Zumi

» see zumi.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In early April 2007 the Polish portal Onet presented Zumi, which it called a lokalizator internetowy, an internet locator. It joined a map of Poland to a yellow-pages directory of about one million companies and public places. A search for a dentist or a cash machine returned pins sorted by distance from wherever the user had pointed, and any pin could become the start or the end of a driving route.

The work was split among Polish firms. DreamLab, Onet's own engineering unit, did the integration. Imagis supplied the vector maps together with the rendering and address search. The imagery came from two firms, Techmex for satellite pictures and MGGP Aero for aerial photographs, and the aerial set was the showpiece. In the largest cities the ground pixel was 10 centimeters, fine enough to tell houses from cars, and a hybrid view laid the street grid over them.

The blog Terra Observer tested it on 12 April 2007 under a title asking whether this was the Polish answer to Google Maps. The reviewer's case for it was that foreign map sites still offered Poland much less than they offered Western Europe, so a local service had room. The complaints were technical. The Flash map took more than 300 MB of memory in Firefox and failed outright in Internet Explorer. Outside Warsaw the Landsat imagery looked, in the reviewer's phrase, as if it had been through the wash without Perwoll.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a listing showed ~

Zumi's bet was on depth of company data. A listing carried the firm's web address and its NIP tax number, and its court registry entry could be had as a business report paid for by SMS. Adding a company was free, while a highlighted or enriched entry cost money, which was the business model. Hotels could be booked straight from the map.

I never had a reason to open it from Turkey. Every one of those million listings was a Polish company, down to the tax number, and the product never pretended to be for anyone else.

~ 4.1 million in january ~

A free iPhone app arrived in January 2011 with an augmented reality view and speed camera warnings, and the Polish Apple site that reviewed it found its maps loaded a second or two faster than Google's. In April 2013 Onet gave the site its biggest redesign in five years, with a homepage that adapted to the visitor's location and a single search box. Wirtualne Media cited Megapanel figures for January 2013 of 4.1 million real users and 27.4 million page views. Star ratings and comments on businesses were added in July 2014, by which time the April figures were 3.78 million users and 18.5 million page views.

~ forwarded to a bus planner ~

No farewell was found. Polish Wikipedia says only that the service closed at the end of 2020. The Wayback Machine has a working homepage on 1 December 2020, still offering cafes and dentists by city, and nothing that loads after that. By February 2021 the address forwarded to jakdojade.pl, a public transport route planner, and it still does.

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