For the majority of Chinese who stayed up late to watch the live broadcast, WWDC 2018 May have been the most tame Apple event ever, highlighting various system upgrades (Animoji’s support for face pinching and tongue sticking, for example) that might not have been as exciting as this one:

It’s always nice to have Chinese elements on an occasion like this.

More than five years after its launch, Carplay’s in-car system is finally starting to support third-party map navigation apps. Autonavi, Apple’s data partner in China, was a natural fit for the lineup; For foreign users, Carplay will support Google Maps and its community mapping app WAZE. They have made a rare positive appearance at an official Apple event since Google unveiled Android a decade ago, provoking Mr. Jobs’s ire.

Obviously, this kind of generalization and localization initiatives, to win more favor for Carplay, after all in the car so absolutely to the behavior of the core products, map navigation is undisputed dominant application – although time has passed for a long time, but have to admit that many of apple’s map just released, still shudder.

In the same way, maps are still one of the core applications on mobile, although they are not used as uHF as the cutting-edge instant messaging apps.

From the point of view of its birth history, even though it has been the oldest application in the Internet, the boundaries of maps are still expanding.

Google Maps was one of the stars featured at Google I/O in May. The latest version, announced today, offers a “For You” TAB that lists the latest and best-reviewed restaurants and attractions around You, along with recommended places based on search history to book or place orders directly within the app. It looks like “Yelp and Foursquare on maps”; Another notable change is the introduction of AR navigation, which helps users get to their destinations more easily and intuitively by combining a 2D interface with a smartphone’s camera lens.

If you take into account last year’s announcement of WAZE’s support for ride-sharing, it’s a clear sign that Google Maps is getting more deeply involved in the real world and becoming a community of discovery, navigation, consumption and other full-link services.

The first reaction from many Chinese media outlets was deja vu. As early as in 2011, there was a big debate on the development direction of map application in China, and the final result was “what everyone expected” : with the concepts of group purchase and O2O, map application was considered to be the most likely to become the entry level of mobile Internet.

All of a sudden, everyone from Nasdaq-listed Autonavi to baidu, then the dominant voice on the Internet, was weighing maps against the traffic thinking of PC browsers and search. The difference is that the PC browser has been connected to the online content, while the map is connected to the real world, but because the online Internet content of the search and browser is the king of traffic in the PC era, it seems that the need to connect the real world is not so necessary.

A few years later, the portal exploration of map came to an abrupt end with O2O, leaving behind a chicken feather style.

But in fact, from the general direction, the map connecting the real world is actually very advanced thinking.

The latest version of Google Maps is just one step closer to proving this. However, the crucial difference from domestic companies seven years ago is the timing and depth of commercial thinking.

The huge cash flow of group buying determines the capital preference. At that time, Baidu tried to seize the entrance of O2O commercialization through Baidu Map, which inevitably transformed the original map with strong tool attributes into a commercial trading platform. Google, on the other hand, only began to explore the community of offline services and the mapping of interests after the further improvement of big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Like search, the mapping business is still essentially a data model, not a transaction model. And for the dimension and difficulty of the offline index, are not comparable to the online index, which also doomed the map business must be the accumulation of “slow business” – Google has swept the industry before the PageRank algorithm, finally achieved their miracle of commercialization.

Fortunately, in recent years, domestic enterprises have realized this and started to reverse the previous situation of putting the cart before the horse. For example, When Autonavi entered Alibaba in 2014, it cut down the commercialized O2O projects that were still popular with capital at that time, and then plunged into the “muddy” travel and location information service field to improve the efficiency and quality of data production and service.

They did their best to crucial new this year, is called “based on the location of the three-dimensional information service”, in addition to the traditional traffic information, will also include meteorological, tourism, and other partners to provide, integrated into the platform of gold content about the travel, after big data optimization, distributed in the form of information service, improving travel efficiency and experience. For example, recently, the AI version of the water map was launched successively (check the water section on rainy days), the map of convenient commercial outlets, and the online car-hailing platform introduced last year.

The latest is an environmental map in cooperation with the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which allows users to view environmental information such as air quality, water quality and pollution sources nationwide, helping to make travel decisions in advance and providing reference for travel.

According to Autonavi president Liu Zhenfei, location-based three-dimensional information services not only provide users with three-dimensional information presentation, but also combine three-dimensional information with users’ travel scenarios. For example, autonavi now takes into account other factors, such as avoiding information about stagnant water, as well as avoiding congestion when offering navigation planning services to users.

Clearly, as new connections are made in the real world and new dimensions of data are involved, the possibilities for map navigation can be enormous. Just like the numerous third-party online information services grafted on wechat, combined with the basic system of wechat itself, such as social communication and payment, the fact of “wechat social operating system” has been achieved.

But there are differences.

Wechat is a pure traffic ecology, starting and ending online. In essence, it is a “time economy” (this is the fundamental reason why Tencent is so nervous about Douyin). Users have a strong autonomy in terms of attention, so they need the underlying supporting infrastructure like wechat. Travel is a more diversified service decision-making ecology. Online and offline may be the beginning or the end, and any variable of data dimension may affect the final result. Therefore, the offline Internet travel ecology needs not the underlying infrastructure, but the top-level brain.

The goal of community mapping and interest mapping of Google Maps, as well as the construction of Autonavi three-dimensional information system, is to become the top brain in travel and location information services.

Theoretically, there will be little human involvement in offline decisions about travel in the future.

The bottom line is that maps may have been overvalued during the O2O bubble, but maps may have been seriously undervalued as an end-game industry.

Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110