Digital maps: The next battleground for internet giants

It looks like the internet giants have been competing in digital maps for a long time. Google with Apple, Baidu, Alibaba (Gould) and Tencent, respectively, in two parallel wars in a protracted war. But then, the two battlefields will be in the same pattern, into the next level of competition, which will not only make the digital map an important business, but also change its existing patterns and the way people use it. First of all, maybe you've noticed, many digital map service providers begin to move "local life" services to the map early on--because of the restrictions on screen display and interactive mode of mobile terminals, the "map" must be separated from "search" on the mobile phone and become an independent service. In turn, it also lets the map eat the search, coupled with the combination of innate and geographical location, "Search for local people, places and traffic" has become a new task on the mobile phone map, it also means that digital maps will be able to have more and more personal information, is divided into more and more subdivision areas, carrying the Internet giants in E-commerce , O2O, payment and other fields of ambition, become the center of the Internet War. This is nothing new, but it is about to make another thing happen-the change in map form. Although we see Baidu has already added a "nearby" function in the map, will be catering, hotels, movies, bus stations, buy even taxi services are built in, Alibaba heavily invested in the gold map has done a similar structure. But the problem is, this feature-level setting still places the index and navigation in the first place, but in fact, as the previous article says, the meaning of the map is changing: people open maps to both search for traffic and places, and search for local life services, and their priorities tend to level. Apple may be the first company to break the status quo--not so long ago, when Apple applied for a new patent, according to the description, Apple's future map products will have a richer layer, such as weather, transport, tourism, shopping and so on. Users can search for more vertical results at different levels. For example, when a user searches for a "skateboard" at the shopping level, the map will present the shop where the skateboard is sold, and when the same word is searched on the travel floor, the map will provide the user with information about the skating field nearby. This reminds me of a pioneering company called Citymaps is trying to open the Citymaps digital map, you see is not the traditional map information, but directly with the merchant's brand logo marked a different location, users click on it can see the information of different merchants, Even some promotional activities. In other words, in the future, the digital map may have multiple parallel, perpendicular to different areas of the map layer, so that users can visually on the layer to see the services they need, and these services information is dynamic, real-time update. On the other hand, "personalization" will also be a necessary feature of the future digital map--map will be prioritized according to the user's personal preferences and historical behavior to determine which geography to showInformation. For example, Google can recommend a diet for you based on your search history, your consumption data, and the restaurants that your friends often visit. Not long ago, Apple was revealed to have acquired Broadmap, a provider of expertise in map data collection and analysis, and also showed plans to make personalized attempts. But for China's digital map service providers, "personalized" to achieve a higher degree of difficulty. The reason is that they do not have a complete account system as a support. For example, for Baidu, although the number of Baidu map users grow fast, but the proportion of "registered users" is low, which makes it impossible for Baidu to connect the various behaviors of users using map, let alone and other service data of Baidu to get through, even now Baidu map many local life service payment channel or Alibaba Alipay. At this point, the gold map seems to have more advantages-double 11 o'clock, consumers through the gold map can find to participate in the cat activities around the offline store, and can be used Alibaba Cat client scan commodity two-dimensional code, add to the shopping cart. Although this is only a brief activity, but as we know, the gold is in the background with Alibaba integration, Taobao account system and user data will be "personalized" play a vital role. Finally, don't overlook the Tencent map. Although it appears that the announcement of the "Street View" as the center of gravity Tencent seems to have temporarily abandoned and Baidu, Alibaba (gold) on the map of the contention, but in fact, in China's more stringent geographical information under the conditions of the huge cost to collect Street View, that Tencent is determined to "streetscape" as the future core competitiveness, It involves two levels: first, Tencent is bound to collect other location information when it collects street scenes to help it build other businesses on it, such as mobile ads, or even Tencent's own unmanned vehicles; second, it can build its own base data platform, making it possible for Tencent to become a map provider for the underlying data and maps. So, soon after, when we open the digital map application, we may not see the same map, nearby, navigation ... Such a logical structure, but can choose their favorite world, roaming in a highly simulated real life in the data kingdom.