Today, finding one’s way through Indian cities can be an arduous task, thanks to the rapid growth and extremely dynamic city landscape. Now, imagine your mobile phone coming to the rescue and it’s not only the expensive GPS enabled phone, but any phone that can send a simple text message. Well, this is exactly what you can do by using Onze Technologies’ LatLong service, which provides driving directions on SMS. “When we started, we saw that there was really no practical and simple option available for people to obtain reliable driving directions in the city,” says Sudarshan HS, CEO and Co-founder, Onze Technologies.

A LatLong user can locate any place in the city and get driving directions to it by simply sending an SMS with the name of the place to 90088 90088. The User will get back a response with easy to understand text based location information and driving directions on SMS. “Unlike many other premium SMS services, this service comes for free and the user only pays his standard SMS tariff,” says Sudarshan. So the next time you are wondering whether to take a right or a left, an SMS can give you the correct direction.

Recently, the company introduced a new feature in LatLong through which users can even get the auto fares from one place to another. The LatLong service is currently available in Bangalore and Chennai and the company plans to introduce it in other Indian metros shortly.

Onze Technologies was co-founded in September 2007 by Sudarshan, Pavaman Athani, Sairam Rajamani and Rahul RS, who were colleagues at IT major Infosys. The Angel funded company currently has a 17 member team, who work round the clock to collate different data required to run the service. The revenue model is primarily based on context advertisements and lead generation.

Apart from launching the service in other cities in the coming months, Onze also plans to add some new features to the service. “Through one of our new features, users will be able find businesses such as coffee shops, florist, ice cream parlors and others,” says Sudarshan. User reviews is another interesting feature that the company plans to introduce. “A person can send his review about a particular place that he has visited and this can give other users a better idea about that place,” says the Co-founder.