While you may think so, I think many like myself and Mohan will feel otherwise. (Of course, none of us are actually in the mapping industry, so we are all talking out of our ass )

But seriously, remember the days before gothere.sg ? Streetdirectory.com was the de facto online directory for Singapore with practically zero competion. And while their product may not be as elegant as what we see gothere.sg is today, it was pretty decent and very usable.

Even then, they saw an immediate need to diversify into a bunch of other stuff like real estate listings, classified listings, and expanded overseas into Malaysia and Indonesia.

The point is, we may be overestimating how much money is there to be made in online mapping – I mean, this is an area where not even Google nor Microsoft is able to fully monetize yet. And these are international players with a presence in every country.

Much less if you restrict yourself to a market of 4.6 million people covering only a land area of 700 square kilometers.

Honestly, why does it matter if gothere.sg (which is definitely the best startup in Singapore, IMO, for many different definitions of best) cannot scale to other countries? It doesn’t matter. As DHH from 37 Signals points out in this wonderful talk[1], you don’t have to sell for a billion dollars to be successful or more importantly, happy. You can be just as happy with a million dollars a year and no VCs forcing you to have an exit strategy. Singapore alone is big enough to sustain one really good player in the “mapping market”. And I think gothere.sg can definitely scale to other countries (albeit with a lot of data collection and other work) but obviously, they don’t see the need to yet. Mapping is an exciting field and even big companies like Google or Microsoft haven’t figured out a half-decent interface yet.

[1] http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08

@Arul: I had a nice chat with Chandra some time back on Fusion Garage etc. When I said “they had their roots way back in 2002″, I was referring to Chandra’s passion in OS and mobile. He had been tinkering with the idea of a “browser without an OS” way before Fusion Garage, in the early days of Radixs. It’s through iterations of ideas, testing and failing etc. that finally brought him to Fusion Garage (which kinda happened by accident too.. hehe) and how all this started way back in the Radixs days..

See you at unConference!

I beg to disagree. Fusiongarage was born in Feb 2008 – After about a month or so of discussions at McDonalds and BurgerKings. The founder might have worked on another startup back in 2002, but we also had an architect, who had been in the industry for 25 or so years. Does that mean we had our roots in the 80′s ?

Most probably am gonna be there as well. Will c ya there!