(Maria la Palma made me write this post…)

In the beginning we sat on wooden chairs – the kind you find in most public schools. The Häagen-Dazs years were still to come, as we sweated out the summers and froze through the winters for lack of central air-con. During the monsoon season water occasionally dripped through the ceiling.

Back then, in our old building, the overcrowded YDreams “sala principal” (main room) was half empty. YDreams, then Ideias Interactivas, was yet to be registered officially but we were already working on the company’s first project, the gig that gave us a head start and kept us financially afloat from day one.

It was called “Canal Mapas”, a Lisbon and Oporto map channel produced for Telecel. YDreams not only delivered a web version (which was all the rage back then) for their online portal, NETC, but also and more importantly a mobile version.

Although a big challenge for a new company like YDreams, web map channels were nothing new at the time. Mobile ones, on the other hand, were almost unheard of. YDreams truly pioneered the field by producing not only WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), but also PDA versions of “Canal Mapas”. So innovative was the solution that, in three months time, Motorola gave our work a 5-star rating in the mobile sector, from a very select global group of leading companies.

The deceivingly simple black and white maps, built pixel by pixel to fit WAP’s first albeit tough 96×44 standards, became the first ‘face’ of many YDreams’ technical advances.

In 2002, NETC became Vizzavi, and Telecel Vodafone, thus YDreams’ first, and to-date, oldest client.

Like any other map channel, a route engine telling us how to get from here to there and showing you all kinds of geo-referenced contents along the way, lay at the heart of “Canal Mapas”. A complete guide to the cities’ attractions and daily agendas complemented the offer. Miguel Remédio managed the project, Tiago Fonseca did all the programming and I took care of the photos and map building. Fernando Birra built the route engine, and former colleagues João Paiva and António Lobo handled the contents and designed the interface, respectively.

The big suppliers back then, i.e. Navtech or Mapquest, had no reliable or interesting street data for Lisbon or Oporto, so YDreams had to start from scratch. After buying basic vectorial maps of both cities, a 24-person crew was employed to stake every single street in Lisbon and Oporto in order to retrieve all the essential data needed for the route engine to work (e.g. street directions, allowed turns, door numbers) To make it even more challenging, no GPS or handheld devices were allowed, only pens (the good ol’ fashioned ones, that is) were used. They would come and go, leaving stacks of paper tattered from use, picking up new ones filled with tables and IDs identifying every conceivable section and intersection (knot). In Lisbon alone, there were over 2.500 different street names: a network comprised of more than 11.000 sections, 7.500 knots, and totaling 1.100 km! Someone would later input all this data onto Excel spreadsheets, where a Visual Basic (VB) macro would organize and dump them.

You should know that Miguel Remédio was a veritable wizard on the subject and a true VB enthusiast. Miguel was best known for having coded in “Fortransit”… and was then trying his luck with PHP. Fortunately, Tiago Fonseca came on board just in time.

There was no real map vectorial drawing (except for the routes), as each of the four pre-defined zoom levels of the main web version corresponded to pre-produced raster images. Although as effective as anything else, this posed a problem especially with the street names, which made the job incredibly painstaking to get right…

The project took off in May 2000 and was launched for Lisbon in September. Oporto followed soon after. The “Canal Mapas” site was officially shut-down in early 2004, as Vodafone Portugal sold its Portuguese Vizzavi web portal to IOL. At its closure, “Canal Mapas” harbored over 6.300 geo-referenced points (bars, restaurants, hotels, ATM machines, etc.) and 6.200 photos.

The mobile edge provided by “Canal Mapas”, together with the logistical effort necessary to keep a web portal going for a top-level client in the highly competitive mobile carrier industry, was decisive in positioning YDreams from the start as both a commercially and technically capable company.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 12:09 and is filed under Company Life, Humor, People, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.