AutoNavi recently unveiled LBS cloud strategy with Alibaba, which invested $294 million for a 28% stake in the company earlier this year. AutoNavi’s LBS cloud platform and Alibaba’s cloud platform has been integrated with each other.
This platform opened up basic services of map, searching, positioning and travelling to developers in a bid to lower their development costs, said Piao Chunzhi, development manager of AutoNavi’s LBS platform, at QCon International Software Development Conference held last weekend.
In addition to mapping data collected by AutoNavi, data shared by AutoNavi’s cooperators, such as Ctrip, Dianping, Sina Weibo and Umeng, will also be available on the cloud platform.
AutoNavi’s LBS cloud platform currently claimed more than 300,000 of developers and operators, with over 10,000 apps drawing upon its data per day. These apps cover the categories of travelling, catering, hotel, social networking, taxi and game, including Ctrip, Dianping, Tuan800, Ele.me, Kumi, and charity app Chinaeagle.
AutoNavi aims to become an access for developers, with focus on POI searching, accurate positioning and big data, which are three keywords in the mobile Internet era, Piao stated. He thinks this cooperation will benefit both of the parties. AutoNavi can capitalize on the cloud storage resources of Alibaba and the mapping data from AutoNavi, a professional map provider, is a strong supplement for Alibaba to complete the O2O business chain.
AutoNavi and its arch rival Baidu Map waged wars for navigation market share in August by offering free services. Piao thinks that their competitive edge is AutoNavi’s homegrown data, while Baidu’s geographic data is purchased from NavInfo.
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