The annual conference that brings together startups and consumers in Austin, Texas until the 19th of March has introduced us new businesses that could rocket to the moon soon. Among the stars of this edition of SXSW 2017, we could highlight Seek and Zippyspot.
Seek has a geolocation system combined with augmented reality, in a similar way to Pokemon Go, to approach the brands that want to interact with their users when they are in a certain location. This means that stores can place an icon or an animation on a determined street to provide interaction between brands and their users. On the other hand, Zippyspot, is a location app that connects restaurants, bars and stores with customers nearby to attract them with coupons and discounts. In other words smartphone replaces the PR person handing over the flyers.
More companies are using location services to offer added value to their customers, for instance Here is another startup spotted at SXSW 2017, that uses a bunch of traffic data to predict the best routes for transport companies, such as taxis, cars or trucks, or even to find probable parking spots free at certains times in various streets.
In Europe we can see a few successful startups that are nailing it right now: Witrac uses its technology to track specific vehicles in the Ford Almussafes car park. Finding an automobile in record time seems simple in a car park, but given that they have parked thousands of cars in the same area, it is very difficult to find an specific one. For instance, Fiat announced a few years ago that they use drones with camera to fly over the cars parked and search for specific ones in their fabric in Turin. However, Ford posed new problems as it is a closed space.
The Witrac founders Pons and Ferrer, devised a set of sensors and connected them to a mobile geolocation system. Without cables it is fast and effective. Their business is basically industrial connectivity that can be transferred to other fields in which they are working, such as, finding defibrillators in a hospital. Witrac has only 8 employees and are developing a real time system that is solving the problems of big players.
Where to place your new business or to buy a real state is another successful pattern we are seeing recently in startup fields like Measurence, a company that analyses data from different location systems to draw a landscape of movement in a city and know exactly how many people walk daily in an specific area. Their founders wanted to use technology to analyze urban traffic and sell the data to companies that are going to place a new sucursal or office in a new city. Specifically analytics in – store to track the behaviour of consumers is the business of the successful startup Proximus.
Location for people
We can disguise many different uses of location systems, whether they are business driven or connect directly with the consumer. We believe that nobody wants to be located at all times, or by everybody.
This is why we came up with Wave Application. Today, with 8 million downloads, it keeps on making it easy and fun to find your friends by sharing your live location on a map only with the people you choose. We have already facilitated 60 millions of meetings and there have been more than 260 millions of Wave sessions around the world. It’s 2017. If we are constantly moving, why should meeting up be so complicated?
Pablo Clemente Pérez 