Welcome to the Location Data Blog!

This week, we are celebrating collecting a quarter million Points-of-Interest with Geolancer. We have reached the 250,000 POI milestone in just 12 months, starting in two countries in Southeast Asia, and gradually expanding to five. Scaling a new product from zero is something we are proud of; however, our platform’s real strength lies in its quality. There is not a single dataset in the industry that even comes close to Geolancer’s accurate, complete, and rich metadata.

Businesses in need of accurate or customized Point-of-Interest (POI) data don't have good choices: crowdsourced or web-scraped POIs are often questionable in quality, and managed services are impossible to scale at a reasonable cost. Our proprietary POI Data-as-a-Service platform, Geolancer, is unique because it delivers the quality of managed services, the coverage of crowdsourcing, and the scalability of web scraping.

In this article, we highlight how we scaled Geolancer from zero to thousands of POIs in just a matter of weeks on markets as different as The Netherlands and Indonesia.

Countless platforms are powered by Point-of-Interest (POI) datasets that are outdated. More importantly, these datasets are not even tailored to the unique requirements of different businesses. For instance, even though a restaurant represents one POI, a specialised search engine will need information on the dietary restrictions that are catered to by the establishment while a food delivery platform needs to know if it has a drive through – data that represents distinct, custom attributes.  

POI data acts as the fundamental building block for digital mapping and navigation platforms. One of our clients – a prominent European mapping and navigation company – wanted to enrich their platforms by procuring a high-quality POI dataset covering several regions in Brunei. To help them achieve this objective, we launched a POI collection campaign in the city (without an already established presence) and successfully produced a dataset of 1500 verified POIs, all with photos. We reached a completeness level of 99.3%, far exceeding the industry standard.  

As users, we are not surprised to discover that a restaurant or a store on the map does not exist in the real world. It might have closed, moved, or never existed in the first place. Low quality POI datasets might be a mere inconvenience in our personal lives; however, this is a multi-million dollar issue for businesses.

Until recently, we couldn't even tell how big the problem is. After collecting and verifying 5,000 electric vehicle charging stations in Amsterdam in person, we have an answer: it is enormous.

We discovered that more than 14% of the locations in the city’s database were incorrect, and more than 11% of the data from a popular mapping platform was outdated. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.