Sticking To Software Drives Big Growth Spike For Indoor Mapping Firm Jibestream
March 26, 2016 by Dave Haynes
Jibestream is a Toronto-based indoor mapping specialist company that has been working around the edges of the digital signage market for the past six or seven years, and some recent strategic shifts have really helped the company get marketplace traction, with triple-digit growth.
The company has moved from a small space in the inner suburbs to much bigger, hipper digs closer in to the city core, based on that massive growth. Jibestream’s navigation and wayfinding toolset is now being used by more than 200 shopping malls globally, and the company includes mall groups like GGP among its key clients. The malls use Jibestream to drive navigation on their mobile apps.
When I spoke to Jibestream co-founder and CEO Chris Wiegand recently, he mentioned his team was in the middle of a project with one of the mega-malls in the UAE.
The exponential growth – top line revenue up 250% in the last fiscal year and recurring dollars up 10X – owes heavily to Wiegand’s decision to pivot the company from being a full solutions provider – doing the display and PC hardware, fabrication, software AND mapping – to a focus on the core application. They developed and now support APIs (programming access and toolsets) that allowed malls and other large footprint organizations and facilities to build into their own apps and tools, or hand them off to the third-party development companies that already do that work.
The company’s indoor mapping engine powers indoor wayfinding across mobile apps, the web and interactive kiosks. Wiegand has also picked up business with big government accounts, like the US Army and Pentagon, and corporate campuses.
“It’s an exciting time for us,” says Wiegand. “We have a proven solution, momentum in the market, and a world-class team.”
Focusing on just the back-end – something we’re starting to see now with some signage software providers – removed a lot of the complication for Jibestream, which in its early days was building and installing hardware, doing the mapping and designing directories for mall and other facilities. Offering up an SDK is much cleaner, and removes some of the tension out of deals – where you might have an internal or third party team for a client already developing mobile apps and directories.
Now Jibestream’s platform allows developers to integrate with 3rd-party applications like parking systems, lease management systems, and location-aware technologies. “Our clients are serious about creating apps that deliver a superior experience for people visiting their venues, our mapping engine powers that experience,” Wiegand says.
Good to see. I’ve known Wiegand says he was in start-up mode with his partners, and while I liked what they were doing and delivering, it was going to be a hard log the way they were going at it. Being the smart engine under the hood, that allows any number of companies to adopt, has a lot of legs.
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