TECH TALK: Local company takes on Google Maps.

Byline: Mutaher Khan

All of us have had our fair share of misfortune (or rage) with the Google Maps.

From making you go around in circles, even when the path is straight, to almost never being able to pinpoint the exact location, it's been a troubled companion to whom we keep returning due to a lack of choices.

But what if there was a better option? At least that's the promise of TPL Maps.

TPL Maps is a Pakistani navigation app based out of Karachi that lets you wander around without getting lost. Open the mobile application, look for any particular place, set directions, see the estimated arrival time and get going. Or you can share location, record a route and do pretty much most of the stuff like any other mapping portal.

They have collected data of over five million addresses, with around 3m commercial and 2m residential. Plus approximately 600,000km of road networks. All in all, this encompasses most of the tier-1 and 2 cities.

'We have been in the tracking business for two decades and at the time we started, there was no Google Maps to help us offer location-based services to our clients. So we set up our own geographic information system team to collect geo-coded location data related to commercial and residential points of interest. And then after years, the company started looking for avenues to monetise that data and that is how TPL Maps came about,' tells Sarwar Ali Khan, Chief Executive Officer of Trakker, which in turn is part of the publicly-listed TPL Corporation.

It works on SaaS models, offering a certain threshold of usage for free. Anything exceeding that requires a paid subscription which has a bucket pricing structure depending on the usage. Plus, they have custom specialised digital maps and analysis offering in case a client requires that.

Most of you are probably wondering why there is even a need for TPL Maps when one of the biggest tech giants already has an offering in the market. How does a local player hope to navigate its way through in such an environment?

'First of all, our pricing is much more competitive than Google. Then the fact that we have physical presence here allows us to have better relationships with the customers,' says Khan.

'Even in terms of accuracy, we fare better on some measures since our data is verified by surveyors unlike Google...