Welcome to Making sense, a new offshoot from Duologue. This is where we try to delve deep on a topic and make sense of it with our guest.
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In the second interview of “Making Sense”1. We are interviewing the co-founder of Locale.ai, Aditi Sinha to make sense of the recent development in the space of geospatial data for Indian entities. This is in line with one of the previous posts yours truly wrote on the role of regulation.
We have regulation playing the role of an enabler in this instance. They liberalised few of the laws that were holding back the sector.
Some context around the interview, i reached out to Aditi on twitter. This is my first time interacting with her. I would like to thank Aditi for her time to help us unpack what happened, why it matters and what to make of it ?
Publisher’s note:
Questions are in bold .
Aditi answered the questionnaire sent to her. So, you will not see much back and forth in the post below.
Interview
Vivek(V): The government out of the blue released a press note stating ‘liberalisation of guidelines for geospatial data ‘[LINK to press note]. The crux of the note can be narrowed down to two points:
“... there would be complete deregulation with no prior approvals, security clearances, licenses, etc. for acquisition and production of geospatial data and geospatial data services including maps”
“ All geospatial data produced using public funds, except classified geospatial data collected by security/law enforcement agencies, will be made accessible for scientific, economic and developmental purposes to all Indian Entities and without any restrictions on their use. Government agencies and others need to collaborate and work towards openlinked geospatial data”.
How do you and other companies that are working in this space, especially out of India interpret this press note? The response on twitter was an overwhelming “YES!!”, but how was regulation holding companies working in the space back prior to this?
Aditi(A): The sweeping changes announced by the government surely got a nod of approval across all industries that are working with geospatial data. The initial landscape of the geospatial industry was laden with a bunch of restrictions, and the decision-making process was drawn out. There was also a lack of comprehensive policies that guided the use and access of the data. If any company needed this particular data, they had to resort to private players who charge an enormous sum. Coming to the open-source alternatives, there was an understandable concern for accuracy. But with these policies, a majority of the barriers have been removed to pave way for innovations. It will also empower mobility, food tech, and ride-sharing/hailing companies as they require strong location intelligence platforms.
V: Can you tell us about Locale.ai and what are you building over there? Will this liberalization help your company’s prospects in any form or manner?
A: Locale is essentially a location analytics platform for analyzing ground operations and user behavior. In other words, we convert your location data into actionable hyperlocal insights. The inspiration comes from web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or Clevertap that equip marketers to increase the conversion and retention of their web products. Similarly, Locale is built for city & operations, business teams, and CXOs alike to increase user conversions and reduce cost per delivery by showcasing how their business performs on the ground and pinpointing where the problems lie. At our previous workplace, we realized that the companies were collecting large amounts of geolocation data, but there was a gap in the availability of tools that could make sense of them. Hence, Locale came into being. Today we are working with some of the biggest companies to help them achieve operational efficiency and encourage experimentation among their teams.
Here are a couple of blogs where we speak about it in more detail.
https://blog.locale.ai/a-product-for-operational-analytics-using-geospatial-data/
https://blog.locale.ai/the-problem-a-testimony-to-why-we-do-what-we-do-at-locale/
The liberalization will definitely be a game-changer for FMCG, supply chain, and distribution companies. It will enable them to analyze their metrics and go granular into their insights.
V: What are some of the typical use cases that Locale can solve for, and what industries do you mainly cater to?
A: Our target market is any company with moving assets — vehicles, users, delivery partners, salespeople. This includes companies in sectors like mobility, on-demand delivery, last-mile delivery as well as workforce companies. The use cases we work with are specifically for operations and city teams to help them get a holistic view of their on-ground assets without any engineering bandwidth. Through Locale, one can get hyperlocal insights and unlock the potential of location data.
MARKETING
Acquisition: Getting visibility on areas with latent demand and expanding in those.
Conversions: Understand where the user churn is high and debug the reasons behind it.
Retention: The ability to focus on areas & routes of non-repeatable users a well as your power users.
OPERATIONS
Allocations: Supply-demand matching is at the heart of any business. Have the ability to debug patterns in gaps in your supply re-distribution.
