Having a digital mapping tool developed for Africa may have been unheard of in past years.
But with the continent taking rapidly to technology, big players such as Google Maps have started to notice the needs of this emerging market.
One company, though, that is making waves in the African digital mapping space is MapIT.
And Etienne Louw, the managing director of MapIT, has spoken to ITWeb Africa about the technology that is transforming how businesses and individuals are finding their way around on the continent.
VINCENT MATINDE: When did MapIT begin?
ETIENNE LOUW: 10 years ago
VINCENT MATINDE: Who founded the business?
ETIENNE LOUW: MapStudio has been mapping Africa for 56 years and 10 years back mapIT was created to take the MapStudio analogue maps digital.
VINCENT MATINDE: What exactly does MapIT provide for users?
ETIENNE LOUW: Originally we focused on the fleet and vehicle tracking market space, as there were no accurate digital maps available to support these businesses. All the big players like Mix Telematics, Tracker, Altech Netstar, Digicore, CarTrack and SmartSurv became early adopters of our maps and are still our clients today.
Then we realised that clients need more than just accurate digital maps and we transformed mapIT from a company ‘Taking You There’ to ‘Your Digital Mapping Partner’ by combining the TomTom maps with a very powerful Location based services (LBS) platform called deCarta.
In partnership with deCarta, mapIT brings to the market a LBS platform that is highly integratable and allows for development on - among others - J2ME, Android, iOS and Desktop/Mobile Javascript. Whether used for fleet management, vehicle tracking, inventory management, mobile workforce management, understanding your sales activities or customer interaction, social networking or entertainment, etc, etc, LBS can create a more dynamic user experience that adds value and convenience and changes the way people transact within a business as well as with a business and organise their activities and free time.
Clients no longer have to worry about developing LBS orientated solutions and then integrating the mapping functionality afterwards. This is offered in one integrated package - clients and system integration partners should worry about their business; mapIT will worry about everything around digital mapping data and platform to enable them to optimise their use of LBS.
The offering also allows for complete ownership of the application. Clients have total control over the branding on the maps allowing for full management of the relationships with their customers. They can also choose how the map is deployed, whether it is in mapIT’s cloud or in their own data centre. The leading edge geospatial functionality will differentiate applications in a crowded marketplace enabling clients to align their business model with customer expectations.
A wide range of industry segments are utilising our LBS as part of their ecosystem and value chain. These industry users include:
• Mobile Network Operators and Network Equipment Providers.
• Local Media companies and Advertising Networks including traditional internet yellow pages companies as well as new internet service companies providing local reviews, reservations, and shopping services.
• Application Developers and Content Publishers including developers of navigation applications, local services applications, and a variety of others applications, which may be monetised as paid apps, ad-sponsored, freemium, etc.
Access to the platform is particularly beneficial to local SMMEs which now have free access to the technology to develop their own, customised LBS without having to spend funds on a solution that won’t necessarily offer the functionality required. It is very important to support SMMEs which often have amazing, innovative ideas but not necessarily have access to the technology and resultant development platform to realise it.
The base of these applications relies heavily on accurate and up-to-date mapping data which is essential to all spheres of government, the private sector and these days, the general public. Research has shown that 15% of roads change every year. mapIT allows their map updating to be enhanced by the community itself. This is supplemented by probe data feeds from millions of devices moving over the globe 24x7 that helps verify the community inputs. Over 200 countries and territories, including 36.5 million kilometres of road and 35 million Points of Interest is covered globally and Africa coverage includes 58 countries with 10 million kilometres of road and over 940000 POIs.
With access to the historical traffic data used by TomTom IQ Routes (calculating your route based on actual speeds driven on roads compared to speed limits) together with TomTom Live HD Traffic updates the ability to re-route service vehicles, estimate time of deliveries and plan ahead of schedule becomes reality for all types of organisations. This information is provided by mapIT through web services at the best coverage – i.e. on all main, secondary and inner city roads which equates to 99.9% of all national roads.
