volunteer mapper today.

Forum: Finally, use this forum to discuss all pune transit related issues. Suggest ideas, organize volunteer meets, and more.

For all those who wanted SadakMap on mobile – this one’s for you.

Visit http://m.sadakmap.com/ on your mobile browser and check it out. All SadakMap web content can now be easily looked up with our lightweight mobile interface.

One key requirement though is that your mobile browser needs to support AJAX. If you mobile browser does not support AJAX you can try downloading one of the following:
http://m.opera.com
http://m.skyfire.com/

So whats in it?

1. All results displayed in context of your location.
2. Sort results by distance, user-rating, relevance.
3. See a map image of any place.
4. Set current location to any point-of-interest.
5. Add a review or leave a comment.
6. Integrated with Google Local Search.

So – what are you waiting for? Head on over to http://m.sadakmap.com and test drive it. There is also a Feedback link on the app if you wish to leave us some “gyaan”.

We have launched “sadakMap Fun” which is a series of map based games that users can play individually or in a group.

The first in this series is a game called “Tag Places” http://www.sadakmap.com/fun/tagplaces
Users can create their own Quiz or attempt to solve the Quizzes created by others. Those with best times find a place in the “Hall of Fame”.

We have started off by publishing 2 quizzes:

1. Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
2. Picture Quiz
3. Oh San Francisco

Try your hand at these and record your best times. Do let us know how it goes.

We announced a new SadakMap app at todays IdeaCamp – one that lets you post location aware updates to Twitter. This was a quick 3 week idea to implementation phase with help from our dear PuneTech folks Navin and Amit (I would highly recommend ideating with them).

http://sadakmap.com/twitter

There are 2 ways to use this:
1. Post updates to your twitter account: click on corresponding button above the map and then click on the map from where you want ot “twit”. You can type an update of any length (long posts are welcome) – SadakMap will send the first 110 chars and a link pointing back to the location on the map. Your followers can read your entire message by following the SadakMap link.
(for the technically inclined: Twitter doesnt support single signon so we had to enable SSL on this page as recommended by the Twitter dev folks. Once Twitter implements http://oauth.net, we will be able to do more)

2. Twitter Search: this is a way to query Twitter by randomly clicking on the map (you may be surprised by what you find – surf the world). Start by clicking on the “Twitter Search” button above the map and go berserk clicking on the map and see what you come up with.

Help spread the word.

Regards,
Unmesh.
www.SadakMap.com
Make your mark
twitter: sadakmap

You can now get images of the marks you have made on the map by simply adding “image” at the end of your mark url.

e.g. if your mark URL is http://www.sadakmap.com/p/Nisarg-Restaurant/

you can get a static image at http://www.sadakmap.com/p/Nisarg-Restaurant/image/

By default, the size of this image is 300×300. If you wish to specify a custom size just add /size=wxh/ at the end of the above URL

e.g. http://www.sadakmap.com/p/Nisarg-Restaurant/image/size=300×200/

Here is the above image embedded in this blog post using the <img> tag

Here’s how to embed a Public SadakMap Group map into your website. Simply add the following code anywhere on your site:

<iframe src=”http://www.sadakmap.com/embedgroup.php?group=Green-India&w=600&h=300″ width=”600″ height=”300″></iframe>

Notes:

1. Replace “Green-India” with the name of the group you created on SadakMap.
2. change the height (600) and width (300) accordingly in both places

Click here for an example.

You can now embed your sadakMap Group on your Blog. See the example below where we have displayed the Map of the “Indian-Startups” group and below it are instructions on how you can do this too.

Title:	Indian Startups
Description:	"A Group displaying Startups located across India

Instructions:

First, these instructions apply ONLY if you have installed wordpress on your own hosted site. These instructions WILL NOT work if your blog is hosted by wordpress.com (e.g. yourblogname.wordpress.com). This is because unfortunately “plugins” are not allowed on wordpress.com

1. Download and install the “Pageview” plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pageview/

2. Make sure you have activated the “Pageview” plugin

3. When writing a blog post, insert the following text in your post where you want your sadakmap group to show up. Make sure you put this text inside of square brackets “[" "]”

pageview http://www.sadakmap.com/embedgroup.php?group=GROUP-NAME “GROUP-TITLE” “GROUP-DESCRIPTION”

replace GROUP-NAME, GROUP-TITLE, GROUP-DESCRIPTION with appropriate values.

For the Group you see above, we inserted the following in our blog post (inside square brackets)

pageview http://www.sadakmap.com/embedgroup.php?group=Indian-Startups “Indian Startups” “A Group displaying Startups located across India”

The TATA NEN Hottest Startup Awards are a result of the combined efforts of TATA, a rapidly growing business group in India with significant international operations, and the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), a non-profit organization, and India’s leader in entrepreneurship education.

SadakMap is happy to be one of the nominees and is vying to be amongst the top 30 in the phase I selection and eventually amongst the top 5 in the final phase. The selection is going to be based on ratings by an expert panel (we are honored to be rated 8.3) and public votes. You can help us get in the top 5 by voting for us online or by sending the SMS message HOT 15 to 56767.

Thanks for your support.

It was brought to our notice that the google map-related pages on our site had stopped working on Internet Explorer 6. On more investigation it turns out that the problem shows up for users who have IE6 and have upgraded to XP Service Pack 3. The fix was to add a ending “</base>” tag to our map pages. Unlike other standards-compliant browser (Firefox being one of our favorites) IE6 wasnt able to handle a perfectly valid HTML. One of the many headaches we have had to face dealing with Internet Explorer. Thanks to those who pointed this out – we would also urge you to switch to Firefox today