Five years ago, the only large market for indoor mapping and wayfinding products was shopping malls, said MappedIn CEO Hongwei Liu. “They knew they had to create a ‘Google Maps’ experience for their centers in a much more dynamic environment—Santa Claus tends to move around. MappedIn won that market, with over a third of enclosed shopping malls in the world as our customers today,” he said. “Now, the market has exploded to everything else. This includes offices, airports, hospitals, hotels, museums, schools and community centers. The more digital indoor maps are available, the more they are expected to just be there.”
MappedIn’s roots in homeland security markets helped the company develop the new solution, Liu said. “[We were] proud to have worked with the [U.S.] Department of Homeland Security’s S&T group to build automation and computer vision capabilities into our products. The funding and, even more importantly, the credibility provided by DHS helped catapult our company in a whole new direction,” he said. “And as it turns out, a tool that firefighters can use to make indoor preplans can also be used by everyone else to make useful maps.”
Prior to Mappedin Maker, the company’s indoor mapping platform was accessible only to enterprise companies with professional expertise. The product now allows a user to create a georeferenced vector map of a building in a matter of minutes by taking a photo of an indoor space and then use the software’s tools, the company said.
Contact: Chandra Lynn, for MappedIn, (650) 464-5708, press@mappedin.com, www.mappedin.com.
