How neighborhood-level data is empowering users to get out and explore their world
By: Brynne Henn
GeoSure, a safety assessment app and platform, uses real-time, hyper-local data to provide travelers with neighborhood safety information along multiple dimensions of identity and well-being.
The app initially launched in 2014, with a focus on women’s safety and in September they were the first to offer hyper-local LGBTQ safety scores, scaled worldwide. Today they provide information on 35,000 neighborhoods encompassing seven safety categories: women’s safety, health and medical, physical harm, LGBTQ safety, theft, and political freedoms.
GeoSure offers free consumer-facing mobile apps, premium mobile apps for organizations, and sells location safety score data via API to platforms and travel actors such as SAP Concur. In their mobile apps, GeoSure selected Mapbox as their mapping platform from day one. We spoke to Michael Becker, CEO of GeoSure, to learn more about their product and how they’re building with Mapbox.
First off, why did you decide to build a safety assessment score?
We developed GeoSure because the notion of travel safety and duty of care is rapidly evolving. While boots on the ground and narrative form country level security solutions existed, there were no safety scoring or quantification platforms available. We also saw that a gap in the market existed for city and neighborhood granularity and few solutions focused on the end user experience. Commercial travel security providers communicate risk through a prism of anxiety, but we wanted to flip that around and instead empower people to travel by providing an understanding of safety based on a quantitative system.
How do you assign a score to an area and how often is it updated?
Our safety scores are color-coded, on a scale from 1 (safest) to 100 (least safe), to make it simple and intuitive for anyone to understand. We create these by combining country, city, and neighborhood statistics; health, macroeconomic, crime, and political data feeds; real-time reports and much more. Then we model data to produce GeoSafeScores™. The ratings cover seven relevant safety categories: women’s safety, health and medical, physical harm, LGBTQ safety, theft, and political freedoms. Scores reflect localized safety environments and are dynamic, in near real time.
How do users interact with the map in GeoSure?
On our mobile apps, users can search either their immediate location or anywhere they’re thinking of traveling. They can first see the score on a city level, then drill down into neighborhoods and streets to make informed decisions as they’re choosing hotels, meeting locations, restaurants, hospitals and more. Users also have the option to contribute to location safety by reporting their experiences, either good or not good, based on an address on their current location — which add street-level perspective to scoring algorithms.
Which Mapbox tools are you using to build Geosure? What features of our tools did you find most useful?
The GeoSure mobile application uses Mapbox’s Map SDK for React Native. Map styling is intuitive and allows for hosted, centralized styles to share across applications so you can easily apply matching branding and design. We also like how the MapView includes a built-in animated beacon for displaying a user’s current location. Most of all, Mapbox’s Offline Manager makes it really easy to store and update “mapPacks” for cached offline use. Mapbox also helped us save development time and greatly enhanced the overall mapping visual for platforms and end users.
Why did you choose Mapbox? Did you explore other providers? What were your most significant needs?
We’re aware of several mapping technologies but we’ve always loved Mapbox products for their functionality, quality, and creativity. We wanted the best displays and easiest integration lifts. Mapbox has provided both along with an absolutely fantastic team.
What’s next on your roadmap?
Next phases are under wraps, but we’re solving some of the most pressing problems facing the ecosystem, as well as end-user problems, such as providing immediate solutions to users who find themselves in uncomfortable situations. Our core vision has always been to enrich the travel experience and improve safety understanding, and we’ve been amazed to see the use cases and applications expanding so rapidly. Purpose and impact are central to our mission, supporting tourism economies, elevating community safety and measuring progress in a positive feedback loop effect. To help make the world a safer place for everyone.
To start traveling with GeoSure, download their app on either Android and iOS. If you’re a business, reach out to their team to learn how you can build with their scores.
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Travel safe with GeoSure + Mapbox was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.