Multimap :: Blog

Some of you may have noticed that a few months ago we enhanced our travel directions service to offer users information about the carbon footprint of journeys, as well as the ability to offset those journeys.

The service is provided through a partnership with Carbon Clear, a leading carbon management company that helps businesses and consumers manage their greenhouse gas emissions.

To use the carbon calculator, Multimap users click the “get directions” link on www.multimap.com, enter their journeys’ start and end points, click “find”, and are presented with step-by-step directions and route maps. The directions results now include information on the carbon footprint of the journey. A pull-down menu allows users to choose the correct engine size of their cars, and to compare the carbon footprint of the journey if they were to go by bus or train instead of driving. Users clicking on the “more info” link will find details of how the carbon footprint is calculated, and can visit the Carbon Clear website to take action to offset their journeys.

The story of how the carbon calculator came to be on the Multimap site is an interesting one, which provides a bit of insight into how we innovate, and how new services don’t always turn out as you expect….

As part of the redesign of the public web site, Multimap engaged IDEO, one of my favourite human factors and interaction consulting firms, to do a study of how people navigate and use maps in their day-to-day lives. This led to several of us attending several of IDEO’s evening events; at one of these I got talking with Clay Shirky, the writer, consultant and blogger, on the subject of carbon footprints of Internet companies. He suggested that as well as calculating and offsetting Multimap’s own carbon footprint we might like to build something in to our travel directions service to allow people to offset individual journeys.

I liked this idea, and I posted it to Multimap’s innovation bulletin board. It did not generate a lot of attention or discussion – about five comments in total, but all of them were positive and it featured quite high in the scoring system that is applied to all innovation ideas. I should point out that all submissions to the innovation bulletin board are anonymous – nobody knew the idea came from me, and I don’t know who posted the comments.

Then, Multimap ran its first “innovation week”, during which about 50 software developers worked entirely on new ideas and innovations – most of them from the bulletin board but also a few others that had been floating around all year. The carbon calculator was one of these, and was taken to the stage where it could go live on the public site.

Although the original idea was to let people offset individual journeys, it turns out that the actual amount of money involved is very small – something like 1p per Kg of CO2. It is far too small for a credit card transaction, and also far too much hassle. We thought of doing something with SMS reverse billing, but if a user spent 25p on a text message then most of that would go to the networks and service providers - only something like 5p to 8p would actually go to carbon offsetting – very inefficient and not the kind of image we want to be projecting.

So, we left out the actual offsetting and went live with the service more-or-less as you see it today. I announced it at our weekly meeting, and one of the B2C sales team asked if it would be possible to offer sponsorship to a car company. As it happened, Volkswagen had been talking to us for some time about ways to raise awareness of the new BlueMotion technology, with its very low carbon footprint. Within a few weeks Volkswagen was sponsoring the offset calculator.

Since then we’ve had several enquiries from our automotive clients about building the same functionality in to their web sites, but unlike the service on the public site, the solution has to be internationally aware, reporting in litres per 100 Km as well as MPG, working with US gallons as well as Imperial units, and supporting all the other variants required of a global service. This makes it ten times as much work as the original very simple idea, not least because we want to do all of this in a robust, configurable way that can be a platform for new ideas and enhancements for years to come.

It’s not often that I get a chance to announce new products and functionality, so I’m especially pleased to announce that our Multimap API for business customers now features an optional carbon emissions calculator. If you are not currently a customer of Multimap and would like a trial of the Multimap API, or you would like to try the calculator in your existing service, please contact the Multimap Business Services team.

And that’s how the carbon calculator got on to the Multimap site. As with so many innovations it started out with one business model which didn’t work but stirred up lots of interest and became successful with a different commercial approach quite soon after we released it. And although the basic idea is very simple indeed, our B2B clients all want slight variants on the same theme; since we’re able to deliver this in an easily-configurable way through our API then we should have the beginning of a flexible and robust ASP service.