2024 Wrapped: Living Map's Product Highlights

Author

Rob Mirfin

Published

19.12.2024

In 2024, Living Map expanded its offering with asset tracking and visualisation, while enhancing the experience of the current product suite—all the while maintaining a solid foundation for the future.

Movin' on Up

There are times when you sit in a meeting and an idea comes up that makes you think. In this case, ladders. Now, ladders are not normally the topic that makes you excited but in this case, Peter Asman, our Chief Revenue Officer, was explaining a conversation he’s previously had about ladders being one of several objects that go missing and how having a way of locating those assets on a map would have great applications.

The conversation rapidly spread from ladders. What about crash carts in hospitals, high-security items in transport hubs, or airport baggage carts?

Thus Locator was born. Living Map can now help a number of industries to locate assets in real-time on a map, allowing users to find, filter and track dynamic and static items on a map. Not just locally but globally. If a tracker is fitted to a suitcase and it flies across the world, we can show its tracking information as it moves.

We are currently launching the product in healthcare and transport settings for our valued customers. While details will be shared soon, you can now register your interest here to be the first to know and receive regular updates.

Living Map's digital mapping software on kiosk in a shopping centre

Seeing the Kiosk at the end of the map

Our kiosk software product has come on leaps and bounds in 2024. Updating the design, look and feel and enhancing the functionality. From the initial kiosks in Canary Wharf, the product now features in 8 different locations with more confirmed for next year.

In the summer, we introduced the new point of information carousel to allow users to browse between different locations in a group. Search ‘coffee’ and select between the options, with the screen showing the user the route to each as they go. Users can transfer that route to their mobile device, using a QR code, and follow it along.

Climb like the locals

Not to stretch my ladder metaphor too far, ladders can vary in different countries, but it is a universally understood concept. As such, even though everyone can read a map, we introduced the ability to have multiple languages available so users can also read the text that goes with the map. Our map of Lima airport in Peru is available in Spanish, Excelente!

Having a strong foundation

You, the user, generally only see the product at the top of the ladder, the product that is looking over the wall. You don’t see the person supporting the bottom of the ladder to make sure it doesn’t fall over or assess if it's made of sturdy enough material.

Billy, one of our DevOps, is writing a separate article about what has been going on behind the scenes of the Living Map product suite. Keep an eye out for this one in early 2025!

Seeing the Horizon

As we use our ladder to look to the horizon, we can see the fruition of the hard work our teams have completed:

Kiosk - aligning our kiosk functionality with our mobile and desktop platforms to allow users to complete sophisticated searches, quickly look for activities in the area and search for customised tags.
Locator - allowing users to see the history of asset location to provide clearer insights about how these move around the map.
Statistics - bringing in a package of statistics into our map management system (MMS) for clients to see what is going on in real time.
MMS - the Hippo design updates for MMS are intended to prepare for enhancements such as uploading and managing 360-degree images for POIs, improved user experience with multi-language support, and the management of geolocated ads, among other features.

If you haven’t had a chance to read our Senior Product Designer Miles' recent article, I highly recommend it for more insights on Hippo, the new design process, and how our product designs evolved in 2024. Read it here.