Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by Hatim M, Chief Commercial Officer at BungkusIT. The on-demand delivery service delivers packages within the hour for one million customers across Malaysia and uses Google Maps Platform to create a seamless end-to-end delivery experience for its customers.

Imagine it’s the end of a long day at work, and you’re heading home for dinner as you look forward to a restful evening. Then just as you arrive at the doorstep, your phone buzzes with a message from a family member, asking if you could grab a carton of milk from the supermarket.

With moments like these in mind, we founded BungkusIT to alleviate the stress of everyday chores and give people a break from having to run seemingly mundane errands that can often be time-consuming. With so much to do and so few hours in a day, we want to make life simpler by providing our customers with an on-demand delivery service.

As a social enterprise, our mission is to create jobs and increase earning potential for BungkusIT roadies (those who run deliveries), while also increasing online visibility for  local small and medium enterprises through an e-commerce platform. As such, we don’t charge merchants a fee for being featured on our app. 

Our roadies help connect users with products and services that they need. Whether it’s picking up the keys you forgot, or buying a birthday cake for a loved one, our on-demand roadies can help accomplish your task quickly and efficiently. In fact, we’ve helped many seniors—a large and often underserved population—to run errands and provide last mile support.

Providing reliable service, 24/7

From the day we launched, our promise has always been to complete every task given to us within one hour. Google Maps Platform empowers us to fulfil this promise. We understand the importance of selecting a reliable mapping service from the get-go. After exploring different map products, we made the decision to go with Google Maps Platform due to its detailed and accurate location mapping system. With the support of our partner Searce, we’ve been able to quickly integrate all the relevant products on our platform and optimize our API calls.

On a day-to-day basis, our roadies rely on the Places API to navigate their journeys. It pinpoints the exact location set by customers so that our roadies can be sure they arrive at the correct destination. With so many small roads and alleys in Malaysia, it can be challenging to find the exact place based on an address. Dropping a pin on a specific location removes any confusion.

Because we price our services based on distance, it’s business critical to determine the exact distance of a location and the most efficient route to reach it. By automating that process with the Distance Matrix API, we can guarantee that customers don’t get overcharged, while making sure that we’re adequately compensated for our services.

Improving the user experience

At the end of the day, we want to make people’s lives easier. That’s why having an app that is intuitive is key. More than that, we want customers to be able to create a request as quickly as possible. By automatically completing the location a customer is typing after they’ve keyed in the first few characters, Place Autocomplete does that job for us. 

As a fairly young company, we’ve got a long way to go. I believe that we’ll continue evolving alongside Google Maps Platform and exploring the new features it has to offer. We’re already talking to global brands to expand our services and I’m confident that with Google Maps Platform as our maps partner, we will go a long way.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

This week, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is launching the first preview of its new Rubin Science Platform (RSP) for an initial cohort of astronomers. The observatory, which is located in Chile but managed by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab in Tucson, AZ and SLAC in California, is jointly funded by the NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy. The platform provides an easy-to-use interface to store and analyze the massive datasets of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will survey a third of the sky each night for ten years, detecting billions of stars and galaxies, and millions of supernovae, variable stars, and small bodies in our Solar System.

The LSST datasets are unprecedented in size and complexity, and will be far too large for scientists to download to their personal computers for analysis. Instead, scientists will use the RSP to process, query, visualize, and analyze the LSST data archives through a mixture of web portal, notebook, and other virtual data analysis services. An initial launch with simulated data, called Data Preview 0, builds on the Rubin Observatory’s three-year partnership with Google to develop an Interim Data Facility (IDF) on Google Cloud to prototype hosting of the massive LSST dataset. This agreement marks the first time a cloud-based data facility has been used for an astronomy application of this magnitude.

Bringing the stars to the cloud

For Data Preview 0, the IDF leverages Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Compute Engine to provide the Rubin Observatory user community access to simulated LSST data in an early version of the RSP. The simulated data were developed over several years by the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration to imitate five years of an LSST-like survey over 300 square degrees of the sky (about 1,500 times the area of the moon). The resulting images are very realistic: they have the same instrumental characteristics, such as pixel size and sensitivity to photons, that are expected from the Rubin Observatory’s LSST Camera, and they were processed with an early version of the LSST Science Pipelines that will eventually be used to process LSST data. “This will be the first time that these workloads have ever been hosted in a cloud environment. Researchers will have an opportunity to explore an early version of this platform,” says Ranpal Gill, senior manager and head of communications at the Rubin Observatory.

Broadening access for more researchers

Over 200 scientists and students with Rubin Observatory data rights were selected to participate in Data Preview 0 from a pool of applicants that represents a wide range of demographic criteria, regions, and experience level. Participants will be supported with resources such as tutorials, seminars, communication channels, and networking opportunities—and they will be free to pursue their own science at their own pace using the data in the RSP. 

“The revolutionary nature of the future LSST dataset requires a commensurately innovative system for data access and analysis paired with robust support for scientists,” says Melissa Graham, lead community scientist for the Rubin Observatory and research scientist in the astronomy department at the University of Washington. “I’m personally excited to enhance my own skills by using the RSP’s tools for big data analysis, while also helping others to learn and to pursue their LSST-related science goals during Data Preview 0.” 

At the same time, the fact that the RSP is hosted in the cloud provides researchers at smaller institutions access to state-of-the-art astronomy infrastructure that is comparable to that of the largest national research centers.

The launch benefits the observatory too: the development team can learn what researchers are interested in while also testing and debugging the platform. Graham says that “the platform is still in active development so researchers using it will be able to follow along in the progress, and provide feedback on ways that we can optimize the development of the tools.”

Next steps

The LSST aims to begin the ten-year survey in 2023-24 and expects it to include 500 petabytes of data. Through the cloud, Google aims to help make this extraordinary project scalable and accessible to researchers everywhere. To learn more about Data Preview 0, watch this video.

Want to ramp up your own research in the cloud? We offer research credits to academics using Google Cloud for qualifying projects in eligible countries. You can find our application form on Google Cloud’s website or contact our sales team.