Kevin: Hi, and welcome to the Location Insights Podcast.
Kevin: I'm your host, Kevin, the global marketing manager at unerry Inc.
Kevin: unerry is a location analytics platform and data insights company based in Tokyo, Japan.
Kevin: My guest for today's conversation is Michael Pasket.
Kevin: He's the VP of commercial real estate at MappedIn, aka the mall guy.
Kevin: Did I get that right?
Michael: Yeah, you've been following my LinkedIn, I see.
Kevin: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin: Great to have you on the show.
Kevin: Welcome.
Michael: Thanks for having me.
Michael: Very excited, super excited to dive into everything.
Michael: Thank you.
Kevin: Yeah, thanks for joining us.
Kevin: So what brought you into the location maps industry?
Kevin: I know we've talked before, you originally started
Kevin: back at Google with Google Maps, but if you can kind of briefly touch on that, how did you get involved with the whole mapping industry?
Kevin: Was that your first entry or did you do something else before then?
Michael: Yeah, no, it's a great question.
Michael: So my entry into the location mapping industry was not linear, and I actually, quite frankly, kind of stumbled upon it.
Michael: Post-university, so I graduated with a marketing degree.
Michael: Thought I wanted to do maybe something with marketing, but at the time of the event industry was what I wanted to do.
Michael: I wanted to do on-site support, registration.
Michael: The event industry is a beast.
Michael: It's lively, high energy.
Michael: And in my younger years, that is something I wanted to do.
Michael: I had actually been applying to various jobs and working in them.
Michael: And one of the jobs I was targeting was an event manager of some sort at Google.
Michael: And I had asked one of my friends actually from university who was at Google if, you know, she could connect me with someone and I could have a conversation.
Michael: conversation.
Michael: She was, lo and behold, actually hiring for a sales job at the time.
Michael: I believe it was called a partner manager.
Michael: And
Michael: I was like, sure, I'll take the interview.
Michael: Lo and behold, it was for indoor Google Maps, specifically the team doing indoor mapping at Google.
Michael: Took the interview, you know, the whole slew of interviews past that and ultimately landed in the job.
Michael: And that was my first entry into the
Michael: location mapping industry and absolutely loved it.
Michael: Absolutely loved it.
Michael: Found out how relevant mapping is in data
Michael: day and just kind of kept trucking along of which then I landed at Mapped In and I've been here coming up on eight years I believe so 10 years of my life has been indoor mapping.
Kevin: Very cool.
Kevin: So you were were you based in California when you you were with Google?
Michael: Yes, I was based in California, grew up in California.
Michael: I was at the Mountain View office at
Michael: a Google HQ and now I'm currently with MappedIn in Kitchener Waterloo over in Canada.
Michael: So you agree.
Michael: My wife is Canadian.
Michael: Love is funny.
Michael: Snow is great.
Michael: I'll tell you that much.
Kevin: Definitely.
Kevin: And then let's kind of get into mapped in.
Kevin: So Mapped In is all about indoor mapping software and technology.
Kevin: But for listeners, maybe in simple terms, how would you define
Kevin: indoor navigation and and what it is and what do companies use it for.
Michael: Absolutely.
Michael: So I would say indoor navigation as you know a general term is the
Michael: Wayfinding or the ability to understand contextually your surroundings and either discover
Michael: or intend to get somewhere using an indoor mapping tool.
Michael: And specifically mapped in, like one of the key things that I I talk through is mapped in, yes, we do wayfinding.
Michael: Yes, we do navigation.
Michael: Indoor mapping is so much larger than that, and navigation is just a byproduct of it.
Michael: So it's one key function, a use case that indoor mapping solves for.
Michael: And
Michael: That's one thing obviously we can do what Mapdin provides is a platform to using AI digitize your floor plans to create a foundation.
Michael: To then enable these different use cases.
Michael: So yes, as everyone relates it to map equals wayfinding, we can do the wayfinding, but then there's asset tracking, there's occupancy.
Michael: indoor location services and there's so much that goes into it and we help to create that foundation and then enable these different use cases of which obviously wayfinding is one.
Michael: Majority of our clients use that as a product set of ours.
Kevin: I think that's a that's a good introduction to what Mapped In provides.
Kevin: You're all about wayfinding, indoor navigation.
Kevin: Do you also do outdoor navigation or it's pretty much exclusively all indoor and in buildings, inside retail, inside of shopping malls, that side of things?
Michael: Yeah, I would say the majority of it is indoors.
Michael: While yes, we can do like campuses, we can do b buildings and the interconnectivity of the outdoors.
