Annonskartan.se, Swedish Classified Ads Google Maps Mashup

    Annonskartan.seAnnonskartan.se is a new Swedish search engine for local classified ads. The service is targeted only for Swedish market and not available in English at least for the moment, but it’s rather interesting and the potential seems big.

    With Annonskartan.se one can for example find an iPhone on sale in a certain city, or a sofa within a 1000m radius from a landmark, or find all possible classifieds close to a certain street in a given city. The service searches through different sites and aggregates this information and positions each piece geographically on top of Google Maps. The positioning is based on the postal number, so it’s not totally accurate but gives a relatively good idea of the location. At the moment the site indexes around 1,2 million local ads.

    The developer is Ted Valentin, a Swedish entrepreneur and web developer, who has been very productive with building different web sites and services, and he’s also sold quite a bunch of the sites he’s put together. Ted Valentin is also working on other maps, now with a working name Allakartor.se (“all maps”). At the moment this main address doesn’t work, in the previous five months Ted has released seven other websites: for example Sushikartan.se (listing sushi places), Wifikartan.se (free wifis), Cafekartan.se (cafe map), and Ted mentions he has “more fun ideas in pipeline…”

    annonskartan.se screenshotAnnonskartan.se hasn’t received completely unanimous reception, though. The service aggregates the local classifieds currently from Blocket.se, Tradera.se och Eniro.se, while Ted states more sources will be added in the coming weeks. At least Blocket hasn’t reportedly been very happy with the mashup. Ted Valentin comments that his aim is that more people would find the ads, which would lead to more traffic and higher turnover also for the sites that are used in searches. A short summary of each item is shown on Annonskartan.se, and then linked to the source of the information where interested users can find the whole description.

    Ted Valentin commented to ArcticStartup that at the moment he doesn’t have any business model for his maps network. His primary goal right now is to grow the network, and attract more visitors. To question whether he has any plans to expand the service into other countries, Ted comments it is a possibility and he will soon have to start looking into finding some business model and partners to cooperate with.