[Blockcast Exclusive Interview] “Sharing Economy” Is No Longer Sugar Coating The World’s First Decentralized Location-Based Service Project GoWithMi Brings “Killer Application” GoWithMi Follow Feb 26, 2019 · 8 min read

The business concept of “sharing economy” is simply to: share the resources you have idle and share with others to maximize the benefits. From the perspective of resource utilization, this can indeed bring benefits to both parties. The so-called Win-Win, even Win-Win-Win to “Win” to the win of N power.

However, the sharing economy, such as Airbnb and Uber, has been approved as a “sugar-coated poison” by hoteliers and taxi operators. The original intention of the “sharing economy” is to use supply to meet more demand, but this is not the case. Under the sugar-coated slogan of “sharing economy”, the group has centralized obtained the right to use the data. In addition, this business model allows Uber to charge 17% commission for intermediaries without having to hold any vehicle and physical resources; under the range of only 25% to 35% of China’s food and beverage gross profit, Meituan extract 22% commission for each order, causing huge burdens for users and businesses.

“GoWithMi, the world’s first decentralized location-based service infrastructure and map ecological public chain project, pointed out after studying the “sharing economy” ecology “credit is the core element of the sharing economy. Only by solving credit problems can we effectively match supply the demand. This is also the existing value of Uber and Airbnb, but they are also exploiting huge “service fees”. As a credit machine, the blockchain is the best thing to solve is the credit problem. If it can integrate the centralized location-based service, it is entirely possible to realize a complete de-intermediary sharing economic model, thus releasing huge industrial potential.”

GoWithMi proposes the use of blockchain technology to achieve the vision of “consensus, mutual benefit, and co-governance”. “Sharing” data and creating “economy” is an important part. For the “map”, almost all companies and apps in the world are using location-based service APIs provided by centralized map service providers such as Google Maps. The high-value data is taken away by them free of charge, and the commercial lifeline and trajectory privacy are tightly controlled. To get rid of the situation of being controlled, exposed, and being held for free, you can only look for the “decentralization path.” To put it simply, it is to return the rights to ordinary users.

“Map” is a monopoly business. From virtual to reality, it is indispensable in people’s lives. Maps can electronically store food, clothing, shelter, and travel data, and data can be called. GoWithMi hopes to make good use of the blockchain to return the data dividends and data security that should belong to everyone and develop a business model of win-win, sharing and mutual benefit. GoWithMi is designed to cope with “the challenges of traditional centralized map service facing high data cost, poor real-time update, oligopoly, weak privacy protection, completely ignoring the distribution of interests of end-terminal users, and blockchain business applications lack trusted location-based services.”

“What can GoWithMi solve for the market? Through the construction of a cross-link cross-platform decentralized location-based service infrastructure, it provides a complete set of services including “location-based service, spatial oracle, and consensus map”, and adopts an innovative “three-in-one” implementation scheme, namely spatial consensus, location-based profit sharing, and spatial co-governance to achieve. “Spatial consensus” drives community members to participate in the production, distribution, and management of spatial information, mapping the world in real time; “location-based profit sharing” enables each participant to share benefits based on trusted locations, each participant will have clear ownership rights; “Spatial co-governance” organically combines the on-chain governance and off-chain self-organizing operations.”

As the world’s first decentralized location-based service infrastructure and map ecological public chain project, the leading souls are Oliver Li, one of the world’s leading experts in the spatial information industry, and Simon Ren, one of the earliest founder of map navigation engines in China. The former is the project CEO, and the latter is the project CTO. The blockcast specially invited the CTO to conduct an online interview to gain a deeper understanding of the benefits that the project brings to the public.

Blockcast: We want to know what was the original intention of planning GoWithMi. Nowadays, especially in Taiwan, how can GoWithMi breaks through the popularity of Google Maps and create market advantages?

Simon Ren: Map is the most important network infrastructure. Indeed, the penetration rate of map products in developed regions including Taiwan is quite high. However, with a global perspective, 4 billion people have just connected to the Internet, mainly in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, and other regions. The infrastructure is quite backward. GoWithMi first targets these emerging markets. We have built a self-organized and self-operated platform based on blockchain technology and cooperated with users to participate in the consensus co-construct and mutual benefits of local maps so that the vast number of users in emerging markets can enjoy the same map basic services as the developed regions.

However, even in a developed area like Taiwan, the basic map level is very high, but there are also many errors in the commercial information of the map. This is caused by the high centralized production cost and long update period of traditional maps. The lack of immediacy is the biggest disadvantage of traditional maps. GoWithMi aims to build a fair and professional platform based on algorithms and consensus-driven, allowing mobile phone users in every corner of the world to participate in map data contribution in real time, while taking into account the high quality of data, creating a digital twin of the physical world on the map, which enables the real-world correspondence between the establishment of the physical business, the digitalization, and the Internet world, and finally leads the evolution of the physical business to the a distributed commerce era of de-intermediary and complete transparent.

