Before we dive in, we should mention that the team will be taking a well deserved break between 22nd Dec and 2nd Jan. If you need urgent support during the holiday period please get in touch at support@acquiredigital.com.

This year has seen some huge updates and improvements to the Wayfinder platform. With updated analytics, expanded metadata tags and key integrations, there's never been an easier or better time to start 3D mapping your properties.

Analytics 2.0

With the release of Analytics 2.0, we've enabled mapping teams around the world to discover, analyze and optimize their guest usage patterns.

Can you guess the most visited destination in 2023? Unsurprisingly its the "Restrooms", with over 2 million visits!
That said, selfie mode is definitely our most popular feature, with over 600,000 taken this year.

Embedded Web Directory

This year saw the launch of a brand new way to integrate and expose your destinations to website visitors. The embedded directory allow you to seamlessly offer searchable and filterable listings. This works great for retail mall websites, giving users a quick way to find their favorite stores, check the latest offers and deals, and then get directions.

Embedded directories are a free update to all customers, so feel free to dive into the documentation and start improving your visitor experience today.

Google & Apple Maps Export

Take away the frustrating task of updating your google and apple maps updated. With automatic submission of map updates, you can let Wayfinder keep your public maps up to date.

Custom File Groups

This super flexible feature allows you to create custom file groups to attach to destinations, enabling lots of use cases.

Some of our favorite's are:

• Custom media galleries, showcasing marketing materials from tenant brands.

• Product PDFs, great for convention booths.

• Digital Menus for restaurants and fast food.

Custom URLs & Social links

A much-requested feature made its debut this year, giving customers the ability to quickly add custom links to their destinations. This super powerful feature enables you to attach any external website links you'd like, and even let users open on their mobile devices via SMS, QR code or NFC.

Star Ratings

Import or add star ratings to locations. Help users find the best places to eat, or the most welcoming retail experiences.

Destination Badges

Add badges to destinations, allowing you to advertise special types of destination. For example, one client has been using this to shout out local and minority owned businesses.

Smart Opening Hours

Big improvements to the smart algorithms inside Wayfinder now incorporate opening hours. When browsing and searching, users are shown open locations first, with callouts for destinations closing or opening soon.

We even factor in walking time, letting users know if they can reach a location before it closes.

Smart Search

Fast, intelligent and context aware searching is paramount when it comes to finding destinations, so it goes without saying that search got lot of attention this year. We've made searching smarter by incorporating fuzzing results, open hours aware, distance, keywords, products, and more into our search algorithms. Admins can now also nominate related destinations to suggest alternative results.

Country Sized Maps

We've beefed up our rendering engine, allowing massive maps, with thousands of destinations to be shown on screens. This year saw the launch of a state-wide Wayfinder solution, with over 15,000 locations, instantly searchable and viewable.

Custom Destination Colors

This update unlocks a realm of potential for creating maps with precisely desired layouts. It enhances map comprehension, enabling customers to instantly recognize and differentiate flagship or anchor stores merely by visual cues.

Furthermore, it facilitates the display of premium stores and distinct categories such as restaurants, clothing stores, and furniture stores.

64-bit support

A little dry we know, but upgrading our entire stack to support 64-bit architecture really helped us push the boundaries of whats possible in the digital space this year. Playback of massive ultra HD content, simultaneous streaming of multiple video files, and rendering complex 3D experiences was no mean feat.

Server Architecture upgrades

It isn't just our front end apps that have received upgrades this year. Restructuring of our servers, databases and CDNs has allowed us to support the huge growth of our clients projects. Faster load times on our CMS's, improved download speeds from our API's, uptimes pushing towards 100%, and huge data aggregation tasks on our analytics platforms are all subtle, but huge improvements.

New Integrations

Welcoming and collaborating with key industry partners is always a pleasure, and we've built integrations with some excellent systems this year. Some of our favorite's are:

Adomni

Imaginuity

Google Maps

Apple Maps

Openweather

NY511

Clearchannel

Simpleview

Looking Forward to 2024

Acquire Studio 1.0

Exciting things are coming to Acquire Studio, with the full release of version 1.0! We've been trialing the platform with some big partners on the Las Vegas strip, and now it's ready for general release. Look out for updates in the new year.

Web Map 2.0

Our web API took a huge leap forward in 2023, with the release of embedded directories, and now we're rewriting our 3D map embeds to match. Faster, cleaner, with a beautiful new user experience. Coming in 2024.

Map Editor 2.0

Our map editor is already making the lives of property managers and marketing teams easier, but we want to go further in 2024. End to end map creation, and total control of the 3D models coming to your dashboard soon!

Vision Analytics 2.0

We've learned a lot launching Wayfinder Analytics 2.0 this year, and we're bringing those improvements to Vision in 2024. You can look forward to much faster load times, even on large timeframes. Aggregated reports and exports too!