French startup Mapstr is a nifty bookmarking apps, but for your favorite places. It lets you keep track of restaurants, bars, shops or your friends’ homes. With today’s update, you can now get walking, driving and public transport directions with integrations with Google Maps, Uber and Citymapper.
And this could make the app a bit more useful. Until today, Mapstr was a great way to get data into the app and browse this data. But when it came to acting on this data, it was a cumbersome process.
Nobody wants to copy and paste an address into Citymapper or figure out how much time it’s going to take you. The good thing is that now you don’t need to. When you tap on the directions button, you get multiple options. The first one is Uber. It tells you how much time it’s going to take if you call an Uber and the cost.
With Google Maps, Mapstr calculates the walking and driving directions. As for the Citymapper integration, you can compare other times with public transportation.
The best part is that you can tap on one of these buttons and it’s going to enter your destination into one of these apps — thank you, deep linking. Rumor has it that people working at Uber and Citymapper were already using Mapstr, so it wasn’t that hard to ask them for an unlimited API access.
Mapstr has raised $800,000 from business angels. Its user base has saved 1.5 million places in total. Users can also share some of their favorite places with friends.
You can add as many tags as you want to your bookmarks in order to filter them out later using the tag drawer (restaurant, sushi, cocktails, etc.). It’s also a great way to check opening hours, get a restaurant phone number and more.
At some point, Mapstr is going to develop its own API so that other apps can add places into Mapstr for example. And this is the only thing stopping Mapstr from becoming a sort of Pocket but for places.