“With the advent of the 5G and unmanned driving era, high-precision maps above the L3 level are bound to require real-time and must rely on consensus crowdsourcing mode, and GoWithMi has already seized the core track. In addition, there is another point, that is, traditional maps are actually making use of everyone’s data for profit, but never share any benefits, GoWithMi shares its full benefit.”

Blockcast: Has the basic map capital been established to shorten the initial technology development and accelerate the establishment of ecology?

Simon Ren: Facing different markets, our strategies are different. In places with poor infrastructures, such as Indonesia, we will use self-built basic map method, apply the strategic techniques of using satellite imagery based on artificial intelligence visual recognition to perform basic data mapping, then rely on crowdsourcing to do full data mapping. At present, the basic map data we have mastered has covered all Southeast Asian countries and regions. However, in developed regions, such as Taiwan, we will choose to cooperate with the local basic map, focusing only on upper-level value-added information, such as architectural 3D models, POI information, indoor maps and positioning.

Blockcast: What are the milestones for 2019?

Simon Ren: First of all, our public chain will be launched in the second half of the year. At that time, we will become the world’s first complete decentralized location-based service platform.

“The goal of 2019 is to increase the number of overall product new users to 10 million, making it the first “life + business” application in the blockchain world, the market share of map products in Southeast Asia to exceed 30%. In the first quarter of 2019, we will cover the markets of Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and open up maps mining and incentive data contributions. In 2019, Q2~Q3, map products realize coverage of major Southeast Asian countries and initiate a pilot project for decentralized distributed business.”

Blockcast: GoWithMi adopts a dual token model mechanism. Can you share its advantages and the reason for adopting this model?

Simon Ren: GMAT is a public sale token, the only driving force for the entire ecosystem, including incentive rewards, service calls, payments, pledges, and voting. GoZone is an internal dividend type token that can only be obtained with GMAT. GoZone corresponds to a digital land right in a large area on the map (usually a thriving commercial block, up to several square kilometers), since it is completely compatible with the physical world, it is naturally limited. We believe that the commercial value of single-point geographic data is very low. What is valuable is a region, such as the rich commercial demand of shopping mall, scenic spot, university campus, advertising, food delivery, e-commerce, travel, etc. At the same time, information changes in the regions are also very frequent, requiring the maintenance of active normalization of stakeholders to generate commercial value. GoZone constructs a self-organizing and self-operating system with network effects.

Blockcast: We understand that the number of GoWithMi users in Indonesia has reached 1.1 million. What is the future coverage blueprint? Is there a solution to the difference in language?

Simon Ren: We have a local team, a multi-language version, and customer services support in the local language.

Blockcast: In the end, it is the confirmation of the authenticity of the information. How does GoWithMi prevent users from uploading fake data?

Simon Ren: We adopts the AI plus symmetric game verification method, and proof of mapping cross-validation, and will send relevant bonus rewards after the map completes compilation.

On January 27, 2019, the GoWithMi team held its first offline conference in Taipei.

At the end of the interview, Simon Ren mentioned that in response to the earlier development of Kaohsiung tourism’s “Kaohsiung dollar”, GoWithMi is looking forward to creating a Kaohsiung exclusive map that allows all Taiwanese snacks and merchants to have their own exclusive currency through GoWithMi, and establish a direct interaction with all users through built-in applications. Simon Ren proudly stated: “GoWithMi is the only map that can store entire data of the map on the chain. If the user interacts with the merchant and comments, the message will remain on the chain.” Realize the essence of “everything will leave traces.”

GoWithMi starts from the location-based service infrastructure and extends unlimited business opportunities. Its distributed map ecological platform has rich business applications scenarios, including traffic information services such as maps and road conditions, traffic forecasts; decentralized O2O services such as shared travel and shared space, speed food delivery; car services such as car front-loading data, car networking, unmanned driving and high precision maps; personal services such as car owner membership services, Internet financial data services, UBI driving behavior insurance, etc.

The more important application scenario is the “commercial map interface”. At present, Google MAP is almost the only supplier that can provide globalized commercial API services. The Google MAP API interface revenue is expected to reach $5 billion by 2020. The GoWithMi distributed map platform has a chance to capture a large portion due to the sudden 14-fold price increase of Google map in May 2018, combined with the drawbacks of traditional centralized maps. “GoWithMi is currently offering customized map APIs in Indonesia. The Universal API will be launched in Q2-Q3 in 2019 and has begun to provide transportation planning solutions for the Indonesian government.”

The first offline activity in Taipei, CTO Simon Ren was introducing GoWithMi to everyone.

According to the data, GoWithMi has supported by many well-known brands, including Charles Xue, the founder of Manzi Venture Capital and a well-known angel investor, Mars Finance, and the support from Chuang Tao, a global map expert. The official express to blockcast, “The future will also focus on building Taiwan, and look forward to bringing Taiwanese friends a different experience than Google Maps.” This is quite exciting!

GoWithMi official website: gowithmi.com/