Michael: The
Michael: Partners and the clients and people we work with specifically our property owners and having been from Google, I'll say like Google, Apple.
Michael: Azure Maps, like they've all solved the outdoor side very, very well.
Michael: The issue and the unskalable side of things for them is the indoors because it's all privately owned.
Michael: So all of a sudden, instead of you having their hands on all of the outdoor data.
Michael: They have to go and ask for permission for this indoor data.
Michael: And the data internally is messy because there's no set standard
Michael: So we help to solve that challenge.
Michael: And specifically it's, in my opinion, a harder challenge because there's so much variability between that and just different parties
Michael: that you have to go and talk to to unlock all of this data.
Michael: So to answer your question, we do work within outdoors, but
Michael: majority is the indoors and unlocking the indoor environments for their different use cases that require a map.
Kevin: No, that's very cool.
Kevin: I think that's definitely very important in these giant shopping malls where you're trying to find
Kevin: Where is that retail store?
Kevin: Where are the where's the shoe store that you're trying to buy a pair of new sneakers or something?
Kevin: And how do you get there?
Kevin: Use the indoor navigation system.
Kevin: And that's part of what you provide.
Michael: Absolutely.
Michael: And more specifically in a touch point or in a touch point that individuals are used to ingesting that side of data.
Michael: So like
Michael: Some people prefer a website, some people prefer a mobile app, some people prefer a digital signage, digital screen, depending on your region.
Michael: Some people like there's different ways to
Michael: view this indoor data, this indoor map, and we help to provide the map digitized in an easy way, no matter what you're used to.
Michael: using.
Kevin: So in other words, like many different formats.
Kevin: So it could be a mobile app, could be a web page, could be um even like the touchscreen kiosk style inside the mole.
Kevin: Absolutely.
Michael: Very cool.
Michael: Mall, stadium, airport, train station, you name it.
Michael: We very confidently have done it.
Kevin: And I read of a put on your technical docs that you have support for something called a blue dot technology
Kevin: Maybe for listeners at home, can you describe what is the blue dot technology and like how does it work?
Michael: Yes.
Michael: It's a great question.
Michael: So
Michael: What the blue dot technology in like layman terms is when you go onto Google or Apple Maps and you say, I need to go to
Michael: insert store name from my house and you get in your car there will be a blue dot that follows you every single time that you turn down the street until you reach your location
Michael: You'll often notice that that blue dot starts to go all wonky and crazy when you enter into the indoors
Michael: So the blue dot is that.
Michael: The reason why it becomes all wonky is that blue dot on mobile phones or in the outdoors, Apple and Google Maps, that uses satellites to triangulate where a user is.
Michael: You know, more or less.
Michael: The GPS signal.
Michael: Exactly.
Michael: And that's great when you're outdoors because there's little and minimal obstruction.
Michael: The moment you step indoors, you've got concrete, you've got glass, you've got steel, you've got all these different material.
Michael: that goes into creating the building paired with it's a big building.
Michael: So you've got constant like obstruction to this GPS, which is why it's all wonky, which is why it's inaccurate and almost unusable.
Michael: So that's the blue dot and that's why it doesn't work indoors.
Michael: The blue dot can be utilized in different functions using other pieces of technology, whether it's hardware like beacons, RFID, ultra band.
Michael: Whether it's sensor fusion, which we use a lot of, which is hardware less, we utilize technology that basically uses Wi-Fi, satellite, other types of signals to triangulate indoors to
Michael: use and create a very accurate blue dot experience paired with like cameras, other types of
Michael: Technologies.
Michael: And we find that this really helps for all of the blue dot technologies and for the wayfinding.
Michael: Like the key point here, I would say, is
Michael: The blue dot for the indoors, natural human behavior, is typically contextual and for that first step.
Michael: Like the first step is always the hardest of understanding, okay, I need to go to
Michael: Zara, the store Zara, and I'm in the Dubai Mall.
Michael: Cool.
Michael: I understand it's on the East Wing.
Michael: Where am I?
Michael: So that blue dot and that indoor positioning is what it's formerly called.
Michael: Helps to get that initial reading of where you are, which is why it can be important to use.
Michael: And then natural human behavior is like, okay, cool.
Michael: I need to go straight, left, right.
Michael: straight to get to the store and they put it back in their pocket and start the walk, which is why our technologies tend to be hardware less.
Michael: We typically recommend not to use hardware just because it's
Michael: It adds costs, it's not scalable.
Michael: And within all of that, it helps to it helps to determine and set forth that first step in the context.
Kevin: Right, right.
Kevin: Yeah, exactly.
