Enhancing Application Access in Intricate Environments – Morten Brøgger, MapsPeople

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Morton Roeger, who is c e o for maps people, and we're talking about how three D mapping will actually result in a better application experience for folks.

Morton, welcome the show. Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here.

When it comes to indoor mapping, especially, I don't think a lot of developers give this much thought. I mean, no one seems to really have a keen understanding of the simple fact that people are walking around an office or a mall or wherever they happen to be using applications, then it has an impact on their experience. Walk us through what it is we should be thinking about here.

Yeah, I can, I can absolutely do that. And it's like, uh, you're absolutely right. Like we all, we all know how to use maps on our mobile devices when we are outside, uh, which like the Googles and the Apples of the world has basically drawn based of driving cars, the streets and satellite photos.

But none of that actually works when you are inside a building. And that's actually what we do. We help map the build world.

Uh, is, is, is what I would say. Uh, so we normally take like ca cap drawings of a building and we con confirm, uh, convert it into a map, uh, just like you know it, and then we geo-reference it. So it, it's actually works on a map.

And then you can actually have a seamless navigation from outside, inside, and inside and out. Uh, and that gives a lot of different use cases. And what we do here is fundamentally like a platform as a service, uh, because clearly people needs to have an app, uh, for doing that.

That could be the app for mall or for hospital or for a stadium. And that's where you need that map. That's where you need to give that customer employee experience.

That that is easier if you can actually use a map and you can do some way finding and you can find other things and you can see status, uh, on other things. And there's a, there's a bunch of use cases and we do that and, and, and that's where our technology stack, uh, allows those applications, uh, to have a content management system and have the APIs, uh, to basically show real-time status on a map. Like, is this table booked?

Yes or no? Where is the x-ray machine at the hospital that is currently available? Uh, like asset tracking, stuff like that.

So, so this is a little bit what we do. Does that make sense to you, Mike? Yeah, it does.

In fact, in life today, you'll see users kinda roaming around places 'cause they get to know a place and they get to know where the application experience is a little bit better than other places, especially airports. And it kind of creates an inconvenience. But it seems like people are, uh, adjusting in ways that perhaps we don't need them to have to go to the trouble to figure out if we could actually do the mapping correctly.

So who has this conversation? Is it the developer, the wifi people? Where does this conversation occur and need to be fixed?

Yeah, it comes from so many places, uh, right now, Mike, to be honest, right? But, but, but in the end it's the people that, you know, we have an application that makes sense and we can see that the use case of that application is better if the end user have a map. And these end users can be consumers, it can be employees, uh, it can be it, it can be workers, right?

But if we take one step back on this one, if I may, just for a second, right? Because like digitizing the buildings that we use, uh, for work or for, uh, for, for, for leisure, I would say the investment and technology into these buildings compared to other, uh, investments where you have digitized the processes and the systems and all that stuff for a long time for buildings, it's actually, in my opinion, been underinvested for a long time. And that is currently changing dramatically.

That is being invested a ton of money in making buildings smart so that we can optimize the usage of them, right? 'cause there's so much optimization to be done in the buildings. How can we run them, uh, efficiently?

How can we utilize them, uh, to a much higher degree? How do we make sure we get the most revenue out of the square footage we have if you're on the retail and, and, and the consumer side. So there's a lot of digitization that goes into this one.

And, and, and I, that's the concept of smart buildings, making the buildings, uh, smart right now. And that's what we are helping with. We talk a lot about digital transformation out there, but is this a space that's been overlooked?

'cause a lot of that focus seems to be, well, either it's on an external user at home or it's somebody walking around. But perhaps we don't think too much about the fact that somebody's gonna be in a building somewhere, whether it's a coliseum or a mall or whatever it might be. But turns out we all spend a lot of time in these places.

We all spend a lot of time in these places. And there's a, there's a ton of use cases. May may maybe, if I should give a couple of examples of the, of the types of use cases we see.

'cause then you'll also understand what are the applications that is out there and, and, and what is, what is these developers and software engineers, what is it that they, they that that they're looking for? And how do you embed that into the application to give a better experience, right? But like take something like super symbol traditional like uh, sport venues, big stadium, uh, and other things.

