DEMOfall '09: Google Maps of the great indoors?

Micello is mapping the great indoors. Unlike the mapmakers of yore, who toiled for years perfecting maps of oceans, continents, and mountain ranges, today's mapmakers have found their outdoor frontiers taken away from them by satellite imaging. The only way to chart new territory, they've found, is to start making maps detailing the innards of manmade buildings and complexes.

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And this is where Micello comes in. The company's goal is to become the Google Maps of indoor spaces as its staff of six people is doggedly mapping large public indoor spaces in the United States such as shopping malls, airports and universities. This way, if you're stranded in an airport and craving a cup of coffee or are at a university looking for a particular lecture hall, you'll be able to look up your location on Micello and find out where you need to walk. The maps the company is developing even include a search engine, so you can type "coffee" into a box and have the map point out all the locations in your vicinity that sell coffee.

In this Q&A with Micello founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal, we discuss his company's passion for mapping, the use of crowdsourcing to make maps and where he plans to take Micello in the future.

You said today that you're making about 10 maps a day. How many people do you have working on these maps nationwide?

Have six people total, three people in design work and three people doing data collection using our tools. In all it takes someone about four hours to get one map done and each person would do around three or four maps a day. We're primarily mapping the [San Francisco-Oakland] Bay Area to start with and our initial focus has been on Bay Area colleges and shopping malls.

Where do you get your data for building these maps?

We get the floor plan of a particular place, whether it's from someone going and taking a picture of it or the building itself gives it to us. We then convert the floor plan to a geo-coded, dynamic, personalizable interactive map, so that when you go to a shopping mall, the floor plan on the Micello map will interact with you.

You saw in our demonstration today that we typed 'shoes' into the search engine and it found all the stores in the mall that sold shoes. That's a somewhat basic version of the interactivity we'll be shooting for in the future. In the next generation of search we're planning on making it really smart so it can get information on specific brands and models if you type them into the search engine.

How does crowdsourcing play into your strategy of building these maps?

For the time being we are designing the indoor maps ourselves. Crowdsourcing comes in for updating information on the maps we've built. So people can share stories about what's happening in different locations on the maps. People can submit content describing who happens to be coming to give a lecture at a particular hall on campus, for instance, or Macy's can let people know that they're having a two-hour sale some afternoon by flagging it on the map.