Kevin: But we at we at unerry we handle basically two types of
Kevin: key data sets, the GPS side of things that as you mentioned works great outdoors where you have a clear view of the sky where the GPS satellites are located, but once a customer goes inside of a shopping mall
Kevin: Or like here in Japan where you have stores underground in subways, GPS is non not even existent there.
Kevin: Um so what
Kevin: We do in unerry is we have actually developed an open beacon platform called Beacon Bank where retailers can register their own beacons onto our platform.
Kevin: And then through our platform and app partners, we can recognize when customers visit to the stores.
Kevin: So we use the Bluetooth Beacon technology.
Kevin: That is not something new, but what we've done is platformed it and kind of opened it up as a network of beacons.
Kevin: We've created a network of fact.
Michael: Or Bluetooth beacons.
Michael: Which I think is brilliant.
Michael: Like absolutely kudos to you guys.
Michael: I think that's the way forward.
Michael: Paired with that infrastructure can very easily be leveraged.
Michael: For exactly what it is I'm talking about.
Michael: Yes, we can still do the hardware list and all the side of things, but for individuals that already have it are utilizing it for your side of things, why not re-leverage it?
Michael: paired with everything else to get bang for your buck and that blue dot for the contextual navigation.
Kevin: Right, right, exactly.
Kevin: Yeah, so just to clarify, so we don't provide the indoor navigation side of things.
Kevin: That's what you guys are excellent at and you do
Kevin: Yeah, you do a great job at it.
Kevin: What we tend to do is more retail analytics.
Kevin: So looking at customer foot traffic, customer shopping patterns, how frequently they're coming to the stores, what times of day are busy, what times of day are slow.
Kevin: So those types of analytics that are very useful for the manager of the store or the store owners that really want to keep track of how their stores are doing as far as customer visitations.
Kevin: Which I think is
Kevin: And so for the shopping malls, there's a lot of changes
Kevin: That happen month to month or even sometimes week to week with new stores opening, new stores closing, or old stores closing as it were.
Kevin: How do you update
Kevin: the indoor maps.
Kevin: How does that work within the mapped in platform?
Michael: Absolutely.
Michael: It's a great question.
Michael: So mapped in and our claim to fame, our secret sauce is our map editor.
Michael: I will be the first to say like anyone can create a beautiful picturesque map.
Michael: And that's great.
Michael: I can perfectly intro you to
Michael: individuals that can do that.
Michael: The issue with that model is the maintenance.
Michael: The moment something changes from that map that you just created and probably spent a lot of money on.
Michael: It's null and void.
Michael: It is not accurate.
Michael: So you have to go through that exact same process, spend all that money to go ahead and do that.
Michael: Mapped-in strategy and
Michael: Secret sauce has been investing in a map editing tool that is easy to use, has different syncs and automation to make the maintenance piece so easy that
Michael: anyone can do it.
Michael: And more specifically, it will go ahead and distribute out to all the different places that the map for a user, for a shopper, for an attendee using the map can have that updated information.
Michael: So the map editor will have your floor plans digitized.
Michael: In this map editor, you can go ahead and change walls.
Michael: You can go ahead and
Michael: add pop-up shops, takeout tree, like whatever it might be that you're looking to change very easily, day-to-day, moments notice.
Michael: Push the save button, push the go live button, within 10 minutes, all of your different wayfinding maps, web, mobile, digital signage, touch signage, will be updated with your accurate information.
Michael: Paired with the location data.
Michael: So like McDonald's, McDonald's opening hours, McDonald's coupons, McDonald's phone number, et cetera, et cetera, all the POI information, point of interest information.
Michael: And all of that information, you can also A maintain and manage in our database as a source of truth.
Michael: Or what I see is the vast majority of our clients already have a database.
Michael: Whether it's malls leasing database, whether it's stadiums like session database.
Michael: Uh they all have these types of databases.
Michael: We can pull that information through a data sync.
Michael: So it's every 24 hours, 2 a.
Michael: m.
Michael: local time usually is like when it's pulled, it will automatically update based on your source of truth.
Michael: And then you can go ahead and use our tools to add Santa Claus.
Michael: That's always a very relevant example during this time of year.
Michael: You can add Santa during the months of December, take them right out in a mall environment when Santa's all gone.
Michael: Very easily.
Michael: Takes less than a minute.
Michael: And our clients do that.
Michael: I think that's the main thing.
Michael: We provide, because it's so easy, the autonomy for our clients to do it.
Michael: So there's no back and forth, no mistakes, no SLA.
Michael: They can go ahead and do it whenever they want.
Kevin: Yeah.
