Location location location: Positioning’s next act (Part 1)
Powering the world’s economy
Positioning has always been central to civilization. The earliest maps date back to prehistoric drawings of the night sky. Advances in cartography have always been closely linked to advances in society, related, as they were, to the opening up of new trade routes.
The biggest breakthrough in recent times has been the advent of the GPS. Billions of devices around the world run on GPS. Freight liners, airlines, ride sharing and advertising, the world’s economy runs on GPS.
Even more amazing is the fact that no commercial entity ever had to invest the capital to build out this asset. We have the world governments to thank for the development, launch and distribution of the global positioning systems we all take for granted today.
The rise of GPS
As GPS trickled down from military use to the civilian handheld device, several major shifts occurred. First, the user experience drastically changed. The fear of getting lost has all but disappeared. Instead of memorizing a route and carrying a map, all we need now is our handheld device. Friction is removed, the user experience improves, usage rates grow, giving rise to new use cases. These include the world of Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) for outdoor positioning (hiking and exercise), tourism, and in-vehicle navigation systems.
The second major shift began in 2007 with the arrival of smartphones. The combination of a GPS in your pocket paired with the power and UX of a smartphone increased the number of users, and gave rise to new business models. Ride sharing, location-based advertising, crowd sourced data and Geo-fenced content are just a few examples. These new use cases are bringing about a major change in our urban environments.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Mobile GPS has been good enough for these uses. However, too often, they still rely on us, the human using the service, to solve the first and last mile of our navigation. I’m sure you’ve been frustrated by at least one, if not all of these situations:
1. Navigating a tricky intersection while driving and being unsure what lane to be in
2. Coordinating pick-up with ride-sharing providers, despite dropping the location pin as exactly as possible
3. Tunnel navigation, when the phone’s GPS goes completely offline. In that case, may the force be with you
4. Stepping out of the metro station and A/B testing whether you’re heading in the right direction
5. Finding a place to park in a crowded parking lot
Despite this “last mile” friction, there has been no significant advancement in navigation UX in 10 years. It’s time for that to change. Consumer expectations constantly rise, and today those expectations are not only of getting to where we need to go, but a navigation that leaves no room for error and shows us the way: whether the right parking spot or a Bird scooter. And this precision is expected regardless of the environment: outdoor and indoor, in the center of town and in the countryside, in a box or with a fox.
Location location location!
Road usage and congestion have been up and to the right thanks to several mega trends: ride sharing, last mile delivery, and a demographic shift to cities. Due to the rise of new urban mobility services, there is a clear need to increase the utilization of current urban infrastructure. Doing this requires more precision from both positioning as well as mapping (What3words and Coord being excellent examples of new standards of precision for the latter). A new era of mobility requires new technologies.
The rise of micro mobility services gives us a helpful lens to understand the current limitations of GPS-based navigation and the need for new solutions. Tapping into more of these services’ potential relies on the advent of new positioning technologies. Companies in this sector are growing at incredibly fast rates. However, cities and regulators as well as the companies themselves are at a loss as to how to better police the usage of their products. To enforce proper parking, riding and storing of bikes and scooters in designated areas, GPS is not accurate enough; meter level accuracy is needed.
The future is full of use cases requiring precise positioning. To name a few:
- Autonomous vehicles
- Ride sharing
- Micro mobility
- AR based navigation
- Drones
- Robotic delivery
- Micro targeted ads
These trends and use cases will increase congestion on our streets, increasing the need for efficient use of our environment. This can only be achieved with precise mapping and accurate, ubiquitous positioning technology.
In part 2 I’ll explore the different technological approaches to this problem, and the key factors to a successful approach that will help navigate us from the winter of our discontent to our glorious summer.
Yehoshua is the Director of Business Development at Spatial Logic, an Israeli startup developing a Visual Positioning System for the mobility ecosystem. Before Spatial Logic, Yehoshua led Business Development at OurCrowd, a global venture capital firm, where he worked closely with Honda, Shell and Denso on the mobility sector.