How do I find my seat? Uh, uh, how do I navigate out? How do I find my friend and stuff in like that that's been, that's been going on for a while.

These state and sport venues are now putting what we call occupancy sensors in. So you can actually see ways, uh, the foot traffic of people, even to the extent if you are searching, I would like to have a beer at the stadium. It will show you where the shortest line is because we can see, uh, that there's a lot of people in line here.

Go to the other one. It's actually shorter. You have a good experience and they probably sell more beer, if you know what I mean.

'cause you don't have to wait in line. No one wants to pay an expensive tickets and then wait in line. It actually also goes into, um, uh, the whole security management, uh, of people, of places where there's a lot of people gathered at the same, at the same time.

You know, from, from, from, uh, where are people, uh, if there's an incident in something like that, how do you basically track everyone? How, how, how do you do this? Even providing first responders and indoor map, which they probably don't have today.

'cause their map stops at the building, uh, just like Google Maps and the other one stops at the building. So these are some of the things offices is getting like smart offices is getting, uh, a lot of traction, uh, here post covid, right? Uh, uh, and this is really about employee engagement.

How do we engage our employees to at least come to the office, uh, once in a while? Uh, because we know like routine work at home is like as efficient as in the office for most people at least. But when it comes to creativity and working with other people, we all have a lot of zoom and it's actually good to be together 'cause we are more creative when we are physically together.

Uh, so you see applications quickly, oh, I'm gonna go to the office on Wednesday and Friday. I'm gonna work with Mike. Where is he sitting?

He's in that building. He's on that floor. He has this desk.

And then I find a desk close to you 'cause I'm working with you and I can see which ones are available because they're green, real-time data on the map. And the ones that are occupied are red. And I pick, uh, one next to you and I can even see the type of a desk.

Is it like someone that can go up and down or is it close to a window? So you can kind of pick this, uh, you can book a meeting room. And again, in meeting rooms, we start putting these occupancy sensors in.

So even if you book the meeting room, but you never show up for the meeting, uh, then after 10 minutes the sensor says, there's no one in here. It's not really booked. I release it so someone else can use it.

Then the office managers can start figuring out what kind of office space do I actually need? How many desks and chairs do I need? How many meetings room do I need in order to optimize this?

And then you can optimize your office real estate footprint and based on these data, while giving a much better employee, um, uh, engagement experience, if I may say. So this is, uh, even coming into parking. We have partners who makes application and for parking, like a big campuses, right?

You know how much tile I'm in this building, then I need to go here, uh, then I need to find the parking spot. And we always think we're gonna get the one right next to the entrance. So we go there and then we start circling out and then, oh, now too far an hour.

And circling in the employee engagement or guest experience, you just book a book a parking spot, and you just navigated right to your parking spot and then you know where it is. And if it's with an EV charger, it can even send, now your car has been charged, please move it to somewhere else so someone can use the EV charger to optimize the utilization of that infrastructure. So this is the whole smart building.

Healthcare is massive right now. Uh, it is really about like, uh, optimizing it Like many places, we don't have enough nurses or doctors and like helping you find where you need to go to get a blood test or an x-ray or something like that is literally a waste of time of them taking your hand and walking you there. If the application could just show you where to be and uh, when to be there, uh, that would be a, a whole different experience.

And as I said, uh, even during covid, we have partners who had like UV robots driving around, uh, illuminating the rooms with ui x-rays to basically kill, uh, bacteria or whatever it is. They do viruses and you need to have a map so they can basically navigate and you can see, have they been there or not? You can have a map for like cleaning which rooms or toilets has been used.

So we need to clean them. You know, in general, toilets doesn't get dirty over time. It's really how much are they used?

Uh, so, so again, this one has not been used today. Let's not clean that today. This, this one has been used.

So you can start guiding that. And then asset tracking, where is the closest x-ray machine that is currently available? So we start being more efficient in, in, in, in utilizing this, um, public safety, um, schools, uh, public building, uh, emergency response, uh, keeping track if there's an incident, incident.

Where are everyone? Uh, are they where they're supposed to be? Uh, we even have, uh, partners, uh, who have solutions that you can like, use on these sensors to detect if someone is armed.