Kevin: And I think most importantly for the customer shopper experience, you know, let's say you're walking around the store, you just want to grab a coffee at the Starbucks.
Kevin: You look at the map and you go to where it says the store is and there's a different store there.
Kevin: Like it's so frustrating.
Kevin: shopping experiences that you can have.
Michael: Yep.
Kevin: Just wanted my caffeine ticks for you.
Michael: Yep.
Michael: Or even a notable like this just happened to me.
Michael: Like I was traveling on an airport.
Michael: I had a 20-minute layover.
Michael: I was like, I'm craving Chick-fil-A.
Michael: It was a 10 minute walk, so I was like, cool.
Michael: I am I will make it to here, order the food, eat it on the way back and catch my flight.
Michael: And it wasn't there.
Michael: And oh boy, howdy was I, because now it's like, okay, I've got 10 minutes to
Michael: figure out and haul or and run back to my gate and eat and that creates like the accuracy is the key point because me as a user I was frustrated I there's a distrust
Michael: I my money was ready.
Michael: Like I was ready to purchase something.
Michael: I ended up not eating.
Michael: So that airport, that store, whatever it might be, they lost out on that price.
Michael: Yeah.
Michael: No question.
Kevin: Yeah, exactly.
Kevin: That's why it's very important to have that flexibility and the option to update.
Kevin: And as you mentioned, for your platform, the stores themselves or the store managers, they can go in themselves, right?
Kevin: And just make
Kevin: changes as a new store is let's say closing or changing position or new store opening, whatever the case is.
Michael: Yep.
Michael: Mall managers, the property owners, the state, the football
Michael: Teams that whoever as an owner of said property is handling that information, usually they're the best to know it anyway.
Michael: So they should be the ones with the key to the castle.
Kevin: And as we're kind of covering the updatedness, the freshness of the of the store data, how does the mapped in platform, without getting too technical, handle like validation, like checking that?
Kevin: the stores are not maybe overlaid on top of each other accidentally or or something like that.
Kevin: What kind of processes do you have in place that handles
Kevin: correcting or preventing errors in the the mapping data.
Kevin: Yep.
Michael: So we have a lot of technical things on our back end that I won't get too deep into, just know it's there.
Michael: I would say for the initial implementation, we have a very rigorous QC or quality control process to ensure that the data we are receiving
Michael: looks identical to a copy and paste.
Michael: There's way more to it, but conceptually we are taking their floor plans, whether they be CAD files, PDFs, SVG, drawings on napkins.
Michael: Please don't give us drawings on napkins, but you know, whatever.
Michael: Taking that information, we do a whole lot more, but we copy and paste it in our map editor tool.
Michael: So you have that digital asset within 100%
Michael: And then the validation from there is the client maintaining that 100%.
Michael: So thinking about it is we take their floor plans from zero to 100%.
Michael: And from there,
Michael: We're able to provide the keys to the castle where the client can then maintain that 100%.
Michael: And often a lot of it is automated because we're pulling information from them.
Michael: And their source of truth, usually they have their own checks and balances in place to ensure that what we're pulling is clean.
Michael: Usually property owners will delegate the structural maintenance to the managers of said property or individuals at said property, because they're going to be the ones that know what's going on.
Michael: Is this pop-up store actually here?
Michael: Yes or no?
Michael: HQ may or may not know this.
Michael: Person at the mall knows exactly, or the mall, airport, stadium, whatever it might be, knows exactly where it is.
Kevin: Yeah, so your system handles and can keep the store locations up to date and there is technical validation as well.
Kevin: QA or QC process that absolutely.
Kevin: Very cool.
Kevin: Yeah.
Michael: And our view on it is our product is white labeled.
Michael: But our view on it is we want to produce the best looking on brand possible example of mapped in towards our client.
Michael: Because while we're like white labeled, we're proud of our name and we're proud of what we're producing.
Michael: But more specifically, it's our clients and their brand.
Michael: that has their name on the line, so to speak, with this information.
Michael: So we want it to be 100% and it will be 100%.
Kevin: Right.
Kevin: It's not going to be you as the mapping technology provider that gets blamed for the shopper that's walking around the mall and the store is not at the right place.
Kevin: Exactly.
Kevin: Makes sense.
Kevin: And so as you've been working in the location mapping kind of software industry for a number of years now.
Kevin: Uh what kind of changes or trends are you seeing in the industry?
Kevin: You can share some insights.
Michael: Oh, that's such a good question.
Michael: There's so much and I've seen so man like so many things over the past 10 years.
Michael: And what's interesting about like the past history and trends is they build on top of each other.
