Tencent Unveils Mobile Navigation Service Lubao To Deepen Forays into Mapping Market

Chinese Internet giant Tencent recently launched its homegrown navigation app Lubao. In addition to basic navigation services, Tencent Lubao also features user generated contents and social functions.

Users can upload real-time traffic data to the platform and Tencent’s Streetview Maps service will also be integrated to enhance data accuracy.

Different from traditional navigation products, Lubao introduced a five-star rating mechanism, which will give users scores on the security level of their driving habits after they finished their trips. The user scores, which can be shared to social networking platforms of Tencent Weibo, WeChat and Sina Weibo, are generated by analyzing factors like, break times, overspeed times, etc.

Baidu Map and Alibaba’ s AutoNavi app currently top China’ s online mapping service market while Tencent is in lack of a strong mapping service which could be leveraged to further consolidate its O2O business along with WeChat. To compete with peers, Tencent poured 60 million yuan ($9.92 million) to fully acquire Beijing-based mapping service Linktech Navi earlier this year to gain proprietary basic mapping data.

image credit: Tencent