A Grab’s map. GrabMaps becomes a data provider for Amazon Location Service. — Photo Courtesy Grab Vietnam
Grab, Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, has recently announced GrabMaps has become a data provider for Amazon Location Service, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) location-based service.
AWS customers who leverage Amazon Location Service, now have access to high-quality regional mapping data that includes over 50 million addresses and points of interests (POIs) from GrabMaps spanning Singapore, Cambodia, Việt Nam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. Customers can also leverage Grab’s hyperlocal search and routing functionality tailored to the region’s unique attributes, from its small alleyways and subdivisions to hard-to-find places.
Many organisations from a wide range of industries including tech, logistics, telecommunications, and Government agencies require location-based services for applications. With this collaboration, developers and teams using Amazon Location Service can enhance or build their own location-enabled applications using GrabMaps.
AWS customers can display their desired data on local maps that are up-to-date, and use search boxes that accurately locate end-user addresses and POIs. Customers can also add route planning and optimisation capabilities to their apps, drawing on GrabMaps’ up-to-date road network and traffic information. Users can calculate the fastest routes and provide accurate estimated arrival times, factoring in parameters such as modes of transport, real-time traffic conditions, departure timing and more, and with options to avoid tolls, ferry routes or highways.
“GrabMaps offers a unique view of Southeast Asia, with data and functionality that is exceptional in freshness, coverage and accuracy. We are excited to collaborate with AWS’s world-class infrastructure to share our capabilities with other companies, and help them build services and applications that we hope will better serve Southeast Asians,” said Philipp Kandal, chief product officer, Grab.
Operational and cost efficiencies brought about by GrabMaps’ core functionalities have already started to help businesses using Amazon Location Service maximise their platform’s capabilities.
An enterprise service that was first developed for in-house use, GrabMaps has now grown to power Grab’s services across the region. GrabMaps is built on the principles of community-based mapping, making the service highly cost-effective while offering high-quality mapping data. It leverages Grab’s extensive network of consumers, merchants, and driver and delivery partners, extracting and refreshing mapping data on a daily basis from millions of orders and rides, with real-time feedback from partners on road closures, business address changes and more.
GrabMaps powers over 800 billion API calls per month across a variety of services encompassing places search, dispatch, ETA calculations, routing, navigation and more. It has helped add more than 800,000 kilometers of missing roads to the OpenStreetMap. — VNS