20 Indian cities 'mapped'

Yahoo! has mapped 20 Indian cities - providing a detailed online map with a decent list of services.

On Wednesday he launched "Our City", a new Net resource which aggregates city specific information including, news, travel and tourism, weather, local business as well as user contributed blogs, photos and videos, for 20 Indian tier-1 and tier-2 towns.

Following are the cities in the radar.

The 20 Indian cities now in Yahoo's new Our City Web portal are: Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bhopal, Bubhaneswar,Chandigarh, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Madurai, Mangalore, Mumbai, Mysore, Pune, Shimla, Thiruvananthapuram.

This is, obviously, a good thing. The maps for these cities are quite detailed. We don't have to purchase a city map anymore, and ATMs and other common services such as restaurants, theatres, hotels and tourist spots can easily be located using this service - especially helpful for someone new to one of these cities. I'm not sure how useful weather information is going to be - Indian weather is too predictable, unlike in the west.

This is a good start. However, I think the key feature that's still missing is the navigation aid. Similar to the US (I don't know about the rest of 'west'), if there is a service that shows the exact map and directions to reach place A from place B - including all the roads and turns you need to take and the distance between each of them, that would be of real benefit for travel. Let's hope this great service comes soon - at least within the major (top 10) cities.