Customer Testimonial] Edenmap

The startup Edenmap relies on the expertise of ITS Group to co-develop its augmented reality application and to focus on its commercial development.

Edenmap: providing a standardized address for everyone and everywhere
Created in 2019, by Stéphane de Goesbriand and Pedro De Oliveira, Edenmap is a Nantes-based startup specialized in geomatics and addressing. Its objective is to provide, to every inhabitant of the planet, a postal address in accordance with international addressing standards. While having a postal address is the norm in Europe and North America, it is not the case in many African, South American and Asian countries.
Giving everyone an address is a key factor in urban development and the socio-economic inclusion of populations. "Having a postal address is a major issue in many countries," explains Stéphane de Goesbriand, co-founder of the company. "It conditions the economic and social development and public services of each country, whether in terms of land, infrastructure, education, tourism, economic development or health. It is also a key element of citizenship in the broadest sense. A standardized address serves everyone, from citizens to public authorities and businesses. »

The digital solution designed by the two partners is aimed at States and local authorities to enable them to organize public services by better understanding their territories. It also targets companies by offering them the possibility to be identified with the authorities and to ensure an efficient and sustainable economic development.

Collect, share and enhance data to improve citizen and customer relations
Edenmap, the eponymous digital solution, makes it possible to provide a postal address in accordance with international standards, but not only that. Once collected and shared, the data is used to provide services to customers and citizens.
The solution is based on tools for contextual coding of roads and automated addressing of buildings for each city, and an interface for generating personal addresses via various web or mobile media. "Edenmap's added value is its resolutely digital approach," says Pedro de Oliveira, co-founder of Edenmap.

We are changing the way addressing service is delivered, which is still too often manual and expensive and therefore sometimes doomed to failure for these reasons. We are leveraging the capabilities offered by digital and smartphones, to reach more people and offer more reliable, faster and lower cost addressing. »

The solution is based on 4 main pillars, namely an addressing engine, which, based on the mapping of a territory, will create an address database in compliance with international standards and practices specific to the territory, a web portal to administer the database created and a mobile application to update it. Finally, Edenmap enhances the data witha mobile application that integrates embedded 2D and 3D mapping and augmented reality.

This is whereITS Group and its teams came in, because the development of the last brick required Edenmap to have very specific skills and expertise in augmented reality.

The project challenges: integrate augmented reality into a mobile application for citizens while controlling deadlines and budget
Since the beginning of their adventure, the two founders wanted to integrate into their offer a digital solution that would allow each citizen to find their way around a given place and to visualize one or more addresses with their smartphone (signage being absent or poorly developed in many countries). What could be better than augmented reality for that? The only problem was that the team didn't have any in-house expertise and was struggling to assess the work and cost of the project. Stéphane then contacted Isabelle Gautier, Director of the ITS Group agency in Nantes, a subsidiary of ITS Group, and discovered that his project could quickly become reality, as he tells us:

We knew that this application had a lot of added value for citizens, but it was also a challenge for us who did not master this technology. I must admit that I did not believe in it until the ITS Group teams told me that it was possible to develop our application by integrating augmented reality, all quickly and within the budget we had set! »

The project: co-constructing an application within the framework of a true partnership
This required finding the right resources and the right way of working, which Isabelle and her team were able to implement quickly. They introduced an Augmented Reality expert to Stéphane and Pedro and set up the project which integrated several service providers as it covered several facets of the solution: the mobile augmented reality application of course, but also the visual and functional optimization of the web portal and the mobile application for updating data. The ITS Group team therefore managed the entire project - including external service providers - and mobilised a complete team on a fixed price basis, integrating all the required expertise, including managerial expertise. The founders of Edenmap were fully satisfied and particularly appreciated working in partnership with the ESN, as Pedro underlines:

ITS Group knows how to find the right resource! Their reactivity and their ability to integrate the right profiles was remarkable! They allowed us to demystify the subject, to reassure us by sweeping away the potential risks and to take the subject head on. We were able to co-construct and co-develop the application with complete confidence. We developed a partnership in which we were a stakeholder. »

The benefits: reduce development costs and free up time to accelerate commercial development
Even if the company is not able to put a precise figure on the return on investment of ITS Group's intervention, it is clear that the choice to call upon an ESN has enabled us to gain in reliability, time and efficiency. "We could have chosen to manage the project internally", explains Stéphane, "but this would have meant recruiting very specialised and very different skills over long periods and also spending time managing the project. However, with ITS Group, we benefited from very competent, available and educational teams, which allowed a real synergy and mutual aid between the different projects. "
Another key point is that the time freed up allowed the two founders to reposition themselves on other value-added tasks, and more particularly on a crucial subject for a startup: the commercial development of its product and services. Pedro recognizes that, even if Edenmap's DNA is to develop its solutions internally, it is also necessary to be aware of its technological and human limits and to know how to call upon external skills.

Development and especially project management require a lot of investment in time that we do not use to find customers and sign contracts... The main benefit of outsourcing to ITS Group is the capacity we had to refocus on commercial development and deploy the solution in our first pilot areas. »