Paktive - Pakistan on the map

So this mornings coffee chai got a bit interesting with an article on GreenWhite about Paktive (what’s with the name?) 

Okay, so what is Paktive all about? Well this is what I found on their website:

“Paktive.com is an experiment to compile and present map locations of Pakistani places of interest like restaurants, parks, landmarks, services and businesses in major Pakistani cities. Currently, it uses satellite imagery from Google maps.”

Interesting eh? Well GreenWhite author Saad Khan has written them off today. According to him its a dead venture. And sadly I agree with him.

The problem with Paktive is that it is not designed for the masses. Nerds like to draw polygons, normal people (and we have a lot of those in Pakistan) do NOT like to draw polygons and identify places on the map. They would rather use the old method of dumping text based data into a database and query it. 

Think about it, how many of you have gone to Google Maps custom map section for Pakistan and drawn or identified any location? (did you even know that Google Maps had that feature?) 

We need to think about the business plan around it. I know community based contributions and web2.0 is all WOW but really this WOW can never become a real WOW without proper business model behind it.

In Paktive.com’s defense they do call it an “experiment” so I will let them go without a attack plan.