But there is an an incident as well. This is, this is going to be big. And, and again, imagine fire departments.

If there's a fire in a building, uh, I heard somewhere that the fire department in New York is driving around with binders with old cat drawings of the building. And then you have to like, like imagine that you can give the outdoor mapping experience on the indoor and an application, send people to the right places and see where to go. It just drives so much efficiency in this case.

It saves lives, right? And the last thing that we, that we started looking into, uh, or that there's actually a lot more, but construction, like it's all about carbon emission. And I'm, I'm learning new stuff about smart buildings every day.

It's so amazing, right? But one of the most expensive things when constructing a new building is the concrete. And it's actually also the heaviest carbon footprint.

'cause it takes a lot of carbon, uh, to make the concrete. Now concrete has to harden and it's not harden enough. Uh, then you risk, uh, ruining it and you have to start over.

It's expensive and have the biggest carbon footprint. So they start putting sensors in the room because hardening, uh, is not like a site. It takes 29 days and 31 minutes.

It depends on the, uh, air humidity, the temperature and, and other things. So you start having sensors say, okay, now this room is ready for the next, uh, set of workers and constructors to go in and finish the inside of the room. They don't start too early 'cause then they risk breaking it and they have to start all over, right?

So it's just like, how do you do this smart? And then of course we have the whole retail sector, as you said, with shopping malls. There's a lot of use cases in that, just being more efficient.

So this is a couple of examples that I hope helped a little bit to understand this. Mike, How do I inject this into the application development process? Because the developers are building the applications.

There's a DevOps team that's trying to deploy it and optimize it. Do they get involved in the front end of this or do I deploy the application and try to tune in later or a little bit of both? How does that kind of manifest?

Yeah, so again, we have all the, we have like the APIs for a lot of hardware sensors and software applications, but normally the developers will take our SDKs and basically use the S D k, uh, to embed our indoor mapping capability into the application. Uh, so it's taking those, uh, and, and, and, and clearly we're making them more, uh, more smart, more easy to use. We even make templates that work for, like, if you are in retail, then use this template of a map.

So it's uh, it's easy to basically, uh, build the visual expression in this. And if you have certain like colors and stuff like that, that you want your desks or your rooms and everything else to be, and then you can basically choose this. So making it very easy to use the application.

Um, so, so we have all that ready. Then we have, uh, something like I think is super cool where we use some machine learning AI capabilities. And that is when you have to make the first maps, uh, you know, normally you get the cat drawings of a building and then you convert them into a map and they always come from like in large, uh, uh, buildings or corporation.

They come from like a facility management system. And we can actually integrate into these. And then we get the, the, the, the, the drawings.

Then we make, uh, the building, we do reference it so it's put in the right place, uh, and then we give it back. That sounds simple to most people to understand, but maintaining the map, which is part of our services for these application is a massive task. Like, because there's always a lot of updates.

And then we think, ah, how often do we build a new wall, a tear down a wall? No, but it's actually also all the logic changes like in the meeting room, like the management understand where, what kind of desk is in there, is a TV screen, is there like a conferencing system and stuff like that. All these logic changes are dramatically, let, let me give you an example.

For one of our largest customer, which is in the financial sector, uh, for the last four months, we have made 5,122 floor updates, which means that we have updated more than 180 million square feet because of all these little changes, physical or logical. And it's all automatic. No one has to touch it.

There's always updated and in real time. And that's a massive burden that you take away from the people that needs to use the application. That has the lag of that has probably also like held back, uh, the, the, the usage of indoor maps, uh, in, in these kind of applications.

So these are some of the things you get right? You get the creation of the map, you get um, uh, you get the maintenance of the map. You have a content management system, so you can drop things in, uh, uh, on, on the app.

You don't have to develop that. Uh, and then you have all these APIs. So you can add, uh, the SDKs for software applications and the APIs for like hardware sensors that you can basically add to your solution that comes as a platform, as a service that fits right into your app.

I hope that answered your question, Mike. Sure it does. Hey folks, as always, application development has a lot more nuances than you think and location matters.

Hey Morton, thanks for being on the show. You're welcome. Thank you so much, Mike.

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