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There may have been a time when it was close enough to find its way. But today, we need to know exactly where we are, or where we need to be in relation to most other things. Customers and businesses need it.
This sense of urgency will only grow. A geographic approach that integrates accurate locations can help with everything from understanding local traffic conditions to understanding the next global crisis is brewing. Here, we examine five innovative ways organizations can add maps to their applications.
Related: 4 Ways Smart Maps Can Help Your Business Deliver on Its Social Promise
1. Understand where risk is growing
If you’ve been watching 6.8 million unique location-based sources of information about world events, you’ve probably seen a pandemic approaching, too. Keeping a close eye on external events, especially global disease outbreaks, may provide enough time to sustain the business.
a company’s Intelligent Drive Technology PlatformFor example, it provides assessments for businesses and organizations, showing risk on a map and showing data on trending issues by region — including disease outbreaks, terrorist activity, and logistical impasses. Leaders use this geographic insight to better prepare staffing levels and evacuation plans based on where risks lie, or to reroute goods and services to safer paths.
2. Building an aerial highway for drones
One day, rearranging shipments could mean airlifting them with unmanned drones. While we may not yet have driverless air taxis, visionary entrepreneurs are already preparing for more automated airspace activities and helping to regulate our current world of unmanned drones.By referencing detailed municipal maps from a geographic information system (GIS), a company even Help guide low-flying vehicles That way they protect each other and don’t pose a risk to the city below, much like how traditional air traffic controllers maintain airspace for commercial aircraft.
One Map-Based Air Management System Also testing in car-heavy Detroit. For drones to gain trust at scale, operators need to know exactly where the drone is in relation to the world around it. The public needs to be confident that drones are getting the best possible information. This is no different than drivers on the ground navigating routes and roads to get where they need to go and react to hazards along the way.
Related: The Geolocation Revolution
3. Keep your head above the water
The threat of climate change is motivating more companies to develop solutions. For residents of coastal cities, dangers include high tides that often flood roads. Elected leaders and entrepreneurs are taking a proactive approach to making coastlines more resilient to rising sea levels by using sensors to monitor water levels in real time. Sensor data and satellite imagery are brought together on a map, and machine-learning models are trained to study the behavior of rising water levels.technology Can be packaged into an application Notify residents of flooded streets so they can avoid, fortify their homes or seek higher ground.
In the past, predicting where flooding might occur has often relied on physics-based simulations of the gravity-pulled path of water—but rising water levels still caught people off guard and ill-prepared. This latest app-based approach aims to warn people about rising water levels. Precise “location” is critical for such services.
4. Know where the power goes out
In most cases, prompt customer service goes a long way toward maintaining loyalty, and in the case of a massive outage, it involves giving customers a real-time picture of the extent of the outage. This includes narrowing down to the community level and identifying what may be contributing to the disruption. For example, a company, Monitoring the last mile of the U.S. gridusing hundreds of thousands of sensors to evaluate every five minutes for real-time situational awareness.
Knowing exactly where electricity is available and unavailable, especially in disaster response situations, can be key to maintaining vulnerable populations and facilities, including hospitals and nursing homes. Viewing information on the map can help prioritize actions and inform high-risk decisions.
Related: 3 Ways to Use Geolocation to Increase Your Revenue
5. Navigate while tracking everyone’s location
Not all situations have the highest risk, but that doesn’t reduce the need for location accuracy for applications. People only need to be separated from friends in crowded or remote areas to realize the relief that location-aware applications can bring. Over the past season, travelers at nearly 20 ski resorts in the U.S. and Canada were able to track their skiers and snowboarders with detailed 2D and 3D slope views and icons that showed where group members were in real time. No exchanging frantic “Where are you?” texting, not coordinating meeting locations, not knowing where everyone is, and not worrying that they’ve inadvertently landed on a black diamond mountain as a beginner. It says there, on the map.
Customers have come to expect real-time location information, and they want to know they can trust it to be reliable and accurate. Accurate mapping technology working behind the scenes in an app can mean many things: escaping floodwaters and being unaware; knowing the cause and location of a power outage, rather than simply waiting for the lights to come back on; tracking family or friends; Be prepared to see risk. Maps can make the difference between app users getting lost (losing time, money, or the whereabouts of friends and family) and getting what they need.
