Keeping on track
- Across Southeast Asia, drivers for 500-backed superapp Grab often navigate winding, narrow alleyways and wrongly labelled addresses to ensure their delivery arrives on time.
- Searching for a location that’s not properly mapped can cause delays, anger customers, and result in cancellations.
- Drivers’ livelihoods depend greatly on the accuracy of the maps they use. Grab relied on 3rd party platforms such as Google Maps in the early days. However, as demand for their services ramped up, the team began getting more complaints from frustrated drivers who had trouble finding locations.
- Eventually, they decided to solve this major problem with GrabMaps, which is built with data from the 5 million drivers on their platform across 8 countries in Southeast Asia.
- Drivers earn extra income for mapping, and the resulting maps were more accurate. What’s more, they also capture colloquial place names and hyperlocal landmarks.
- Today, GrabMaps’ data includes over 65 million addresses and points of interest in more than 500 cities in the region, adding more than 800,000 kilometers of missing roads. According to the team, they have plotted about 80% of the points of interest they need.
- The data is refreshed every day, with real-time inputs on road closures, address changes, and other updates. The map’s accuracy even helps drivers reduce the duration of their trips by about 90 seconds, allowing them to complete more orders.
- Last year, Grab became the data provider for Bing and Amazon Location Service in Southeast Asia.
- Read the full story on Rest of World.
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