As further part of the ‘value stack’ mapIT offers the South African market 7 day local weather forecasts which help with planning around road conditions.
VINCENT MATINDE: How is it different from services such as Google Maps?
ETIENNE LOUW: Various applications that make use of digital mapping need to be able to overlay additional custom data such as vehicle positions, own and competitor stores, sales territories, LSM data, census data, pipeline infrastructures etc. This is on top of the base data that we provide. Our base data includes all the layers you would expect in a high quality navigation ready database – roads, points of interest, land use and much more.
Furthermore, these apps often need to get access to the layer attributes that we carry, such as posted speed limits to enable fleet companies to generate route compliance reports for every truck they manage or insurance companies monitoring driving habits; on a driver behaviour incentive package. This is not available from Google. Also in Africa connectivity is not always good – so we offer a fully self-hosted solution including our data + software – I do not think Google offers that. Another differentiator is that for us it is all about the client’s brand and not ours – quite a bit different to the Google model.
VINCENT MATINDE: What has been the challenge to develop this product in Africa?
ETIENNE LOUW: One does not map Africa overnight. For 56 long years we have been travelling the continent and mapping it … Africa is not a place for sissies
VINCENT MATINDE: How has the reception been for the product? What are the numbers on users?
ETIENNE LOUW: The reception has been fantastic. We have more than 600 users from over 300 companies on our DevZone.
VINCENT MATINDE: How does the company make its money?
ETIENNE LOUW: We sell our mapping data to GIS clients etc who wants to use it inside their own software. Most of our sales these days are from offering our TomTom data/deCarta platform to users as SaaS + DaaS (software as a service + data as a service).
VINCENT MATINDE: What are the near future improvements and advancements for the platform?
ETIENNE LOUW: We are continuously extending the ‘value stack’ to our clients. We are busy incorporating indoor mapping (maps + navigation) into our platform – clients want to extend the excellent outdoor navigations etc experience to the indoors – here we have partnered with Micello and SenionLabs.
Furthermore we are working with some partners to embed our LBS offering within their platforms (this includes mobile workforce, mobile rapid application development frameworks, CRM integration, ERP integration etc etc). So very exciting times. More and more people are realizing the fact that basically no business transaction does not happen in space somewhere and LBS can add value to understand that transaction better and optimize it for the service provider as well as the client
VINCENT MATINDE: How many partners do you have and how do they add to the value of the platform?
ETIENNE LOUW: We have more than 30 partners and they add value by bringing domain experience, platforms etc to the party. mapIT is an enabler and we work with our partners to ensure we offer our clients a top solution every time. Extending enterprise solutions with LBS is the future and here our partners are playing a crucial role in extending their offerings with our LBS offerings.
VINCENT MATINDE: What are some of the achievements the company has made since inception?
ETIENNE LOUW: mapIT was profitable from year 1 and gained the attention of large international players in the industry. The quality of our maps lead to Tele Atlas, a Belgium company (second largest map producer in the world at the time), buying a 49% share in mapIT in 2008. They subsequently got bought by TomTom and in June 2013 TomTom Africa bought out the other 51% share in mapIT. This recognition of service excellence was a proud moment in mapIT’s history.
Furthermore we are proud to be the LBS suppliers to all the big fleet/vehicle tracking companies in South Africa and helping them expand their wings across the globe by offering them a one stop international LBS solution.
VINCENT MATINDE: What one great lesson have you learned about technology business in Africa?
ETIENNE LOUW: Africa is hungry for adopting good technology and it is a pleasure to work with young entrepreneurs who is not scared to try new things using technology – often when dealing with technology business outside of Africa I find less open mindedness (probably because they have more money to throw at resolving problems) and willingness to think out of the box in applying technology to resolve day to day problems – so if there is one lesson I have learnt is that an African will make technology work for him come hell or high water and this is very refreshing in this modern age of instant gratification where often developers want to be spoon fed and things must always work ‘now’.
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