I just came across routeguru.com , promoted and founded by Avinash Agrawal. Its still in Alpha (19-June-07). But works!!
Route Guru is about planning route, presently only a few Indian cities are supported. The data is licensed from Eicher, yes the same company that manufactures tractors and had published the city guides. In fact, we had approached Eicher around Y2K (during the last dot com boom), and we could not strike a deal as they were asking a bomb for their data and wouldn't consider revenue share! Good that Avinash has been able to convince them. Though, it would be interesting to figure out the terms of the deals :)
The technology is Java, though Struts has been used, which is a bit outdated. Ajax has been used as well. Though, use of Google Map API would have been a cool feature. The site was slightly slow when I clicked about us. But, I guess it may be due to the sever capability. probably a VPS with less than 200MB RAM must have been used. That's OK for testing the concept.
The idea of Route Guru, is well timed as the 2010 games is looming...also many mobiles come with LBS (Location Based Service) and GPS.
I think Route Guru should be ported to mobile, using Google Ajax mobile technology which is free and open source.
Overall an excellent idea with great potiential and right timing. Good work Avinash :) and congrats to your team.