Michael: And what I mean by that is 10 years ago everything was web.
Michael: had to have a web map, had to everyone was using like a web-based digital map, which is great.
Michael: It didn't go extinct.
Michael: They built on top of it.
Michael: So now it's like this de facto you need a web map.
Michael: Because it's expected by consumers.
Michael: And then next up, there was a mobile application paired with digital signage.
Michael: Same thing, brand new.
Michael: Do we do it?
Michael: Do we not do it?
Michael: And it began trending to where people needed it.
Michael: And now those three, web, mobile, and digital signage, are a de facto expectation of the consumer.
Michael: What I'm seeing currently right now, and it varies, but the expectation of consumers is having all of these sources and being able to
Michael: Pull up information at a moment's notice, knowing it's accurate.
Michael: And I think the chat GPTs, the AI model, like the all that kind of stuff, is
Michael: Training consumers to have this opinion that I can find information anywhere and it's going to be accurate, which they should.
Michael: And being able to have all these different
Michael: sources to obtain this information in a map format that's visually appealing, visually contextual, is going to be
Michael: What the consumers expect, but more specifically what they want.
Michael: So property owners need to get on board.
Michael: But more specifically, within this trend, having more information associated to each store.
Michael: Five years ago it was like description, hours of operation, phone number.
Michael: That's about it.
Michael: Now, and we help with this, it's deep linking to the menu to show the menu within each individual store.
Michael: But maybe if it's a store of different coupon codes or loyalty programs, loyalty programs is really, really big right now in the indoor mapping industry that I'm seeing.
Michael: And this is all just probably on the tenant side that I'm seeing that's trending, knowing that
Michael: You know, COVID happened, brick and mortar, had its thought to be a downfall.
Michael: It's it's back.
Michael: It is alive, I'll tell you that much.
Michael: And with that on the tenant side, that's what I'm seeing is like they the consumer is in charge now.
Michael: The old models that the landlords were using to get people in are no longer working because the consumer is expecting experiences, they're expecting information at a moment's notice, they're expecting
Michael: uh digital technology to solve for all this and just have a more luxury look and feel.
Michael: On the mapping side of things, the trends and changes.
Michael: Is AI shocking?
Michael: Everyone sees it in the news.
Michael: It it every company's trying to do it, whether it's smoke and mirrors or the real thing.
Michael: I would say how Mappedin has been going forth with this is we're ahead of the curve.
Michael: We've been developing an AI mapping tool.
Michael: It's out in public.
Michael: You can go ahead and go to our website and check it out to where you can plug in a floor plan, PDF, CAD.
Michael: SVG, PNG, whatever floor plan you have, you can have you can do your apartment right now.
Michael: Plug that in.
Michael: You can still manually create it, create the walls, create everything, or manual's boring.
Michael: You can push the AI button and it will automatically convert your map to where that you can then have a digital map.
Michael: using AI as the creation point.
Kevin: Yeah, I was on a call with your CEO the other day and I think he demoed that.
Kevin: It's very impressive demo there.
Kevin: You could you can do that in
Kevin: It even works with just a high-end iPhone or iPad, right?
Michael: It does.
Michael: I would even say like the the conversations for me are wickedly fun.
Michael: Because I can go ahead and yes, show the tool with my map and push the AI button, but the power here is
Michael: I can say, don't believe me, do it yourself.
Michael: Sign up.
Michael: Try it for try it whatever floor plan put us to the test.
Michael: And they always come back very impressed because it's not smoke and mirrors.
Michael: It has been years in development.
Michael: It's been two or three years on the market.
Michael: And it's real and it's good.
Kevin: Awesome.
Kevin: So where can listeners find out more about MappedIn?
Kevin: What's the best place?
Michael: Yeah, of course.
Michael: You can go ahead and head over to our website, map mappedin.com
Michael: You can go ahead and find anything that we do, find all of our case studies, dev portal.
Michael: As always, my LinkedIn, Michael Pasket, you can go ahead and add me.
Michael: Throw me a chat, I respond to everything.
Michael: I'm more than happy and call me a mapping nerd to really dive into things, even if it's just knowledge base, even if it's just expanding network to help to solve problems.
Michael: Give feedback, give my best practices that I've seen throughout the years, those would probably be the two best.
Michael: Our website, mappedin.com
Michael: or myself, Michael Pasket on LinkedIn.
Kevin: All right, and I've been your host, Kevin.
Kevin: I'm the global marketing manager at unerry Inc.
Kevin: You can subscribe to the Location Insights podcast in whatever podcast app you're listening right now so you get episodes automatically.
Kevin: And thanks for listening, everyone