What does Mapxus do?
Mapxus is a global indoor map platform. Our objective is to use AI and mobile technology to bring indoor map and positioning to everyone. Our main technology is to enable indoor maps affordably and quickly, and we offer it as a software service including indoor digital mapping, positioning and 360° panoramic view.
How did you/the founders come up with the idea?
In Hong Kong, there are tonnes of buildings where GPS does not work well, indoor environments are like a blackbox. In an emergency, there is a critical demand to have up-to-date indoor maps and real time indoor positioning to facilitate rescue activities. Since 2014, our founding team began research and aimed to develop a public and universal technology to solve this problem.
Could you tell us a bit about you and your team?
We were founded by a passionate team of professors, tech professionals and entrepreneurs. Our founders started indoor map and positioning research since 2014 and we have over 5 years of experience to implement our technology in smart city projects. We had a significant research breakthrough in 2017 and in order to focus on this breakthrough, we set up a spinoff company Maphive Technology Limited and branded our unique indoor solution as Mapxus.
Ocean is the co-founder and COO of Mapxus. He possesses 15 years of seasoned experience in state-of-the-art technologies such as IoT Solution, location-based tracking and Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID), etc. He is an experienced consultant which translates business needs into products/applications by integrating ranges of IoT technologies and applying it in different sectors. His role makes the bright ideas become workable and scalable.
Ivan, our project director, is responsible for articulating product vision, strategy, and roadmap for Mapxus. He also oversees end-to-end product design, development, and product delivery to ensure we are building the right product to exceed our customers’ needs. He is an expert in leading and coaching product teams to adopt user-centric design and agile development. He has over 12 years professional product development and project implementation experience gained from both startups and multinational enterprises.
Leslie is our head of business solutions and map production. He is responsible for designing business solutions and achieving customer success for Mapxus’ customers and partners. He also leads the continuous cities growth of map data, implements the best practices and makes the map production process scalable. He has over 13 years experience in solutions architecture and project implementation on a global scale.
What are the other alternatives to Mapxus?
Traditionally, indoor mapping and positioning may be implemented by professional surveyors, sophisticated equipment and require the installation of a lot of hardware like Bluetooth iBeacons.
Our outstanding advantages:
1) Cost: 10% cost of the traditional solutions (infrastructure free)
2) Function: one system including indoor digital map, indoor positioning, and indoor street view
3) UX: across iOS and Android
4) Integration: one system for all buildings and comprehensive SDK
5) Easy to maintain
6) Feasible and pay-as-you-go business model
Who is your target customer?
We have two main customer targets where our system helps them to enhance their applications to support indoor without difficulties.
1) Building Owners – it dramatically reduces the cost and time of implementation and maintenance. It makes indoor mapping solutions for multiple buildings in a city become possible.
2) Software Developer – it allows them completely ignore the development of indoor mapping and positioning technology, just subscribe to our SDK and integrate it like other general GIS systems.
How does your product make a difference to the industry?
Mapxus focuses on indoor mapping and data maintenance. We want to act as an indoor mapping platform and develop an ecosystem to provide our technology to different stakeholders. Different stakeholders can completely ignore the problem of indoor mapping, and just use Mapxus so that they can focus their resources to build different and wonderful applications.
What are the milestones for Mapxus?
Mapxus is very excited to participate in the Startupbootcamp Scale Osaka program. In this Demo Day, we have successfully implemented our technology in Hankyu and JR West’s buildings. We will not only demonstrate how easy our technology is to use, but also how to enable barrier-free navigation (even to disabled and vision-impaired persons). We will also show how to make a digital marketing application on top of Mapxus’ technology.
Why did you start targeting Japan?
All smart cities face the same problem, that GPS doesn’t work well inside many buildings. Currently, other outdoor mapping solutions are not sufficient enough, and indoor mapping technology is too expensive to use. Japan is a huge blue ocean market for indoor mapping and positioning, Mapxus wants to promote the new technology to smart cities within Japan.
