Have you watched the James Bond film Casino Royale? About half an hour into the movie, there's a scene where Bond is driving a car in the Bahamas when he picks up his phone and looks into it. There's a navigation screen on which we’re shown a graphical icon of his car on a map, moving towards his destination.
Nothing special, right? We all do it on our phones today. Well, here's the thing: Casino Royale was released in 2006. There were no smartphones back then, let alone mapping services like Google Maps. Daniel Craig's Bond had a mapping service on a Sony Ericsson feature phone.
Fifteen years on, mapping services are no longer restricted to British secret agents with a licence to kill. And one of the major reasons for this, apart from the advent of smartphones, was Uber. The American ride-hailing pioneer made maps mainstream, especially in the business-to-consumer context.
Today, apart from navigating yourself while driving a car or riding a bike - you use maps to track your taxi or where your delivery order has reached. Almost every company in the e-commerce, food delivery, ride-hailing, and logistics/mobility sectors—all of which received a boost during the pandemic—uses a map.
This is where Next Billion.ai comes in. Founded in February 2020 in Singapore, the company builds the spatial infrastructure needed to enable location-based experiences. It basically helps companies build and manage their own mapping service. And these aren't ordinary maps. A food-delivery company can, for instance, get map data that takes into account accurate restaurant locations, entry/exit gates, detailed apartment maps, and parking spots so that it can reduce delivery times.
In the latest edition with the co-founder of Next Billion.ai, Ajay Bulusu, concern about geospatial technology, competing with the likes of Google and Grab, and the future of maps. Oh, and by the way, did you know that Uber co-founder Garrett Camp got the inspiration for the company after watching that very scene in Casino Royale? A True story once again for our audience of www.multimediastudio.net