When you stop and think about it, a huge amount of innovation in the highways and transport technology industries over the past 20 years have been related to location services, but what about the mapping that underpins it?

The latest Highways Voices podcast digs into the issue by talking to HERE Technologies Chief Product Officer Jorgen Behrens about their latest innovations involving personalising maps, data privacy and 3D mapping, and then hears from Steve Birdsall, CEO of Highway Technology Company Gaist about innovations based on location.

“What we’re noticing is that a lot of our customers are sitting on a lot of location data, and are looking for ways to monetise that and to make use of it in a kind of differentiating way in their own business,” explains Behrens told host Paul Hutton. “So what we’ve done is we’re gradually exposing our mapmaking capabilities in our platform so that customers can use the platform to ingest their own location data, process it into location contents and make maps with it.”

Highways News co-owner Adrian Tatum talked to Birdsall who told him, “I guess it’s just our imagination, really, that limits what we can do. There’s still a long way to go, we’ve got all of this capability growing, but it still needs to be bolted together and still needs to be brought to bear on a lot of problems. But if you were to look forward another five years, I believe that we won’t be able to recognise the way that we do things.”

Paul and Adrian also discuss the latest stories on the Highways News website and explain how you can sign up to the podcast and the unique Highways News daily lunchtime briefings.