HyperTrack: Enabling Location-powered Applications
I met Kashyap Deorah on 10th November 2016 at our office in Menlo Park while he was on a short visit to the US from India. This was meant to be an intro meeting with no agendas. He talked about the rich data associated with location and its potential broad relevance. I can safely say that we immediately hit it off. At a subsequent meeting a week later, I proposed a HyperTrack/Nexus partnership even though Kashyap had recently closed a seed-funding round and did not need additional capital. After a few iterations, we signed the term sheet on December 17 on my visit to their offices in the New Delhi suburb of Vasant Vihar and closed the financing a month later. Our entire Nexus team could not be more excited. Let me share some thoughts.
It is difficult to not develop an instant liking for Kashyap. Exceptional leadership combines smarts, commitment, courage, and empathy with an ability to connect with and influence others. For Kashyap, that started early. He was a top performer in the Indian Institute of Technology joint entrance examination (JEE) that has an acceptance rate of less than 1% — a rate far lower than Ivy League admissions. Since then he has started and sold a few companies based out of India that addressed global opportunities. Companies that had legs in the US as well as in India. As an aside, India is beginning to see the emergence of globally competitive technology start-ups.
HyperTrack’s approach to location tracking, analytics, and associated services is intriguing based on the simple observation that location varies more frequently for any individual during the course of days and weeks than most other parameters. Location is also relative and time sensitive. For example, meeting of two or more people requires coordination of relative location at a pre-arranged time. In addition, the economy is becoming more dynamic with equipment and products on the move and services increasingly delivered in locations of customer’s preference.
Precise location determination became widely accessible with the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) by the US government in the early 70s. It is a sophisticated system that consists of more than twenty non-geostationary satellites. Initial use focused on military applications. The system was opened for private use in the late 80s.
While, GPS-based location combined with mapping data has been used for navigation for almost three decades, so much more is possible. The breadth of use was limited for a long time because of the expense and inconvenience associated with GPS receiving devices. The ubiquity of smartphones has changed that dynamics. Now it is possible to continuously track the location of more than 2 billion people at very low cost.
Many state-of-the-art applications we depend on every day leverage location data. Most current applications though are for consumer use. Two factors have restrained the expansion of use cases. First, location determination drains significant battery power. Secondly, innovation has been limited because most location-based applications have to reinvent location technology. To foster innovation in the use of location data it is important to open up the opportunity to a broader developer community.
In a hackathon in Poland, a young participant built a location-based safety app in less than 24 hours using HyperTrack API.
This is the mission of HyperTrack and we believe that the mission is timely. HyperTrack recognizes that it cannot come up with all possible applications for location data by itself and hence delivering the solution as a micro-service using APIs is critical. The delivered micro-service must ensure minimum battery use. Since the company offered the stack just two months back, many existing use cases have been successfully deployed inside existing applications and several new use cases have emerged. In a hackathon in Poland, for example, a young participant built a location-based safety app in less than 24 hours using HyperTrack API.
I predict that within the next two years, several as of now unimaginable applications would be enabled using this technology. Some applications will combine location with other micro-services like payments, identity verification, or communications. We are also likely to see applications for business use. For example, a sales or service person may receive relevant information based on their current location or expected future location. As new applications become location powered, HyperTrack will be able to offer unique location-related capabilities, analytics and other services. Hopefully new applications and new capabilities feed off each other to leverage location information more deeply and thus improve a broad range work and leisure use cases.
