Page 132 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

site in China to offer ad-supported local search for finding the nearest
McDonald’s, subway station, or cinema, for example.
What’s driving Lingtu is GPS navigation software in cars and on phones.
With their product, mobile phone users can, for a small fee, click to find sights
and get from point A to point B. Some 10,000 customers get an add-on
premium service called CareStar that is handy for monitoring elders or kids
who are always wandering off somewhere.
With Lingtu’s SmartGPS technology, drivers can get updates on traffic
jams or find the nearest gas station. On the corporate front, as many as
40,000 businesses use Lingtu’s GPS service to track sales fleets, schedule
deliveries, and find the quickest routes. Locating where employees are rather
than where they say they are can save a great deal of time and money.
Moving on with the demo, we come to SmartGuider, the sexiest member
of the product lineup. To show me how it works, Tse takes out his fully
loaded Singapore-made DoPod smartphone—as popular in China as the
Blackberry is in the United States—and instantly pulls up a digital map that
depicts the roads I took to get to Lingtu’s offices, with points of interest such
as the Buddhist temple I spotted on a hilltop in the distance. The same tech-
nology comes pre-installed on PDAs, including a new Hewlett-Packard PDA
model in China. And try to top this: Lingtu claims to have put the first built-
in GPS devices in a laptop, a local brand from the Chinese producer Haier. All
in all, Lingtu has more than 70 software registrations and copyrights in
addition to 17 patents that are pending in China.
What’s left for the firm to do in maps? Lingtu wants to integrate the
services across mobile phones, the Internet, and CDs and market digital maps
on the Web that show landmarks and roadways in three dimensions.
In a world in which making maps has become nearly as high-tech as
designing a semiconductor chip and compasses, tape measures, and drafting
paper are becoming obsolete, the homegrown Lingtu has developed these map
technologies in-house from scratch and excelled. Perhaps this accom-
plishment should not seem surprising. Years before those Chinese admirals set
sail, China developed the compass in the eleventh century, and ancient maps
of China depict the Silk Route, the Yellow River, the Great Wall, and the Han
Empire’s boundaries. The country’s advanced surveying technology dates
back to the Tang dynasty of the seventh and eighth centuries. China’s map-
making craftsmen did not fall behind the West until some 40 years ago during

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