UpNext, an angel funded New York start-up, makes beautiful maps. Using a number of clever views, the team has built a wildly unique way to navigate your city and, more importantly, see buildings, points of interest, and even public transit in real time.

The company, Raj Advani, Vik Advani, Robin Har, and Danny Moon, have been working in mapping for four years and recently released an iPad version of the app.

“UpNext is dynamic, Google Maps is static,” said Moon. “Google Maps is a navigation-centric map. Its cartography geared toward navigating road networks, relegating other map details to the background.”

“We put special emphasis on making our maps fast, highly stylized, and highly interactive. You can tap on buildings to see the businesses inside; better, you can tap on subway stations to see actual trains moving along the map with estimated arrival times (where the data is available). Making every part of the map interactive is important to us,” he said.

The team has a background in video games, which gave them the impetus to rethink the way maps are rendered and displayed. “Maps historically were about more than finding your way around: they were immersive and evocative; emotional, even. Our eventual goal is to bring this sense of wonder back to maps.”

There are three ways to explore the maps. “Immerse” gives you vector based, textured cities with roadways and tappable buildings while “Explore” focuses on venues and POIs. “Navigate” helps you navigate a vehicle through the city without distraction. They also include real-time train information and multi-model routing so you can plan your own routes through a city.

The app currently covers 22 enhanced 3D cities and over 60 cities in total. While it’s no Google Maps beater (yet), it definitely offers a brisk and compelling alternative to Google’s staid yellow and blue.

Product Page

The future was supposed to be all about swooping through pixellated cities, the crepuscular computer ghost-light arcing through the Aurignacian canyons of Neo Tokyo as we trailed our enemies into the dark. Instead we get some of the coolest map visualizations I’ve ever seen with a few social media tricks thrown in to make a very cool mapping platform called UpNext. You win some, you lose some.

UpNext uses 3D renderings of world cities to show points of interest and Foursquare checkins inside a real representation of nearly 50 cities. They’ve just launched their app for the iPad and Android tablets and I am seriously impressed. The resolution is great and the onscreen update speed is amazing. It offers the best of services like Google Maps alongside real city imagery, allowing you to use the map to orient yourself in 3D space. A blinking dot on a 2D street-scape works, but a 3D dot in a 3D city works even better.

“Google launched Google Maps 5 for Android last year. We are bringing the same vector based goodness to iOS, but with more beautiful cartography, faster rendering, and fluid search with our innovative search results system. Our cities are fully textured, our roadways carved in full 3D with overpasses and tunnels and our buildings are all tappable,” said Danny Moon, CEO.

Now all I need are a pair of Virtual Light glasses and a carbon-fiber messenger bike. The app is available now for iPad and Android and is coming soon on the Kindle Fire.

iPad Product Page
Android Product Page

Mapping is a big boy’s game, with Google Maps, Bing Maps, and MapQuest dominating maps on both the Web and mobile. But sometimes it takes a startup to push things forward. 3D mobile mapping startup UpNext is hoping to get on the map, so to speak, with its detailed 3D maps of cities and venues like the Super Bowl stadium. The New York city startup, which has been around since 2007, just raised a $557,000 series A round of preferred shares, according to an SEC filing. That amount includes $57,000 that converted from a previously-undisclosed friends-and-family round in 2009. The new round is $500,000 and investors include Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, David Cohen of TechStars (who invested individually), David Tisch and Oleg Tscheltzoff

Co-founder Danny Moon says the company will use the funds to expand its platform from its own mobile and iPad apps to become an underpinning technology for “travel guides, resorts, event planners, amusement parks, to name a few,” which can incorporate UpNext’s 3D maps into their own apps. UpNext allows a level of detail not seen in most mapping technologies, including directories of business inside specific buildings or the ability to zoom down to the seat level inside a stadium, as it showcased with its Super Bowl app.

UoNext will also keep pushing with its own iPhone app. “We’re creating exciting new technology to enable users to explore cities, visually. Think an interactive, social city model that changes in realtime,” hints Moon. Realtime, in 3D,—what more could anyone ask for?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/30/upnext-ipad-fluid/

Navigating maps on computers and mobile devices can still be a clunky experience, especially when you try to search for places on a map. Typically, on Google Maps or Bing Maps, you get a bunch of virtual pushpins for each place which you can click on for more information.

UpNext, a 3D mapping startup based in New York City, brings that information forward in amore fluid way in the latest release of its iPad app. As you push the 3D map around with your fingers, labels for specific searches or your friends’ recent Foursquare checkins pop open as they come into view. UpNext calls this the Fluid Labeling System, and you can see it in action in the video above.

