Frost & Sullivan recognizes the Mapbox live-location platform
By: Marc Prioleau
Every year, Frost & Sullivan recognizes a company for having “demonstrated an ability to scout and detect unmet needs, and proactively address them with a platform that caters to evolving customer demands, products, lifestyles, and technologies.” Frost & Sullivan is acclaimed for their insight and understanding of the technology space, so Mapbox is honored to have been chosen as 2019 Platform of the Year on the basis of our mapping and live location platform. That’s great for us but also significant recognition of the growing importance of live location and maps for many enterprises in many markets.
“Mapbox has embraced a forward-thinking, developer-focused platform-approach that leverages live location, whereas much of the competition is merely providing customers with static maps. Moreover, Mapbox provides the developers with the flexibility to work within the confines of their desired business models, in contrast to competitors that obligate customers to conform to models of self-interest.” -Brent Iadarola, Vice President of the Mobile and Wireless Team at Frost & Sullivan.
I love that Frost & Sullivan recognizes what I see every day at Mapbox: Engineers working with customer-facing teams to first understand how location data is transforming the landscape, and then building tools that let developers build amazing maps that turn that data into truly differentiated products. We have the privilege of working with some of the best companies in the world. They push us to think more broadly about how maps can drive competitive advantage.
Frost & Sullivan’s analysis highlights that location (and by extension, maps) has moved from a nice option to an essential part of the user experience. We see this in the growth of “Map First” applications, applications where the map is not an after-thought but is actually the organizing principle of the application:
“Geolocation has become an essential utility, not only in consumer environments but across a range of industry verticals and business uses cases. As geolocation and mapping now sit at the confluence of many technological advances, application developers are increasingly in search of innovative platforms to enhance their service offerings with location to personalize and contextualize end-user experiences further.”
Beyond that, this recognition points to the most compelling trend that we see in mapping: the use of live data from millions of sensors to build a map of what the world looks like now, not what it looked like a year ago. Frost & Sullivan noted how building with live location offers massive competitive advantage to businesses and increased value to their end users:
“Mapbox’s live location platform collects approximately 250 million miles of anonymized road data daily, creating highly precise and dynamic geospatial maps. Live location also structures maps with time functions; i.e., when and where an object was located opens up vast possibilities for asset tracking, delivery, and shared-mobility use cases.”
This will only accelerate. Our customers are asking for more, richer real-time data. Frost & Sullivan showcased the Vision SDK as a demonstration of our commitment to continuous innovation, with the combination of phone vision sensors, and neural networks working at the edge to optimize data bandwidth constraints to collect rich roadside data across a worldwide network.
In the end, we are only as good as what our customers build with our tools. 2018 was an amazing year for that… maybe the fastest evolution of new and innovative maps that I have seen. Our goal is to continue to provide the tools to unleash our customers’ creativity and ability to build with location in the ways that work best for them:
“In contrast to certain competitors, partnering with Mapbox allows developers to support their own predefined business models, without adhering to stack structures. Top competitors, for example, have locked developers into an ad-driven business model, which is not always conducive to the goals of customers. Thus, the Mapbox model provides the flexibility for developers to work within the confines of their desired business models and provides the flexibility to experiment creatively with new use cases.”
We are honored by this recognition but know there is much more ahead. We start 2019 with an amazing list of new projects and initiatives. We’d love to dig in with you on your application. Read the Frost & Sullivan report and get in touch to start building with live location.
2019 Platform of the Year was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.