The website www.mapntl.com allows users to search for any street in Lagos, in addition to the location of any business by name and address. According to the initiators, the innovation is aimed at bringing the benefits of digital technology to the doorsteps of Nigerians. The website works in the same way as the Google map website.
Ireti Ajala, the promoter of the project has over 14years industry experience. He said: "MapNTL.com can show the precise location of over 50,000 businesses in Lagos including banks, ATMs, restaurants, hotels, post offices, Shopping plazas and markets among others.â€Â
Ajala, a United Kingdom-based map and GIS specialist, added that the project’s database contained over 400,000 routable Lagos digital streets measuring over 5,400km in length and was equivalent to more than two-thirds of the earth's equatorial radius or twice the distance from Port-Hacourt to Sokoto. "Visitors can interactively zoom in/out, re-centre the map, e-mail the map to customers and friends, and click on a business symbol to get localised information about the particular business such as contact phone number, email, address, etc and other details to assist in the purchasing decision," he said.
Ajala noted further that businesses with location elements like banks, hotels and restaurants in Europe were all benefiting from increased footfalls and patronage simply because their customers could see where they were located on Google map, MapQuest, Yahoo map and other similar maps
A GIS specialist, formerly with MTN, he added, "Sometime ago, an attempt was made to search for Ojuelegba Road on Google map and it returned an error saying this popular road could not be found. Why should Google map know the location of all of Barclays Bank, HSBC, MacDonald's, Pizza Huts, KFC outlets in UK but cannot find the location of Zenith Bank, Bank PHB, Mr Biggs, Sweet Sensation, etc in Lagos."
He explained that the reason for this was that the search application did not have intelligent street maps for every single city in the world, noting that this might explain why local online street maps were springing up everyday in India, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia and China among others.
"But Nigeria, with over 10 million internet users cannot boast of a decent online map. People still expect okadas to know every street in Lagos,†he lamentedÂ
Ajala said "MapNTL.com recently unveiled an innovative map-based advertising platform called Mapvertising , which allows companies in Lagos to brand their business locations on an interactive street map using their corporate logos or symbols to improve their brand visibility. Google map made this concept popular and MapNTL.com had adapted it for the Nigerian environment.
"Mapvertise is a radical new idea which brands your business location with your corporate logo on an interactive map of Lagos making it very easy for new customers to see where your business is located in Lagos. It costs less than N5,000â€
He added, "Mapvertising will definitely be useful to companies in Lagos to connect with their customers by showing where they are located. To illustrate marking the location of over 50 Mr Biggs' outlets using its distinct corporate logo on MapNTL.com for just N4,500 per location will ensure that over 100,000 visitors to the website can easily see the location of any Mr Biggs' outlet by looking for Mr Biggs' logo on the map".