Monitoring: The real world is chaotic and fickle. Monitor your metrics and KPIs 24X7 and get alerts for anomalies. This allows one to act on the go and take decisions seamlessly.
Profitability: Know which experiments are helping you become profitable by comparing revenue with costs (distance & time to travel) across different areas and times.
STRATEGY
Cancellations: Know the distribution of the areas where orders get canceled by users & partners
Delays & SLAs: Be able to identify where, when & which lap of the journey caused the delay to take targeted action
Productivity: Correlate sales and time spent by your workforce in areas as well communicate across the teams with our collaboration additions.
V: Geospatial data forms the base layer on top of which most of the digital economy currently runs. It is still expensive to populate this data. Could you walk us through some of the nitty grit-ties of how geospatial data works and how does one develop on top of that?
A: I completely agree. Geolocation data is the backbone of the digital economy, and it continues to be collected at an exponential rate. But processing location data is an uphill task given the scale - millions of lat-long data points are collected at any given second in real-time. It takes a lot of computing power to gain valuable insights.
Though location data is so pervasive, there are still challenges in the way we handle it. Moreover, geospatial visualizations and plotting the points that we mainly see are in sharp contrast to analyzing movement. It encompasses the historical analysis and live monitoring of the on-ground assets, and often in real time. The existing tools fall short in incorporating the nuances of location data due to its resource-intensive and time-consuming nature. Hence the process becomes expensive in this sense. Considering this, we have built Locale in a way that the location data is a first-class citizen and it can perform spatiotemporal analysis.
V: To those who are now googling spatiotemporal’s meaning, allow me, it means belonging to both space and time. Moving on to the next quesiton.
Open source tools(Mapbox (Mapbox.gl/js), Uber’s Libraries(Deck.gl, viz.gl), PostGIS,) and so on have been the household tools in the geospatial industry. What are their unique capabilities and how is Locale.ai different from them?
A: At Locale, we use a wide range of open-source tools to help us solve complex problems and handle large-scale datasets in the front-end and backend. They handle high-performance visualizations, additional editing capabilities, and rendering maps.
But what sets Locale apart is the ability to ingest an extensive amount of data, both in real-time and on-demand to analyze and gain insights on the fly. We make use of PostgreSQL and PostGIS for powerful data processing and geospatial operations.
So, a company would choose Locale for of the following reasons:
A simple and intuitive user interface to carry out analyses, especially for business users
Scalable geospatial visualizations with actionability
ETL robust enough to handle streaming data as well as historical analysis to go back in time
This enables business users or decision-makers to get the right insights about their ground operations. They turn to Locale because they don’t have to depend on their teams of analysts or engineers to get valuable information.
V: In essence, Locale is making the analysis and actions to be performed on the same tool. Impressive. Hopefully, we get to put it to use once our operations pick up volumes. Finally, ending with a meta question.
What according to you are some of the problems that are being overlooked in the geospatial industry that new people from the industry can look to take a stab at?
A: 10 years the collection of event data skyrocketed, and that gave rise to a new era of growth. We saw companies take advantage and went on to build some of the best platforms to leverage it. Today some of the biggest businesses have been built with event data as their foundation. Similarly, with the rise in location data, there lies a lot of untapped potential in what we can do with it. In the current scenario, it still remains underutilized which opens up the ground for experimentation and innovation in this space.
There are various facets of geospatial data and we can see a lot more companies in this space with different approaches. With location data being as ubiquitous as it is and at the rate at which it is growing, the possibilities are endless. It has a fair potential to be the next big thing in the tech industry. It could be largely divided into the following sectors:
Analytics and visualization
Intelligence and models
APIs for geocoding, routing, ETAs
Collection of location data
The new reforms will accelerate this, and I believe there is a revolution well on its way!
I thank Aditi once again for taking the time and writing down such comprehensive answers to help us grasp what is going on in the space and what are yet to come. You can direct your questions with regards to the interview or topics discussed to her on twitter.
: First Interview in this series was with Karan Patil on Civic sense, moral responsibility and liberalisation of agriculture