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The innovative route-planner mobile application

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  • Country

    USA

  • Industry

    Travel
    GPS Navigation

  • Type

    Mobile, Web,
    Backend

  • Duration

    3 Years

About

It is an advanced mobile travel app, underlied by a patented route-specific social network, and employing a proprietary, a uniquely innovative distance-measuring algorithm that takes intelligent route-planning to an entirely new level.

This app allows charting a route on a map, displaying a variety of businesses (restaurants, cafes, stores, hotels, motels, filling stations, and more) located within a specified distance along this route, and getting acquainted with the various contextual information provided by these businesses. The user can specify the distance for route-related businesses to display.

Unlike similar apps based on standard geocoding algorithms, the underlying algorithm of the client’s application allows the user to precisely measure the distance to any of the businesses displayed for their chosen route.

In addition to the appropriate regular business information, the contextual business information provided in the application includes information associated with sales, discounts, and various fun events.

Importantly, this information also includes the current price of gasoline at each of the filling stations located within the user-specified area.
The user can privately share the information they find with their family and friends registered in the system.

Businesses that want to advertise through the client’s mobile app can conveniently provide the required contextual information by inputting it into the system on the client’s website.

Challenge

A US-based technology start-up was looking to develop an innovative intelligent route planner mobile application that was to become the company’s flagship product.

The app was to be used in conjunction with a back-end and the company’s website to constitute a single route-planning, advertising, and information-sharing system.

The client approached Envion Software with the request to take over the challenging project.

The project was on hold as the previously hired team of freelancers didn’t meet the client’s expectations.

By that time, the client had only a semi-functional website that could only display routes and businesses associated with them. No backend or mobile functionality existed at the time. The existing solution had no proper documentation, and no efficient knowledge transfer was possible.

One of the major challenges during the project’s implementation became the ever-evolving requirements for the application under development. These requirements had to be modified multiple times in response to the greatly varying custom business needs of the client’s B2B customers.

As a result, the project team had to opt for the Agile methodology to implement the project.

 

Approach and solution

To take over the project’s implementation, Envion Software put together an 8-strong development team that consisted of 6 software engineers, 1 QA engineer, and 1 PM.

As the bulk of the solution’s functionality was not yet defined, we guided the client through the requirements gathering stage and came up with a detailed functional specification for the system.

Implementing the client’s proprietary geocoding algorithm was the project’s most conspicuous challenge, as the need to calculate the distance to all the businesses within a user-specified area created a significant excessive load on the server.

To solve this problem, we developed a proprietary calculation module and used Amazon services to create an infrastructure supporting the related business processes.

It took the project team 6 months to deliver the first, Android version of the application that successfully went live.

The project has been ongoing for more than 2 years now. Currently, the Envion Software team is involved in scaling up the system and adding billing functionality to it. They are also creating an API that will enable the system’s integration with external services.

Envion Software has delivered an innovative route-planner, the American company is currently using as their flagship product.
It’s about to get easier to find one’s way around the unfamiliar territory and make the tripping experience smoother, – if one has any mobile device.
The client’s mobile app, developed by Envion, allows to:

  • chart a route on a map using GPS
  • discover a variety of businesses (restaurants, cafes, stores, hotels, motels, filling stations, and more) located within a specified distance along the route
  • get acquainted with the various contextual information provided by these businesses (sales, discounts, events, etc)
  • share the found information with family and friends registered in the system, making the latest similar to a social net

 

Technical details

  • PHP
  • Objective-C
  • Swift
  • Java
  • C++
  • SQLite
  • JSON
  • REST
  • XML
  • SQLite
  • C#
  • JNI
  • Mongo DB
  • Golang
  • OSRM
  • Nominatim
  • Routino
  • OSM
  • PostgreSQL with custom PostGIS
  • AWS

Business result

The startup has become a leading technology vendor in their business domain. Their innovative and scalable product is competitive enough to trigger company’s expansion into new regional markets and business market segments. 1.5 years after the product has been released, the number of the client’s B2B partners – businesses that want to advertise their services within – is still rapidly growing.

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