BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY MEDIA FOR AFRICA

Charting Africa’s digital course

Charting Africa’s digital course
By Sean Robson
06 Sept 2012

Leading digital map provider mapIT is fast becoming the one-stop shop for all things concerning location-based services (LBS) across South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

The Pretoria-based company has access to shareholder TomTom Africa’s complete catalogue of digital maps as well as a strong LBS distribution enabler in the form of the deCarta platform.

Speaking at the recent Mobile Entertainment Africa conference held in Cape Town mapIT’s managing director Etienne Louw expressed his belief in his company’s latest partnership.

“From our companies point of view we have access to fantastic visual mapping data and we needed something to offer our client or partner base, a platform to enable them to utilise this data. What we have done is to strike a deal with deCarta which is an LBS platform company. We are now the go-to-market partner for these two companies.”

The deal was struck in March of 2012 and Louw is confident that the addition of deCarta has a massive upside for his customers and partners. deCarta has been around for 15 years and has upwards of 250 million users which make it a well-established company with a strong reputation in the LBS space.

“deCarta was actually the platform that powered both Google and Yahoo maps for their first four or five years of existence. This platform is actually a hierarchy and we take the TomTom data into this, down through the drill down server and then through a whole range of web services,” explains Louw.

mapIT currently covers 104 countries and territories worldwide with 34.8 million kilometers of road covered globally with African roads making up 8 million kilometers. It is this extensive coverage together with the deCarta platform that leads Louw and his team to believe in their solution.

“Where do we position ourselves and what are our offerings? We are for companies who are there to build their brands and businesses using maps. So we give you a fantastic quality data set, a world class platform and it’s all about your brand. It’s a white label solution,” says Louw.

With LBS becoming more and more relevant as consumers look to get online or on their phones and find their nearest restaurants, petrol stations and much more so Louw believes that mapIT becomes the obvious choice of provider.

“We have a fantastic live traffic feed and in South Africa specifically it is one of the top four services in the world. Every two minutes we deliver live information into your application. Whether it is on mobile or whether it is on web we can help you expose ads on your application by actually taking into account what the situation is while someone is driving past this ad that you are trying to serve them,” says Louw.

This system takes multiple factors into account including road access, distance to the location as well as traffic patterns thereby making it a comprehensive platform.

Organisations fearful of giving away their data can be reassured that mapIT ensure that they retain their own data store unless agreed upon. “We have a very comprehensive platform that we provide to yellow page companies and others. In that the critical element is that you can have your own data store, it is private and you can dish it up without 35 million points of interest or you can do it on your own, mix and match but you never give your data to us unless we have an agreement of some kind but you are always in control.”

Location based services are ideal for business eager to expand and grow but they are equally important in terms of governance and civil society. In recent times it has become a sector that mapIT are beginning to see renewed interest from.

“We actually have a very bad history with governments and mapIT in the past. I have a bit more of a passion for making change happen and so we have actually sponsored a very big Geographic Information Systems (GIS) conference that in Johannesburg in October we expect something like 300 to 400 government delegates to attend.”

This move to get involved in governance has seen mapIT begun a dialogue with the South African national mapping component and Louw is positive that by working together a real difference can be made to the country and its infrastructure.

Whether in the context or governance or private enterprise its clear that consumers will continue to grow more sophisticated in terms of LBS and their ability to look for and locate just what they are after so companies and brands will have to look towards organisations like mapIT to retain and grow their markets. It’s an opportunity that they seem ready to grasp.

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