Marie Wiere's Blue Sky Management Blog

Recently on an outing with friends, our group split up into two groups for a short period of time. Not long after we tried to arrange by cell phone to meet for dinner at a restaurant one of the groups had found. Unfortunately, trying to give directions when neither group knew the area well enough to know exactly where they were, in relation to the other group’s location, was challenging even for a group of MBA students. After a lot of time wasted wandering around we were all reunited, only to find out our two original locations had originally only been a block or two apart. Yes, seriously! If only we had, had Mapfia, it wouldn’t have been so complicated.

Mapfia is a smart phone application that enables its users to share their real-time locations on a map. In the case given above instead of calling and describing our locations, we could have used the Mapfia app to see one another’s locations on a grid, to get real-time directions instantaneously. Indeed, Mapfia was even created in order to eradicate situations like the one I described above. Mapfia was founded by a team of engineers, who frustrated with giving directions on the phone, set out to make navigation and location sharing simple and secure. The video below shows how the technology works:

Mapfia could also come in useful for business people. For example, realtors could use the application to help direct their clients to a house viewing.

While many location-sharing applications raise privacy concerns, this does not appear to be the case with Mapfia. For security purposes Mapfia users only share location information for the duration of the phone call. Once one party hangs up the phone the other no longer has access to their real-time location.

I think the Mapfia application has great potential, but what do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.