Location data is at the core of any service that any organisation provides anywhere in the world. For instance, for developing autonomous driving technology and connected cars, carmakers have to rely on location data and mapping platforms, and this data is equally important for fleet operators, food delivery apps and public transit users.
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas, HERE Technologies—recently ranked the world’s top location platform by Omdia—announced many steps in location technology that, it said, will make navigating the world easier.
These include UniMap, and a new service that predicts the availability of electric vehicle (EV) charge points globally.
Terming these steps revolutionary, Edzard Overbeek, CEO at HERE Technologies, told FE that with UniMap, the world is moving into a new era of mapmaking.
UniMap
Ever since HERE started out mapping California in the mid-1980s, it has been seeking to shrink the time it takes to detect a real-world change, reflect it in the map and get it into the hands of its customers. The turnaround time in the industry is typically measured in months. “With UniMap, we provide anytime access to a unified map that’s refreshed in hours, minutes or seconds,” Overbeek said. “This is a big leap forward for anyone building applications that use location data.”
In short, UniMap is a highly automated mapping technology that enables rapid creation of digital maps and location products. It is primed for a rollout to selected customers in 2023, ahead of coming fully online for all HERE customers by 2024.
Predicting a charging point
HERE announced a new service that predicts the likelihood of an EV public charge point being available in the future. “Rising EV sales may create near-term scarcity in charge point availability,” said Overbeek. “Our charge point prediction feature incorporates both EV infrastructure supply and real-world user demand, while factoring in variables such as weather, time and day. This supplements our existing HERE EV Charge Points offering that has been deployed globally with many automakers.”
Making driving safer
HERE launched HERE Road Alerts, a cloud-based service that fuses rich vehicle sensor data from millions of cars on the road with traffic incident data to provide real-time hazard warnings to drivers for optimal safety assistance.
“With HERE Road Alerts, drivers will have accurate and timely information about hazards on the road ahead to make better and safer driving decisions,” Overbeek said. “Enhancing the functionality of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) for greater safety, the service helps drivers build trust in the gradually increasing automation of driving.”
HERE also said it is giving leading companies better data privacy with on-premise location services. The HERE on-premise (on-prem) service allows customers and partners to install and run HERE Location Services software directly on their servers or cloud environment, creating another level of privacy and security to interact with sensitive end-user data.
HERE is also helping companies differentiate their location search using custom places data. During the CES, it announced a new platform capability available for global businesses to uniquely customise the search outcomes their users receive by using their own places of interest data. “As consumers demand more personalised experiences and B2C brands explore a broader range of value-add services, this new capability is a further step in enabling HERE customers and partners to deliver differentiated services,” Overbeek said.
3D models of cities
Two years ago, HERE announced it is developing high-fidelity, 3D models of 75 city centres around the world. Overbeek said that now it has been expanded to 87 cities. “The last two cities of Taipei and Taichung were added in Q4 2022,” he said. “In addition, we have plans to expand to more than 100 cities in the future. We’re proud that our HERE Premier 3D Cities coverage now spans about 2,000 square-km globally.”
Operations in India
In India, HERE Technologies has its largest production centre (in Mumbai) and employs over 4,000 professionals. “India is a very strategic market for us, not just for production of maps—we have a large presence in Mumbai with very capable people—but we also know that India is becoming a frontier of location-based services and we are thinking through what all we can do to start creating a digital representation of India. There are over 85,000 developers who are actively using our platform in India,” Overbeek said.
