Search Stats - 2014

Here are some of the trends found in Loppee in year 2014:

Most searched categories in different countries:
1. USA - Blood donors, Doctors, Missing persons and Domestic Help
2. Greece - Doctors, Missing persons
3. Albania - Missing Persons
4. Iraq - Mechanic
5. Denmark - Doctors
6. Pakistan - Blood donors
7. India - Blood donors, persons with disability
8. Philippines - Missing persons

Social Map Portal

I wish to transform loppee.com into a social mapping portal. Here are some of the use cases I'm thinking about:

1. Private / Closed-group map clusters
- Family and relatives share their locations
- Students/Alumni of a school share their location on map
- A community sharing the location of its members
- A personal map where I mark all the places I visit, I liked, or wish to go, location of people I work with, location of people who work for me

2. Privately-owned publicly-viewable map clusters
- A retail shop sharing the shop locations on map.
- A bank sharing the location of its branches and ATM.
- A public transport service sharing the location of their stoppage and timing

3. Public map markers (this feature is available in Loppee.com)
- Individuals publish their positions on map for a social cause. For example - blood donors, helpers, volunteers, etc.

Dear Readers, please let me know your thoughts about this.

Changes in September release

 

New Tagline - Help is Near

 

The home page has a new tagline - Help is Near. This goes with the philosophy of Loppee that help was always near. Someone out there is always ready to help you. You just didn't know about it.

 

 

Distance in search results

 

You can now see the distance in the search results. The result is sorted by distance.

 

Changes in August release

Users are now required to Sign up to use the service. The performance is now better than before. The page loads in less than 1 seconds.

1. Google Places Search:

Geolocation and the fallback IP triangulation can find the current location of the user or at least the city where the user resides. But at times users may want to start search from some specific place. In this case, users can make use of the Google Places search:

2. Search Filters

In the previous release, a user could search using filters Category and Tags. But that was not sufficient. In this release, we have a new filter added to people search - Type. This filter was added for categories like Blood Donors, Missing People, etc. The Type includes options like - Patient / Donor, Missing / Found, etc.

3. Search Results

The search results now show more results than before:

4. Marker Popups

Marker popups are now better than before. The picture frame and content rearrangement makes the information more readable.

Plans for the next release:

1. Location enabled tweets when a request for blood is posted on Loppee.com. This was tested successfully.
2. Geo-Fencing for alerts and notifications.

An introduction

 

Loppee.com is a crowdsourced service to search 'people' and 'places of interest' on Google map.

 

Traditionally, maps were used to show the location of a place of interest. Lot of applications are available in the internet which shows the location of restaurants, hotels, bust station, gas station, etc. We can easily find the nearest pizza corner.

My wife and I thought that it would be great if we could find people on map. Like the nearest blood donors, domestic help / home maid / nanny, home nurse, gardener, etc. Thus was born Loppee.com

The name L O P P E E is an anagram of P E O P L E.

Loppee is crowd sourced. Which means that all the data / content is user generated.

Lopee has the following categories:

1. Blood Donor
2. Doctor
3. Home maid
4. Missing people
5. Differently-abled

I work for a reputed software company. At office, we get at least one mail in every two days by people seeking blood donors. Every day someone staying in your neighborhood need blood. In facebook, google plus and twitter, there are numerous groups for blood donors. There are at least 200 donors in each group.

Imagine how nice it would be we could find all the volunteer blood donors on map. You may ask - "why would I want to know the location of thousands of people? I'm interested in knowing only the blood donors near my home". We agree. That is why we have made loppee location-aware. When you open loppee.com in your web browser and if you have enabled geo-location, it would show your exact location. And when you search for a blood donor, it would show you the nearest blood donor. If required, you can increase the radius of search and see blood donors in a 50Km radius.

Currently we have not integrated Loppee with social media. But we are working on that.

In addition to people, loppee also has places of interest. No one knows your locality more than you do. You can add a nearby shop, lodge, school, eatery, gas station, market, police station, etc to map.
Some of the featured categories in places of interest are:

1. Accomodation (Hotel, Guest House, Dormitory)
2. Food (Restaurants, Bakery)
3. Education (College)
4. Hospitals (Clinic)
5. Charitable organizations (Beggar homes, Orphanages)
6. Entertainment (Movie theater, Pub)
7. Fuel (Petrol/ Gas Station)
8. Market (Supermarket, Mall)