Welcome to the Location Data Blog!

In our sales pitch, we promise our partners, some of the biggest tech companies in the world, that we will supply them with accurate Point-of-Interest data “from downtown Singapore to the rainforests of Sumatra”. Building a Points-of-Interest database in a dense area like Singapore CBD is trivial, and many companies can do it; but how about rural Indonesia or small islands in the Philippines? This is a story of how we employed blockchain technology and fantasy storytelling to get accurate ground truth data in areas that couldn’t be realistically mapped before.

Geospatial data and technology offers great opportunities for the development of modern tourism applications and businesses. Accurate Point-of-Interest (POI) data is crucial for effective trip planning, online bookings, and location-based services such as digital maps and navigation systems. On the other hand, analysis of mobile location data can offer comprehensive insights into travellers' movement and behavior, allowing businesses to derive actionable business intelligence and improve their offerings.

For years, Quadrant has been offering high-quality, authentic, and reliable mobile location data. In our interactions with customers and prospects, we discovered that many of them seek Point-of-Interest (POI) data to go with their mobility analysis. Good quality POI data is critical for operational efficiency, especially in sectors like transportation, delivery of consumer services, supply chain logistics, freight, and many others.

However, existing off-the-shelf POI databases are plagued with issues. They are not updated frequently enough, and the way they are assembled -- most often through web scraping -- leads to inevitable inaccuracies.

Appen Limited (ASX: APX), the leading provider of high-quality training data for organizations that build effective AI systems at scale, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Quadrant, a global leader in mobile location data, Point-of-Interest data, and corresponding compliance services.

Geolancer, Quadrant’s proprietary platform for manually verifying Points-of-Interest (POIs) on the ground successfully concluded its second beta launch campaign. In five weeks, Geolancers collected over 130,000 POIs across Southeast Asia.

We’ve run the campaign for five weeks between July 7 and August 10 in seven countries and the city of Gurugram (Gurgaon) in India. Geolancers were tasked with mapping as many retail POIs as possible, including restaurants, convenience stores, shops, pharmacies, banks, telecom shops, and more. Because of the stringent Covid restrictions across most of the region, most of the POIs came from two countries, Indonesia and the Philippines. Covid hit these businesses hard, and many of them are closed, rendering existing POI databases outdated.