Streetdirectory.com back into business
Online map website relaunched with new owner and maps created from scratch
By Irene Tham
STREETDIRECTORY.COM is back online.
The website, whose street maps were found by a court to have violated the copyright of the Singapore Land Authority (SLA), was taken offline in late March but is being relaunched today.
Two things are new about it: The site has new maps, created from scratch over the past nine months, and a new owner.
JobsDB, Asia’s largest online recruitment firm based in Hong Kong, bought the streetdirectory. com Web address and its assets from Singapore-based Virtual Map in the fourth quarter of last year for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition was kept under wraps until yesterday.
Mr Samuel Sung, chairman of JobsDB, told The Straits Times: ‘Our online recruitment and classified ads businesses need maps. And streetdirectory.com is a good domain name to own.’
The revamped site offers users the conveniences of its predecessor, such as location search by postal code, building and street names.
But the site now also allows map users to pan across a particular neighbourhood by holding down and dragging the mouse.
Users will also be able to look for jobs based on location, since the online street directory has been integrated with JobsDB’s recruitment engine.
A new company, called Streetdirectory, was recently incorporated here to run the online map business spanning three countries.
The outfit has about 70 people, including land surveyors and cartographers who chart the landmarks, buildings and roads here and in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Mr Sung, asked why he chose to build the maps from scratch when he could buy them from other providers, said: ‘We’re starting on a clean slate. No one can question our maps. We own them.’
More than 10 senior managers from Virtual Map have joined the new entity, including former Virtual Map managing director Firdhaus Akber, now the managing editor at Streetdirectory.
Virtual Map is still awaiting judgment from the Court of Appeal, Singapore’s highest court, on its application to file an appeal against an earlier High Court decision.
Meanwhile, SLA has applied to strike out Virtual Map’s notice of appeal.
The problem between the two former business partners began in 2004, when SLA filed a suit against Virtual Map for using its copyrighted materials after it no longer had the permission to do so.
SLA won the case in a district court. Virtual Map then appealed to the High Court against the decision but was turned down.
When the High Court ordered Virtual Map to take down the maps that infringed SLA’s copyright in March, the map company went to the Court of Appeal, the judgment of which is pending.
Whatever the Court of Appeal decides, Mr Akber said, Virtual Map will ‘fulfil its obligations to SLA and the lawyers’.
‘We’re not going to run away,’ he said.
At its peak, Virtual Map had about 500 corporate customers in Asia, for whom it customised maps used, for example, on company websites and brochures.
Today, that customer base has under 100 names, said Mr Akber, who expressed hope that customers would recontract with Streetdirectory.
Virtual Map will remain open till the end of this year to service existing contracts. Until then, it will resell Streetdirectory’s new maps to these customers.
Source : Straits Times - 01 Aug 2008
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