With a competition like Google, Garmin and Apple, and their resources, do you think there is enough "unmapped" to keep this project alive?
Slack channels are widely corrupted.
You have strong competition in Google, Garmin, TomTom... They all offer their product almost for free. Why do you think your product will survive such battle with the giants?
Thanks for the question! I want to add a few things to what my teammate has pointed out.
1. There are still a lot of places unmapped, especially in third world countries. The good map coverage in the United States oftentimes blinds us from this fact that things could be very very different elsewhere.
This statistic may be a bit outdated but in 2011, Google estimated that
only 30% of the world is well mapped.Here are a few concrete and more recent examples about missing maps in places around the world (note that some countries cited below are not even third world countries but quite developed ones):
- In Nepal: http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2016/10/questionable-accuracy.html#.WgK1QLCnF8d
- In Africa: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/02/google-maps-gets-africa-wrong
- In Lebanon (posted on January 2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui6RSejqX3Q
Reading into the comments of this video also reveals many interesting problems of Google Maps that we believe GeoPin can solve with our crowdsourcing approach that relies on local contributors:
I live in Sweden (which is not a third world country), but when you get outside the cities and big highways Google Maps have loads of interesting issues. Such as:
* Roads that are misplaced by a few hundred meters, causing "return to road" navigation all the time
* Sometimes missing small roads completely.
* And for me the most important issue: the inability to start navigation when there is no internet connection (happens to me, I like hiking, and sometimes even the parking spaces at national parks completely lacks mobile coverage)
2. We are not worry of running out of places to map since a digital map is a living, breathing project. A good map needs continuous updates to account for landscape changes because of of urban development, natural disasters, or even regular road block / maintenance by local authorities.
As an example, this article, dated 2 months ago, shows the problem of Google Maps not updating road information in a timely manner to account for road projects in Ireland. (
http://www.highlandradio.com/2017/09/11/council-should-inform-google-maps-when-major-road-projects-are-complete-mc-bride/)
Also, besides outdoor mapping,
indoor mapping is also an emerging greenfield that no corporation has gotten a decent solution. This is also where we see a lot of opportunity for GeoPin, with the help of local contributors, to outperform the giants since indoor knowledge is inherently very local. See below an example of Google Maps’ indoor mapping issue.
- “...in Austria, which is a FIRST world country. And my home addresse is not available because Google Maps doesn't know there are also larger buildings that can hold one house number but be separated in "stairs" or "entrances" which are numbered individually. But Maps doesn't know this at all. Since there is a house opposite my building, I use that house number to navigate home. Which is weird.” (In the comment section of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui6RSejqX3Q)
3. In my opinion, there’s actually not enough competition in this space. Most mobile applications currently are using either
one of these two map services: Google Maps or OpenStreetMap.Google Maps is actually charging enterprises very expensively; that’s why companies started to switch from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap in 2012.
Apple is actually using OpenStreetMap and TomTom for their map, which means they don’t really involve in the data collection activity for mapping.
For Garmin, we don’t consider them as our competitor since their business centers around GPS technology and hardware. They do offer maps as a fully packaged solution instead of allowing integration to enable other applications; and as my teammate pointed out, their maps are expensive for the modern world.
Tom Tom is actually a premium service that charges fee to the end-users because unlike Google, they don’t have the luxury of using advertising revenue to subsidize for the map service like Google. Though they have the same problem as Google Maps by being a single corporation trying to map the whole world. At GeoPin, we believe that open collaboration around the world is the future of maps.
Regarding OpenStreetMap, it’s a wonderful open source project. We are not a competitor but rather a supporter of it. In fact,
our baseline map data is built on top of OpenStreetMap data; we don’t want to reinvent the wheel here and want to stand on the shoulders of giants like OpenStreetMap.
4. As mentioned above, we believe that crowdsourcing is the most efficient and cost-effective way for a large scale and continuous geographical project like this. Even Google has admitted this by asking its users to fill in the local details to create a map that's almost as accurate as the territory it represents. But Google doesn’t compensate its users anything and Google does not respond fast enough to its user feedback. See a testimonial about that here: “When I reported an issue on google maps, they just got back to me about half a year later saying they couldn't verify what I reported...” (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui6RSejqX3Q)
With a reward system that fuels the contribution and participation of the crowd, GeoPin has a fair chance to surpass the giants such as Google
(no matter how much money they have) just like how Wikipedia usurped Encyclopedia.
5. Lack of diverse real-time and local informationTake a look at a few complaints below to see how our digital map lacks real-time and local information.
- “I used it once to get to Reliance Fresh (a supermarket) in India, and I was standing in front of someone's house and it said destination arrived. 😐”
- “yes always difficult to trace exact location and any atm , local shop in India”
- “it always tries to guide me the shortest route without any concern for the width of the street. here that can be a serious issue since some streets are only wide enough for one car and sometimes not even that.”
GeoPin plans to solve this by letting users create real time information of any type to be pinned on the map into different Pin Channels. For example, you can pin relative street widths of local streets; you can pin local shops or ATM locations into appropriate Pin Channels. All Pin Channels are user-generated and you can pin pretty much anything just like how anyone can create a subreddit of choice and start sharing information about the topic there.
Thanks for reading through this. I’d love to discuss more about any aspect of the project. Please keep more comments and feedback coming.