The app, which is also available on the iPhone, now covers eight cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Portland, San Francisco, and Austin. The apps are free, and they’ve been downloaded 170,000 times—not terribly much, but it is a good example of where map apps could be going. It renders each city in full 3D and lets you dive into each building to find the businesses inside.

As far as the Fluid Labeling goes, anything that eliminates an unnecessary tap is good in my book, but this is really just an improvement on the existing map UI that is now commonplace. Is there a better way to display information about places on a map than through pushpins?

One of the most detailed 3-D mapping apps on the iPhone is UpNext, which lets you click on 3-D buildings and see a list of the businesses and offices inside. Up until now, however, it only covered New York City.

A new update adds three new cities: Boston, Washington, D.C., and Austin (just in time for SXSW, of course). The Austin map won’t be available until later tonight, where it will appear in the app’s city selection screen. UpNext lets you zoom around the city in a very Google Earth-like fashion, search for restaurants, bars, and stores.

You can favorite and bookmark different venues, see Citysearch and Yelp reviews, and broadcast a tip about the place through Facebook or Twitter. UpNext now pulls in local listings data (addresses, phone numbers, reviews,menus, websites, photos) from CityGrid, Citysearch’s local content and advertising network.

And what would an Austin update be without Foursquare integration. Once you log into Foursquare through UpNext you can see where all your friends are checking in. The checkins are overlayed as glowing blue dots on the map.

Here’s a video demo showing off all the features of the app:

UpNext only maps Manhattan right now (they hope to add Boston and San Francisco next spring), but it is a powerful demonstration of how 3-D experiences could soon become more mainstream. (No download is necessary, but you do need Java 1.5—and be warned that older Macs might have some issues with it). I met UpNext chief architect Raj Advani last week at our Boston MeetUp, and he came by today with CEO Danny Moon to show me the site and its new Facebook app.

Yesterday, UpNext launched its map on Facebook, although it is not yet in the app directory. (Unlike many Facebook apps, it is not a subset of the main site’s functionality. You can do everything inside Facebook you can on UpNext.com.) UpNext is a complete 3-D representation of the city, down to practically every single building. You can pan and zoom, and click on any building to get a list of the businesses inside. Type in an address and the map flies right to it. If you want to see nearby restaurants, bars, stores, hotels, museums, or sports facilities, you can set a filter to light those things up on the map. This building-by-building and category search “is something you cannot do on Google Maps,” claims Moon.

For many businesses, UpNext pulls in ratings and reviews from other sites like CitySearch, the New York Times, and Time Out. And you can add your own reviews, and look at all the places your friends on UpNext have rated, reviewed, and visited. That now includes all your New York City Facebook friends, whom you can import into the main site as well. They pop down in a friend slider that lets you sort through them and all the places they’ve rated.

UpNext gets its map data from VisionMedia, which flies over the city taking pictures and then extrapolates the height of each building, allowing UpNext to render them in 3-D. It then takes local business information from Localeze, and drops it onto every building (which is geocoded using data from the City of New York). “We want to reach a new level of detail in immersive search,” says Advani, “so I can see at a glance where things are happening.” He’s even added day and night cycles to the map.

All of this would not be possible using Ajax or even Flash, says Advani. Only Java lets UpNext tap into the video acceleration card on your PC to render the polygons fast enough. The trick is to compress each building, rendering it with as few polygons as possible. There is some lag time while you are waiting for Java to load, but that should be fixed in an update to Java coming in about three months.

And what about a mobile version? Advani is thinking of entering the $10 million Android contest sponsored by Google for its new mobile operating system. And of course, he would develop for the iPhone in a second if Apple “would tell us some details about their API.”

UpNext is a real bootstrap operation. The four employees put in $50,000 and pulled together another $45,000 from friends and family, which was enough to create the map of New York City. Now they want to raise about $1 million to expand to other cities. In terms of making money, at some point they will turn on local search ads as well as in-map ads where buildings light up during certain searches (like for “shoes”). Moon also envisions creatiev banner ads linked to the map. “If Starbucks is launching a new drink,” he suggetss, “all the Starbucks could light up if you click on the ad.” Local business Yellow Pages-type ads are another natural fit.

In reality, though, UpNext is a technology demo waiting to be picked up by a larger company building out a global mapping platform. It cannot survive as a standalone company given the competition. Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft should buy these guys and blow out these maps worldwide.